The Billionaires Who Are Threatening Democracy

By 2017, the billionaire financier Ray Dalio had grown his company, Bridgewater Associates, into the world’s biggest hedge fund. And like many wealthy executives, he had also begun to reinvent himself as a “thought leader,” weighing in frequently on topics such as geopolitics, public education, and workplace culture.

In the fall of that year, Dalio was interviewed by Michael Milken, a fellow billionaire who had. Onstage in Santa Monica, California, Dalio Lee Kuan Yew, considered the founder of modern-day Singapore, as “probably the greatest leader of the last 50 or 100 years.” Lee’s three-decade rule transformed the country from what Dalio called “a mosquito-infested backwater” into a vibrant economy with a GDP per capita than that of the United States. “The man was a very strong man,” Dalio said. Under Lee’s rule, “there was a firmness … there was a strictness in terms of the definition of what a good citizen was.”