Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?
When Roman Abramovich relocated his five yachts to international waters during the 2022 sanctions response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he was not hiding. He was using his ships as tools to keep himself out of the reach of any particular state. There are now over 6,100 superyachts in the global fleet. They are owned, in effect, by a club—a small, identifiable group whose members number in the low thousands.
I have sketched the Four Factions of this club in earlier essays. Here I want to look at the club itself: who these people are, how they live, what they believe, and what holds them together as a class even as they fight a civil war over the future architecture of global power.
The concept of the Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC), developed most systematically by Leslie Sklair and William I. Robinson, describes a class that emerged from the wreckage of the postwar Bretton Woods order—wealthy and powerful individuals who consolidated themselves across the 1990s and 2000s. Where earlier capitalists were bounded by nation-states with wealth rooted in national boundaries, the TCC operates above and across borders. Their corporations are incorporated in Delaware, their holding companies in the Cayman Islands, their personal residences distributed across jurisdictions selected for tax escape and legal convenience. The nation-state is, for this class, a tool rather than an identity.
I depart from Sklair and Robinson on one important point: the TCC is not a homogeneous monolith. Entry to this class is based on mega-wealth, adjacent mega-power, and elite education—Ivy League, Oxbridge, the grandes écoles, Tsinghua’s cadre schools, or their global equivalents. On this definition, the class numbers no more than a few thousand people. And it is currently at war with itself.
1. The Markers of Membership
The most visible signs of TCC membership are the easiest way to spot members. Yachts and private jets, penthouses in Manhattan and villas in Cap Ferrat—these are not merely consumer choices. They are status symbols, boundary markers, and useful tools simultaneously.
The superyacht is more than a flamboyant display of wealth. It is a sovereign space—a floating private estate, flagged in the Marshall Islands or the Bahamas, capable of crossing territorial waters without the customs routines reserved for ordinary travellers. The private jet functions similarly. A member of the TCC in London can attend a meeting in Riyadh, a dinner in Zürich, and a foundation board meeting in New York within forty-eight hours. The global business aviation fleet runs into the tens of thousands of aircraft, owned by perhaps 0.001% of the world’s population. Rapid mobility gives this class extraordinary power, unavailable to the average person.
The ultimate expression of belonging to the global capitalist class may not be owning a private jet or a superyacht, but owning both simultaneously. The “fly-and-float” lifestyle is a key marker.
Gated communities and exclusive residential enclaves complete the picture. The TCC does not live among the populations of the cities in which they reside. Mayfair, the Upper East Side, the 16th arrondissement, Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah—these are staging posts in a transnational circuit of elite social space: school networks, club memberships, charity boards, investment relationships. The gated community is less about security than about maintaining an insulated social world that exists above the city rather than within it.
This is not a Western-only phenomenon. The Chinese billionaire class is often equally extravagant—Jack Ma owns a Gulfstream G650 and the Zen, a 289-foot Feadship superyacht delivered in 2021. But the distinction matters: China retains substantially more state control over its billionaire class than the West does. That structural fact will return when we discuss the State Capitalist faction.
2. New Money, Old Money
The TCC is not homogeneous in how its wealth was acquired, and these differences in origin produce real differences in mentality, political instinct, and factional alignment.
Old money—the dynastic wealth of the Rothschilds, Wallenbergs, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Du Ponts—is not experienced as having been acquired. It is simply the condition of one’s existence. This produces a certain conservatism: an investment in the institutions that protect and expand inherited wealth across generations, and a habitual disdain for the nouveau riche. Old money is the de facto global aristocracy, the money most comfortable with Davos, with the multilateral architecture, with the patient labor of institutional preservation. It has the most to lose from rupture.
New money is more variable and unstable. The most significant new money of our time is Silicon Valley money, accumulated at speeds and scales previously impossible—fortunes measured in the tens or hundreds of billions assembled within single decades. More importantly, it was accumulated through control of information infrastructure: search engines, social networks, cloud platforms, the architectures through which modern human beings organize their attention, their relationships, and increasingly their political lives. This gives Silicon Valley capital a different relationship to power than any previous faction of the ruling class possessed.
3. The Question of Loyalty
Perhaps the most revealing question one can ask of any ruling class is: to what are they loyal?
For the industrial bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century, despite all the cosmopolitan pretensions of capital, the answer was ultimately the nation-state. The Manchester manufacturer was loyal to Britain. The Krupp family was loyal to Germany. Not out of sentiment alone, but because their wealth was territorially rooted, their contracts enforced by national courts, their property protected by national armies.
For the TCC, this territorial loyalty has been detached from the nation, and they have proven unable or unwilling to attach it to humanity at large. The most honest answer—and the one most members of the class would resist if it were stated plainly—is that the primary loyalty of the TCC is to itself: to the protection and survival of the class.
Even this minimal class solidarity is now fracturing, and the fracture is revealing.
The Davos Globalists remain loyal to the institutional architecture through which class power has been exercised—the multilateral organizations, the NGO networks, the technocratic governance structures. Their loyalty is to the system that produced them and that they have, in turn, shaped.
Silicon Valley has transferred its loyalty to a vision—the Network State, the crypto-secured enclave, the corporate polity—that hasn’t yet been built and whose construction requires demolishing existing institutions. Their loyalty is to a class future that doesn’t yet exist.
The Imperialists have arguably recaptured something closest to the old territorial loyalty, but displaced from the nation to a civilizational-imperial project: American and Israeli dominance as the organizing principle of world order. They are loyal to empire.
The State Capitalists maintain the rhetoric of nationalism, but the CCP project is transnational and capitalist at its core. The Belt and Road Initiative spans 140 nations. BRICS is a transnational project. At minimum, BRI is an empire-building project comparable in ambition to Roman road construction.
What none of them are loyal to, in any meaningful sense, is the populations over whom they exercise power.
4. Living Above the Law
The TCC does not, as a rule, simply break laws. It has accomplished something more sophisticated: the systematic construction of a legal architecture that ensures the law does not, in practice, apply to it the way it applies to everyone else.
Extreme wealth buys a legal team that is categorically different from what is available to ordinary defendants—not merely better lawyers, but the capacity to sustain litigation indefinitely, to appeal across multiple jurisdictions simultaneously, to negotiate settlements that preclude precedent-setting judgments. The rule of law is formally intact; in practice, it is a tiered system.
Beyond this, the TCC operates through legal structures—trusts, foundations, holding companies—designed to create distance between ownership and accountability. When a holding company registered in a British Virgin Islands shell corporation, owned by a Cayman trust, controlled by a nominee director, engages in tax avoidance or environmental destruction, there is no individual who broke the law. There is only an architecture.
And the TCC has increasingly developed the capacity to shape the laws themselves. The revolving door between Goldman Sachs and the U.S. Treasury, between pharmaceutical companies and their regulators, between tech platforms and the Congressional committees that oversee them, represents not corruption in the traditional sense but a system that functions as enabler, protector, and guardian of ruling-class wealth and power.
5. How They See Themselves
The dominant self-conception within the TCC is meritocratic. The story this class tells about itself—and has worked energetically to propagate—is that extreme wealth reflects extreme competence, creativity, and contribution. The billionaire earned his billions. The hedge fund manager’s returns reflect genuine insight. The technology founder’s fortune is the fair reward for having changed the world.
It would be a mistake to dismiss this as merely cynical. Many members of the TCC genuinely believe it, and the belief is reinforced by the selection effects of their social world, populated almost entirely by people who have navigated the same competitive gauntlet and emerged successful.
What this self-conception obscures is the role of inherited advantage in creating the conditions for success; the role of luck in differentiating the very successful from the merely successful in high-variance domains; and the role of collective infrastructure—legal systems, educated workforces, public research, stable currencies—on which all private wealth is built.
Each faction inflects the meritocratic story differently. The Davos Globalist imagines himself as a steward of systems he did not build. The Silicon Valley techno-lord imagines himself as a builder of systems that supersede the old order: his wealth is proof of superior vision, institutional resistance is proof of institutional corruption, democracy itself is a constraint on the progress only the genuinely exceptional can deliver. Peter Thiel’s remark that he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible is the unguarded statement of a faction whose success has convinced them the existing architecture of accountability is simply an obstacle.
The Imperial Nationalist self-conception dispenses with the legitimating language of governance or progress entirely: power exists, it must be wielded, the only question is by whom and in whose interest.
6. Market Realism
Beneath the factional disagreements, the TCC shares a single underlying philosophy. Call it market realism: the conviction that market-mediated power relations are the only legitimate, intelligible, and durable basis for organizing human affairs at scale—and that all other ordering principles (democratic legitimacy, religious authority, traditional sovereignty, civic solidarity) are either subordinate instruments, decorative legitimations, or obstacles to be managed.
The factions disagree about the institutional form market realism should take, not its foundational claim.
Davos says markets need transnational technocratic governance to function. Silicon Valley says markets need liberation from the administrative state and re-founding under competent CEO-sovereigns. The Imperialists say markets need a hegemon enforcing the rules with hard power. The State Capitalists say markets need a sovereign party-state directing capital toward civilizational ends.
Four answers to one question: what political system does global capital require?
This also explains the universal core of TCC interests—wealth concentration, anti-democratic drift, elite immunity—without needing a conspiracy.
7. The Philanthropist Alibi
There is one practice so universal among the TCC that it functions almost as a membership requirement: the foundation. Gates, Rockefeller, Ford, Soros, Bloomberg, Bezos, Koch, Chan-Zuckerberg, Schwarzman—every major TCC figure eventually acquires not just wealth but a philanthropic vehicle through which to deploy a portion of it.
The original model was established by John D. Rockefeller, who in the late nineteenth century found himself the wealthiest and most hated man in America. Standard Oil’s monopoly practices had generated Congressional investigations, muckraking journalism, and genuine public fury. Rockefeller’s response was to hire Ivy Lee—widely considered the founding figure of modern public relations—to manage what we would now call his brand. Lee’s advice was not to defend Standard Oil’s practices but to humanize Rockefeller himself: distribute dimes to children, publicize charitable giving, make the man visible as something other than a predator. The Rockefeller Foundation, established in 1913, was the institutional culmination of this strategy.
It was brilliant because Rockefeller genuinely believed in the philanthropic mission. The foundation funded real public health advances, supported universities, shaped policy for generations. The ideological function and the sincere function were not in conflict; they reinforced each other.
This is the essential structure of TCC philanthropy: simultaneously genuine and ideologically functional, with the genuine character what makes the ideology work. If Gates’s foundation were merely a tax shelter, it would be vulnerable to exposure. Because it has genuinely reduced child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa, it is largely immune to critique—and that immunity extends, through association, to Microsoft’s monopoly history, to Gates’s network of policy influence, to his capacity to shape global health architecture in ways that happen to align with his investments in pharmaceutical companies.
The foundation is also, more prosaically, a tax-exempt vehicle for funnelling capital, avoiding taxation, and funding NGOs that the foundation owner creates. The philanthropic function and the asset-protection function coexist comfortably.
8. The Gold Book
In Plutocrats, Chrystia Freeland—a journalist who would later join the WEF Board of Trustees and serve as Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister—identifies what she calls the “gold book”: the unofficial credential that marks true membership in the transnational elite. An Ivy League degree, or its equivalents (Oxbridge in Britain, the grandes écoles in France, the IITs for India’s technical elite), is not primarily about education.
The elite university produces not merely graduates but class members—people who share a set of references, a style of argument, a private society. The roommate who becomes a partner at Goldman Sachs, the classmate who becomes a Senator, the professor who introduces you to the foundation board: these are the relationships that constitute TCC membership far more than any formal credential.
Education is the network.
The pattern is remarkably consistent across all four factions. Davos figures are disproportionately products of elite European and American universities—Schwab studied at Harvard’s Kennedy School, Freeland attended Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, Carney took his doctorate at Oxford. The Silicon Valley faction is almost uniformly Stanford and MIT—Thiel did Stanford undergrad and law, Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard but only after gaining admission. The Imperialist faction runs through Georgetown, Yale, and the military academies.
The Chinese State Capitalists attend the Central Party School of the CCP—132 members of the 19th Central Committee held master’s degrees from it. But the integration runs deeper than that: the CCP’s Central Organization Department selectively sends mid-to-high-level officials to elite Western universities for specialized leadership training. Harvard’s Kennedy School alone has hosted over 4,000 Chinese officials, with parallel programs at Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, and Tokyo.
The factions disagree about nearly everything, but they were all admitted to the same system.
9. The Necessary Ability
What skills does one actually need to accumulate and manage wealth and power at this level?
The most fundamental is the ability to operate across institutional domains simultaneously—to translate between the logics of finance, politics, media, and law without being captured by any single one. The TCC member who succeeds over the long run is not merely a good businessman or a shrewd politician but someone who can move fluidly across all of these registers and exploit the opportunities that exist at their intersections. Davos figures move between finance, foundation, and government. Silicon Valley technocrats move between platform, capital allocation, and political intervention. Imperialists move between policy, military contracting, and ideological production.
Cross-domain fluency, not technical excellence in any single domain, is the core class competence.
Related is what might be called extreme patience—the ability to operate on time horizons ordinary political and market actors cannot sustain. A democratic politician thinks in four-year cycles. A public company executive thinks in quarterly cycles. The TCC thinks in generational cycles, which gives it a structural advantage in any competition with short-horizon actors. The Rockefeller Foundation, established in 1913, is still operating. The Davos network, assembled over fifty years, is still functioning. The long game is a class characteristic.
10. A Class in Crisis
The Transnational Capitalist Class is keenly aware of both its privileged position and its vulnerability. Is it any surprise that its members surround themselves with private security, travel anonymously in private jets, live in massive gated communities, and spend millions of dollars cultivating the public image of philanthropy?
The portrait sketched here—a class defined by transnational mobility, meritocratic self-conception, sophisticated relationship to legal architecture, and shared commitment to market realism as background philosophy—is the portrait of the TCC at its moment of maximum coherence. This is the class that built the post-Cold War order and believed, briefly, that it had achieved something like a permanent settlement.
That settlement has collapsed. Not from without, but from within.
The fractures now visible are not superficial disagreements about policy. They are ruptures over the fundamental question of what form class power should take in the twenty-first century: multilateral governance, corporate sovereignty, imperial dominance, or state capitalism. And the depth of the shared formation—the common yacht clubs, the common credentialing institutions, the common philosophy—is what makes the fracture historically significant.
This is the condition of an organic crisis within the ruling class itself. The TCC has not been destroyed. But it has stopped being, in any meaningful sense, a unified class—and the consequences of that disunity are being felt across every institution and geopolitical conflict we observe today.
For previous articles in the series:
The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War
Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War
The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class
Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe