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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.)
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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