robber barons

A term applied to certain leading American businessmen of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Cornelius Vanderbilt and John D. Rockefeller . The term suggests that they acquired their wealth by means more often foul than fair.

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Example Sentences

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“Bernie is rising to the top, in my eyes, because I’m seeing all this corruption that’s going on at the top of the Republican Party, all the robber barons. I relate to him more.”

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It's anti-government; Trump — the Trump regime and Trump himself — seems to really admire the era of the downfall of Reconstruction, the Gilded Age; the age of robber barons, of unregulated, rapacious capitalism and open imperialism, when the United States acquired an overseas American empire after the Spanish-Cuban American war of 1898.

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Even in the triumph of the worst, which is the age of robber barons and the age of rapacious capitalism and imperialism, even those things were being contested.

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Because even the robber barons were not that bad; at least they endowed some libraries and foundations and fellowships and had some idea of wanting to pretend to some sort of cultural capital.

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And the thing about Musk, along with midlife crisis-edition Mark Zuckerberg and other tech bros, is that they’re styling themselves as entertainers instead of robber barons.

From

robber baron robber crab

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