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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.
Example Sentences
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.
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.
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.
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.
In his farewell speech to the nation Wednesday, President Joe Biden compared the "rise of a tech-industrial complex" to the robber barons of the 19th and 20th centuries.
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