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!
Europeans know they are being scammed by high taxes and overregulation.
Americans however convince themselves that healthcare is for losers, that driving two hours to work every day is what real men do, and that psychotically violent crime is just part and parcel of city life.
Money, wealth, and value are all three completely different things.
Money is what you use to exchange wealth (actual goods, intangible and tangible) in order to derive value (some personal satisfaction or joy).
Confusing the three is either cope or a deliberate scam.
Europeans aren't poor. They are illiquid. Much of Europe's wealth is stored in safe streets, nice parks, public transit, "free" healthcare, etc. which, it turns out, are too socially expensive for Americans to maintain. Americans take the money instead. The rest is only natural.
The EU has triple the population density of the United States and doesn't believe in "suburbs," just "cities." Given how much more space there is in America, it's surprising that the numbers are so close, if anything.
Americans would kill each other to live in Manhattan, which they treat like a utopia and pay exorbitant prices to live in because it has corner stores and you don't need to drive a car.
But that Manhattan-tier density is common for even small and unremarkable European cities.
Daily reminder to teach your kids that they can easily find the e-mails and phone numbers of domain experts in any field online (e.g. a medical professor or a niche historian) and literally just politely ask them some questions, gaining priceless expert opinion for free.
Daily reminder to teach your kids that, if they are smart enough and willing to put in the time, they can most likely learn everything the accountant or lawyer knows online, or from a book, and fill out the scary government forms themselves, thus saving thousands of dollars.
Daily reminder to teach your kids that, if an organized group to do something basic doesn't exist, or does exist but is failing to coordinate (e.g. a homeowners' association) they can literally just start the group themselves or tell everyone else what to do and why.
This week, a single pioneering donor gave gifts worth $640 million to hundreds of advocates of equity, environmentalism, public health, and gender justice.
Does anyone know how much advocates of space exploration, nuclear power, or good city governance received this week?
When the directions of intellectual, ideological, artistic, and cultural philanthropy are lopsided by five orders of magnitude or so in one direction rather than another, it's hardly surprising that society follows in that direction.
A tremendous number of people seem to think that investing in businesses or working on technology balances out this kind of philanthropy somehow.
But better businesses and technology don't make a society's need for intellectuals, culture, art, or ideology go away.
Some academics got mad at my bespoke categorization of Africa's geo-economic regions, but it perfectly explains why colonial borders were drawn up so randomly.
They intentionally fragmented every natural economic region btw. multiple empires to maintain the balance of power! 🧵
French Africa wasn't some rational unified whole, it was most of the Maghreb and half of "The Gulf" divided by the Sahara.
They gave France and Italy bits of the Red Sea so that Britain couldn't just dominate it outright.
Germany got a random slice of every region, just cuz.
If you wanted maximum economic growth and development, you'd have turned entire geo-economic regions into vast unified states or spheres that could transcend ethnic conflict and benefit from economies of scale.
Like a Super-Nigeria across all West Africa. A Nile Confederation.
"The elite" is not shadowy or mysterious. America is ruled by technocratic lanky GenX Ivy League white guys who fly under the radar because they are powerful.
For example, pictured below are the American foreign minister, information minister, and AI minister.
While flaccid debates about Ukraine, wokeness, or AI safety or whatever soak up attention on here, the American foreign minister is fighting a global proxy war with Russia/China, and the American information minister is scientifically determining the correct level of wokeness.
The AI minister has not been formally sworn in yet but to be fair he would be the inaugural officeholder.