Because complacent oligarchs rule our world

A few years ago – I think it was 2015 – I got a little lesson in how easy it is to become a horrible person.

I was a speaker at a conference in São Paulo (Brazil) and my arrival flight was significantly delayed.

The organisers, concerned that I would miss my shift due to city traffic, arranged for me to be picked up from the airport and taken directly to the hotel rooftop by helicopter.

After the conference, a car was waiting for me to take me back to the airport.

And for a moment I found myself thinking:

“What? Do I have to get in the car?”

By the way, in real life I almost always move with the subway.

In any case, the lesson from which I drew my average moment it was him privilege corruptswhich very easily generates a sense of entitlement.

And surely, to paraphrase Lord Acton, enormous privilege corrupts enormously, in part because the highly privileged are usually surrounded by people who will never dare to tell them they are misbehaving.

That’s why I’m not shocked by the show of reputational self-immolation from Elon Musk.

Fascinated, yes; who does not?

But when a dirty, wealthy man, accustomed not only to getting his way but also to being a much admired icon, finds himself not only losing his aura but becoming the object of general ridicule, of course he it hurls erraticallyand by doing so your problems get even worse.

The more interesting question is why are we governed by people like this now.

We clearly live in the era of petulant oligarch.

As the Times’ Kevin Roose recently pointed out, Musk still has many admirers in the tech world.

They don’t see him as a whining brat, but as someone who understands how the world should be run:

an ideology writer John Ganz calls “caciquismo“, the belief that the big ones don’t have to answer to the little ones, or even face their criticisms.

And it’s clear that supporters of that ideology have a lot of power, even if that power still fails to protect people like Musk from being disruptive in public.

How is it possible?

Unsurprisingly, technological progress and rising gross domestic product have not created a happy and equitable society; pessimistic views of the future have been commonplace in both serious analysis and popular culture for as long as I can remember.

But both social critics and John Kenneth Galbraith and speculative writers like William Gibson envisioned corporate dystopias that suppressed selfhood, not societies dominated by thin-skinned selfish plutocrats who vented their insecurities in the public eye.

What happened?

Part of the answer, no doubt, is the enormous scale of wealth concentration at the top. Even before the Twitter fiasco, many people were comparing Elon Musk to Howard Hughes in his later years.

But Hughes’ wealth, even measured in today’s dollars, was insignificant compared to Musk’s, even after the recent crash in Tesla stock.

More generally, the best available estimates state that the share of total wealth of the top 0.00001% is almost 10 times greater today than it was four decades ago.

And the immense wealth of the modern super elite has undoubtedly brought a great deal of power, including the power of act childish

On top of that, many of the super rich, who were mostly reserved as a class, have instead become celebrities.

The archetype of the innovator who gets rich by changing the world is not new; it dates back at least to Thomas Edison.

But the great fortunes amassed with information technologies have transformed this narrative into a real cult, with aspirations Steve Jobs everywhere.

Indeed, the cult of entrepreneurial genius has played a significant role in the cryptocurrency debacle.

Sam Bankman-Friedof FTX, wasn’t selling an actual product, and apparently its old competitors that haven’t gone bankrupt yet:

After all this time, no one has found significant real-world uses for cryptocurrency other than money laundering.

Instead, what Bankman-Fried was selling was an imagethat of a scruffy, scruffy visionary who captures the future in a way that normals cannot.

Musk is not in the same category.

His companies make cars that drive and rockets that fly.

But the sales and, above all, the market value of their companies depend, at least in part, on the strength ofand your personal brandwhich it seems it can’t help but destroy with each passing day.

Ultimately, Musk and Bankman-Fried could end up doing a public service by tarnishing the legend of entrepreneurial genius, which has done a lot of damage.

For now, though, Musk’s Twitter antics are degrading what had become a useful resource, a place some of us went to get information from people who actually knew what they were talking about.

And a happy ending to this story seems increasingly unlikely.

Oh, and if this column gets me banned from Twitter — or if the site simply dies from the mistreatment — you can follow some of my thoughts, along with those of a growing number of Twitter refugees, at Mastodon.

c.2022 The New York Times Company