Now how shall we condescend to McCaw? Well, "he is an earnest fellow from Seattle with an environmentalist agenda -- the OneWorld Web site proclaims the team's ambition 'to win the oldest trophy in sports in the name of the health of the world's oceans.'" Anything wrong with that? Well, not obviously wrong, so the author has to rev up the ridicule. "McCaw is well-known for having helped save Keiko, the "Free Willy" killer whale, by bankrolling a program to return the captive orca to the wild."
We have here a stylistic problem, because to make fun of saving whales is the kind of thing one expects from insouciant dilettantes, acting out P.G. Wodehouse. You're not, theoretically, supposed to make fun of people who care about whales. Unless they are billionaires.
What happened to OneWorld is, we are told, that the recession brought down McCaw's fortune "from $7.7 billion to a paltry $2.3 billion. ... That put something of a crimp in McCaw's do-gooder budget, so he brought in Allen to keep OneWorld funded at a respectably obscene level."
Enter another billionaire, Larry Ellison, chief executive of Oracle. "Ellison for years has been trying to stick a harpoon in his rival Microsoft and surpass Bill Gates as the world's richest man." But he is "down to $15.2 billion" because of the recession.
Enter then a Swiss billionaire, and ... on and on it goes. Mark Lewis, the author, is rooting for the New Zealand team, current proprietors of the Cup. That way, "the four billionaire-backed syndicates would have nothing to show for their collective expenditures of at least $300 million. The rest of us would cackle with glee."
Cackle! Was that the word Dickens used to describe the sounds in revolutionary Paris? What's nice about all this is that the article was published in Slate, property of billionaire Bill Gates, and the author works for Forbes, property of billionaire Steve.