How do billionaires become untouchable - and what finally brings them down?
For decades, the super-rich have exploited a global system that allows them to move money across borders, escape political threats and turn fabulous wealth into power. Offshore accounts, media empires, political connections and foreign laws have made plutocrats seem almost impossible to dislodge.
In Oligarchy Ltd., geopolitics expert Nikhil Kalyanpur follows the spectacular rise and fall of oligarchs from Russia, China and Kazakhstan to Venezuela, Angola and Nigeria. An oil trader who defied American foreign policy. Africa's richest woman. A one-eyed former bodyguard who turned political access into a fortune - and spent it on sixty horses. A Chinese property magnate who joined forces with Steve Bannon. Their stories reveal the different routes to extreme wealth - and the fatal mistake billionaires make when they assume the rules that enriched them will never change.
Drawing on hundreds of court documents, interviews with the lawyers who work for oligarchs and his own upbringing in Dubai, Kalyanpur shows how the very tools that protect extraordinary wealth can be turned against it. And he makes a provocative case for how we can fight back: by making it profitable to expose corruption and forcing the super-rich to compete - against one another.
Billionaires are not untouchable. We already have the weapons to bring them down.