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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'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.
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.)
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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...
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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).
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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.
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