About Men Doing Greed

If you’ve been paying attention for the past decade, you see a lot of major issues follow what we call Men Doing Greed, and to keep you informed on these Men Doing Greed, we’ve started a series titled as such. It’s wild to track the money and decisions in our country, only to learn that a small list of wealthy men at the top are running it all – and it’s time you know who they are. We’re diving into who they are, what they have built, and why you are going to keep hearing about them. Even if you know many of these names, you may learn something new, or you may learn about someone you hadn’t heard of.

Track these names, watch what’s written about them, and over times, patterns reveal themselves.

Elon Musk

Net worth: ~$670 billion

As you likely know, Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, renamed it X, gutted its safety and moderation teams, reinstated accounts like Nick Fuentes that had been banned for hate speech, and then used the platform’s algorithm to amplify his own posts to 200 million followers while reshaping it into the world’s most influential far-right megaphone. Joy! He spent over $250 million to help elect Donald Trump, took a role leading the Department of Government Efficiency, and used that position to dismantle federal agencies and fire thousands of government workers. He has posted AI-generated images mocking political opponents, amplified Russian disinformation, and called for the prosecution of judges who have ruled against the administration he helped install.

Oh and his kids hate him, publicly speaking out against him often.

Best known for: Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter/X, and becoming the wealthiest person in the history of the world.

Why he sucks: The concern with Musk is not that he has opinions. It is that he owns the platform where the worst public discourse happens, funds politicians who make the laws, and has positioned himself as an unelected co-president with more access to power than any private citizen in American history. He has also been sued repeatedly for labor violations at Tesla and SpaceX, where workers attempting to unionize have been illegally fired.

Daddy Issues: His father publicly called him a “terrible human being”, then had a child with his own stepdaughter, and, as proven in his biography, Elon has been trying to earn his father’s love his whole life.

For the dinner table: “The only reason that Tesla is giving him a $1T (yes 1 trillion) payment package is to trap him with golden handcuffs after the business took a nosedive when he went to DOGE. Sure he could become a trillionaire, but he’s continued to say his money is no longer worth it.” (read here)

Predicted Taxes Paid on 2024 Earnings: $0; did not take a salary

Watch: Musk on HBO for more

Jeff Bezos

Net worth: ~$240 billion

Jeff Bezos, we all know. He founded Amazon in 1994 as an online bookstore and turned it into a company with a market cap that has exceeded $2 trillion, the second largest private employer in the United States, with over a million workers worldwide. An October 2023 report found that 41% of Amazon workers had been injured on the job, and a 2024 Senate investigation found that Amazon had manipulated its own workplace injury data to make its warehouses appear safer than they were. Bezos has spent millions opposing unionization efforts, while his personal assets include a $500 million superyacht, a $75 million support vessel for the superyacht, four private jets, and several hundred million dollars in real estate. He bought The Washington Post in 2025 and is continuously caught in censorship methods to keep it aligned with his efforts.

Best known for: Building Amazon and being the person most responsible for making next-day delivery a requirement for ecomm brands, putting many brands out of business.

Why he sucks: Amazon’s business model requires treating humans as logistics machines. The injury rates, the timed bathroom breaks, the algorithmic surveillance of productivity, the aggressive union-busting, the wages that require many workers to hold multiple jobs: it’s been called a modern profitable prison. Bezos attended Trump’s inauguration alongside Musk and Zuckerberg, and Amazon has filed lawsuits seeking to dismantle the National Labor Relations Board, the only agency that gives private sector workers the legal right to organize.

Daddy Issues: Was adopted at 3 years old after his dad left him at 17 months old. He tried reconnecting with Jeff once he was successful and Jeff never spoke to him. Jeff’s stepfather Miguel is an immigrant from Cuba who has treated him with love and invested $250,000 into Amazon at a time when he thought he’d lose it. And still, Jeff continues to align himself with anti-immigration policies.

For the dinner table: “Did you know that Amazon allows dupe sales to stay on their site so brands have to sell on his platform? You can’t legally fight his dupes of designer product being sold unless you too are selling on Amazon. It’s so messed up for these product brands.”

Predicted Taxes Paid on 2024 Earnings: $0; did not take a salary

Watch: The Billionaires Who Made Our World (Prime Video/Apple TV)
also covers Musk, Zuckerberg, Gates

Larry Ellison

Net worth: ~$245 billion

Larry Ellison co-founded Oracle in 1977 essentially for the CIA and built it into one of the largest enterprise software companies in the world, a company whose databases run governments, hospitals, banks, and militaries globally. In 2024, Oracle paid $115 million to settle a class action lawsuit alleging the company had collected and sold personal data from billions of consumers without their knowledge or consent. That same year, at an Oracle investor meeting, Ellison outlined his vision for the future: AI-powered surveillance cameras everywhere, tracking everyone, ensuring that citizens would be on their best behavior because they would always be recorded.

His son David now controls TikTok, CBS, CNN, Warner Brothers, Paramount, and HBO and promising the Trump administration editorial changes at CNN in exchange for regulatory approval.

Best known for: Oracle, a net worth that briefly made him the richest person on earth in 2025

Why he sucks: Ellison has been advocating for mass surveillance of American citizens since September 11, when he offered Oracle’s software for free to build a national ID database. He has since lobbied for a unified national database of all American citizens’ data, including DNA, to be fed into AI models, with Oracle at the center of it. Ellison and family also funded a lobbying operation through his donations to the Tony Blair Institute that one investigation found had effectively turned the think tank into a global sales arm for Oracle in over 45 countries. And as if it doesn’t get worse, he allowed Israel to use Oracle for their war efforts and personally funded the IDF with millions and millions of dollars.

Daddy Issues: His adoptive father Louis told him repeatedly that he would never amount to anything in ilfe. When his adoptive mother Lillian, the only person in that house who was kind to him, died while he was in college, he didn’t have anyone else to care for him, so he turned to power.

For the dinner table: “He said out loud, at a shareholder meeting, that mass surveillance would keep citizens on their best behavior. He said it like it was a good thing but everyone thought it was creepy.”

The Koch Brothers

(Charles Koch, net worth ~$59 billion. David Koch died in 2019.)

Charles and David Koch inherited their father’s oil and gas company and turned it into Koch Industries, the second-largest privately owned company in America. Between 1997 and 2018, Koch family foundations spent more than $145 million funding organizations dedicated to climate change denial, making fake research, paying for fake grassroots movements, and influencing over 400 members of Congress to sign pledges against climate legislation. They built what critics call the Kochtopus: a web of think tanks, advocacy groups, academic programs, and political candidates all funded and coordinated to serve a single goal, which was eliminating government regulation of their industry.

Best known for: Creating the climate change denial movement

Why they suck: The Koch network spent decades literally funding actual fake news about climate change, causing enough people to believe their lives even today, and likely for generations. The US has fined Koch Industries repeatedly for environmental violations, including a $35 million penalty for 300 oil spills across six states. While all of this was happening, David Koch put his name on Lincoln Center, the Met, and the Museum of Natural History, and called himself a “great philanthropist of New York City”. His money was funding voter suppression laws in 38 states, the Tea Party, and Citizens United, the law that made it legal for billionaires to spend unlimited, undisclosed money on elections.

Daddy Issues: Their father Fred built oil plants for Stalin and Hitler, came home deeply paranoid about government, and spent the rest of his life drilling that fear into his sons. Charles and David took their inheritance and spent the next five decades turning that paranoia into the most effective anti-government political machine in American history, setting the stage for modern MAGA.

For the dinner table: “We’d actually have a country who believes climate change was real, if these two brothers weren’t funding all climate change denial campaigns.”

Watch: Dark Money

Rupert Murdoch

Net worth: ~$22 billion

Rupert Murdoch inherited a single Australian newspaper at 21 and spent the next seven decades building a media empire that now includes Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and HarperCollins. His business model is formulaic: turn news into entertainment, weaponize outrage for profit, and sell political influence to the highest bidder. Fox News paid $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit after airing false claims about “the rigged 2020 election”, and internal documents revealed the network knew it was lying and did it anyway because the alternative was losing viewers.

Best known for: Creating the media infrastructure that made MAGA possible and turning the American news cycle into a 24-hour loop of grievance.

Why he sucks: He is the definition of fake news, and built an empire banking on people’s stupidity. His empire of wealth proves that if you say anything to the American people, it becomes fact that’s hard to walk back. Decades of deliberate disinformation have measurable consequences on democratic participation, on policy, on how millions of people understand reality.

Daddy Issues: His father Keith was a powerful media figure who built the empire Rupert inherited, spent Rupert’s childhood treating him as a disappointment, and died before he could see whether his son would amount to anything. Rupert spent the next seven decades building something bigger than his father ever had and then did the exact same thing to his own children, who now hate him.

For the dinner table: “He once admitted in a deposition that he knew his network was lying about the election but he chose the ratings anyway. No wonder his kids are democrats who can’t stand him.”

Watch: Dynasty: The Murdochs (Netflix)

The Sackler Family

(Collective net worth: ~$10.8 billion after settlements)

The Sackler family owned Purdue Pharma, the company that made OxyContin and made a generation addicted to painkillers. For years they marketed it to doctors and patients as “non-addictive” even though it was, and they knew that. They’re, in essence, responsible for the opioid epidemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. Before Purdue declared bankruptcy, the family withdrew more than $10 billion and moved significant portions offshore to keep it untouchable. They donated millions to museums and universities to “fix” their reputation, then spent years in court trying to avoid paying anything back. In 2024 they reached a $7.4 billion settlement, the largest of its kind, paid out over 15 years. They are still billionaires.

Best known for: Funding the opioid epidemic and then funding the Sackler Wing at the Met, the Sackler galleries at Oxford, the Sackler Museum at Harvard, and dozens of other institutions whose boards have since removed their name.

Why they suck: A congressional hearing on Purdue described the family’s behavior as “shockingly callous.” A congressman from Tennessee said watching a family member testify made his blood boil and that he was not aware of any family in America more evil. Author Patrick Radden Keefe, who wrote the definitive account of the family in Empire of Pain, noted that they could produce a rehearsed simulacrum of human empathy but were impervious to any genuine moral epiphany. They have never meaningfully acknowledged what they did and many of the family fled the country.

Daddy Issues: Their father Isaac was a Brooklyn grocer who lost everything in the Depression and couldn’t afford to send his sons to college. He was a good man, beloved by his community. Before he died he told them: “What I have given you is the most important thing a father can give – a good name.” They felt pressure to honor their father’s legacy, but history now knows them as the architects of the opioid crisis.

For the dinner table: “Makes me not want to go to The Met, seeing their name everywhere”

Watch: The Crime of the Century (HBO); or miniseries Dopesick – not a documentary but powerful

Peter Thiel

Net worth: ~$7.9 billion

Peter Thiel co-founded PayPal, was the first outside investor in Facebook, and built Palantir, a surveillance and data company with deep ties to government intelligence agencies. In a 2009 essay published by the Cato Institute, he wrote that extending the vote to women had rendered the idea of capitalist democracy an oxymoron, and that freedom and democracy were no longer compatible. He has since spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding politicians who reflect that worldview, most notably JD Vance, whose Senate campaign Thiel funded to the tune of $15 million, the largest individual donation to a single Senate candidate in American history.

Best known for: Being the intellectual and financial architect of the current tech-right movement, the man whose 2009 essay essentially predicted and prescribed everything that is currently happening in American politics with Project 2025.

Why he sucks: Thiel did not just donate money to candidates he liked. He built their campaigns, he wrote the philosophy, and he mentored the people now sitting in the highest offices in the country. When JD Vance says something that makes your jaw drop, trace it back and you will almost always find Thiel. He has also specifically and on the record stated that women’s participation in democracy is bad for the country, and then spent a billion dollars making sure the people who agree with him run for office and win.

Daddy Issues: Klaus Thiel spent his career managing mines in apartheid South Africa and Namibia, never telling the African miners that uranium was slowly poisoning them. People were dropping like flies while Klaus kept the operation running, and Peter was there through it all to absorb the lessons. Klaus later his own son before he was ready, stripping away his right to tell his own story and come out on his own terms.

For the dinner table: “He wrote in an essay that women getting the right to vote was a blow to capitalism. That essay is now basically the governing philosophy of the United States so thats fun!”

Watch: The Ruling Class: Who’s Afraid of Peter Thiel (Prime Video)

---

Men Doing Greed is an ongoing series. Still to come: Roger Ailes, Bernie Madoff, Adam Neumann, Billy McFarland, Harvey Weinstein, Travis Kalanick, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, Martin Shkreli, Les Wexner,