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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.)
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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