We Tracked the CEOs. We Forgot to Track the Country.

KJS DC 3.26

Re: Bloomberg piece by Adrian Wooldridge, published March 13, 2026. The article critiques a book defending billionaires while making the opposite case: that plutocratic wealth is corrupting and hollowing out American democracy.

Bloomberg called it this week. Adrian Wooldridge didn’t mince words: America’s plutocrats are derailing democracy.

I’ve been writing about this for two years. The ESG framework we built — tracking CEO compensation, board independence, political exposure, governance risk — was supposed to be the early warning system for exactly this.

We forgot to run it on the country itself.

I wrote a piece today about what that oversight has cost us — and what a young professional needs to understand about the system they’re inheriting. Teddy Roosevelt saw this coming in 1910. The question is whether we act before it fully arrives.

In business school, they teach you ESG. Environmental, Social, Governance. You learn to read proxy statements. You learn to track executive compensation against performance. You learn that when a CEO’s pay is 400 times the median worker’s salary, that’s a governance red flag — a sign that the board has lost its independence and the incentive structure has broken down.

We built entire industries around this discipline. Analysts, ratings agencies, disclosure frameworks, shareholder resolutions. The logic was simple: unchecked power in a corporate structure destroys value and eventually destroys the institution. So we watch it. We measure it. We hold it accountable.

Then we went home and forgot to run the same analysis on our democracy.

Bloomberg’s Adrian Wooldridge wrote this week that money is not only corrupting American politics but turning what was once a globally admired system into a byword for plutocratic excess. He’s right. But this isn’t a surprise. A Princeton study a decade ago found that the influence of ordinary citizens on policy outcomes was at a statistically “non-significant, near-zero level.” America, the researchers concluded, was already a functional oligarchy. We just hadn’t updated our frameworks to reflect it.

Here’s what the ESG lens shows when you point it at the federal government right now:

Billionaires are 4,000 times more likely to hold office than you are. Elon Musk donated at least $132 million to the 2024 Trump campaign and now runs a government efficiency office with unchecked access to federal data and personnel decisions — while holding billions in government contracts through SpaceX and Starlink. That’s not just a conflict of interest. In any corporate governance framework, that’s a material breach. A board that allowed it would be sued.

Billionaire wealth is now growing three times faster than the world economy , while the policy apparatus is being staffed not by career experts but by loyalists whose allegiance runs to donors, not to the public. We call this “de-skilling” in organizational management. When a company replaces experienced professionals with political appointees, it becomes fragile. It loses institutional memory. It stops being able to respond to crises. Watch what’s happening to the FDA, the EPA, the civil service. That’s not reform. That’s organizational arson.

Teddy Roosevelt knew exactly what this was. He called it “the tyranny of mere wealth — the tyranny of a plutocracy.” He said it in 1910, when the first Gilded Age was doing to America what the second one is doing right now. Roosevelt wasn’t a radical. He was a rich man who understood that unchecked wealth concentration destroys the systems that made wealth possible in the first place.

You were handed ESG as a professional tool. It was designed to protect institutions from exactly this kind of capture. The irony is that the same forces dismantling environmental standards, rolling back social protections, and hollowing out governance accountability are the ones who spent the last decade attacking ESG as “woke capitalism.”

They attacked it because it works.

The governance failure happening in Washington right now is the largest ESG event of your professional lifetime.

We have all the frameworks to understand it. We just have to decide to use it.