Why Are the Rich Obsessed with Stewardship?
From fund managers talking about the eye-popping amounts they control, to celebrities waxing poetic about a vast piece of land they just bought – likely in an exotic and climate-endangered location – they’re all about that stewardship.
The other day, I was listening to Mark Zuckerberg’s interview on the Joe Rogan podcast and there it was again, “steward”, in the middle of an episode about Meta welcoming hate speech back on its platforms and eliminating DEI training. While off on a tangent about how male energy is good, actually, a visually rebranded Zuckerberg called himself a steward of the 1,400 acres of land he owns on the island of Kauai, in Hawai’i.
Around the time of the controversial purchase, the tech billionaire clashed with locals by building six foot stone walls that cut them off from Kuleana land that had been passed down in their families for over 150 years. There was also concern that the compound, which reportedly includes a 5,000-square-feet underground bunker, would remove access to a public beach.
The following year, with the support of a retired professor who lived on Kauai, Zuckerberg filed quiet title suits against locals who had small parcels within the boundaries of his property. These kinds of lawsuits are meant to clear up disputes where ownership is not passed down in writing, but often end up forcing owners to auction off their land. In some cases, the defendants also have to pay the legal fees of the plaintiff. This led to backlash from the islanders, who called the Meta CEO “the face of neocolonialism” in a statement to The Guardian.
The lawsuit was eventually dropped, but the lands were later sold anyway and bought up by Zuckerberg’s partner from the community. There was speculation that the retired professor must have had support from Zuckerberg in order to outbid his own relatives and purchase the contested lands for $2 million.
In the three-hour interview, which was published on Friday, Rogan and Zuckerberg gushed about male spaces, corporations with masculine energy, kicking it with the boys and hunting.
“Hunting, yeah!”
The Meta CEO then launched into a story about hunting invasive pigs on his Kauai property and teaching his daughters about “all the…everything that goes into having a farm.” The “circle of life” talk aims to introduce the kids – who are eight, six and one-and-a-half – to the family’s duty, “as stewards of this…thing”.
And, he added, it’s easier than explaining what goes into managing a tech company.
So, what is stewardship and what is it not?
It’s important to know the difference.
Stewardship refers to the careful management of something entrusted in one’s care, for example a natural resource, like land. This is different from ownership, which implies exclusive possession of something and the ability to keep it for oneself, to prevent others from using it.
When the term first entered Middle English, stewardship usually referred to the management of a large household. It was the steward’s job to ensure that everything ran smoothly and efficiently on a daily basis. Later, the word became more closely associated with care and responsibility. Nowadays, what we call stewardship is virtually synonymous with guidance, oversight and care.
But what stewardship is not, is having the kind of wealth human brains weren’t built to understand and using it to buy land so you can cosplay as a farmer. Bonus points if it’s in an exotic paradise where locals’ rights to it have been stripped away by successive waves of colonisation.
On Kauai, locals have always had a special relationship with their land, seeing it more as an ancestor than as a possession to be bought, sold and exploited for resources. Before the idea of absolute ownership was introduced to the islands, the prevailing attitude was one of collective stewardship.
This sounds a lot like another example of stewardship I think is relevant here, from David Graeber and David Wengrow’s 2020 book, The Dawn of Everything. The authors start out by trying to trace the origins of inequality and end up challenging the popular view that our societies evolved in a linear way, from primitive hunter-gatherers, to farmers, to the neoliberal capitalism of the present day.
Instead, we’ve always experimented with different ways of organising our societies, some more egalitarian than others. We picked up agriculture and the domestication of wheat, then dropped it again, countless times. We moved from place to place, usually with the seasons.
Importantly, land belonged to no one, but anyone who happened to live on it for a while was responsible for it. Everyone cared for the land together and everyone had access to it and its resources. This included fishing, hunting, farming and foraging within reason and using methods geared towards long-term ecological health. But also, in the case of some indigenous American tribes, looking after an animal native to their area, like grizzly bears.
“I’m just holding it for a friend”
This version of stewardship is so far removed from the one practiced by tech magnates like Zuckerberg that they may as well exist on different planets. This parallel-world stewardship is the one that appears in copy written for and about immensely wealthy people.
It’s meant to signal the billionaire in question is simply guarding this money, making sure it gets put to good use. The word lends a gentle earthiness to something that is, in fact, the very pragmatic matter of having oodles of cash and the power to make people believe you’re really just taking care of it.
There’s something very Wild West about calling oneself a steward, very return-to-nature, a toreador wrangling the bull into the endgame – never mind how bullfights usually end. We can understand it as branding, as an attempt to ingratiate oneself with the common folk by feigning humility. Just like Zuckerberg’s new Zoomer haircut and sudden passion for MMA have a different kind of cachet – appealing to the right-leaning young men he hopes to win back onto his platforms.
But PR good vibes aside, the preoccupation with stewardship is also about ego. Rather than someone who can buy and own the natural wonders of the world, the ultra-rich would rather see themselves (and be seen) as shepherds using their wealth and power to do the kind of good that only unchecked privilege thinks it can do.