Then why are their actions more harmful than any other class? I see them:
* Starting proxy wars, fueling climate doubt, lobbying/destroying governments to allow every kind of degradation of every commons.
* Paying people 6 or 7 figures to confuse and divide the people earning 5 or 6 figures.
* Apparently utterly ignorant of their legacy, which will be one of murderous self-interest and absurd delusion.
Do all their "trustworthy sources" feed their biases and class interests, their self-delusions, their greed? It's astounding how people can have all the facts and teachers in the world, while dodging genuine understanding of everything most important.
I haven't seen any sign that this is the case among politicians where I live, or among the few quite rich people I've looked into the lives of, mainly through their email and interviews. Compared to the leftists in my "in-group" they're generally very uncritical, poorly informed and pretty narcissistic.
Hanlon's razor doesn't take into account the fact that they have a perfect motive.
But that is obviously the solution at the individual level, and it is always productive to put the burden of solving your own problems on yourself like OP suggests.
- things like the FT and the Bloomberg terminal continue to be reliable, because people are paying them to be reliable and are making decisions based on the news; but those are for the "financial middle class" who are still doing something that could be called a "job"
- people like Musk pick news sources which confirm their biases, and are at risk of spiralling off into a Fox News hole of untruths, because they're too rich to be adversely affected by poor decisions or things that turn out not to be true.
Most people who are really good at something, and became successful for it, primarily became good by doing. Some of those people read and developed complex thought, and likely and rightly give great credit to that. But many others? Not so much.
On the other hand, I think the quality (or the direction of quality) of a society as a whole has a very strong correlation with the percentage of people who read deeply and widely.
I am not only surprised by how simplistic many people's views and reasoning are, but how unaware they are of the world. And how unaware they are that there are people around them that know so much more.
They are not just myopic, they don't have a map, and are unaware other people have them and expand them.
I had a desktop wallpaper of a visualization of a large part of the universe, the beautiful webbing and voids, where galaxies are pixels or less. An aquaintance asked what it was. When I told her, she stared at it like her brain had just crashed. She couldn't process, couldn't believe, the picture, the concept.
People unfamiliar with that artifact is no big deal. But people not having anything to mentally connect it to when they encounter it is scary.
In the drug analogy I am saying most addicts know about rehab. The conspiricy isn't hiding all the NA groups.
To give another analogy, if you want people to recycle, you need to create recycling stations in their area, and not force them to drive 50 kilometers to recycle a plastic bottle. That burden of infrastructure is on the government unfortunately in some part.
"Reliable" doing some heavy lifting here.
Sports figures and statistics are reliable. Stock tickers are reliable. Neither will ever lie to you, but neither are they likely to teach you anything of real value.
FT and Bloomberg are extremely biased toward class interest; in what they choose to cover, in how they cover it, etc.
Did they ever speak out against torture, or illegal war? How much? Did they ever go into the long term advantages of Jill Stein's economic plans; or Bernie's? How much?
The fact that we spent over $8 trillion in a murderous money laundering scheme should have been front page news every day for years. The costs of our incredible and historic inequality are rarely discussed, and if they are, it's in the most limp manner imaginable. The opportunity cost of all this fuckery, from a rational economic perspective, is mind blowing.
The Overton Window is now looking onto bipartisan genocide, after decades of bipartisan illegal war and an extreme agenda of Islamophobia.
> people like Musk pick news sources which confirm their biases
People like Musk buy news sources to spread their biases. Same for Murdoch, Turner, Bezos, etc.
It comes across almost trite, but it's still perfectly relevant:
> Canada [and The West], the most affluent of countries, operates on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in its wake. Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.
- Alanis Obomsawin
This isn't rare or hidden knowledge. Billions of people know this for a fact. Versions of this phrase go back well over a hundred years.
Yet the media and political classes do everything they can to diminish such "sentiment" as "naive" and "childish" "wishful thinking"; with or without the tacit understanding that this is what their owners demand.
I suppose I'm defending the FT in the sense that there is no alterior motive, I believe. Compare this to the tabloids, which don't charge for online access and make money by peddling particular business or political interests - mostly shady business, I think most would agree. I'd therefore trust FT on the facts, albeit probably not for wide coverage.
It’s not true for the extreme top end: [0]
Here’s a Yahoo Finance article citing several efforts to investigate inheritance vs self-made wealth in the upper middle class: [1]
We keep electing new politicians and buying the latest and greatest thing. Technology keeps revolutionizing everything.
This leads to a ton of churn at the top as incumbents are replaced.
What may fool you though is that all successful people are similar in important ways (Anna Karenina principle). But they are not the same people.
[0] https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/billionaires-self-made
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/79-millionaires-self-made-les...
Oh oopsie, I am the owner of highly popular media, that by accident does everything to not talk about subjects that are highly damaging for society, but that, if they would, would be highly detrimental to my and my business partners interests. Also, by accident, instead of bringing real investigative journalism looking at the big picture, my media brings a firehose of addictive, emotionial pulp of no relevance.
How do you do that when you
1. were never taught to take that painful step of doubting your deepest held memes
2. were brainwashed by endless affirmation via infotainment
3. are living in an infotainment environment were half of your countrymen believe things like "the election was stolen"?
It's a metaphor (though in many parts of the world it's a simple fact); but yeah, it could be global some day. I wouldn't put it past us. We've lost countless species already.
We've been abysmal to trees. If we were to keep losing forest at our current global rate we'd lose the last tree in 400-800 years (though tbf this is decelerating right now).
New England has more tree cover than 200 years ago - great. Europe too. Is 200 years ago a good reference point though? Isn't that when we chopped like 80% of our forests down for industrialization?
Anyway, so the centers of Empire are green(ish). How's the Amazon doing though? How's South-East Asia? Central Africa?
And our new forests - are they old growth and diverse, or monoculture Sitka spruce? Organic, or doused with glyphosate?
And then there's the climate, which we are fucking up faster than scientists predicted... Can trees adapt in time? ... Would trees survive nuclear holocaust?
I'm not saying Bladerunner was a documentary. But we're on course for catastrophe, no doubt about it; and the relentless pursuit of ever more capital via externalized costs is why.
No ulterior motive? I really don't know about that.
They're better than most, because they generally tell the truth - a shockingly low bar - but it's a specific type of truth, as seen from a specific and very narrow window, from a deliberate vantage point.
Always viewing the world from that specific window belies a motive, conscious or not, to maintain a highly destructive status quo. They are not seeing the forest for the trees, while writing factual and detailed reports on the least consequential tree bark facts.
Which is fine, if tree bark facts are your bag, I guess - but I'm more concerned about the rapidly deteriorating forest.
Have you contemplated such possibility?
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/apr/03/all-billion...
The article you linked was a bit fuzzy, seems they counted people like Thiel and Musk as 'entrepreneurs' rather than inheritance because they didn't keep running a family company. But them being wealthy is absolutely connected to their families being privileged and the nasty, nasty crimes they profited from.
Lets assume all people when given the opportunity will do what is in their own best interests first.
The less power you have, the more working with others is in your own best interest.
The more wealth you have, the more power you have and the less you _need_ to work with others to achieve what you want or need, so you have an increased ability to weigh what is best for you vs what is best for everyone.
At some point the wealth/power split is so much that you can effectively stop caring about what everyone else wants and pursue what you want and what benefits you.
So while they may have better information, they aren't incentivized to decisions that are less harmful to everyone.
> Starting proxy wars, fueling climate doubt, lobbying/destroying governments to allow every kind of degradation of every commons. Paying people 6 or 7 figures to confuse and divide the people earning 5 or 6 figures. Apparently utterly ignorant of their legacy, which will be one of murderous self-interest and absurd delusion.
All of those can be leveraged for profit if one is cynical and self-serving enough. Most of 'them' that fall into these categories know to some degree the actions they take are harmful to others, and frankly they don't care. Either in their own self-interest, or deluded interests of whatever group they identify with.
Any extreme is, by definition, unusual. You don’t need to be a billionaire (which is what the articule you linked to focus on) to be considered powerful or wealthy.
Tellingly, that articles notes that:
> The proportion of those in the list who grew up poor or had little wealth remained constant at roughly 20 percent throughout the same period.
Which suggests that inheriting power and money does make a difference in your chance of success. They continue:
> Most individuals on the Forbes 400 list did not inherit the family business but rather made their own fortune.
But one does not follow from the other. Inheriting a business is not the only way to have a leg up. If you’re well off you have the opportunity to risk going into some venture on your own and fail, because you have a safety net. Furthermore, your affluent family can and probably will make a difference in your business. I’m reminded of a piece of news a while back where a couple of rich kids were bragging they made their company successful “from scratch” but upon further inspection into it was revealed their customers were rich friends of their parents.
Tautology.
> The more addictive facebook, tiktok and twitter are, the bigger the premium is of being part of the right group
There is no causal link here.
It's been important to be at the right place (group) at the right time always.
Social media being more or less addictive or existing at all changes this banality not.
Were you trying to say that maybe all that destruction in the pursuit of insatiable greed could be 'good' somehow? Like Zorg's little speech [0] about the benefits of destruction (the broken window fallacy)?
Having a leg up due to coming from a well-off background invalidates nothing. These top entrepreneurs and politicians typically grew up upper-middle class or as members of the minor rich; they rise to positions of prominence from there.
That’s fundamentally different from inheriting power even if you’re a dunce as kings once did.
You said they are dodging 'genuine understanding'.
I am saying you aren't the final word on what 'genuine understanding of everything most important' is.
In other words - you are using lots of words to say 'I want others to do more of the stuff I want them to do and less of the stuff they are doing because the stuff I want them to do is obviously good and the stuff they are doing is obviously less good'.
Thing is, almost everyone thinks this. Given that almost everyone already thinks this way and the world isn't what you want it to be, maybe something about such a worldview is off. Or maybe we just need more of people like you in positions of power and you'll fix it :) Where have I heard that one before?
And anyone who calls out vapid conspicuous consumption, or the greedy exploitation of the planet for personal gain, that's not obviously perverse to you; it's just one person's opinion and easily disregarded - because they're not the final word on genuine understanding?
Well, pick your prophet; pick your genius; they all say the same thing:
"It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God."
- Jesus.
"By his craving for riches the foolish man slays himself, as if he were slaying others."
- Buddha
"The mutual rivalry for piling up of worldly things diverts you, until you visit the graves."
- The Qur'an
"He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have."
- Socrates
"It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor."
- Seneca
"The more you have, the more you want. The more you have, the less you are."
- Tolstoy
"A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness."
- Einstein
"Wealth is like seawater: the more you drink, the thirstier you become."
- Schopenhauer
"A small terrace by the mountain stream, living at ease, free from the burdens of the world — this is better than the glory of an emperor."
- Zhuangzi
Etc, etc, etc.
Some people, really, truly, have a genuine understanding of this concept. And many, probably most incredibly wealthy people, with every possible opportunity, can't grasp it for the life of them. That's not really "my opinion"; it's the opinion of anyone worth listening to.
r/leopardsatemyface sums it up though (although I don't blindly agree with all that is posted there)
That the worlds premier capitalist publication publishes facts capitalists find useful?
Yes.
Also bears shit in the woods.
Pretty much, yes.
Yesterdays vapid conspicuous consumption is tomorrows minimum living standard.
Three meals a day every day forever?
Even medieval kings had to go on a diet when famine struck.
Today he's also a fascist grifter who's entered into politics. For some reason usians don't revolt when their political system elects rapists, genocidaires and people on the far right, so I'm hoping it'll turn into something like a kingdom that they find it in themselves to overturn.
No accounting for taste
> born into ... wealth
It's a very minor thing in the big picture to be born into a 3rd world country like South Africa's top 1%.
> criminal wealth
His dad likely had some dodgy dealings, but there's every indication that he made the bulk of his money legally. Anyway, how does that reflect on Musk? Did we go back to "sins of the fathers"?
> organisations he ends up in needs to protect themselves from.
Ah yes, it's pure coincidence that so many of these organizations go on to absolutely kick ass. Let's check in on the EV situation at, say, GM or BMW in an alternate universe without Tesla. Or on the progress at ULA or Blue Origin.
> fascist
I don't think you understand what that word means. A key part of fascism is unlimited government control - the exact opposite of what he wants.
> grifter
He sells stuff? I guess that's bad in your eyes?
> who's entered into politics
How very dare he!?
> rapists, genocidaires and people on the far right,
Nice linking those three things together.
Today?
He incessantly spews anti-inspirational anti-rational anti-social and anti-business diarrhea to an alarming and epic degree. He drives Twitter/X’s business logic like a drunk going the wrong way on a highway, seemingly intent on hitting every guardrail he can find.
So far SpaceX and perhaps to a lesser degree Tesla are getting by on the deep talent he gathered in better times.
He is an unusual person.
Both Tesla and SpaceX are military labs behind plausible deniability, dual-use aprons. Hence they're run to a larger extent by people who aren't him and he works like a neat distraction for outsiders.
Much like Thiel he doesn't show any "deep talent". That's something other people are bringing to the organisations they're part of.
Mistaking first-mover advantage and access to extreme amounts of funding for "kick ass" is quite weird.
No, that's not a characteristic of fascism. He's impressed by and promotes nazis, maintains his wealth through corporativism, and so on.
No, it's that he makes wild promises, takes money and then don't deliver on them that makes him a grifter.
That the word reliable was being used to describe the FT.
'Reliable' within a certain narrow context for the people trashing our potential (ie, the capital class)? Yes.
'Reliable' within a broader context, where we get to the root causes of our catastrophic inequality, our over extraction of resources, our environmental destruction, our war mongering leaders, etc? Also yes; but in precisely the wrong way. They can be relied on to support whatever makes the yacht class more money in the next few quarters.
This matters because corporate media has been truly complicit in much of our impending doom/s; the FT being far from an exception.
Handy tip: If someone's point seems very obvious, like where bears shit, it's usually worth reading the comment again to see if you've missed something. Ie in this case, the entire second half of my comment.
The way of life of our billionaires is threatening all life on the planet, particularly the poorest [0]. There might not be a living standard if we don't fix this issue.
0 - https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaires-emit-mo...
Dramatic exits after successful acquisitions are common. You have to earn “failures” like that.
That created SpaceX’s seed capital.
(You can’t have it both ways. If he had convinced the US to bankroll him, that would have been serious business acumen.)
Minor success on hard problems, with a shoe string budget, and an attractive business plan (vertical integration, fast-failure iteration, reusability) got investment capital flowing.
More successes, more capital.
Result: They changed the economics of space launches & save money for all their customers, including NASA & the military.
No resemblance to nepo operations or results. See Boeing, Lockheed, etc.
$ billions of dollars burn with each SLS launch. Massive delays & cost plus overruns. For now.
They are financial news, if you want to read news or opinion articles about other topics go read something else. Something being important doesn't mean it should be written about everywhere.
Billionaires emit a bit more, but not that much more.
Note the very disingeneous comment here:
> tracks the emissions from private jets, yachts and polluting investments
"Private jets" and "polluting investments" were in the same sentence as if they were in the same ballpark, but its the investments that count for almost everything and they would be polluting regardless if the billionaires owned them or not.
There's been a lot of reporting about how SpaceX is keeping Musk's influence at a minimum. If you go looking you'll also find video from interviews with Musk in that role where he isn't talking from a script and comes across as a clueless high schooler.
Why are you taking hits for him? Does he somehow pay your bills?
First, fascism is a totalitarian ideology. You could have googled it yourself instead of parroting what The View tells you. It demands 100% subordination of individual interests in service of the state. Here's a quote from Mussolini: "The Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist" [0] From his support of Trump and DOGE, we can conclude that he's the opposite of a fascist and wants to reduce the state. He's much more Millei than Mussolini. This is so elementary I'm a little confused as to why I have to spell it out.
Here's some more homework for you: [1]. Words like Nazi and Fascist and Communist have meanings. If we want to have a civilized society, we must first respect the meanings of words so that we can have a conversation.
Second: name a Nazi that Musk likes. Before you say Trump, here's Trump's Fine People speech. Watch the whole thing, then tell me he's a Nazi. Then also keep in mind the massive "Trump calls Nazis Fine People" hoax the media has been banging on about ever since: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGKbFA7HW-U
Here's one of him disavowing the KKK many times over a long period: https://x.com/TimRunsHisMouth/status/897112536574828544
Third, Musk is known for making wild promises, many of which are as yet undone. Nobody would care who he is if that was all there is to him. But some of his wild promises are real and part of everyday life.
Fourth, if you think he wins due to extreme funding, go read the stories of Zip2, Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX. All of the above teetered on the brink of nonexistence due to being bootstrapped by Musk who was then strapped for cash.
Financial news from a specific and narrow viewpoint. There are others.
This is the third time I've said it now. It would be nice to know where the confusion is coming from. Is it simply that many people can't imagine any alternate view of finance news, other than that sold by FT?
I don’t like one-sided trolls who are insecure that some other people are exceptional?
Is that really the kind of conversation we want to have?
—
More productively:
I don’t have an axe to grind either way, other than giving credit where it is due, and vice versa.
My original comment reflected both.
He has done some truly incredible work. He earned his success.
Lately, he is a mess with completely different priorities.
I imagine many employees in all his companies are happier when he is not around these days. And would be happy if he stopped posting opinions, given the downstream impact to their brands.
What if, back in the slavery days, a newspaper reported solely from the perspective of slaveholders, never slaves. They only printed 'facts' - how much a slave could be expected to depreciate by age, which regions produced the hardest working slaves, etc.
Would this be a 'reliable' paper? Would it just be 'financial news'? Would it simply be a 'premier capitalist publication publishing facts capitalists find useful'? Well, yes, in a way.
And that's exactly what financial newspapers back then did. They traded in dry, money making facts - in support of a deeply exploitative and unsustainable system. Always from one particular perspective - the slaveholder's; that of the ownership class.
'Reliable' isn't a word I would have chosen to describe them.
In more modern times, FT takes huge ad money from fossil fuel companies, cheer-leads the likes of Thatcher and Reagan, has never met a neoliberal/neocon since that they didn't love; and takes the view of the 0.1% 99.9% of the time. Almost completely heedless of the permanent damage that is being done to all life on Earth as a result, except as a side note in an article about how apocalypse might affect your portfolio.
Will any of this sink in? Can you change your mind, or at least the subject? Let's see.
What "success"? The stuff that other people have made happen that he takes credit for?
The state is much, much more "all-embracing" today than what Mussolini could ever have imagined, and has been for a long time, decades.
Musk wants a more total influence on the world, he doesn't want anyone to be able to say something negative about him, for example. He wants to eradicate large swathes of people, explicitly by making it impossible to talk about them and in practice it will likely boil down to the destruction of their bodies once that fails.
You're obviously sympathetic to this neo-fascist movement. Let's hope you'll manage to leave, because by now it looks like the resistance to it has to get violent.
I responded to your pointless, inaccurate and rude conjecture with an equally pointless, rude, and what I assumed was an equally inaccurate conjecture to suggest that perhaps we keep our conversation substantive.
If the sense in that still isn’t clear, you might check out the guidelines on this site for keeping discussion constructive.
> What "success"? The stuff that other people have made happen that he takes credit for?
I don’t know how “success” could be any more evident.
But if you believe you see shortcuts that were taken, then perhaps take your insight and do something comparable? Good luck!
That's not "a bit more". That's insane.
And there's absolutely nothing disingenuous about it, because the article clearly states:
> the average investment emissions of 50 of the world’s richest billionaires are around 340 times their emissions from private jets and superyachts combined.
> Through these investments, billionaires have huge influence over some of the world’s biggest corporations and are driving us over the edge of climate disaster.
... I don't know why this isn't convincing to you, but it's not Oxfam's fault.
I think some people responded to the deluge of slop by clutching out their connection to reality and relying solely on a couple of third parties for their worldview.
There's no point in arguing with someone who looks at Elon Musk and cannot see success because they can only look at him through a thick lens of ideology and tribalism. Five, ten years ago, some these same people probably thought he was in their tribe and idolized him then. Ten years ago, they probably liked Trump and his shows too.
This is why they're being very unspecific and arguing like a child from a position of conviction, "this is the most evident thing there ever was".
I've never had a keen eye to people that ride on the labour of other people and take credit for their work. Gossip magazines just don't work on me, and I don't trust the rich when they say they're "progressive" or whatever, like Musk did before. If they meant what they say, they'd get rid of their riches and return to society.
There you go again, making up my back story despite having no idea who I am.
It is rude, but worse than that, a waste of words.
I would insert another whimsical parody, referring back to you, but that somehow threw you last time.
So I will just repeat:
> Is that really the kind of conversation we want to have?
> you might check out the guidelines on this site for keeping discussion constructive.
--
It isn't controversial, nor should it require a complex justification to say with some confidence, that the richest person on the planet has been "successful". Widely documented synonym: "prosperous", i.e. achieving great wealth.
>> "this is the most evident thing there ever was".
I will be more precise and less rhetorical: based on the meanings of the words "successful", "prosperous" and "richest person on the planet" it is as close to a tautology as informal human language allows.
--
> I don't trust the rich when they say they're "progressive" or whatever, like Musk did before. If they meant what they say, they'd get rid of their riches and return to society.
"Progressive" doesn't mean charitable.
As has been pointed out to you already, reading and using words consistent with their widely documented meanings will help you communicate better, and communicate something coherent, beyond simply projecting strong dislike and distrust of Musk.
But, I am sympathetic to that viewpoint as was evident from my first comment.
Musk has not lived up to values he previously espoused. And he routinely demonstrates deep hypocrisy relative to principles he claims to value today.