The month of July kicked off in New York City with two showy stories of couples disrupting life to celebrate their love. On July 1, extreme climbers Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus announced their engagement by scaling the Empire State Building and unfurling a banner from its famous antenna that proclaimed the healing power of love. A few days later — and just two avenue blocks west — pop singer Taylor Swift wed Kansas City Chiefs tight-end Travis Kelce at Madison Square Garden in front of what appeared to be nearly every celebrity imaginable. Outside the arena, digital billboards proclaimed “JusT&T Married!”
Both stunts caused trouble for everyday New Yorkers just trying to live their lives. Police were called out to deal with Nikolau and Beerkus, who put themselves and the people below in physical danger with their trespassing. Swift and Kelce’s midtown nuptials caused major traffic headaches, with street closures around the arena, along with cancellations (and rescheduling issues) for train passengers, all made worse by the wedding’s overlap with the World Cup, which brought more visitors than usual to the crowded city.
While both couples were being selfish, the official reactions to the two pairs couldn’t have been more different. Nikolau and Beerkus were arrested, held overnight in jail, charged with multiple crimes — and deemed “dingbat daredevils” by the New York Post. But Swift and Kelce were warmly welcomed by the city, which provided police protection and shut down traffic around the arena on their behalf. Coverage in the Post included stories of people raving that it was all “very cool” and “magical.”
The difference? Swift is a billionaire who can afford to rent a massive arena and spend an eye-watering sum — reported to be up to $20 million — on her nuptials. The Russians weren’t.
Swift built her reputation as an ultra-relatable pop star, seemingly down-to-earth with her regular girl fashion sensibilities, boy troubles and cat-lady tendencies. While there are still legions of Swifties — the crowds that gathered around Madison Square Garden on Friday confirmed that — there has also been a noticeable cooling between the singer-songwriter and music fans in recent months. Critical reception of her most recent album “The Life of a Showgirl” was mixed, and although it sold well, the fan chatter about it died nearly immediately. Swift’s popularity has been sliding since the peak of her well-received Eras tour that kicked off in 2023. The vibes, as many a fan will tell you, just seem off these days.
Many fans have blamed her relationship with Kelce, suggesting that the couple’s contented monogamy means Swift has lost her edge as the queen of heartbreak songs. But plenty of pop stars, from Madonna to Britney Spears, have changed their brand as they age without losing faith from their fans, which means the likelier explanation for Swift’s dip in popularity is financial.
In 2023, Swift joined the fewer than 1,000 Americans — less than .0003% — who can call themselves a billionaire. Since then, her net worth has doubled, and while most of us can’t claim to know her on a personal level, from the outside it seems she has developed billionaire brain worms. This chronic condition is contagious among the ultra-rich; its main symptoms are forgetting what it’s like to be a normal person who endures occasional inconveniences and the indignity of people saying “no.”
Swift’s Madison Square Garden wedding may be just the latest — and most outrageous — example of this change, but it’s as good an explanation as any for why her music has grown colder as she’s become richer.
Swift’s Madison Square Garden wedding may be just the latest — and most outrageous — example of this change, but it’s as good an explanation as any for why her music has grown colder as she’s become richer. Flying around the world on a private jet, living behind a phalanx of security and saying Kelce is “putting his life on the line” as a well compensated football player are all signs that Swift has lost touch with humanity. This would be hard for any artist, but it’s disastrous for someone whose work is generally interpreted as autobiographical.
Hyper-wealth is not just a problem for artists. In recent years, there has been a growing public discourse about how the mere existence of billionaires exacerbates all manner of economic and social ills, and that debate has sometimes been accompanied by calls for the country’s elected officials to abolish the billionaire class through tax policy, reducing their wealth to mere multi-millionaire status.
“There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said during a May appearance on “It’s Open,” comedian Ilana Glazer’s podcast. “You just can’t earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that.”
Her remarks caused an explosion of outrage from a lot of very rich people — and the media outlets they own — but many experts agree with her views.
“Billionaires just have too much and give back too little,” Brian Galle, a law professor at the University of California at Berkley, told me. In January, Galle published a book-length report titled “How to Tax the Ultrarich” for the Roosevelt Institute, and he has argued that a major problem with hyper-wealth is it creates unchecked power. “They control media, other key enterprises, and today the Cabinet.”
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But Galle said the Swift-Kelce wedding isn’t even close to the biggest billionaire-based scandal around Madison Square Garden. He instead pointed to Wired reporting about New York Knicks owner Jim Dolan allegedly using cameras and security at the arena to spy on his critics. Galle also noted that Dolan appears to trade on his ownership of the team “for political favors — say, by giving the president a luxury box for game three [of the NBA championships] and spoiling things for every New Yorker.”
This includes Dolan’s fronting of an embarrassing blues-rock band, often while sporting a fedora, and he inflicts his music on audiences by installing himself as the opener for acts like the Eagles. While this is horrifyingly funny, such details matter, reminding us that having too much money can serve to erode a person’s basic human empathy or reasonable sense of shame.
“It is crazy that even as billionaire control over everything gets bigger and bigger, the contributions they give back to everyone else get smaller and smaller,” Galle said, noting that, overall, the tax rate paid by billionaires is about 20% less than the average American. The Supreme Court has gotten in the way of increasing the tax rate on billionaires, Galle pointed out. But he argued that there are policy fixes that could, at least, make sure “we’re no longer paying extra taxes to make up for the fact that [Jeff] Bezos and [Elon] Musk aren’t.”
Taylor Swift’s wedding may be far from the biggest issue caused by allowing a small number of people to accumulate so much wealth, but it is still a very straightforward example of this problem.
The issue isn’t just that it’s unjust for a few folks to make far more money than any person can fairly earn, as Ocasio-Cortez argued. It’s also that billionaires, having functionally unlimited money, can buy their way out of living within, or even in spitting distance of, the same social contract the rest of us must adhere to.
If you or I were. to disrupt a major city’s traffic to perform a wedding, we would go to jail. We can’t just waltz into the White House and demand the destruction of an international aid program that has saved the lives of millions of people around the world, as Musk did, just because it annoys us personally. Being a billionaire comes with too much power, and it saps them of the human connection and ordinary experience that keeps normal people honest. In the process, they become a serious threat to the rest of us.
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