Robert Kapito, the president of asset management behemoth BlackRock, earns about $20m a year and is worth around $400m. You can buy a lot of fancy trinkets with that kind of money but alas it doesn’t seem to purchase much self-awareness. We are in the middle of a cost of living crisis, with low-income households disproportionately affected by the highest inflation in 40 years. People are struggling to heat their homes and worrying about feeding their families thanks to rocketing food prices. Kapito’s reaction to all this? To complain to a bunch of energy executives about how entitled young people are.
“For the first time, this generation is going to go into a store and not be able to get what they want,” Kapito recently said at an energy conference in Texas in reference to inflation. “And we have a very entitled generation that has never had to sacrifice.”
It’s not clear which generation 65-year-old Kapito is referring to. But I’d bet all the avocado toast in the world he’s not sneering about his fellow boomers. No, one imagines he means millennials: the generation who famously can’t afford housing because they fritter away all their income on takeaway coffee. The generation who earn 20% less than baby boomers did at the same stage of life despite being better educated. The generation that entered the workforce during a giant recession caused by corporate greed, can’t afford to have kids because it’s too damn expensive, and will be paying off student loans for the rest of their lives. On the one hand, millennials have grown up being able choose from around 45 different types of sugary cereals in a grocery store. On the other hand most millennials will never be able to retire. What’s the word to describe that? Ah, yes, “entitled”.
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