The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich
by Evan Osnos
View on GoodreadsNew Yorker writer Evan Osnos's 2025 collection of his pieces on the contemporary ultra-rich — superyachts, doomsday prepping, oligarch portraits, the financial-elite-and-Trump alignment — built from a decade of reporting that adds up to a coherent portrait of a separate American social class.
Core ideas
- The "have-yachts" are not just rich; they have constructed an effectively separate civilization — schools, healthcare, transit, security, and increasingly geography (New Zealand bunkers, private islands, climate-resilient enclaves) that decouples their futures from the broader society's.
- The doomsday-prepping chapter is the book's most-cited material — Osnos's reporting on tech billionaires building survival infrastructure for civilizational collapse, treating it as a probable future to plan around rather than to prevent.
- The Trump alignment of finance and tech elites in 2024 is presented as continuous with the broader withdrawal — once you've planned for the collapse, the political incentive to prevent it weakens.
Published2025
Pages304
ISBN9781668204481
ReadJan 2026
