It's Not Just You: Tech Billionaires Really Are Becoming More Unbearable
The less competition they face, the more money they make. And the more power they accumulate the more it stokes pretentions of genius in all matters of human endeavor, no matter how ignorant, naive and wrong they may be.
As British historian Lord Acton once said, "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." JL
Douglas Rushkoff reports in The Guardian:
Challenging each other
to cage fights, building apocalypse bunkers, vampiric longevity strategies, outlandish social media pronouncements,
private space programs and virtual world-building ambitions - the behavior of today’s
mega-moguls is becoming increasingly outlandish and imperial. However avaricious, the titans of past gilded eras saw themselves
as human members of civil society. Contemporary billionaires appear to
understand civics and civilians as impediments to their progress,
necessary victims of the externalities of their companies’ growth, sad
artifacts of the civilization they will leave behind in their inexorable
colonisation of the next dimension.
Challenging each other to cage fights, building apocalypse bunkers – the behaviour of today’s mega-moguls is becoming increasingly outlandish and imperial
Even their downfalls are spectacular. Like a latter-day Icarus flying too close to the sun, disgraced crypto-god Sam Bankman-Fried crashed and burned this month, recasting Michael Lewis’s exuberant biography of the convicted fraudster –Going Infinite– into the story of a supervillain. Even his potential sentence of up to 115 years in prison seems more suitable for a larger-than-life comic book character – the Joker being carted off to Arkham Asylum – than a nerdy, crooked currency trader.
But that’s the way this generation of tech billionaires rolls. The Elon Musk we meet inWalter Isaacson’s biographyposts selfies of himself as Marvel comic character Doctor Strange – the “Sorcerer Supreme” who protects the Earth against magical threats. Musk is so fascinated with figures such as Iron Man that he gave a tour of the SpaceX factory to the actor who plays him, Robert Downey Jr, and the film’s director, Jon Favreau. As if believing he really has acquired these characters’ martial arts prowess, in June Musk challenged fellow übermensch Mark Zuckerberg to “a cage match” after Zuck launched an app to compete with the floundering Twitter. Musk and Zuck exchanged taunts in the style of superheroes or perhaps professional wrestlers. “I’m up for a cage match if he is,” tweeted Musk. “Send Me Location,” responded Zuck from Instagram’s Threads.
Billionaires, or their equivalents, have been around a long time, but there’s something different about today’s tech titans, as evidenced by a rash of recent books. Reading about their apocalypse bunkers, vampiric longevity strategies, outlandish social media pronouncements, private space programmes and virtual world-building ambitions, it’s hard to remember they’re not actors in a reality series or characters from a new Avengers movie.
Unlike their forebears, contemporary billionaires do not hope to build the biggest house in town, but the biggest colony on the moon, underground lair in New Zealand, or virtual reality server in the cloud. In contrast, however avaricious, the titans of past gilded eras still saw themselves as human members of civil society. Contemporary billionaires appear to understand civics and civilians as impediments to their progress, necessary victims of the externalities of their companies’ growth, sad artefacts of the civilisation they will leave behind in their inexorable colonisation of the next dimension.
While plans for Peter Thiel’s 193-hectare (477-acre)“doomsday” escape, complete with spa, theatre, meditation lounge and library, were ultimatelyrejected on environmental grounds, he still wants to build a startup community that floats on the ocean, where so-calledseasteaderscan live beyond government regulation as well as whatever disasters may befall us back on the continents.
To escape “near-term” problems such as poverty and pollution,Jeff Bezos imaginesbuilding millions of space colonies housing trillions of people on the moon, asteroids and in other parts of the solar system, where inhabitants will harvest the resources of space for themselves and those left back on Earth. Elon Musk is convinced he will build a city ofa million people on Mars by 2050at a cost of up to $10bn a person. The ChatGPT impresario Sam Altman, whose board of directors sacked him as CEObefore he made a dramatic comebackthis week, wants toupload his consciousnessto the cloud (if the AIs he helped build and now fears will permit him).
Oddly enough, while their schemes are certainly more outlandish, on an individual basis today’s tech billionaires are not any wealthier than their early 20th-century counterparts.Adjusted for inflation,John Rockefeller’s fortune of $336bn and Andrew Carnegie’s $309bn exceedMusk’s $231bn, Bezos’s $165bn and Gates’s $114bn.
But, as chronicled by Peter Turchin inEnd Times, his book on elite excess and what it portends, today there are far more centimillionaires and billionaires than there were in the gilded age, and they have collectively accumulated a much larger proportion of the world’s wealth. In 1983, there were 66,000 households worth at least $10m in the US. By 2019, that number had increased in terms adjusted for inflation to 693,000. Back in the industrial age, the rate of total elite wealth accumulation was capped by the limits of the material world. They could only build so many railroads, steel mills and oilwells at a time. Virtual commodities such as likes, views, crypto and derivatives can be replicated exponentially.
What evidence we do see of their operations in the real world mostly take the form of externalised harm. Digital businesses depend on mineral slavery in Africa, dump toxic waste in China, facilitate theundermining of democracyacross the globe and spread destabilising disinformation for profit – all from the sociopathic remove afforded by remote administration.
As a Partner and Co-Founder of Predictiv and PredictivAsia, Jon specializes in management performance and organizational effectiveness for both domestic and international clients. He is an editor and author whose works include Invisible Advantage: How Intangilbles are Driving Business Performance. Learn more...
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