Stewards of Capital: How Hedge Funds, Venture Capitalists, and Technology Startups Legitimize Inequality

The hedge fund (HF), venture capital (VC), and technology startup (TS) industries all play a central role in how allocations of capital in United States society structure economic and social inequality. Men monopolize all three fields. This chapter asks: How do the drivers (mostly men) of capital understand the impact of their work on society? And how does who composes these industries shape how they think about their work and its implications for inequality? The chapter describes interviews and observations of people working in three industries. While HF managers justify their work as creating more efficient markets, protecting the savings of public institutions and pension workers, and allowing them to donate to the societal causes they care about, TS founders and VC investors say they want to create technologies that disrupt the status quo and revolutionize how business is done. All three reflect a market and economic logic of inequality embracing a legitimizing narrative that casts inequality as a justifiable externality of the consequences of their, according to them, very important work. This dominant cultural assumption holds that amassing wealth is indicative of merit in capitalism. Thus, these drivers of capital create new economic value that will benefit society widely, and inequalities are an acceptable byproduct of that impact. I argue that these market logics justifying inequality are indicative of how the three fields feature durable social inequalities and financial capitalist ideology that constrain their ability to address social problems.