The fact that outright billionaires are choosing to spend their time being irate online commentators and podcast hosts rather than, like, literally anything else productive, seems like a sign of one of the most important and unspoken sociological facts about modern America.
Billionaires are poor.
Having more money doesn't make you wealthier or more powerful.
Apparently in America the purpose of having billions of dollars is to have job security for being a full-time podcaster or online commentator about the woke left, which, it turns out, has gone bananas.
Billions of dollars to pursue my lifelong dream of being an inflooencer.
My advice to billionaires:
Use your money to generously and widely fund crazy people with unconventional ideas. Not just their startup ideas to get A RETURN. Fund them without strings attached. Write a serious book.
Do not start a podcast. Do not tweet. Do not smile in photos.
If you only fund business ideas, you are only ever going to get more useless money. This is a terminal dead end.
If you want to change the world, you have to be willing to lose money. The more you lose, the better.
The modern billionaire will inevitably be expropriated by his hated enemies and lawyers. It doesn't take a genius of political economy to see this coming.
The only solution is to pre-emptively self-expropriate by giving away your money to people you actually like and support.
More tens of billions of dollars expropriated just through *marriage or divorce* have been used to fund intellectual and cultural movement than perhaps all of the intentional funding of all other tech billionaires combined in history.
MacKenzie Bezos and Laurene Powell-Jobs.
The reason civilization is declining and we aren't getting Martian Technocracy is that you won't pay for your preferred ideological vision of the future, but environmentalist degrowth billionaires etc. *will* pay for theirs.
It would cost no more than a few billion dollars at the absolute max, from start to finish, to reform modern society into an expanding spacefaring civilization. Cheap!
The West has two kinds of elites. Those who earn their money from suspiciously skyrocketing asset prices. And those who earn it from fraudulent nonprofits with government contracts. The former wants to audit the government. The latter wants a tax on unrealized capital gains.
As a Western elite, these are basically your two options to actually cash in on your hard-earned status. In practice you either end up owning enough infinitely-growing tech stocks to never have to work again, or you end up with a suspiciously highly-salaried fake nonprofit job.
In some other time and place, our elites could cash in on their status with grants of landholdings, appropriately labeled government sinecures, or active ownership of a productive factory.
The purpose of dysfunctional migrants in every country is to create problems that justify bureaucratic budgets for upper-class college-educated white people to give themselves no-show e-mail jobs safe from market forces. Also those migrants vote for continuing the system.
The way to solve this problem would be to give upper-class college-educated white people no-show e-mail jobs safe from market forces by fiat. But there are too many people who want such jobs now. So the actual solution is to aggressively remove the status of no-show e-mail jobs.
The only conceivable way to aggressively remove the status of no-show e-mail jobs is to inspire our elites to want to expand across space and time rather than die comfortably alone after a lifetime of petty status games.
It seems like this is the actual plan of all governments in the developed world. No need to ask hard questions or commit to major reforms when you can just spam Indians until GDP is up 500% just from population growth and establishment parties get 99% of the vote.
There really seems to be no solving this without completely breaking out of the modern social-democratic post-industrial paradigm of governance. The fundamental driver of mass immigration is the same as that of money-printing and deindustrialization... civilizational laziness.
The reason nobody turns off the mass immigration is the same reason nobody stops printing money or selling off industry to China. Because everybody just wants to be a lazy retired Boomer going on cruises while somebody else does the hard work. Or a lazy Millennial on DoorDash.
The bear case for AI is that bringing 10x or 100x or 1000x more intelligence to America will not change anything because U.S. institutions are already designed to ignore or waste intelligence and have no idea what to do with any more of it. Unemployed AIs making video essays.
AI is not going to bring us post-scarcity, because we have had post-scarcity for a century. A world where nobody has to work is going to be a world where everyone can and will devote 100% of their time and energy to politics. It won't be peaceful.
There is no level of AI advancement that will make it possible for hard-working AIs to build more housing in California, until we are talking AIs smart enough to conquer and rule California, which is explicitly the thing every AI lab wants to prevent.
Europe is great because you can never find clear information about laws because we peasants are not intended to know them, and even if you do they are written in unclear, useless legalese, because the real law is just "whatever we don't like is illegal," which is "everything."
U.S. laws and regulations at least attempt to set clear, simple, and fair guidelines and punishments, but European laws are all deliberately written to be like "the fine can be between zero to one trillion euros" and "breathing in an unsanctioned manner can be an infraction."
I don't think the U.S. comes anywhere close to being as clear, simple, and fair as Americans would like, and that's not a minor problem to forgive, but it's edifying to see how Europeans just dispense with the illusion entirely and write themselves total discretion into the law.
Acquiring wealth may seem like a rational pursuit in the face of a system apparently too hopelessly broken to fix. But this is a catastrophic error because even if wealth is not confiscated or devalued, the things it could buy now or before will just disappear, at any price.
Eventually even the richest man in South Africa or Brazil or whichever parallel you may use will want nothing but for his grandchildren to be able to get a job designing space rockets, and this will be impossible, because there will be no space program and no money to build it.
The idea we can "out-grow" dysfunction like Elon Musk or other pro-AI people think is flat-out backwards, unless you think the AI will obsolete humanity in totality. The dysfunction literally lives off of growth! Growing the economy subsidizes it more and allows new injustices!