Despite my inherited diseases, WIRED’s interest in cash is as clear as it is enormous: We cover an economy brimming with trillions of dollars, and that business just therefore happens to be shaping all about how we all live. But who precisely has that income? How do they operate it? And what does that imply for the rest of us, exactly? To find out, we dispatched some money-eyed Designed writers to far-flung areas: From the United Arab Emirates to Denmark to Washington, DC, to freaking Florida, we cast far and wide to take you some truly Designed stories documenting wealth and power across the world.
Suddenly, a group of reporters sat down to examine our portfolio. And we noticed things, as we flicked through the documents and visuals. Wherever in the universe we’d sent a writer, whichever part of the tech environment we were covering, the recipients of all of that money? People. All of them. Every. Single. One. Bill Gates, who sat down with Steven Levy to talk about his new memoir ( stay tuned ), has enjoyed 19 of the last 30 years atop the list of the world’s richest people. Of the 30-odd blockchain investors in Trump’s inner group, all of them are—wait for it—guys. Yet the young folks hustling door-to-door in the Sunshine State, shilling solar panel in a desperate bid to be millionaires by 30, are, well, people.
Allow me be the first to point out that this problem contains more testosterone than the combined output from the previous ten issues of Women’s Sexiest Man Alive. In component, that’s a real given of situation: 87 percent of billionaires around the world are men, and women continue to be significantly, wildly outshone in executive positions within the tech industry. None of that perhaps considers cultural diversity, which paints a more bleak picture. And it’s likely to grow as technology giants like Meta and Google squander their La purchases. However, the online manosphere—newly emboldened by President Trump and his First Buddy Musk—continues to metastasize in context and control.
But I’ll get rights to. At WIRED, it’s our loss of newspaper vision and mind to have seen the obvious—the obvious, frequent masculinity, page after page—only at the last minute. To not have, earlier in our assigning process, decided to interrogate the fraught and fractured gender dynamics of wealth accumulation, of corporate influence, of power. All of which still, infuriatingly, belong nearly exclusively to people with penises, with boardroom-commanding baritones, and with a centuries-long head start.
Don’t get me wrong: You’ll enjoy this issue, both in print and online. We hope you learn a thing or two about how the big bucks in tech are being amassed and spent, and how the men are accumulating and spending them. But from one woman in charge to all the men out there, including those featured in our pages, I assure you that women also enjoy money. And we’re coming to take some of yours.
