The rich rule the world

Whenever I get new job, the first thing I do is call my dad. And the first thing he asks me is: How much do they pay you? The man’s obsession with dollars and cents is legendary in the Drummond family. But his keen interest in the size of my salary has a very good reason: after all, money rules the world, whether you there is or there is not. So, Mr. Drummond thinks you can try to win as much as you can.

My hereditary pathologies aside, WIRED’s interest in money is as obvious as it is overwhelming: We cover a trillion-dollar industry, and that industry happens to shape everything about how we live. But who exactly has this money? How do they master it? And what does that mean for the rest of us? To find out, we sent some WIRED reporters with an eye for money to far-flung places: From the United Arab Emirates to Denmark to Washington, D.C., to fucking Florida, we cast far and wide to bring you some unique WIRED stories documenting wealth and power across the planet.

Finally, a group of editors sat down to evaluate our lineup. And we noticed something as we flipped through the drafts and infographics. Wherever in the world we had sent a reporter, whatever corner of the tech landscape we were covering, the holders of all that money? men. All of them. Everyone. Unmarried. one. Bill Gates, who sat down with Stephen Levy to talk about his new memoir (wait for it), has enjoyed 19 of the last 30 years at the top of the list of the world’s richest people. Of the 30 crypto investors in Trump’s inner circle, they’re all — wait for it — guys. Even the young people going door-to-door in the Sunshine State selling solar panels in a desperate bid to become millionaires by 30 are men.

So let me be the first to point it out: There’s more testosterone in this issue than the last decade of People’s Sexiest Man Alive issues combined. In part, this is a reality born of circumstance: 87 percent of the world’s billionaires are men, and women continue to be vastly, horribly outnumbered in leadership positions in the tech industry. None of this even begins to account for racial diversity, which paints an even bleaker picture. And that’s likely to continue quickly as tech giants like Meta and Google part with their DEI investments. Meanwhile, online manosphere— recently encouraged by President Trump and his first friend Musk — continues to metastasize in scope and influence.

But I’ll take ownership too. At WIRED, our failure of editorial foresight and imagination is to see the obvious—the glaring, insistent masculinity, page after page—only at the last minute. Lest we decide earlier in our commissioning process to interrogate the fraught and fractured gender dynamics of wealth accumulation, of corporate influence, of power. All of them still, infuriatingly, belong almost exclusively to men with penises, commanding boardroom baritones, and centuries of head start.

Don’t get me wrong: you’ll enjoy this issue, both in print and online. We hope you’ll learn a thing or two about how the big money in tech is amassed and spent, and how people—men—amass and spend it. But from a woman in charge of all the guys out there, including the ones featured on our pages: it may be a rich man’s world for now, but believe me, women like money too. And we’re coming to get some of yours.

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