Moneyed men who make the world go round

A friend was once at the same swanky Upper East Side eaterie where the much-married Revlon gazillionaire Ron Perelman was having lunch with his children. A more cheerless sight it would be hard to find, apparently: the infinitely wealthy (and gloomy) Perelman contemplating the cost of his next yacht, perhaps, and the children dreading the prospect of yet another mother to have to get to know. (However much you might not want to have lunch with him, Perelman does deserve respect for once being married to the actress Ellen Barkin, of whom it was said she had the kind of body that would make a dead man dance.)

Anyway, Perelman is a minor but not unrepresentative figure in David Rothkopf's rollicking jaunt through the ranks of the global power elites. Rothkopf has identified 6,000 people - from New York to London, Santiago to Sydney, Beijing to Bombay - who effectively rule the world. (It's a speciality of Rothkopf's; he has served his time as an international 'consultant'.)

One day hobnobbing with political honchos in Gleneagles, the next sharing a cheese fondue with a Nobel laureate in Davos, or a Georgian meal with a Soviet oligarch in Moscow, Rothkopf has totted up the air miles to bring us close to these guys (and they are almost all guys).

The men who run the world are, he argues, an alliance of the political, the financial, the military, media barons and energy moguls, ­ many of them operating, in their own globalised interests, outside the constraints of national and international regulation.

And the richer these outlaws get, the more glaring and offensive does the disparity between their wealth and that of the man in the street become; one reason, perhaps, why the Ministry of Defence last year speculated about the possibility of Britain's middle-classes turning into Marxist revolutionaries.

Thank heavens, though, the book is not preachy. Lord, no: Rothkopf is keen to acknowledge that most of this superclass are immensely talented, and gifted. Any flaws? Perhaps they might show more concern about the huge inequities in how we have organised the world. (Rothkopf would like some beneficial system of world governance, run by Davos man with - the subtext clearly reads - Rothkopf himself as their spiritual and moral guide.)

But even Rothkopf is rightly outraged by the behaviour of some of the world's richest: they acquire billions and give back on average about one per cent (compare that with the 90 per cent that Andrew Carnegie gave back in his lifetime) when more than a billion people live on under $1 a day.

That state of affairs is unacceptable, and will increasingly be a stain on the civilisation of the 21st century, if not a danger to world stability. Though it is hard to see how it's possible to spread that enormous wealth beyond just a few, unless you redraft capitalism on a global scale, and that's not going to happen.

When people are that rich, what is it for? They can't just leave it all to their children: that's obscene. And it can't just be to buy more and bigger yachts. Abramovich has four, and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen (as well as Perelman) have vast boats.

Maybe one consolation is that they aren't always that happy. Another friend was at a reception on Allen's boat at Cannes recently. The billionaire was bored, tetchy, unhappy, surrounded by ex-Spetsnaz bodyguards in olive green suits with bulging guns.

My friend started talking to Allen (left) about the day that he and Gates wrote the first programme for a PC. Allen suddenly became animated: soon the table of financiers, actresses and movie moguls fell silent as he relived the first steps of the computer revolution, of Gates writing programmes from his head on 40 yellow legal pads and not making a mistake. Simpler, happier days. But not much solace for the beggar in Mumbai. ·