"The King Of The World," a statue of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein installed on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. on March 10, 2026 by the anonymous art collective, The Secret Handshake.
Rob Larson's Mastering the Universe: The Obscene Wealth of the Ruling Class, What They Do With Their Money, And Why You Should Hate Them Even More is a fiercely pleasurable polemic.
In 2024, Donald Trump managed, for a second time, to become the most powerful man in the world by posing as an anti-elitist, an outsider who would turn his attention from forever wars everywhere to making America great again here. Needless to say, that’s not what we got, but Rob Larson, author of Mastering the Universe: The Obscene Wealth of the Ruling Class, What They Do With Their Money, And Why You Should Hate Them Even More thinks there’s still some promise in that. Americans didn’t get an anti-elitist, but that’s what they thought they were voting for. Can’t that sentiment be redirected?
Larson sets out to do so by, for one, exposing just how ridiculous the super-rich can be. He wrote this before the crude extravagance of Trump’s Great Gatsby party at Mar el Lago, but had fun with rich people so determined never to open their own doors that they’ll stand in bitterly cold weather waiting for the help to open it for them. Others will buy yachts with IMAX theatres that cost the GDP of a small town. Long known for exercising their status by flying around in private jets, oblivious to the environmental cost, they’ve now taken up private helicoptering and even space tourism:
“That Noise? It’s the 1%, Helicoptering Over Your Traffic Jam,” wrote the New York Times, adding the industry was “yet another manifestation of the income inequality that has come to define life in a new Gilded Age.” One passenger flying to the Hamptons says, ‘The exclusivity of it, I like that.’
“And yet the real monstrosity is yet another market serving the rich: space tourism. Subject to an insane amount of hype, the space launches that were once the pride of America’s public sector are now the playthings of the literally stratospherically rich. As noted in the introduction, three separate billionaires now have their own space programs, some serving military satellite launch clients, and others for space tourism—taking tiny numbers of people sixty-two miles up, to the Kármán line at the very edge of space, to experience a few minutes of weightlessness. The cost is unbelievable, both in money and in emissions.”
Plutocracy and class domination did take a number of hits in the mid-twentieth century, when labor and left-wing parties made gains for economic democracy. Wars of national liberation freed billions from imperialist domination, and countries like Sweden socialized medicine and otherwise greatly expanded their social safety net. Britain’s democratic socialists won the National Health Service and American leftists won the New Deal reforms including Social Security and unemployment insurance. In the 1960s Medicare greatly improved health care for the elderly, though the battle to expand coverage to the general population continues today.
Why have we made so few gains since? How have the rich instead achieved a turn back to neoliberalism, a world of unregulated markets and low taxes?
Larson says it’s because European social democrats and US New Deal reformers succeeded in heavily taxing and regulating private property without expropriating it. Private property was still private and our oligarchs still owned it. Manufacturing, military contracting, finance, technology, and big media were all in the hands of rich individuals who launched a neoliberal counter-offensive, dramatically retrenching class rule around the globe. According to Larson, we’re now in a new Gilded Age. The rich own everything and most of us own next to nothing, and even so, it keeps getting worse.
Most of us don’t need a lot of statistics to know that’s true, but Larson provides plenty. The World Inequality Report found that between 1980-2017, the global 1% reaped about 37% of the world’s per capita wealth growth. In the United States in 2021, the richest 1% of Americans own 34.9% of the national wealth, with the top 10% of Americans owning 70.7%.
Larson doesn’t leave us without hope. He shares statistics indicating widespread support for the rich paying their fair share in taxes, and points out that “socialism” is no longer a dirty word, as manifest by the Democratic Socialists of America and their electoral successes, whatever their faults, and public opinion can still sway policy here and abroad. Since Mastering the Universe was published, the ruling class have come to be known as “the Epstein class.”
Mastering of the Universe is the kind of righteously angry, readable, fierce and funny polemic we need in order to get back in the trenches.
Ann Garrison is a Black Agenda Report Contributing Editor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at ann@anngarrison.com. You can help support her work on Patreon.
Afeni is a community organizer and writer who is co-authoring an article soon to appear in Rolling Stone about FBI surveillance of Aretha Franklin. Afeni is joining us from Washington DC.
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