BILLIONAIRES

British cartoonist Cunningham serves up the tales of four moguls with outsize influence on the lives of the rest of us.

The new gilded age is America-centric, though far from confined to the U.S., since “there are few geographic barriers to enormous wealth.” Around the world, the ultrawealthy have asserted policies to undo governmental controls on the economy and dismantle the welfare state, however benign, whether breaking the backs of unions or obliterating pension funds. Cunningham focuses on Rupert Murdoch, David and Charles Koch, and Jeff Bezos. Murdoch began by assuming control of a lucrative media network in his native Australia, then worked his way into mostly crafty acquisitions of other networks in the U.K. and U.S. by recruiting leading politicians to evade monopoly statutes. Of course, he made his share of errors, including his purchase of MySpace, which he bought for $580 million in 2005 but dumped six years later for $35 million. The Koch brothers, by Cunningham’s account, were even more politically aggressive, and their meddling has “only helped weaken democratic safeguards that had previously kept at bay would-be demagogues like Donald Trump.” They inherited a fortune, too. Only Bezos came from a comparatively modest background, though, to judge by this narrative, he has been no less politically ruthless. Cunningham’s drawing style is faux naif, representational in the manner of Derf Backderf, if a little less controlled, but his writing style is terse and declarative: “Murdoch’s drift to the political right began in 1975. That year, Australia suffered a constitutional crisis.” His own tendency is clearly to the left, but regardless of stance, it seems inarguable that we are all at least complicit in the power of the mega-rich. “None of us have to buy from Amazon,” he writes. “It isn’t against the law not to contribute to Jeff Bezos’s fortune.”

The rich really are different, as this lightly presented but utterly serious presentation proves beyond argument.