Rich men rule the world

Whenever you get New job, first thing I do is call my parents. The first thing they ask me is: How much do they pay you? The man’s obsession with dollars and cents is a tradition in the Drummond family. But his enthusiastic interest in the size of my salary is for very good reason: money runs the world, after all, whatever it is You You have any or not. So, Mr. Drummond argues, it’s best to try to make as much money as possible.

Inherited maladies aside, WIRED’s interest in money is as clear as it is formidable: We’re covering an industry filled with trillions of dollars, and that industry happens to shape everything about the way we all live. But who exactly owns this money? How do they use it? What does that mean for the rest of us? To find out, we sent some of WIRED’s money-eyed reporters to far-flung places: from the United Arab Emirates to Denmark to Washington, D.C., to stunning Florida, we’ve taken a look at each place 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. We noticed something while looking through the drafts and charts. Wherever we sent a reporter in the world, whatever corner of the tech landscape we were covering, who owned all that money? men. All of them. all. bachelor. one. Bill Gates, who sat down with Steven Levy to talk about his new memoir (stay tuned), has enjoyed 19 of the past 30 years at the top of the world’s richest people list. Of the roughly 30 cryptocurrency investors in Trump’s inner circle, all of them are — wait for it — men. Even the young men who go door-to-door in the Sunshine State, selling solar panels in a desperate attempt to become millionaires by the age of 30, are men.

So let me be the first to point it out: There’s more testosterone in this issue than in the last decade’s issues of People’s Sexiest Man Alive combined. In part, this is a fact borne of circumstance: 87% of the world’s billionaires are men, and women still vastly out-perform executive positions in the tech industry. None of this takes into account racial diversity, which paints an even bleaker picture. This is likely to continue apace, as tech giants like Meta and Google scale back their investments in DEI. At the same time, Manosphere online— recently encouraged by President Trump and his first friend Musk — continues to spread in scope and influence.

But I’ll take ownership too. At WIRED, our editorial insight and imagination fail to see the obvious — blatant, persistent masculinity, page after page — only at the last minute. Did we not decide, earlier in our recruitment process, to interrogate the fraught and fractured gender dynamics of wealth accumulation, corporate influence, and power? All of which, infuriatingly, still belong almost exclusively to people with male genitalia, who control boardrooms, and who have a centuries-long head start.

Don’t get me wrong: You will enjoy this issue, both in print and online. Hopefully you’ll learn a thing or two about how big money is made and spent in tech, and how people – men – make and spend it. But from one woman in charge to all the men out there, including those who appear in our pages: It may be a rich man’s world right now, but trust me, women love money too. We are coming to take some of you.

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