Book Bits: 1 November 2025

● The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy
Ray D. Madoff
Review via The Chronicle of Philanthropy
The power imbalance between charities and the wealthy donors and foundations that support them leads to a lot of tongue-biting by the supplicants. And that leaves a relatively small group of people who know how the nonprofit world works and yet are independent enough to speak out about what they see as hard truths.
Ray D. Madoff, author of the new book, The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy, is one of these people. Madoff, a law professor at Boston College Law School, has carved out a side gig as a gadfly to big philanthropy, most significantly in 2020, when she and billionaire John Arnold drafted a legislative proposal designed to spur private foundations and donor-advised funds to give away more money faster.
It didn’t succeed.

● The Long Game: A Playbook of the World’s Most Enduring Companies
Eric Becker
Summary via publisher (Simon & Schuster)
Competition. Stock market downturns. Geopolitical crisis. Poor planning. Millions of companies struggle to make it past one year, but how do the rare few manage to endure one hundred years? And is it still even possible to future-proof your business? The answer is yes. This playbook, developed by Eric Becker, will show you how it’s done.
As an investor, board member, CEO and founder, Eric has become a global leader in private equity and wealth management and successfully played key roles in over one hundred companies in his career. He has also guided some of the world’s most powerful entrepreneurs and ultra-high net worth families.

● Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley
Jacob Silverman
Review via Financial Times
There was a time in the not too distant past when Silicon Valley figures like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen funded and supported Democratic political candidates. Even if they sometimes also padded the coffers of business-friendly Republicans, they seemed reliable avatars of the liberal ethos that has long pervaded northern California’s tech scene.
Somewhere along the way, something broke. It wasn’t just that they flipped their political allegiance: they became culture warriors in a battle that spilled over from X to make them fixtures of Mar-a-Lago and the Washington of Trump 2.0.

● Wealth Management With a Difference: Your Guide to Achieving Client, Generational, and Business Success
April Rudin and Nick Rice
Summary via publisher (Wiley)
There are hundreds of thousands of financial advisors globally serving clients whose needs are undergoing a revolution. Generational shifts are transforming how these clients approach money, spanning values, technology, investing, and even politics. Younger investors and women are creating wealth, inheriting tens of trillions of dollars from relatives, and accumulating money as they move closer to retirement. In Wealth Management with a Difference: Your Guide to Achieving Client, Generational, and Business Success, global financial services veterans April Rudin and Nick Rice show how advisors and wealth managers can serve these growing needs and position themselves at the heart of families and their legacies.

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