- The human mind has difficulty comprehending just how much money $1 billion actually is.

Today's guest is part of a reporting team that has unpacked the power of billionaires in American communities and American politics where their influence is substantial.

He's Stephen Rich this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(bright upbeat music) (bright upbeat music continues) Hello, and welcome to "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from The Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

And my guest this week is Steven Rich, a data reporter for "The New York Times."

He's joining us today from Washington DC.

Steven, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thanks for having me.

- You know, you have done some really remarkable reporting in your career, and we're gonna talk a little bit about a recent package that you did with some colleagues at "The Times," but let's start sort of at the beginning, as it were.

You are a data journalist.

How is that different from the kind of journalism that people maybe are a little bit more familiar with?

- So I see my job as a data journalist as very similar to what most people are familiar with in journalism, except for the most part, my sources aren't people, they're data sets.

And so my job is often to acquire, clean, and interrogate data, to have a better understanding of what's going on in the world, and then communicate that to the broader public.

So I collect data across the spectrum of beats and of subject matters.

And look at it for trends, look at it to understand if the things that we're writing about are actually happening systematically or if they're sort of one-offs.

- What drew you to that work in the first place?

- I've always sort of been a math-brained person.

And in journalism, I think whether or not it's true, journalists sort of get this reputation for not knowing math.

And so I sort of leaned in and tried to use my skills to understand how the world worked.

And I realized that I was pretty good at it, and started applying it more broadly, and just got really fascinated by all of it.

- Is part of your secret power or superpower that you have a good appreciation of where data sources lie or how to find them?

- I think that's part of it.

I think some of it is that I'm a naturally skeptical person.

And with as much data that is out there, I take the approach of I think this data is bad until I can prove that it's not, because there is a lot of bad data out there, things that are collected poorly.

There's a whole lot of reasons why it would be.

And so I bring that skeptical eye to things and help do that so that the other reporters that I work with especially don't misuse data and are using it in like a way that that helps inform readers.

- So there's a tremendous piece that you and some colleagues at "The Times," Mike Baker as well as Katie Benner, John Branch, and photojournalist Will Warasila, I hope I pronounced that right, a package that you did for "The Times," a couple of stories, on essentially the power of billionaires in American public life.

Sort of a macro question first.

How does that series come to be?

Who says, "Hey, I think we should do a story on billionaires"?

- So this was a series that sort of came about from one of the reporters, Mike Baker, sort of being interested in the subject matter and trying to figure out how can we write about these folks?

Because the whole idea was we know sort of anecdotally that these people are more in the limelight than they have been in the past.

And so part of the question is, is that because there's more of them, is that because they're exercising power at a greater level?

And so we sort of set out to understand that with that basic question sort of guiding us the whole way, which is what is different about billionaires now than was even a few years ago?

- And so what was the role that you as a data journalist on this team played in this reporting?

- So my job was primarily to contextualize the reporting that the other reporters were doing and to help sort of push us in the correct direction.

So the way that I sort of see my role in general, but also on this project, is that I can look at data and say, "This is a path of reporting we can pursue.

And this is one that where maybe it doesn't bear as much fruit."

So in this case, you know, what I was able to find was that the number of billionaires had been rising pretty rapidly in recent years.

So the reporters could start to talk to folks about why that's happening.

I could also look at sort of the inequality in some of these places, which is how we identified one of the places where reporters spent a lot of time, Teton County, Wyoming, that really helps point the reporters to places that could be interesting for further reporting because the data can tell us certain things, but, like, it can't tell us why things are happening.

And so that's where me and the other reporters sort of go back and forth to try to find the right places and find the right ways to contextualize the data that I'm finding.

- Yeah, so those of us who grew up in a certain generation, you know, Thurston Howell III was a millionaire, right?

And that was a ton of money.

I think it's hard for the human brain to actually conceive of how much money $1 billion is.

Can you help us sort of put that into some sort of context that gives it meaning?

- I mean, it's very difficult for most people, myself included, to understand how much a billion dollars is.

You know, I've often joked, and I don't know how many of your viewers will remember this, but they need to remake the movie "Brewster's Millions" at this point to probably be "Brewster's Billions."

But the reality is you can have a million dollars or you can have 1000 million dollars and then you have a billion.

And what can you spend a billion dollars on?

Pretty much anything.

Like, there is not much that's out of your range.

It's really difficult.

All I know is that you could spend a lot of that money per day and still have a ton of money.

If you put it in the bank and let it accrue regular interest, it's probably more than you make in a year anyway, by a long shot.

- Oh, it's remarkable.

So how many billionaires are there in the United States right now?

- Currently there are more than 900 billionaires across the country.

- And you mentioned this earlier that there has been in the last decade, there has been a substantial increase in the number of billionaires.

Do we have a sense of what explains the increase over that timeframe?

- There were a bunch of reasons that explain that increase, but the one that we found that sort of explains it the most was the Trump tax cuts of 2017.

In the wake of those tax cuts, we saw the minting of a lot of new billionaires.

And then the pandemic, the COVID-19 pandemic, sort of put that on steroids.

A lot of these folks were getting these huge benefits from it.

The tech industry as a whole really sort of exploded in that time as well.

And so you saw tons of new tech billionaires just sort of crop up out of nowhere as their companies became exceedingly huge very fast.

And one of the things that I think a lot of people forget is before the pandemic, Elon Musk was worth a lot of money, don't get me wrong, he was worth like $20 billion, but his new net worth really just started skyrocketing in the wake of 2020.

- Yeah, so one of the provisions of the 2017 tax cuts was that it slashed corporate taxes from 35% to 20%.

Advocates of that change said that companies would reinvest that into new investment, new development, and better compensation for their employees.

Has any of that panned out?

- I mean, some of it has.

You know, not every corporation acts exactly the same, and some of them do that, but generally speaking, when companies tend to increase their profit margins, the money tends to sometimes get reinvested, but also goes into bonuses for the folks at the top.

It goes into new pay packages for those people, and it goes into stoking the amount of money in the stocks for the people who own stocks in the company.

And so we see the people who are already rich get much richer.

Where the, you know, the sort of people who make the products at the lowest levels of the company see some impact, but not nearly as much as the folks at the top.

- You know, so ultimately this winds up being a story about concentration of wealth.

In "The New York Times," you and your colleagues reported quote, "Overall, the top 1% now control $55.8 trillion in assets, more than the GDP of the United States and China combined."

That's a lot of money concentrated in very few hands.

What does that mean overall for society?

- What it means is that very few people suddenly have a lot of power because, you know, in the United States, money sort of has become speech in a lot of ways, especially in the wake of the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling.

And so these folks are able to control a lot of things.

I mean, they can't control everything to the fullest extent, but spending that money generally gains them more advantages than your average citizen.

And they certainly believe so based on the way that they spend this money and increasingly are spending this money.

- And that was the piece of your reporting that drew me in in the first place.

And we're gonna talk a little bit about that, but you know, Elon Musk, I think gave $250 million to the Trump campaign in 2024.

Does that kind of financial power essentially make you the loudest voice in the room?

- Yeah, I mean, the way that I have sort of seen money in politics especially is not that money is in and of itself is speech, but that it is an amplifier of speech.

And so when you put a lot of money in, the people who you are giving that money to tend to listen more.

In part because they want more of that money, and in part because that money helps fund them potentially getting into the role that they are seeking.

In the case of Donald Trump, was the presidency, but in the case of many others, it's a role like senator or member of the House, which also comes with a lot of power.

And so, you know, it's natural for a politician to listen more to a person who's giving them a million dollars than to someone who is giving them $20.

- Yeah, yeah.

In your reporting, you note that there was a time where the billionaire class essentially was split between giving to Democrats and giving to Republicans, but that trend has been increasingly to the right.

Is it because of the tax cuts?

- So we see billionaires sort of giving all over the political spectrum, depending on sort of the issues that they're interested in.

But the one sort of issue that ends up cutting across the folks who give to primarily to the left and primarily to the right is taxes broadly.

Most of these people tend to be invested in lowering their tax rate because it means more money in their pockets to do sort of what they want.

And so some of it is that they're giving money because it helps their taxes, some of it is because it helps their bottom line, but ultimately a lot of this is about increasing what the dollar amount in their bank account or their net worth is because a lot of the money for these billionaires isn't necessarily sitting in a bank somewhere.

- So you mentioned Teton County, Wyoming, which is home to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which is the playground of the super rich.

How has the explosion of ultra wealthy families in that community changed the people who, you know, live and work in that community who are not of that super wealthy class?

- I mean, part of what it's changed is the ability to live and work in that community for those folks is incredibly tough.

What we've seen is that a lot of the people who work in that community don't live in that community anymore because they simply cannot afford to.

Last year we found that the average home price in Jackson Hole, it surpassed $7 million for like a single family home.

And that's impossible to afford if you are working at a local restaurant.

And so we've seen a lot of people have to commute in from neighboring counties, neighboring towns, to basically serve the folks who are making those large amounts of money.

And it's become increasingly more difficult for those folks to survive in that area.

You know, one of the things that I have found is that there are a ton of nonprofits based out of Teton County, Wyoming that are funded by many of the folks in this ultra wealthy class, but most of those tend to be like arts nonprofits or not necessarily things that are going to helping the people in the community who can't necessarily afford to live and work there.

- Does it do something to the social contract or the social compact that sort of binds a community together?

- I mean, I can't necessarily speak to that, but it clearly remakes how the community works and functions on a daily basis.

And the folks who live there, there's just a ton of mixed views about whether this impact is good, bad, what it's good for, what it's bad for.

And so, you know, ultimately no one can really stop the folks who want to move in there and pay the exorbitant prices for the homes that are there from doing so.

- You know, in the story, the scale of billionaires campaign donations in US is overwhelming US politics.

You report that the campaign of US Senator Tim Sheehy, who went from a struggling aerial firefighting company to investment by a billionaire investor and then the United States Senate with the help of some wealthy supporters.

In fact, you find that 64 billionaires and 37 of their immediate family members donated directly to his campaign.

How normal is that prevalence of that number of super wealthy people supporting a US Senate campaign?

- I mean, it's incredibly not normal, especially in past years.

So, you know, before 2010 and the Citizens United ruling, billionaire giving was very low because there were limits on how much they could give.

And given how few billionaires there were at the time, they just weren't giving a ton of money because they were hitting those limits very fast.

But now, you know, especially because that race was potentially going to impact the control of the Senate, a lot of these folks were giving despite the fact that very few of them had any connection to the state of Montana.

And so even among federal campaigns that are not a presidential campaign, that's a lot of different billionaires giving to the campaign.

That's just the folks though that are giving directly to his campaign.

There's also the PACs that supported him.

There were plenty more billionaires and ultra wealthy folks who gave to those campaigns as well, or those PACs as well, to support him.

So the reality is that more folks than that in that class were giving to him to win this campaign in large part so that the Republicans could retake control of the Senate.

- You know, there's a staggering tidbit that you had.

You reported that in 2024 in the federal elections, 300 billionaires and their immediate family members donated more than $3 billion.

That's 19% of all contributions.

You know, I understand that Citizens United sort of blew up that notion of limits on campaign spending, but isn't there a whiff of corruption that comes with that much money flowing from so few people into what should be an open democratic process?

- I think whether or not there is corruption there, there will always be people who look at that and say something is wrong.

That it opens the door for that corruption.

And, you know, I think that in a lot of ways, especially the way that the political system has worked for a long time, is that even the optics that there might be corruption has been reason enough not to do certain things.

And so, you know, are these things, are these donations, in and of themselves corrupt or illegal?

They are not.

But can they be?

Of course, like the people can give this way and affect things all the time, especially if you're giving that much money.

One thing that I will note here too is that 19% is also very likely low.

We were very conservative with how we counted.

And with the huge influx of dark money that comes into these campaigns, we have no way of knowing how much more some of these folks are giving, but is just not disclosed as part of this process.

- I was gonna, actually, that was my next question was gonna be about dark money.

So there's no way of getting our arms around how much money is not, you know, I guess accountable in the current system.

- We know how much money is dark money in the system.

We just don't know who gave it.

There's a lot of presumption that much of it is coming from this ultra wealthy class, but it's just that, it's a presumption.

Unless and until some of these groups like put their own documents out on who is giving to them or it leaks somehow, we won't actually know who is giving to these, but what we are seeing is an increase election cycle over election cycle in the sheer amounts of dark money flowing into campaigns.

- Is there any reason to believe that's gonna change?

- No.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

So we've talked about, you know, at least tangentially, a little bit of the 2024 presidential cycle, we've talked about a specific Senate race so far, but it's not just limited to federal races the power of billionaires and elections.

Can you say a little bit about that?

- Yeah, I mean, one of the things that we spent a lot of time looking at in the reporting was how low, and by low I mean like small, do some of these billionaires give their money to, and in a lot of cases they're giving to state campaigns, they're giving to local campaigns.

We found billionaires putting tons of money into local school board elections in the communities that they live in.

And in some cases we found that billionaires funded 90 plus percent of some of these races.

So it was basically just billionaires pouring money in.

In some of these cases, they were on both sides of the issue.

You'd have billionaires on one side and billionaires on the other.

So it's basically just one billionaire competing against another billionaire in the same race at a very, very local level.

And we are increasingly seeing that in some races across the country.

In large part, you're seeing these billionaires put money into these local races in their own communities, but you're also increasingly seeing them put money into other communities that they run businesses in or that they have some sort of vested interest in.

And, you know, with no campaign limits in some of these states, they're just giving exorbitant amounts of money to races that otherwise normally attract very small amounts of money.

- You reported, you included the attorney general race in Pennsylvania, Denver mayoral race, Nevada governor's race.

Are there watchdogs?

So "The New York Times" is, you know, fulfilling an incredibly important role here in sort of holding people to account, but are there watchdog organizations that are digging into this even more, trying to, you know, shine some light, as it were, on what's happening particularly in the dark money cases?

- Yeah, there are plenty of organizations out there that are trying to shine light both at the federal level and the local level.

There are a lot of local journalists doing really wonderful work across the country on some of these races in their own communities.

But ultimately, could there be more?

Yes.

Is there so much information out there?

Yes.

I mean, like, there's so much data to crunch, there's so many documents to crunch, that I could spend all of my time for the rest of my career on just the 2024 race and still not reach the end of reporting on individual races.

- Yeah, so, you know, if you're a concerned citizen at home listening to this, watching this, is there a way to know if the candidates we support are taking substantial donations from billionaires?

- I mean, yes, and a lot of that is through their own research.

I mean, very little of what we did in the campaign space involved prying some of this data out of the hands of the government.

It just involved going to wherever the campaign data existed, usually at the state level, it was kept by some agency, and downloading it and looking for ourselves.

I mean, there's not like a flag in the data that says this person is a billionaire, but you can sort of cross reference with who's giving how much.

You can see who the top donors are to specific campaigns and then match those things.

- It's probably not a $20 donation you're looking for?

- No, probably not.

You could call and and look at these things, and Microsoft Excel is very useful for this.

- You know, so we've got literally about a minute left here.

And I'm wondering, so you're a data reporter and you're looking at these massive data sets.

What role does artificial intelligence play in the work that you do?

And does it pose any particular challenges as you look at the, at the coming wave of elections, whether we're talking about '26 or '28?

- I mean, I think that AI plays some role in what I do.

I think that it can help with data cleaning and it can help with categorization, but ultimately it needs a human eye.

People need to look over it and make sure that it's doing what it says it's doing because I view AI as a potential tool, but also one that requires a lot of oversight.

The thing that people should be looking out for in the coming campaigns is more on the flip side of AI, which is generative AI in terms of I think we're going to see a lot more ads that are fully AI that may attribute or create quotes or videos that do not exist.

And I think people need to be very skeptical about what they're seeing because there currently are no limits to what campaigns can do with creating videos of opposing candidates that are of events that did not occur.

- Skepticism is the hallmark of great reporting.

Steven Rich, thank you for spending some time with us.

That is all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit selve.edu/pellcenter where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

And thank you for spending some time with me this week.

I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

(bright upbeat music) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (bright music)