‘Should Billionaires Exist?’: Bully Pulpit catalyzes campus debate

An email sent out to the student body in mid-October posed a simple question: “Should billionaires exist?”

“I think it was intentionally an inflammatory and provocative question,” debate attendee Turner Van Slyke ’28 said. “I think that it made more people show up.”

The email promoted “Should Billionaires Exist?”, a public debate that drew over 100 students to Koret Pavilion on Wednesday. The event, which opened with student speeches, featured a conversation between experts — including an ex-billionaire and a former Trump administration economic adviser.

“I’ve seen expert speakers take on topics from different angles, but what I haven’t seen is expert speakers rigorously defend and examine their perspectives,” event organizer Araha Uday ’26 wrote to The Daily. “To me, it isn’t enough to accept anything I hear as the truth. I want to be convinced because I know I’ve gotten the best out of each side.”

Uday, along with Atman Jahagirdar ’26 and Jaxon Gonzales ’26, created Bully Pulpit as an organizational medium for the debate. The team said they plan to continue organizing similar on-campus forums throughout the year. 

Planning for Wednesday night’s event began over the summer. A constant stream of cold emails from Uday, Jahagirdar and Gonzales since July led to former billionaire Brian O’Kelley, Center on Poverty and Inequality Director David Grusky, former Trump economic advisor Joshua Rauh and Altimeter Capital founder Brad Gerstner sitting center stage.

“It [was] striking to see decades-long pioneers who aren’t jaded, but fired up with hope and fear like the rest of us,” Jahagirdar wrote.

The debate was moderated by economics lecturer Christopher Makler, the associate director of the department. Rauh presented first, in support of billionaires, before facing questions from O’Kelley and Grusky. Each speaker had a chance to speak and take questions. 

“I appreciated what I perceived as mutual respect and a desire to be engaged in good faith,” Van Slyke said.

A pre-debate survey found one-third of attendees in favor of billionaires, while two-thirds of students coming into the event supported a wealth cap of some kind. According to Makler’s post-debate poll, the results flipped: two-thirds of students left the event in favor of billionaires and one-third against. 

“My problem is no longer just the billion sitting in an account, it’s the pockets it was taken from and the reasons it ever could be [taken at all],” Jahagirdar wrote.

Student speakers Medhya Goel ’26 and Ishrita Pol ’26 took opposing sides on the issue but agreed that the event itself was more important than their respective sides. Throughout their time at Stanford, Goel and Pol said they found panels often have “friendly” moderators. To Goel and Pol, renowned figures invited to speak on campus are rarely challenged by a critical question.

“This [was] a fantastic opportunity to reintroduce that dialogue spirit to learning and to education,” Goel said. “I’m jealous this is happening in our senior year.”

During his opening speech, Gerstner shared how growing up in a single-parent household motivated him to become a serial founder, backing over 100 private companies’ transitions to selling public stock. Central to Rauh’s pro-billionaire position was the idea that maintaining wealth is a matter of personal freedom.

While Pol’s position on the matter didn’t change post-event, she found the debate valuable.

“I think hearing people’s personal stories on the matter definitely gave me more insight into the issue,” Pol said.

Though Aydin Rosas ’29 left the event in favor of billionaires, during the closing Q&A portion he asked to hear Gerstner or Rauh’s perspective on the power of wealth to look critically at how it can be wielded.

“I wanted to see where they found that middle ground of this concentrated power that’s necessary for innovation but can also be used for bad,” Rosas said. 

Uday, Jahagirdar and Gonzales hope that Bully Pulpit can become a longstanding hallmark of productive discourse on campus.

“We want to get people talking about things that are controversial and not necessarily political, and we want to make a space to do so that feels uniquely Stanford,” Gonzales wrote to The Daily.

The organizers say their sense of accomplishment is defined by what the debate was able to inspire.

“It’s easy to be indifferent, it’s much harder to hear multiple perspectives, gather all the evidence and stay open-minded,” Uday wrote. “If the debate sparked curiosity and made that process just a little bit more fun and engaging, then we accomplished exactly what we set out to do.”

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