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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12517 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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I've been having some thoughts recently about the billionaires among us, some opinions, some takes even. My politics on this has evolved over time; at one point they were admirable titans of industry, then they were capitalist parasitic ticks, then they were a necessary part of the incentive structure that drives to economy, and now they are a bloated level of inefficiency preventing the market from functioning efficiently.

But over all this time, I've kinda synthesized a superstructure that I don't think is gonna change, that I think is not on the left right axis, but on another mysterious plane: I'm jealous of china. I think we're gonna have to steven universe meme one of these guys. I don't even really care who, and I don't care who does it. It could be Il Duce Trump, it could be General Secretary Mamdani, it could be some boring centrist whose name we don't know.

Anyone who imposes consequences on or limits the behaviors of the managing class would win my instant approval. This could just be because of my space autism getting triggered unimaginably by space-x getting fucking shackled to a corpse right before IPO/ Artemis being a big fucking waste of time and money* / Boeing doing boeing stuff, it could be the long 2008 hangover, it could be a thousand things.

I guess I'm just kinda over us deciding that once you reach a certain net worth, you are some sort of luminous being. You can go to pedo island and it's fine, you can do drugs that normies go to prison for an it's fine, you can fuck up critical national infrastructure and it's fine, you have infinite money when it's time to do what you want but somehow you have no money (or negative money!) when it's time to contribute to the public good.

I recall Luigi, and I recall the polling: people old enough to have been adults when a the post FDR wealth redistribution program was still around were very unfavorable; people who came into consciousness as the program was being fully unwound in the late 80s and 90s were split 50/50, and people who never experienced that social milieu were yelling "BASED BASED BASED!"

I really think that unless the uniparty plays it's cards right, the next realignment is not gonna be pretty for anyone. We need another FDR type to head that shit off like it's vanguardist communism in the 1930s, and at this point I don't think I care if they are left or right, they just need to be for the bottom and middle and even most of the top, and against the peak.

*Yes I know about pork. Pork can at least do something! highways can get build, parks are nice, and if we need to build bombs somewhere to it might as well be in bumfuck nowhere to give the nowhereians something to do other than meth.

I feel like you're confusing different categories of people here, which is a common failure mode when it comes to discussions on "billionaires". A lot of generic dislike for both capitalism and rich people (not necessarily billionaires) gets swept up with talk of Musk, Gates, et al., and it seems like it would be useful to break down what we're talking about. Even if you really do mean only billionaires, you're still talking about both the mega successful Musks with dozens of hundreds of billions, local oligarchs and royalty, your mostly unknown investors, and even apex celebrities and sports people.

And then you've got:

Anyone who imposes consequences on or limits the behaviors of the managing class

Billionaires are largely not the managerial class. Even within the managerial class, it's worth splitting up your C-level and CEOs with the PMC that are much more middle and upper middle class

So when it comes to your overall complaints, who do you actually dislike?

  • Billionaire 'founders': Musk, Bezos, Ellison, Gates, etc. The richest of billionaires, but with most of their wealth tied up in the businesses they created and still run. Typically very high profile.

  • Investors: Buffet, Larry Fink, Carl Icahn, etc. Those who largely made their income from hedge funds, PE, and other market moves. They can be further split between the activist investors like Fink and Icahn, and the passive like Jim Simons and John Bogle

  • Old money: Royalty, Rothschilds, etc. Now we're getting into a group which doesn't comprise that many billionaires anymore. I'm tempted to put in second and third generation families here as well like the Walton family, although most wouldn't use old money in that sense.

  • Oligarchs: I'm counting any of the third/second world mega-rich here, the people that essentially just stole their country's wealth. Your emirs and sultans, as well as more typical corruption.

  • Apex celebrities: Swift, Jay-z, Michael Jordan, Ronaldo, etc. The very top of the sports and art worlds, the vast majority of celebs are only multimillionaires and even the richest are <$5bn

-CEO billionaires: Tim Cook, Nadella, Pichai, etc. The very top of the greasy pole, the execs who didn't build anything but are at such large companies they've still reached the billion mark thanks to stock options.

  • The rest? The other thousand+ who have 1-10bn, probably from a business. A ton of people no one has ever heard of and who probably don't have much influence on anything.

Then there are the many who aren't billionaires at all:

  • HNWI, the 1%, the "elite": Basically everyone who has a few million+ in liquid assets, a vastly larger group than the billionaires. At this point you're picking up successful upper middle class professionals even.

And the "managerial classes"

  • C-level execs: All of the other business leaders, from enterprise down to SMEs.

  • The Professional managerial class: The millions of senior management roles that make the vast majority of day-to-day decisions in big business.

When most people complain about billionaires, I think they really mean the 'founder' category, the handful of tech founders with the highest profile. When pushed they'll probably complain about Joe Business who made 2Bn from his real estate company, but they never actually think about that kind of person.

When I read your complaint about the managing class, I feel like you mostly mean the PMCs and C-level people, many of whom won't even be millionaires. And perhaps some of the activist investors?

The only meaningful issue I have/had with the ultra wealthy is the possibility of influence on politics, and it does seem somewhat the case but I've become less convinced it matters that much. Despite the flood of money into politics, things seem to be getting worse and worse for our business environment. Even our first billionaire president is literally a big government anti market populist who holds little difference on many topics from the stereotypical redneck and would make many so called commies blush with his strong central planning desires.

Bribery and fraud happens from time to time for specific sectors but most political corruption still seems to be the type that's handing out contracts to your friend's company or whatever. I'm open to the idea that rich people have outsized influence but when we have blue socialist vs red socialist it's hard to see how money actually matters that much for politics as opposed to just general idealogies.

I increasingly think it might even be the other way around; The more you limit the powerful people on the free market, the more the powerful will move into the state and other entities that are harder to control since they are the control. Plenty of ultra-rich are happy to let you do whatever you want as long as you let them do whatever they want. But if the same person is instead managing giant flows of money that aren't actually theirs but technically belong to the people, it's suddenly at the minimum their business to control your behaviour insofar as it concerns that flow of money. And unlike the free market, where they need to find a way to offer you a deal or product that sounds good enough, if they are in the state, they can just straight-up force you. And often enough, that taste of power will only grow; If you're already controlling people, you'll find excuses to extend that control. For their own good, of course.

The key mistake IMO lies in the idea that money equals power. No, money is primarily a consumptive element of power. You can always trivially convert money into gaming consoles, vacations, yachts or any other consumptive good. Once you try to convert it into other elements of power, you'll have to expect losses and/or require sufficient skill to do it correctly: If you want to create something new, you need a good idea and the capability of running at the very least a lab, possibly a lean&mean start-up, often against much larger, established companies with massive legal moats. If you want to change or manipulate society, you need charisma and social acumen. If you want to simply force people to submit, you need to get control of the government, and those who already control it will not appreciate your meddling. A minimum amount of money is certainly required to get things off the ground, but you don't need to be ultra-rich. Upper-middle class money and/or a bank loan is often already enough for most purposes.

Things getting worse and worse for the business environment is one of the explicit goals and purpose of money in politics. Capture, both regulatory and otherwise, is the point. It increases the barrier to entry, benefits the incumbents, and prevents disruption from newer and more agile players.

The social media giants will bend over backwards to accommodate the state's demand for surveillance and age-gating of online platforms, as the more compliance hurdles there are, it makes it harder for them to be supplanted. Their eager capitulation will grow only more fawning as long as they're never held accountable for what people do using their platforms.

Government likes this, because they like playing kingmaker.

While I definitely understand the sentiment, other people have already commented on the reality of the situation.

I think the biggest thing that actually makes the whole system more asymmetric is globalized finance for fungible assets, like cash, bitcoin, heavily traded stock options. For non-fungible assets like buildings, real estate or physical assets it's a bit more questionable.

The rich cannot be functionally governed in 2026. The only real currency at that level is power, and money buys a decent amount of it. What can you do against someone rich and powerful? They'd move. They'd pack up their bags and go somewhere their money is more accepted; capital, like armies and water, follows the path of least resistance. You can't tax them, even if you could figure out a way to enforce labyrinthian tax laws and close loopholes you'd better keep an army of lawyers on retainer and a heavily armed IRS, and doing so has its own perverse incentives on those who dodge them by technicalities. They'd move. They'd buy islands, they'd pay off foreign governments, they'd set up shop elsewhere and continue their business. And that's just talking about individuals, not the networks of vast multinational corporations that can be easily moved. The Fed could make a lot of noise publicly about declaring Elon persona non grata tomorrow; it wouldn't change much for him unless they actually bag him a la Jack Ma, and as long as wallets are going to get lighter even the people responsible for bagging him will #resist.

Vigilante actions like Luigi's seem more appealing partly because a large section of society understands that there is no recourse under the rule of the state or immune system for handling functionally unaccountable parasites. In many cases the parasites are the system.

My opinion on Musk has changed a lot over the years. I thought for ages he was a grifter who found the hack of selling the government and his investors big ideas that allowed him to functionally fund his moonshots forever because they make people feel good. Then it seemed like maybe he had an eye for people, and then SpaceX became the obvious leader in the space arena (although comparing them to NASA at this point is like comparing a functional human being to one with fifty self-inflicted concussions). But at least he's trying to do something with his money that isn't "I want to own all the water". I respect a rich crank who wants to use his resources to turn people into dinosaurs way more than someone who wants to use it to simply increase his own share of the pie.

I recall Luigi, and I recall the polling: people old enough to have been adults when a the post FDR wealth redistribution program was still around were very unfavorable; people who came into consciousness as the program was being fully unwound in the late 80s and 90s were split 50/50, and people who never experienced that social milieu were yelling "BASED BASED BASED!"

Am I crazy for thinking that our welfare state is probably the most generous it's been in our history? We surely are a lot richer and have a lot more programs than FDR did. FDR had make work programs, we hand out cash. Propaganda is a hell of a drug, I guess.

No you're not crazy. Not only is our GDP much larger now, we also spend much more of it on welfare than we used to. Yes, at levels that even approach western Europe. That doesn't prevent people from being jealous, though. Even under hard core communism, the preternaturally jealous personality will covet the smallest things with equal resentment.

Pre FDR there was essentially no federal welfare of any kind, just local poorhouses and a single mothers/elderly pension at the state level. Then you had social security/welfare with FDR, medicare/medicaid/food stamps with LBJ, clinton's overhaul, and ACA medicaid expansion, to name a few.

The uniquely American aspect of spirit that prevented socialism from ever getting a serious grip appears to have washed away somewhat. Now people look to European countries that spend 2-3x federally on welfare.

There aren't "countries" in Europe that do any spending on the "federal" level because there is only one country in Europe with a federal level at all (unless you count Russia as European).

At least two - Germany and Switzerland. (You may have meant only one country in the EU). Belgium and Spain are marginal cases - they don't use the word but they are probably federal in substance - definitely the top-tier subunits have executive, legislative and at least some judicial power entrenched in the constitution.

Yeah, I'll concede Switzerland (what makes a man turn to neutrality?).

I guess "federal" is simply intended to mean "national" here?

Yeah, probably, but I will always jump on the opportunity to point out to Americans that other countries do, in fact, exist.

Fair.

Also, is Germany really the only country organized along federal lines, in Europe? I never realized.

Also, just as im America, modern ideologues hate federalism and want the central government to concentrate as much power as possible.

People who used to just die are now morbidly obese with access to cheap entertainment and drugs.

If you get sick we treat you regardless of ability to pay instead of just throwing you onto the street.

This is the society that the billionaires built!

Being poor in America or Western Europe is probably the best now that it has ever been.

I suppose you could argue some issues with antisocial poor people clouding your poverty, but also 'we make real efforts to keep drug users and the mentally ill alive' also pretty good indicator the current level of social benefits is historically high.

There are almost a thousand billionaires in the United States. About one third of them inherited their wealth; in the U.S., 70% of billionaires are billionaires because they started a company and were successful at it. Most of their wealth is tied up in their ownership stakes; if you were to confiscate the wealth of every single billionaire in the country, it would not fund the United States federal government for more than a single year. Asking them for money "when it's time to contribute to the public good" is pure grandstanding. They simply haven't got that much real, actual money. Their valuation is as real as international borders, that is: it takes its reality from the collective faith and expectations of humanity.

I know a handful of billionaires and many, many multimillionaires. I have also met government officials whose control over the economy and other things makes them effectively billionaires and millionaires, for all practical purposes, even when their personal assets are not that great. Wealth and power are functionally interchangeable. People in all such positions often develop strange outlooks on the world! They are frequently out of touch with the "normies."

To my eyes, then, your post reads approximately like this: "there are some powerful people doing things that upset me, and I think it's because they are too powerful and it has driven them insane. Can we pick some different people, empower them, and take this current batch down a peg?"

But of course, you've already seen what happens when people get power. Giving different people the power will not fix the problem. It will simply cycle the cast. China is full of "billionaires," not just the ~500 monetary billionaires but all the government officials with contextually absolute power. They're not any better (or worse), over there. They're just different people.

They're not any better (or worse), over there. They're just different people.

And, importantly, there's a distinction in how you get there and what the side effects are. In a capitalist system, the way to become a billionaire is to create or invest early in a billion dollar company. In a capitalist system with no holes or exploits, this means you generate multiple billions of wealth in the economy and extract a fraction of that as profit for yourself. In a capitalist system with holes and exploits that usually involves a combination of wealth creation, rent-seeking, and market capture. But it's still almost always positive sum. The world is so much better because Amazon exists than it was before it did.

Government bureaucrats mostly don't create wealth, they suckle on the teat of the wealth creators and enrich themselves off someone else's work. Theoretically there could be exceptions, if one has an especially important job and creates especially efficient legislation or regulations that smooth things over for everyone else as individuals they can do more good. But there aren't capitalist feedback loops, so there's nothing causing the better ones to be richer than the worse ones. Giving them more money and power might incentivize more people to want to be them, but that doesn't create more wealth the way incentivizing more people to want to be tech founders does. It just creates more competition to suck wealth that other people created.

Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos shouldn't be billionaires because they're good people. They should be billionaires because they reached into the void and pulled out billions of dollars of wealth and shared some of it with us, and kept some of it for themselves. They did that, who are you to confiscate it from them? And if you do, who else is going to risk reaching into the void when they could just become a confiscator instead and do the safer job of reaching into wallets?

you have no money (or negative money!) when it's time to contribute to the public good.

Just think of what you could do with billions of dollars. You could build an online shopping, shipping, book publishing, and cloud computing service that improves countless millions of lives. You could revolutionize communication and information flow or connect rural and remote people to the World Wide Web. Heck, you could just make a fun game.

Oh wait, those were all private billionaires' projects. The "public good" doesn't count unless it's filtered through the government first.

In my own life experience, I think I have a lot more distaste for the "mere millionaires" than the billionaires. Maybe it's because I've met a bunch of people in the 10 - 50 million dollar net worth range and only one billionaire.

Nonetheless, every single person I know who is worth more than $10 million reached that position through inheritance or marriage.

They don't work, and seem to flutter through life thinking they'll become an Expert at Something, but usually get bored before they actually get anywhere. The most dedicated of them might get another degree, but it seems to stop there.

Beyond that, they're insulated from consequences in a way that warps their minds. Most of them think they're quite brilliant investors, for example. Unlike me, they're able to afford big, risky bets that I can't take unless I want to stake my entire future on it. They'll then crow about their enormous unrealized gains on their portfolio, failing to note that every single investment they've made other than Nvidia is down 10 - 50%. They could have literally made more money investing in a basic-bitch whole market fund. It doesn't matter though, because they've staked enough of it as collateral for tax-free loans that they're set for life.

They frequently don't even realize what is realistic or not. I was talking about burnout once with one of them, and he gave me his sure-fire stress solution: just take a year off and go to Europe. I didn't have the heart to tell him that even if I could afford to take a whole year off work and start the job hunt when I got back, I still didn't have a family chalet that I could use rent free during my visit.

The one billionaire I have met, however, was sharp as hell. He clearly knew both his industry and finance inside and out, and simultaneously had the self-awareness to realize that he was not normal. He knew he had a lot of help getting to the point where his wealth could really snowball, and he recognized that luck was involved. Someone asked if he had advice on becoming a billionaire. The answer was long, but one of the most important things he said was that you can't do it without taking risks. He also made it clear that you aren't going to even be able to take those risks unless you're a multi millionaire first. It was a very different conversation compared to people who fell into money.

Nonetheless, every single person I know who is worth more than $10 million reached that position through inheritance or marriage.

I guess I know a different crowd (American, here), but I know a few folks in that scale, all of whom are retired, married professionals (doctors, medium-tier business executives, engineers) that spent within their means and lived comparatively modestly and drive Toyotas. Maybe they inherited some of it, but it wasn't the majority of their income. But you also probably wouldn't know those details unless you were close to them: the millionaire-next-door types don't tend to talk much about money.

Also American. The people I know who meet that kind of millionaire next door criteria (eg: frugal, older) tend to not get into the eight figure range. It could be a regional thing: I'm in a pretty LCoL area. The people who I'm describing all ended up here because of the nearby college.

He also made it clear that you aren't going to even be able to take those risks unless you're a multi millionaire first.

I wonder how true this is. Looking at the richest men in America:

  1. Musk: Started his first company in 1995 with about $60k of capital in 2026 dollars and seemed to just bootstrap his success from that. His dad famously owned an emerald mine, but there's conflicting reports about how much money that actually brought in and he was estranged from his dad.

  2. Larry Ellison: mildly shitty childhood, raised by aunt and uncle, started his business with $11k starting capital in 2025 dollars, of which he personally invested about $6k. Not a multimillionaire and didn't come from money as far as I can tell.

  3. Zucc: professional parents, high status schools, probably UMC or LUC. It's not clear how much starting capital Facebook requires from a cursory skim, but I can't imagine it was a lot considering its humble beginnings. He had a parental safety net, but certainly wasn't a multi millionaire.

  4. Jeff Bezos: born to a teenage mother (high school student) and father (an alcoholic "Danish unicyclist"). Later adopted by a Cuban stepfather (petroleum engineer). I guess his mom's dad was a regional director of the atomic energy commission? Bezos had a successful professional career after college and started Amazon with $600k of capital in 2025 dollars from his parents.

  5. Larry Page: college professor parents. High status summer schools. Got some seed funding for basic equipment and then managed to attract bigger investors with demos of the technology.

I don't really think that any of these people were only in a position to take risks from having millions already. Bezos is probably the closest thing to this given the size of the investment his parents put in (although it's a mystery to me where they got that money from in the first place). The most you can say for the rest of these is that their lives wouldn't have been over had their businesses not succeeded and they could have moved in with their parents or something - but that goes for a lot of people, not just multi millionaires.

I think he meant it more in the way that you can't swing for the fences on day one. You have to aim for millions before you get to billions.

I think he meant it more in the way that you can't swing for the fences on day one. You have to aim for millions before you get to billions.

Looks like that's not true, at least if you're doing it by founding a company -- Ellison, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Page all did it in one shot.

Bezos was already rich by normal-person standards after four years at DE Shaw, during which he was promoted unusually rapidly so was presumably a high performer. (Incidentally, I think this answers the question about where Bezos Sr got the $600k from - a lot of it was Jeff's own money but in the 1990's startup culture daddy was a better story).

Maybe he was full of shit on that one, then. I'm not a billionaire, so it's hard to speak from experience.

The best solution I've heard to this issue is that people are allowed to earn as much money as possible without interference (which avoids distorting incentives) but then at the end of each year there is a referendum on each of the top 10 richest people in the country and if they don't gain majority support in that referendum they get publicly executed. This way there's no distortion in incentives for the vast vast majority of people who are never going to end up being the 10 richest people in the country and for those where this is a real risk (top 500 or so richest people) it incentives them to stay on good terms with the rest of the population and not act with total impunity.

That, or the other solution is of course to bring back the Athenian Liturgy.

So we go from a world of the rich flaunting their wealth, to a world of the rich hiding it by putting scapegoats in nominal charge of it.

Your solution is a "this one weird trick", and what actual problem does it even address? It and OP's post are just thoughtless "eat the rich" rhetoric. You can eat them for all that I care, but that won't improve the world by much, and will make it worse by the crudity of the suggested measures. Go on, eat the rich, see what happens. The poor and the middle classes aren't any better. The rich didn't get where they are by accident.

Aside from it never going to happen, it would be massively distortionary and set up horrible incentives. We already have the problem that most people who become moderately rich are unwilling to take any risks and basically just coast, especially those who inherited. Trying to become ultra-rich is just not worth it even now. If you look at the ultra-rich, it is often just a side effect of other goals. Say what you will, but Musk clearly wants to develop new, revolutionary technology, taking arguably irrational risks (in the sense of pure expected risk-reward in terms of money), working ungodly hours and making plenty of enemies.

Your proposal would turn everything into ultra-europe, where all the powerful people are somewhere in the government and nominally only modestly rich, and the few very richest would be extremely bland and boring inherited wealth who maybe run some old established uncontroversial business and mostly spend charitably, never taking any risks or making any enemies. Everyone else who risks becoming too rich will try to get rid of that money ASAP since it's just not worth it for the risk to get executed.

If that's the "best" solution you've heard, I really don't want to know what the others were.

I really do!

Man I actually love this solution. At worst the billionaires would just massively bribe part of the population, which would certainly help alleviate the current problem.

The bribes wouldn’t—couldn’t—be high enough. Too many Americans would expect $1,000,000 checks from each billionaire. They’d all be slaughtered due to the population’s innumeracy.

I am inclined to defend the billionaires because the people going after them aren't going to stop there. Rather, they are just looking for a non-sympathetic target. I guess you could say something like "first they came for the billionaires"

Besides, I find the billionaires to be rather entertaining. I enjoy reading about their luxury bunkers in New Zealand; their mega-yachts; their mistresses; etc. No billionaire ever called me a n*gger, so to speak.

I mostly agree, and don't see all that many billionaires acting like the OP describes. FOr example:

I guess I'm just kinda over us deciding that once you reach a certain net worth, you are some sort of luminous being. You can go to pedo island and it's fine, you can do drugs that normies go to prison for an it's fine, you can fuck up critical national infrastructure and it's fine, you have infinite money when it's time to do what you want but somehow you have no money (or negative money!) when it's time to contribute to the public good.

These sorts are incredibly rare. Instead most just kinda sit in anonymity being rich and living in luxury. The ones that are public figures are often total dorks that are funny and do things like buy sports teams then cheer enthusiastically on the sidelines just like they were a 12 year old. The rare few that are actually toxic to our society and discourse are actually closer to the OP's sentiment themselves. The Bill Gates or Mackenzie Bezos types that agree with the OP that being a billionaire is something that must be atoned for, so they distribute their billions in toxic ways intending to buy social clout with influential non-billionaires. If Bill just bout a mountain chateau in British Colombia and employed a bunch of servants the world would be better off. The problem was he wanted to pretend help Africans and the like, and thats why hes jetsetting with Epstein (prurient interests aside), its because he wanted to meet people to do his fake charities and buy social clout.

No billionaire has ever called me a nigger, but they have no idea that I exist. If I was powerful enough to be on their radar, there's a good chance that at least one of them would call me a nigger. Or whatever the modern, PC version of it is.

there's a good chance that at least one of them would call me a nigger. Or whatever the modern, PC version of it is.

I tend to agree with this, but it seems to me the problem is not billionaires per se but rather what you refer to as "modern PC"

I'm somewhat sympathetic to the "billionaires bad" cause but the people making it always use really poor examples and lines of argumentation. Using Musk or Bezos (like many of the "billionaires bad" crowd do, including you) makes for really bad examples because those two, and other people like them, really did build impressive things that are useful to people, they are not what one would think a "parasitic capitalist tick" is.

The china worship also, especially from the Hasan Dogshocker Piker camp, is a bit baffling. I don't know if you consider yourself communist, but the dogshockers do and China isn't really communist for the man on the street. When they say they like China because of billionaires it makes me think that their preferred economic system isn't communism but fascism.

Another thing that bothers me is the focus on "net worth". That's also in your post. Net worth isn't the same thing as liquid money, they just happen to be measured with the same unit of measure. People sometimes say "just imagine how much good we could do if Musk didn't hoard all that money for himself" but that's not how anything works.

I think you would have a better time advancing your theory if you used better arguments.

somehow you have no money (or negative money!) when it's time to contribute to the public good.

But this isn't true. They pay taxes and in great quantities. You can look up what portion of the population pays most federal taxes. It is hyper-progressive.

Rhetoric about them not paying their fair share is common, but I think rather wrong.

I'm jealous of china

China is run by billionaires. The billionaires are directly in charge of their government as high ranking party members. Non-party-member billionaires get humbled sometimes, but keep in mind who is in charge.

Hi, I don't have much to add to the topic at hand, because 'billionaires have too much power/influence/XXX' is not super interesting to me. But I wanted to comment that I do not know what the 'Steven universe meme' is, and do not care to investigate it to figure out all its nuances. From what I can gather, this sentence:

I think we're gonna have to steven universe meme one of these guys.

was essential to your thesis, it may even be your thesis statement, and I have no idea what it means.

I understand everyone on this forum likes to write in this witty memetic style but please don't do so at the expense of clarity. /soapbox

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-think-were-gonna-have-to-kill-this-guy-steven

See now I'm even more confused. OP is suggesting we kill US politicians because they're irredeemable? Is he saying Trump, but also Mamdani, is literally Hitler? What does this have to do with China?

Point stands. Don't use memes as your thesis. Use your big boy words!

It's not so much about the meme as it is about he plausible deniability, I'd wager. Understanding that our government has a panipticon that may be at any moment oriented toward you in particular, sometimes it's necessary to clarify that you're only proposing we do radical things in minecraft.

I've updated my opinion of Elon considerably downward over the past few years. This isn't motivated reasoning or tribal updating, I think his early work genuinely represented some of the most impressive entrepreneurial achievement of the century, and I weighted that heavily for a long time. It's just that the account has been drawn down pretty substantially at this point.

my space autism getting triggered unimaginably by space-x getting fucking shackled to a corpse right before IPO

SpaceX exists because Elon Musk willed it into existence through what can only be described as an unreasonable application of personal capital, obsession, and tolerance for failure. The prior probability of a private company successfully developing orbital rockets from scratch was, charitably, very low. He is not a steward of someone else's vision. He is the vision, or at least was its necessary precondition. You can believe the xAI merger is strategically stupid (I have no strong view either way) while still acknowledging that "guy makes questionable decisions about his own company" is a fairly weak indictment. The stronger criticism would need to be about the employees or shareholders who signed on under different assumptions, which is at least a real argument.

On billionaires more broadly, I find myself in the uncomfortable position of being genuinely more sympathetic to them than the median person in my reference class seems to be, to the point I'd have gone on that Pro-Billionaire March in SF if I was eligible and there, and I've spent some time trying to figure out whether this is motivated reasoning or just correct.

Here's the thing about capitalism that I think gets systematically underappreciated: it's one of the only wealth-generation mechanisms in human history that is even structurally capable of being positive-sum. The historical alternatives (conquest, extraction, inheritance, political rent-seeking) are zero or negative sum almost by definition. Someone taking your grain is not creating value; they are relocating it, while destroying some in the process.

Whereas Bezos building a logistics network that genuinely makes it cheaper and faster to get goods to people is, at minimum, attempting to create value, and by revealed preference it mostly succeeds. I'm simplifying, obviously. There are real extraction dynamics in modern capitalism. But the baseline isn't "billionaires take from the poor"; the baseline is "billionaires accumulate disproportionately while also expanding the total pie," which is a meaningfully different situation that calls for different policy responses.

The talent point is one people find uncomfortable to make explicitly, but I think it's basically right and the discomfort is doing a lot of work to obscure valid reasoning. The self-made billionaires specifically, the ones who started from, say, merely-upper-middle-class and compounded from there, represent a genuinely unusual combination of intelligence, risk tolerance, executive function, and social skill. You can find individual counterexamples, and luck is real and important, but as a population they seem to have a lot of the thing that makes economies grow. Artificially capping that seems like exactly the kind of policy that makes a satisfying fairness intuition and a mediocre growth outcome.

These people genuinely are *better" than you and me. Smarter, more driven, more ambitious, and more willing to take risks. All men are categorically not made equal.

("If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" is not an entirely invalid argument)

I'll steelman the opposition: you could argue that beyond some threshold, wealth primarily compounds through rent-seeking rather than value creation, and that extreme concentration creates political capture that undermines the positive-sum game entirely. I think this is the correct version of the billionaire critique, and it's pretty different from "they are morally bad people who should be humbled."

The relationship between wealth and virtue is much weaker and in an opposite direction from what progressive discourse implies, and if you're selecting for "demonstrates poor impulse control, short time horizons, willingness to harm others for small personal gain," you will find that distribution pretty spread across income levels, possibly with some concerning concentrations nowhere near the top of the wealth distribution.

(If it's not obvious, this is not my stance on all billionaires. It doesn't extend to Russian oligarchs, tinpot dictators etc.)

I've updated my opinion of Elon considerably downward over the past few years. This isn't motivated reasoning or tribal updating, I think his early work genuinely represented some of the most impressive entrepreneurial achievement of the century, and I weighted that heavily for a long time. It's just that the account has been drawn down pretty substantially at this point.

It does credibly seem like he's become the victim of (wealth induced) substance abuse generated personality change.

That's a hard thing to deal with.

if you're selecting for "demonstrates poor impulse control, short time horizons, willingness to harm others for small personal gain," you will find that distribution pretty spread across income levels, possibly with some concerning concentrations nowhere near the top of the wealth distribution.

The last one is more important than the first two, and a decent chunk of Western billionaires got there from it. Sam Bankman-Fried got there by screwing his cofounders out of FTX (also he did massive fraud later). Sam Altman got there by massive deceit of the public until OpenAI had enough power to make it hard to knock over.

Don't get me wrong, Elon Musk is a positive-sum guy. But what Zvi calls the "maze nature" is almost certainly more prevalent among billionaires than among people in general, even if it's likely less common among billionaires than among CEOs.

These people genuinely are *better" than you and me. Smarter, more driven, more ambitious, and more willing to take risks. All men are categorically not made equal.

I think for that to be true, we would need agreed-upon criteria for how to evaluate goodness. Which I don't believe we really can achieve. Let's say for the sake of argument that Bezos is higher on all those axes than me, fine. But it's not clear that all of those things make someone good. Ambition is notorious for being a double edged sword as a character trait, and risk-taking is imo more of a negative trait than a positive one. And of course, Bezos has cheated on his wife more than me, and has engaged in unethical business practices more than me, both of which I would say are pretty strongly negative.

So who is better, Bezos or me? It is going to depend on whom you ask; we just don't have a set of values that everyone (or even most people) can agree upon to answer the question. I don't think one can correctly say, therefore, that Bezos (or any other billionaire of course) is better than me, nor that I am better than him. Nor would it be reasonable to say that he has more moral worth than me (which is what the "all men are created equal" line means). The only thing we can say with any real certainty is that he has more money and business success than I ever will, but that doesn't make one man better than another.

So who is better, Bezos or me? It is going to depend on whom you ask

You're welcome to use whatever criteria for "goodness", I've just used mine. I value intelligence, conscientiousness, ambition, drive etc etc, and at least by those metrics, I think the type of billionaire I've singled out is ahead of the both of us. There are obviously other factors I care about, these are just the ones where they're clearly above average.

Nor would it be reasonable to say that he has more moral worth than me (which is what the "all men are created equal" line means).

I happen to disagree with that. I think different people can and do have different moral worth. I think a billionaire contributes more than a peasant in Africa, or a hardworking middle class person deserves more moral consideration than a serial killer, and thus I value their existence more, and would make ethical decisions accordingly. So does the rest of the world, going by revealed preference.

Also even if we assume it true that all men are created equal, there's no reason to assume that they remain forever equal.

They may be better than me personally, but I doubt they're any better than the millions of other people trying to do what they do. I don't think it's rent seeking so much as sales prowess and (mostly) luck. It's easy to look at someone like Bezos or Gates or Carnegie and point to value created, because everyone knows what they did. But take a guy like Mark Cuban. He's a celebrity billionaire if there ever was one. He owns a pro sports franchise, which is about the most stereotypically billionaire thing you can do, and he hosts a show that presents him as a Svengali of entrepreneurship. Everyone has long forgotten that the value he created was broadcast.com, which no one remembers and which became defunct within a couple years of his selling it to Yahoo. He had a business with minimal value and happened to unload it at just the right time; a year later and he'd be living out of a cardboard box right now.

Of course, the smart set knows that Cuban was lucky. But we don't even have to leave the NBA to find another one: Steve Ballmer. He was Bill Gates's right hand man, so one can argue that he built part of the value of Microsoft. But when Gates handed the reins over to him, his tenure at the top wasn't exactly stellar. He had a few hits, but the Ballmer era will be known more for the long string of misses, and the end of Microsoft being the undisputed industry leader. If we move to another league but stay with Microsoft we have Paul Allen, who was instrumental in the very early days but quickly took to feuding with Gates and was forced out of the company. He didn't do much after that besides philanthropy and other stereotypical billionaire stuff, and most of his net worth came from stock he was able to hold onto.

Elon himself is really the worst of the bunch when you think about it, a combination of Cuban and Allen. He had a good idea and was able to get investors but was bad at running the company and got forced out. The brought new management in, changed the name, and sold X.com, since renamed PayPal, to eBay for enough to net Elon a cool hundred million. Everything else in his career is the result of having fuck you money to begin with. I'm not saying that intelligence or vision doesn't play into this at all, but luck and salesmanship are a huge part of it. I wouldn't even put risk taking in this category because lots of people are willing to take huge risks doing things like taking out home equity loans to buy sports bars and pizza shops.

Of course, the smart set knows that Cuban was lucky. But we don't even have to leave the NBA to find another one: Steve Ballmer. He was Bill Gates's right hand man, so one can argue that he built part of the value of Microsoft. But when Gates handed the reins over to him, his tenure at the top wasn't exactly stellar. He had a few hits, but the Ballmer era will be known more for the long string of misses, and the end of Microsoft being the undisputed industry leader. If we move to another league but stay with Microsoft we have Paul Allen, who was instrumental in the very early days but quickly took to feuding with Gates and was forced out of the company. He didn't do much after that besides philanthropy and other stereotypical billionaire stuff, and most of his net worth came from stock he was able to hold onto.

I mean, even if Ballmer was a literal idiot, whats wrong with him having money and being a doofus at Clippers games? SOMEONE has to own the Clippers and his personality is entertaining. Its not like he's spending his billions lobbying for the expansion of food stamps or setting up a bunch of those fake "success academies" that just spend ungodly sums doing no better at educating poor kids than a lady in an unheated basement with a chalkboard would.

This is completely egregious with regards to Elon. I don't think you appreciate the magnitude of achievement of starting a new (electric) car company in a country when a new successful car company hadn't been started for decades. Similar for rockets, where the private industry was incredibly inefficient and the public side almost completely ineffective. If he'd done this with purely inherited money it would still be incredible. I think he has personality flaws but his work input and entrepreneurial ability are not matched.

Cuban is correct. He was a pretty good NBA owner. Above median. Witless when he sold the team - and seems to be developing more liberal witlessness the older he gets. Licking a dirty boot can do strange things.

Ballmer seems right also. His era was when Microsoft was heavily hamstrung by anti-trust. He doesn't seem like a good NBA owner - given that's all we have to go off.

I think Bezos worked extremely hard and knew how to make consistently good business decisions, which if you've ever worked with other people isn't trivial. Much like Elon I think he has personality flaws.

The funny thing about these 4 is the 2 with the highest levels of social intelligence (Cuban and Ballmer) have the least case for true business brilliance, while the other two are less savvy but have better resumes.

You don't necessarily have opportunities to evaluate these guys if they don't take repeated swings. Some people are just carried on good business waves. Pretty hard to argue against Elon and Bezos though, given the breadth and success of their product/service suites.

In this context, I can't give him credit for Tesla or SpaceX because he was already incredibly wealthy when he got involved with those ventures, and that wealth didn't come from any particular display of talent, at least not enough to say that he's simply better than the rest of us. I'm not trying to diminish his accomplishments, just saying that it's a lot easier to take huge business risks when you have 100 million dollars already.

Plenty of people with more money have tried and failed at the exact same purpose. The majority of the NASA expert class has repeatedly made an ass of themselves claiming that this or that is never going to be cost-effective or not even physically possible, only to be disproven a year or two later. I have no problem saying Musk is an asshole, or that he is clearly abusing substances that fuck with his mind, but you could have given ten times as much money to any other rich guy or even an established subject expert and they would have not even come close to accomplish what he did.

Otherwise, strong agree with @pusher_robot. The rational behaviour for a self-centered person with 100 million dollars is to take no risks whatsoever and make no enemies, just coasting for life. And this is what most of them do. Anyone in that position who instead risks it all and tries to create something new should be highly respected.

I disagree with this take. The natural human tendency will be to either invest it conservatively or spend it on lifestyle. For a person with that kind of wealth to plow ~100% of it on self-run high-risk, high-reward business ventures is actually quite rare and should be lauded.

On the other hand creating a large business making actual high-tech physical products is very difficult if you don't have huge backing to begin with. Getting enough money to start swinging on that tier requires hitting something softer

These people genuinely are *better" than you and me. Smarter, more driven, more ambitious, and more willing to take risks. All men are categorically not made equal.

Don't they start 'better' (in this specific sense) and then become 'worse' – more callous, more capricious, less able to understand others – as a direct result of their money?

Oh god, please don't start the master morality vs slave morality debate again...

Easy to claim, harder to prove. If you have studies saying so, I'll take a look.

Unfortunately not, just my own sense that dynamic rising entrepreneurs are bringing more innovation and open mindedness and that old ones are more focused on preservation, and that often the main impulses they are left with once their excitement and love have died down are grudges, which for most of us are thankless, but which they are able to indulge on a continuing basis. You may say I am going with a folk morality view of the wealthy here but I think there is at least a core of truth about the phases of billionaire founders' lives that is inevitable, in a Greek theatre sort of way, given the positions they find themselves in. I also think it is healthier to eat the rich in the knowledge they are similar to us, than to do it because they are fundamentally different (even if they are different along certain dimensions).

SpaceX exists because Elon Musk willed it into existence through what can only be described as an unreasonable application of personal capital, obsession, and tolerance for failure.

I think it owes a big part to a whole generation of engineers that wanted to build spaceships, but previously had to settle for either pushing paperwork on mundane siloed details at BigGovCo contracting for NASA or the DOD, or settling for work outside of aerospace. I know some of them. The stream of smart college graduates willing to work long hours for peanuts just because the work was cool was there before, but not the money to pay for peanuts and materials. I'll give credit for the funding and risk-taking, but I have more mixed feelings on building an empire on burning out smart early-career engineers.

My understanding is that even a few years of experience at SpaceX is an easy ticket to a much more cushy/comfortable position elsewhere in aerospace, especially for a newly minted engineer. These guys aren't idiots, they weren't coerced into anything. They made the conscious choice of opting-in to work in the most exciting and fast paced company in their field, and most of them saw that as a golden opportunity. If they don't like it, they can quit, and many have. Elon isn't a slave-driver, he's just a hardass boss.

But over all this time, I've kinda synthesized a superstructure that I don't think is gonna change, that I think is not on the left right axis, but on another mysterious plane: I'm jealous of china.

Any ideology rooted in jealousy is likely to be catastrophic in its application to society.

What is the engine of capitalism, good will to all men and peace on earth? Our economic ideology is rooted in jealousy, and the jealous rise to the top to be crowned "billionaire". You need a jealous temperament to spend so much life behind spreadsheets making Number Go Up at the slot machine company. Without that temperament, it would be difficult to find motivation for such time-consuming and unrewarding work. Some billionaires are even open about being rooted in jealousy, like Ellison who admits to being motivated by personal vanity, whose favorite quote is “it is not sufficient that I succeed, everyone else must fail".

Sure, but feminism and communism (the two most common ideologies of this type) can take a very long time to break that society, especially if that society is lucky enough.

We do have one example of how fast things fall apart, of course; South Africa's trajectory is a pretty clear object lesson on that.

Feminism and communism are the same ideology: the satanic destruction of natural hierarchy by those who imagine they can fill the shoes of their natural superiors. Children insisting upon receiving the full rights and privileges of adults would be a congruent third leg but at least so far almost nobody seems dumb enough to push for that. Then again it wasn't so long ago that the same would have been said of women. Or vagrants; or indigenes.

Communism is implicitly feminist; feminism is implicitly communist. These are branches, not separate trees.

Didn't I just see Kamala argue for lowering the voting age? Like, yesterday?

Kamala and Stalin want pretty different societies. So I'd say that's enough to mark their ideologies as different. Actual commies even western ones hate Kamala and don't see her as a fellow travelers. She certainly doesn't want to abolish capitalism.

Do you consider actual existing communism, not theoretical communism on the Berkeley campus, to be a destruction of natural hierarchy? Because I have a hard time seeing guys like Lenin and Stalin as natural inferiors to the Czar and most organic communist revolutions were replacing a degenerating nobility or ruling class of colonial foreigners. Is climbing the party bureaucracy really so different from climbing the corporate ladder? No granted Soviet economics didn't work very well but I don't see that as a product of subverting a natural hierarchy.

Children insisting upon receiving the full rights and privileges of adults would be a congruent third leg but at least so far almost nobody seems dumb enough to push for that.

We did have that one guy (I think his username was something to do with baseball?) who wouldn't ever talk about anything other than child emancipation. I think his arguments were retarded, but really his biggest flaw is that he was unwilling to talk about literally any other topic, it was always the same points rehashed over and over and over.

That's because, iirc, he had other sockpuppets for other topics.

I think his arguments were retarded, but really his biggest flaw is that he was unwilling to talk about literally any other topic

And this is different than the GP's "natural order is man > woman, anything else is Satan"... how, exactly? (Though I get that JuliusBranson, whose alt that was, was/is just kind of like that- and to be fair mangoodwomanbad generally isn't used as a self top-level post, or when it is, it's not quite that naked.)

The trick about arguing against discrimination against children this way is that it's kind of like arguing against discrimination against those poor in worth more generally- and it might be justified simply on those grounds- it's simply what's in the water and thinking about it too much means you're only in it for the miscegenation, so to speak. (Actually, I guess tomboys also count as miscegenation under those rules.)

It might be helpful for you to draw up a list of the ways men are better than women, and the opposite; and then draw some conclusions about how societies might function. And the opposite. The exercise itself is likely to yield some interesting insights.

As a general rule if practically every historical human society seems to have agreed on something that seems crazy to you it might be time to stop and reflect.

Satan

What does this mean to you? What do you think it means to me? Consider Paradise Lost or maybe just the traditional understanding of what Satan, highest of the angels, did wrong.

People will notice that a truth-seeking site like this is 99% male and shrug and move on without considering why. This selective blindness used to bewilder me.

Instead of being coy I'll just say it forthrightly: You have been conditioned your entire life to never, ever think along this axis and it might be time to start asking questions about what's going on with that.

mangoodwomanbad

Does someone who thinks adults are superior to, and morally responsible for, children think that adults are good and children are bad? What would have to have gone wrong for someone to immediately leap to that conclusion?

What would a non-feminist modern western society actually look like to you? I'm honestly asking and not looking to argue, I just have a hard time modeling what you're actually wanting. Would a society like the 50s be acceptable to you or would it need explicit rules like the 1800s? Or something different to deal with modernity?

My politics on this has evolved over time; at one point they were admirable titans of industry

You're gilding the past a bit. JP Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt and Andrew Carnegie and the like are remembered with a sort of fond awe because they left a lot of money to charitable endeavors and endowments, but the term "robber baron" came about for a reason. They weren't "luminous beings," they were far less constrained than rich people are today (Elon Musk could probably have you whacked if he really wanted to but not without risk; robber barons were nearly as powerful as medieval aristocracy) and the ratio of those who felt some sense of social responsibility versus amoral sociopaths was probably no different than now. Do you think there were no 19th century "pedo island" equivalents? Tales of nobles engaged in depravities with the local peasantry go back centuries.

You're gilding the past a bit

I think you're misunderstanding OP. In the context of the paragraph, it seems clear to me that "at one point they were admirable titans of industry" means "at one point current billionaires seemed like admirable titans of industry to me", not "I currently think that billionaires actually used to be admirable titans of industry back in the day".

You're gilding the past

I see what you did there.

There are a lot fewer stories of the Gilded Age billionaires being personally depraved than there would be for an equivalently-sized group of medieval aristocrats whose escapades were equivalently well-documented. "Robber baron" refers to business practices that were and are considered evil by leftists, but in many cases are still SOP today.

They really were better people than most elites through history. I suspect they were better people than most modern-day billionaires, although it is hard to tell because modern-day celebrities are so well-documented that you hear about every minor extramarital affair, which would not have been the case back in the Gilded Age.

I don’t think this is true. We have glimpses into the behind-the-scenes depravity of the Gilded Age; the Maiden Whores of Babylon; the infamous Stanford White scandal, several others besides. And this was when the press was even more corrupt and in many ways deferential than today.

I've been having some thoughts recently about the billionaires among us, some opinions, some takes even. My politics on this has evolved over time; at one point they were admirable titans of industry, then they were capitalist parasitic ticks, then they were a necessary part of the incentive structure that drives to economy, and now they are a bloated level of inefficiency preventing the market from functioning efficiently.

Elon Musk is an argument against ALL of these.

I guess I'm just kinda over us deciding that once you reach a certain net worth, you are some sort of luminous being. You can go to pedo island and it's fine

It turns out there was no pedo island, just hookers-as-young-as-17 island, and that's kind of meh. And lots of "mere millionaires" went there.

you can do drugs that normies go to prison for an it's fine

I'm pretty sure lots of people with net worth hovering around zero do drugs (meth, cocaine, opiates) without going to prison.

you can fuck up critical national infrastructure and it's fine, you have infinite money when it's time to do what you want but somehow you have no money (or negative money!) when it's time to contribute to the public good.

So is your lifetime tax bill even a mere 8 figures yet?

Whenever billionaire discourse comes up I wonder what percentage of the people engaging in it think A. Being a billionaire means you have a salary of a billion+ a year B. Being a billionaire means you have a Scrooge McDuck style mansion filled with ash

As opposed to what if often means, you have a controlling (or large) ownership interest in a company you built that has been enormously successful.

Or you inherited a fortune from someone who did - that part is maybe more justifiably upsetting.

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