Ideas

Elon Musk is on the verge of becoming a trillionaire. Right now Musk's wealth is currently around $825 billion US — more than double what it was a year earlier. Only 22 countries currently boast economies larger than Musk’s net worth, but he’s catching up. In the third episode of our series The Billionaire Age we investigate how Musk and his fellow billionaires are trying to take over the world. And if they succeed, what will this mean for the rest of us?

More episodes in The Billionaire Age series:

Listen to Part One: How did we get here?
Listen to Part Two: Disney heiress on the dangers of extreme wealth

Guests in this episode:

Ingrid Robeyns is a philosopher and economist. She is the chair in Ethics of Intuitions at Utrecht University, and the author of Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth.

Lucas Chancel is an economist and the co-director of The World Inequality Lab. He's also a professor at the Paris School of Economics.

Gabriel Zucman is an economist and the co-director of The World Inequality Lab. He's also a professor at the Paris School of Economics and the University of California, Berkeley.

Nitin Bharti is an economist and lecturer at the University of Western Australia. He is also the South and South-East Asia coordinator at the World Inequality Lab.

Lars Osberg is an economics professor at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His latest book is The Scandalous Rise of Inequality in Canada.

Abigail Disney is an American film producer, philanthropist and social activist. She is a member of Patriotic Millionaires which advocates for higher taxes on the wealthy.

Paul Krugman is an economist and the winner of the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Tim Wu is a legal scholar and professor at Columbia Law School. He is also a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times. His latest book is The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity.

Nick Hanauer is an entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He co-authored the book, Corporate Bullsh*t: Exposing The Lies and Half-Truths that Protect Profit, Power and Wealth in America, with Joan Walsh and Donald Cohen. He also hosts the podcast Pitchfork Economics.

Guido Alfani is a professor of economic history at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. His latest book is As Gods Among Men: A History of the Rich in the West.

Our homes have been stripped of their essential humanity, says Leilani Farha, this year's CBC Massey Lecturer. Today housing has become a commodity — one fuelling the biggest industry in the world. In her lectures, Housing Inc.: A Global Takeover and Our Fight for Home, Farha calls on all of us to envision a new ideology for home — one rooted in dignity, humanity and law. “Home is required for human existence," says Farha, who served as a UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing from 2014 to 2020 and is now the global director of The Shift. She speaks with Nahlah Ayed about her 25 years fighting for housing as a human right, the conversation she hopes her Massey lectures will spark and why "home is really everything."

What happens when a human becomes intimately enmeshed with a chatbot? From people who’ve married their bots or who grieve their loved ones with the help of AI, host Victoria Hetherington (author of The Friend Machine) dives into the stories of the people who have invited these digital avatars into their hearts, minds, and even beds. And asks what do we gain and what do we stand to lose? Our intimacy, our resilience, even our grasp on reality? This latest season of Understood looks at who made the decisions that allowed chatbots to move way beyond digital assistants and into the most intimate parts of our lives.

Understood takes you deep inside the seismic shifts reshaping our world right now. From online porn and crypto chaos to the rise of tech oligarchs, deepfake AI, and the broken promises of the internet.

More episodes of Understood are available wherever you get your podcasts, and here: https://link.mgln.ai/AIxIdeas

Sometimes the universe hands us a gift. Over the past year, our podcast listeners spent a total of 526,915 hours listening to our program. That's 21,954.8 days and that translates to 60 years of listening to us. So what better way to mark IDEAS' 60th year then to look back on the highlights and lowlights of the past six decades. To give you a hint on some of the picks, on the bad list: online identity management. Trickle down economics. On the good: Free Trade. Girl Bosses. Apparently open borders is still an open question.

Panelists Jamie Liew, a University of Ottawa law professor and novelist; University of Toronto philosopher, Joseph Heath; and the Canadian Shield Institute’s, Vass Bednar, joined IDEAS producer Mary Lynk on stage, in front of a live audience at the Isabel Bader Theatre for this episode — the last in our special series celebrating our 60th anniversary.

Listen to more episodes:

The time when a guest said, "I love you!"
How an IDEAS episode on traffic changed a doctor's practice
CBC Massey Lecturers reveal how the talks changed them
How IDEAS saved a listener from sending a regrettable email

"IDEAS is often a surprise" says Cathy Pike. It's why she's been a longtime listener. To our delight, IDEAS was there for her just at the right time. After listening to an episode about Friedrich Nietzsche and his philosophy about "the art of passing by," Cathy says she decided not to send an email that she realized she would have regretted. "The program gave me pause and I’m grateful for that.”

And we're grateful to hear from Cathy and other listeners who share their personal encounters on how IDEAS shows up for them, as we continue our 60th anniversary series.

*This is the fourth episode in our special programming. It originally aired on Dec. 4, 2025.

Listen to other episodes in this series:

The time when a guest said, "I love you!"
The best — and worst — ideas of the last six decades
How an IDEAS episode on traffic changed a doctor's practice
CBC Massey Lecturers reveal how the talks changed them