“You don’t want to say how much you’ve given away?” I asked.

“I don’t want to subtract from my pleasure,” he said. “I especially don’t want it written up. It would be a disaster for me. It would hurt me.”

“Why?” I asked.

“It would subtract from me,” he said.

Then, later, he said, with an anguished look, “Don’t you think I have an urge to say, ‘I did this and I did that and I got studies going in twenty hospitals . . .’ I have an urge to say that but I’m sitting on it. Why? Because once I say it, I’ve lost it! It’s gone. Forever. The whale doesn’t get harpooned until it rises to the surface to blow. If you do a good deed, a deed you’re proud of, and you don’t tell anybody, it will be the most difficult thing you’ve ever accomplished, but with the highest payoff. You feel good about yourself. It gives you happiness and satisfaction. It makes you different from other people in ways people don’t realize. If you follow the rule, I promise you it is a life-changing event.”

It was a lovely, engaging, strange philosophy. But there’s another side to it. Dr. Hudson chooses whom to bestow his graciousness onto. It’s entirely his choice. Taxation takes that decision out of his hands and gives it to the state. It screws up the formula completely.

Wayne’s avuncular manner deserted him when he talked about what to do about the have-nots. “I remember an advertisement with an Indian in a canoe in a harbor,” he said, “and tears are running down his face because he sees all the trash in the water and he sees what’s happening. That’s how I feel about America. It’s an emotional thing for me.” He paused, and that’s when he said, “I’m a little surprised to find out that I’m an enemy of the state at this time in my life. They talk about your ‘fair share.’ ‘Are you paying your fair share?’ Fair is in the eyes of the beholder.” He paused. “I hope I don’t come off like some big person . . . so conservative . . . I believe in spreading it around, but I believe in doing it myself. . . .”

“So the trash in the river is higher taxes?” I asked.

“It’s the idea of entitlement,” he snapped. “That idea wasn’t there in the history of this country. I remember passing a building and my father saying to me, ‘That’s the poorhouse. You don’t ever want—’”

And then we were interrupted by his daughter, a woman in her forties. She came into the room, kissed him, and asked him if he was going to walk along the beach later. He said he was. She kissed him again and left and he didn’t return to the “poorhouse” anecdote. Instead he said, “When the politicians said, ‘Everybody is entitled to a house,’ you saw what happened. And now you have ‘Everybody is entitled to go to college.’ Which is stupid! When I went to college I had to drive a truck to pay. I had a partial scholarship, but I took care of myself.”

“So you’re saying everybody is entitled to college, but they should have to pay their own way?” I asked.

“Some people don’t belong in college!” he said. “That should occur to you.”

I understand why Wayne’s great love in life is his stud farm. There’s something very Thoroughbred-horses about his view of the world. Perhaps the different ways Nick and Wayne made their money may explain their politics. Nick sees an economy of luck. He got lucky, and he understands that fragility for what it is. Wayne sees an economy of earning where those with exceptional talent or exceptional grit rise, as they should, to the top.

For Wayne’s philosophy to work, though, he needs to see those who don’t make it as kind of deserving of their ill fortune. He talked to me about “derelicts on welfare” in Los Angeles who check themselves into the hospital because they’re “bored” and “want feeding” and “we’re paying for all that kind of activity.” He said too much tax money is spent on “guys going to chiropractors, guys getting massages all over the country! On us! Give me a break. Guys getting Viagra!” He talked about “Los Angeles bus drivers who are on permanent stress leave because someone spat on them when they got on the bus and now they’re emotionally upside down. More than half the bus drivers are out on stress leave! Systems like that cannot work!”

Later, I hunt for published data that back up Wayne’s feckless-bus-driver nightmare scenario. I can’t find any. I do find something else, though—plenty of statistics showing that a guy with Wayne’s level of wealth has never had it so good in America. And yet, of all the people I interview, Wayne is the only one who seems angry about the politics of his situation. Frantz, Dennis, Rebecca—those at the bottom looking up—showed no animosity at all.

The government used to tell people like Wayne exactly what to do with huge chunks of their income: Hand it over and we’ll decide how to use it. Today, America’s richest citizens have won the right to control these decisions themselves, and that’s a big reason why income inequality is so dire. For every secret philanthropist like Wayne, there are many who give little or nothing back. Meanwhile, Dennis and Rebecca continue to tread water, and might even drown.

Wayne’s heart is in the right place. He’s not parsimonious. He started from nothing and he wants to give back, but he wants to choose how. He genuinely believes that higher taxes ruin society. But I can’t help thinking that when he talks about bored derelicts and emotionally weak bus drivers, he’s really—even if he doesn’t know it—talking about Frantz.

The Man Who Tried to Split the Atom in His Kitchen

Angelholm is a pretty southern Swedish town, famed for its clay-cuckoo manufacturing, a clay cuckoo being a kind of ocarina, which is a kind of flute. The crime rate here is practically zero. Except one of its residents was last year arrested for trying to split the atom in his kitchen. His name is Richard Handl and he buzzes me into his first-floor flat.

I wanted to meet Richard because I keep seeing reports of home-science experimenters clashing with the authorities. There’s been a spate of them this past year or two.

I glance into Richard’s kitchen and recognize his cooker from the news. It was horrendously, alarmingly blackened then, but it’s clean now.

“So, you aren’t currently doing any experiments?” I ask him.

“I’m banned,” he says.

“By whom?” I ask.

“My landlord,” he says. “And the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority.”

When Richard was a teenager, everything, he says, was fine. “I had friends. We’d go partying. I have Asperger’s, so I was a bit of a nerd, a geek. My interests were chemical experiments. I’d make solutions that changed color. When I was thirteen, I made some explosives in the garden, using gunpowder, stuff I got from a paint store and from my father’s pharmacy. He had sulfuric acid, nitric acid. Visiting my father in his pharmacy was very exciting.”

His father assumed Richard would grow up to be a pharmacist too. He was, Richard says, happy and proud of his son, as it was his dream to raise a boy to follow in his footsteps. But something unexpected happened to Richard fourteen years ago, when he was seventeen: “I became very aggressive to people,” he says.

“In what way?” I ask.

“It was toward my father,” Richard says. “Sometimes I hit him.”

“In response to what?”

“Very small things. Like if he was late and didn’t call.”

“Was he worried about you?”

“Yes, he was quite worried about me. He took me to the hospital, so I could talk to psychiatrists. They said I was depressed. And I had some paranoid disorder.”