What the Study of Oligarchs can teach Leaders today – An Interview with David Lingelbach and Valentina Rodríguez Guerra
What skills do oligarchs have that others don't? We talked to David Lingelbach and Valentina Rodríguez Guerra about those who convert money into political power and what their playbook can teach us about effective leadership in an uncertain world.
Oligarchs are not merely billionaires, political insiders, or controversial public figures. They are actors who use wealth to gain power and power to protect and expand wealth. They thrive in environments where uncertainty is extreme, inequality is high, and institutions are weak or changing. So what can leaders learn from those who have mastered the fusion of wealth and power?
That is the question at the heart of Games Without Thrones: 8 Leadership Lessons from Oligarchs. Joining us to discuss it are the authors, David Lingelbach and Valentina Rodríguez Guerra. They are the founders of The Center for the Study of Oligarchs, an independent research center dedicated to the study of the causes, dynamics, characteristics, consequences and strategies associated with oligarchs.
The interview was conducted by the journalist Meaghan Beatley.
Meaghan Beatley: You’ve been researching oligarchs for 30 years and have written about them extensively. This book was a bid to reach a bigger audience. Why was that important, and how was the process of researching and writing this book different from your previous work? What were some of the challenges of writing for a wider, less academic audience?
David Lingelbach and Valentina Rodríguez Guerra are the co-authors of three books from De Gruyter Brill: The Oligarchs’ Grip: Fusing Wealth and Power (2024) Games Without Thrones: 8 Leadership Lessons from Oligarchs (2026) and the forthcoming The Oligarchs of the Americas: From the Conquistadores to Silicon Valley.
David Lingelbach: Oligarchs are one of the greatest challenges of our time. Their world order has reshaped the opportunity set that businesspeople, policymakers, and citizens face. So it seemed important to begin to put tools in peoples’ hands that they could use to navigate this new order.
As business-school academics, we have been struck by how little sustained attention our field has given to the fusion of wealth and power. Business schools study entrepreneurship, leadership, finance, and political risk, but rarely bring those subjects together to examine oligarchs. We wanted to help change that conversation.
This book required a different kind of research. Our first book drew more heavily on interviews and primary fieldwork. Here, because we were comparing oligarchs across periods, regions, and industries, we synthesized a much larger body of biographies, investigative journalism, historical scholarship, financial reporting, and public records. Access to oligarchs and their inner circles has also become more restricted, which is itself revealing.
We have actually enjoyed writing for a wider and less academic audience. In part because of our backgrounds, we are comfortable in talking about complex topics in simple to understand terms. We are both active and engaged university professors, and explaining these topics to our students is something we have always enjoyed doing.
“Today’s world is the Gilded Age on steroids. Wealth and power are being accumulated and fused at a much faster pace than that period.”
MB: Many people have said this is a new Gilded Age, where monopolies (or oligarchs) like the Rockefellers rule. How is today’s context and landscape different from then? Can we learn anything from that era?
Valentina Rodríguez Guerra: Today’s world is the Gilded Age on steroids. Wealth and power are being accumulated and fused at a much faster pace than that period. And while the Gilded Age was concentrated in a handful of industrializing economies, today’s oligarchs operate globally. Technology has a lot to do with that.
The reaction to the Gilded Age in the US does give us some limited hope. As we wrote about in our recent Washington Monthly piece, the inspiration provided by figures like Brandeis and Teddy Roosevelt should help all of us believe that humans can again find it in themselves to face down and contain oligarchs.
MB: You explain that wealth, power, and uncertainty are the three main ingredients to make an oligarch. What makes this day and age more uncertain than previous decades?
DL: This is a very important question. The structural break began in the 1970s, when Bretton Woods collapsed and the oil shocks disrupted the postwar economic order. Globalization then created a more interconnected but shock-sensitive world. The decisive rupture was the 2008 financial crisis, and the data suggest that global uncertainty settled at a persistently higher level around 2011 or 2012. Brexit and Trump were major political accelerants.
We describe the period beginning with 9/11 as a new twenty years’ crisis because security, financial, political, health, and geopolitical shocks increasingly began to overlap. All of this uncertainty was the oxygen that oligarchs have used to power their rise. They have skill sets that others don’t have, ones that enable them to lean into uncertainty and take advantage of its myriad opportunities.
“We actually see oligarchs as both a cause and consequence of weakening institutions.”
MB: You call oligarchs canaries in the coal mine; a symptom of weak institutions, not the cause. In your view, what’s actually driven that weakening over the last few decades? And would it be possible to strengthen those institutions to contain oligarchs, or is it too late?
VRG: We actually see oligarchs as both a cause and consequence of weakening institutions. Institutions have been weakening for a couple of additional reasons. First, in a globalized economy, national institutions are less effective, and no really powerful global institutions has arisen to fill the gap. Second, rising inequality–which helps to cause oligarchs–has undermined trust in existing institutions. No one seems to be able to address the central issue in many advanced economies: why are people’s economic lives getting less and less appealing? Why are prices rising and staying high? Why are incomes stagnating for the average person? Institutions have failed people globally through repeated crises as well, accelerating their weakening.
Other causes include the perception that citizens are losing their voice in the political and economic systems, polarization, and the way our digital world is pushing us into our own little worlds, where we can be more easily manipulated. Strengthening institutions requires resources, but money alone is not enough. Institutions need capable people, political independence, public legitimacy, enforcement power, and rules that apply to the powerful as well as everyone else. We are not optimistic about a rapid recovery. But institutional decline is not irreversible, and history offers examples of institutions being rebuilt after periods of severe capture and failure.
MB: Of the three pathways to oligarch wealth – entrepreneurship, inheritance, and connections – you point out that entrepreneurship – or the idea of the “self-made” man – is the most popular. In your experience, and according to your research, how often are oligarchs actually self made, and why do they cling to this narrative? Why do we?
DL: Our provisional estimate is that more than half of the oligarchs we have studied have genuinely mixed wealth origins. Entrepreneurial activity appears in roughly two-thirds of the cases, connections in nearly half, and inheritance in slightly more than two-fifths. Those figures overlap because Trump-like combinations are common.
Why do we cling to the idea that oligarchs are actually self made? Well, in our research for our first book we identified that being entrepreneurial–as opposed to being an entrepreneur–is a key strategy in being an effective oligarch. So there is some truth in the perception. But, in addition, oligarchs have good PR. They work to present themselves as virtuous risk takers who better society. That makes them more politically palatable.
MB: Audre Lorde famously wrote, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” While you make it clear that this book is not a how-to guide to become an oligarch, you draw on lessons we can use from them to stay in the game, if not win it. How can we learn from the oligarch playbook without adopting their methods?
“Many of the underlying capabilities are morally transferable, even when oligarchs use them for destructive ends. Mastering uncertainty, maintaining discipline, building multiple advantages, and choosing alliances carefully can serve democratic or emancipatory purposes.”
VRG: Many of the underlying capabilities are morally transferable, even when oligarchs use them for destructive ends. Mastering uncertainty, maintaining discipline, building multiple advantages, and choosing alliances carefully can serve democratic or emancipatory purposes.
It’s the objectives of leadership that matter more. For each of the lessons in the book, it is easy to think of virtuous leaders who employ them. Lincoln mastered uncertainty. Marshall never relied on a single advantage. Havel embraced darkness. Lee Kuan Yew was disciplined. Mandela wasn’t trapped by alliances. Deng Xiaoping waited for his main chance. Dag Hammarskjöld hid in plain sight. Gandhi could not be contained. We learn from the oligarchs’ playbook by being clear about our moral compass.
MB: How can we learn about how oligarchs rule the world and avoid becoming cynical? How have you managed it throughout your careers?
DL: This is a difficult and close run thing. And we are not saying that we haven’t lapsed into cynicism, even despair. We think the antidote to cynicism is to remain scientific. We study oligarchs like scientists study viruses and pandemics. Rigorously, dispassionately, and with an objective of using the reliable knowledge we generate to help contain oligarchs.
MB: You point to Buddhist equanimity and existentialism as ways to counter the oligarch’s tragic worldview, and make the point that there is value to relinquishing control and accepting what you can’t change. But politics runs on hope and mobilization, not detachment. How does a politician, or an ordinary citizen trying to fight back, use equanimity without it becoming resignation?
VRG: Equanimity is not passivity. It is the capacity to act without requiring immediate victory, emotional reassurance, or total control. It helps citizens and politicians absorb setbacks, distinguish what can be changed from what cannot, and continue acting without being consumed by rage or despair.
In our view, contemporary democratic politics runs too much on optimism, and not enough on hope. What’s the difference? Hope admits to realism. Optimism does not. So we hope, but we insist on logic and evidence to light the way forward. Politicians that rely on something else can become demagogues, whatever their underlying value system.
MB: How is this book different from other books about oligarchs, particularly profiles of people like Elon Musk or Donald Trump? You say in the book that you want to avoid dwelling on Trump because he sucks up so much attention – was it intentional to not spotlight any one individual too much or too long?
DL: Most books about oligarchs are biographies, national studies, or exposés. They tell us who a particular oligarch is and what that person has done. Games Without Thrones asks a different question: what do effective oligarchs have in common across countries, industries, and historical periods, and what can the rest of us learn from the strategies they use?
We rely heavily on journalists who dig deep on individuals like Trump or Musk. We just don’t want to get sucked into a worldview that Trump or Musk represent the world of oligarchs. Because they don’t. Not even close.
“Containing oligarchs begins by defining limits, building fences. To what extent should their wealth be converted into power, or their power into wealth?”
MB: The book deftly explains how oligarchs evade containment. How would you say societies can try to contain oligarchs?
VRG: This question is the subject of our current focus at The Center for the Study of Oligarchs. We have written two recent pieces about this in the international media.
Containing oligarchs begins by defining limits, building fences. To what extent should their wealth be converted into power, or their power into wealth? Societies will need to answer those questions first. In our view, there is no single global answer to this question.
Those fences might include strict disclosure of ownership and political spending, limits on conflicts of interest and media concentration, stronger taxation and competition enforcement, and rules preventing public office from being converted into private wealth. Then, once these fences have been designed, strategies must be implemented to build them. Sanctions, prosecutions, and protests can matter, but they are inadequate when used episodically or performatively rather than as parts of a sustained strategy. We need to use the technologies the oligarchs have built against them, revealing the extent and origin of their wealth and power. Those seeking to contain oligarchs must also build a global movement to act in greater concert.
We must accept that oligarchs have always been with us. But we do not need to accept that they must dominate our world. We have many historical examples on which to draw as we develop strategies, pathways, and toolkits to contain oligarchs.
