Episode
Don't Cry for Jeff Bezos's Yacht
- Podcast
- Paul Krugman Podcast
- Published
- May 5, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 439
- Processing state
not_requested
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Summary
Transcript According to press reports, Jeff Bezos is planning to sell his 417-foot yacht, the one with a carved figurehead of Lauren Sanchez, his second wife, at the front. According to these reports, he’s unhappy at the attention that the yacht is getting. Funny how that works. Hi, Paul Krugman with a bit of an experiment. I am recording this in a cafe, a cafe that is not in New York, as you could probably guess. Let’s see how the noise level works with the headphones. OK obviously playing the world’s tiniest violin . We’re not going to weep for Jeff Bezos’s discomfort and yes there’s a certain amount of just plain satisfaction at seeing him taken down a peg. But I think there’s a little bit more to it. This is not just invidious comparison and hostility towards people who have acquired great wealth, although there’s nothing wrong with that. This is about the role of moods, vibes, and the motivations of the malefactors of great wealth that play such a large role in the US political system now. As everybody should know, we have seen an extraordinary concentration of wealth at the top, probably bigger than the concentration that took place in the Gilded Age. And it’s gone along with something which is, I think, different from what we had in the late 19th century. In the late 19th century there were certain proprieties that people of great wealth felt that they had to observe. They had to maintain a certain pretense. The Victorian virtues were honored at least on the face of it. Extremely wealthy men had conventional marriages. Presumably very many of them had mistresses as well; the strictures of conventional morality were not actually obeyed nearly as much as people wanted you to think — but they wanted you to think. They wanted to pretend to be good family men, all of…