You become a billionaire by fucking over just enough people. Too many and they turn on you, too few and you have to settle for being a filthy multimillionaire. The entire job, as it were, of a billionaire is to go as far as you can without pissing off the wrong people. They didn’t forget about the social contract, they’re just confident that a little more won’t hurt.
Edge cases of billionaires who genuinely innovated their way to the top aside (I can’t think of any) I think going too far is just a feature of billionaires as a class.
Curiously, we live in an age in which billionaires are glad to broadcast every whimsical thought they have to the rest of the world. Tycoons of previous ages didn’t have that capacity even when they wanted it, and the best they could do is hire a biographer.
But because of this, we are certain of how our billionaires today have gone mad with power, believe that somehow they’ve earned their lucre, and have total disregard of the well-being of the working class, even those whom they’ve hired and depend upon. They seem entirely oblivious to the possibility of revolt of the masses, or believe that robust surveillance and security will be enough to stop the onslaught. So, too, believed the French aristocracy in King Louis XVI’s court.
Stark-raving-mad billionaires are not really a new phenomenon. Andrew Carnegie once got a chill when he realised that J. P. Morgan would totally shank him to take is assets if he could. Carnegie was only slightly less ruthless, himself.
This has created a dilemma for many of them since they want mercenaries and servants to support them in their apocalypse bunkers, but don’t want to be at their mercy when suddenly the billionaire, himself, is no longer useful to the killers that he’s hired. The only solution that has emerged from futurologists is maybe be nice to them so they don’t turn on you. But rare is the billionaire who is capable of actually doing that.
You become a billionaire by fucking over just enough people. Too many and they turn on you, too few and you have to settle for being a filthy multimillionaire. The entire job, as it were, of a billionaire is to go as far as you can without pissing off the wrong people. They didn’t forget about the social contract, they’re just confident that a little more won’t hurt.
Edge cases of billionaires who genuinely innovated their way to the top aside (I can’t think of any) I think going too far is just a feature of billionaires as a class.
Curiously, we live in an age in which billionaires are glad to broadcast every whimsical thought they have to the rest of the world. Tycoons of previous ages didn’t have that capacity even when they wanted it, and the best they could do is hire a biographer.
But because of this, we are certain of how our billionaires today have gone mad with power, believe that somehow they’ve earned their lucre, and have total disregard of the well-being of the working class, even those whom they’ve hired and depend upon. They seem entirely oblivious to the possibility of revolt of the masses, or believe that robust surveillance and security will be enough to stop the onslaught. So, too, believed the French aristocracy in King Louis XVI’s court.
Stark-raving-mad billionaires are not really a new phenomenon. Andrew Carnegie once got a chill when he realised that J. P. Morgan would totally shank him to take is assets if he could. Carnegie was only slightly less ruthless, himself.
This has created a dilemma for many of them since they want mercenaries and servants to support them in their apocalypse bunkers, but don’t want to be at their mercy when suddenly the billionaire, himself, is no longer useful to the killers that he’s hired. The only solution that has emerged from futurologists is maybe be nice to them so they don’t turn on you. But rare is the billionaire who is capable of actually doing that.