And what can one do after he’s been on top of the world? It’s a precarious, unstable mental place. There’s a disorienting emptiness mixed with residual dynamism that’s built up from the years of hustle and combat and that now lacks an outlet and direction. There is a creeping dread borne out of unexpected idleness. The restless mind longs for action, like a street fighter, flexing muscles and crackling knuckles, looking to beat up the next villain. But there’s no villain to beat up this time. You are alone with your thoughts and with nothing to do. The problem is unidentifiable. There’s no solution. This is a state that can create monstrosities.
Limits of Infinite Freedom
Musk, Bezos, Zuck, Andreessen, Altman––these men have a degree of freedom that is limited only in a sense that they can’t commit murder in broad daylight. None of their other ambitions, assisted and facilitated by lawyers, powerful connections, friendly lawmakers, favorable legislation, and weak or non-existent law enforcement, meet resistance or accountability. What could and does prevent them from fully realizing their grand schemes into reality and from experiencing absolute freedom, are obstacles of amorphous and capricious nature that are difficult to single out and attack: irrational human behavior, fickle customer loyalties, collective skepticism of or disenchantment with the products that they’re selling, public mockery of their ideas and egos, elections that don’t go their way, etc. These phenomena can’t be harnessed and corralled by a corporate decree or by an army of lawyers or by money thrown at it. To have almost no institutional or legal restraints coming up to this point, and then to suddenly face these volatile, unpredictable masses who deny them their due respect, who refuse to acknowledge their unrivalled acumen, and who question the usefulness of their inventions, makes them feel confused, frustrated, and unfree.
What can’t Musk do at this point? He has more money than God. He has our attention. He can have as much sex as he wants, he can buy a US president, he can go into space. He has Putin on speed dial. He can get access to your personal data. He can get away with naming his kids Techno Mechanicus and X AE A-12. But he’s still unhappy. He’s still striving. He still feels like a victim.
Musk is famously sensitive to being stifled. Paranoidally, he sees an insidious censure coming at him from all sides. His algorithms on X are set so that his own tweets reach the most audience. Well, he gets our attention, but then what does he do with it? All these elaborate tweaks in the algorithm, all the billions spent, all these free speech proclamations––all of this, so that he can peddle conspiracy theories and tell 420/69 jokes. Why would a billionaire many times over, owning a bunch of other, more serious companies, would spend most of his waking hours on this platform, getting into juvenile name-calling, spats with libs, and retweeting Catturd? Is it not enough for him to lord over us? Does he also want us to think he’s witty, cool, and funny? Does he also want to be loved?
Love then, whether public or private, is the elusive final frontier of a centi-billionaire. Like Trump, Musk is not entirely unloved. Both are leaders of cults with millions of followers, and yet they’re dissatisfied. They’re loved, yes, but by the wrong people. Somewhere deep in their hearts they both know that the people who worship them have been suckered into it. They don’t want the love of dimwits and morons––of the marks. They want to be loved by the smart and serious set, by the kind that could be invited to a black-tie event without risk of embarrassment, by the NYT opinion page, by the Nobel Peace Prize committee, by the European leaders, by bond traders––people and entities who are not swayed by the silly theatrics, who are immune to bluster. But Wall Street, once a lonely pocket of tepid support among the smart set, is second-guessing them now. The inability to control this slice of important reality, while dominating everything else, can derail Musk and Trump into feeling helpless. And it is this helplessness that brings about feeling of unfreedom, of unjust restraint. And when they feel unfree they seek an exit, any exit by any means.
The Road to Batshit
I think, in a way it was quite inevitable that Musk would venture out, like Trump, into the public sphere. There were no questions left in the business world and the world of engineering about Musk’s abilities. There, he was God-like. So it was a natural next move for him to step outside the familiar zone of tech entrepreneurship and try his hand at public works.
Musk and Trump want to make policy. But they’re both constitutionally (as in temperamentally) incapable of being bogged down in policy details. It’s like that time, during Trump’s first term, when he thought that he could write a new ‘bigger and better’ healthcare bill to replace Obamacare in two weeks. One look at a Cybertruck, and you know how it was designed: Musk drew it on a paper napkin, handed it to his engineer, and told him “make it look like this.” The engineer didn’t dare to ask further questions. Their policy is a feeling, a shapeless, broad-strokes sketching, a ten-thousand foot view. A size of the government must be cut. How? They’re not going to go into minutia. “Boom-boom-boom-bing”––that’s how.
So it was also inevitable that Musk would soon get bored with it. Entering public service exposed him to having to deal with those very amorphous forces that frustrated him in his business life, but now more prevalent and more entrenched, and lacking due deference. He was accustomed to rule by decree, to cutting costs and personnel without any remorse, but here, in the public sector, the riffraff, the immanent, cretinous masses, the unproductive, the retarded, have the nerve to talk back, demanding to know how they will benefit from his grand vision. They want to know how cutting Medicaid will help improve their health and other such silly things. And Musk can’t just tell the ingrates to take a hike, because the whole purpose of a billionaire entering public spotlight is, supposedly, to show the rubes how great he is.
He is mocked, unloved, and prevented from showing us what a great guy he is. What good are billions if you have no control over these things? What a guy to do?
by Katya Grishakova, The Center Holds | Read more:
Image: uncredited via
[ed. See also: For the Men Who Have Everything (Political Currents).]
"They are running out of goals. Musk longs for Mars because the Earth can’t satisfy him any longer. Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg try on new outrageous personas because they can’t feel comfortable in the skin they always knew. Sam Altman speaks of OpenAI like it can guarantee eternal life for all who might sign up for a ChatGPT subscription. All of these men enjoy an unfathomable amount of freedom. Absent murdering a few bystanders in the middle of Fifth Avenue, they really can do whatever it is they want. The old emperors and feudal lords were accountable, in some form, to the polity, and even they were constrained by technology and geography. These oligarchs are nation-states unto themselves. Legal and institutional restraints mean little to them.
Yet they ache. None of them, publicly, appear especially content, and some like Musk are in constant online combat with their critics. Musk bought off an American president and it wasn’t enough; Bezos is trying now. What they can’t seem to accrue—not Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Altman, Peter Thiel, or Mark Andreessen—is broad popularity and respect. (...)
The tech oligarchs understand this well enough. As insulated as they are, they are uneasy because they have to keep straining for attention and approval. If they, outwardly, shun the left-leaning, college-educated cognoscenti, they’d still, like Donald Trump, prefer some kind of affirmation. Much of Trump’s career can be understood through the lens of a Queens boy trying to get Manhattan to take him seriously. Most troubling for the oligarchs is that it’s not just the Times editorial board turning from them—it might be Wall Street, too. The bond traders are second-guessing them. Trump found his “liberation day” tariffs were not, in fact, going to liberate the world. They were going, instead, to crash the economy until Trump beat a hasty retreat. The tariffs are one kind of failure; the various business pivots of the tech elite are another. AI, in the end, might be too big to fail, treated by the federal government like the development of nuclear weapons. But there is no real business model otherwise: AI costs many billions of dollars and there’s no way to recoup on these losses unless ChatGPT or Claude subscriptions start costing individuals thousands of dollars per month. If Amazon, in the early years, lost money, it always had a road to profitability that seems indefinitely foreclosed to AI. One can detect a subtle angst: AI must happen because Silicon Valley is otherwise out of ideas. There are few great leaps forward left. AI cannot stack up to the invention of the internet or the personal computer, or even the introduction of the iPhone. Zuckerberg is chasing AI too, now that the Metaverse is emptied out. All the billions in the world can’t buy a new idea. Nor, after a while, validation. Musk’s retreat from the White House is proof enough of that. Tesla is losing to Chinese electric vehicles and will probably keep losing. Mars, meanwhile, remains uninhabitable, and always will be. The space-age billionaires cannot even match the achievements of the federal government in the analog age: fifty-six years ago, we put men on the moon, and neither Musk nor Bezos appear especially capable of replicating that feat. Instead, Bezos shoots his fiancé and a few fading celebrities into the lower reaches of outer space and begs for accolades. All anyone will remember of that voyage is the round of mockery aimed at Katy Perry, who wishes, more than almost anyone on Earth, it was still the year 2010 and not 2025. The “girl boss” and “lean in” era is as dead as techno-optimism. The Facebook whistleblower’s book is outselling Sheryl Sandberg these days, and will be for a while longer."
"They are running out of goals. Musk longs for Mars because the Earth can’t satisfy him any longer. Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg try on new outrageous personas because they can’t feel comfortable in the skin they always knew. Sam Altman speaks of OpenAI like it can guarantee eternal life for all who might sign up for a ChatGPT subscription. All of these men enjoy an unfathomable amount of freedom. Absent murdering a few bystanders in the middle of Fifth Avenue, they really can do whatever it is they want. The old emperors and feudal lords were accountable, in some form, to the polity, and even they were constrained by technology and geography. These oligarchs are nation-states unto themselves. Legal and institutional restraints mean little to them.
Yet they ache. None of them, publicly, appear especially content, and some like Musk are in constant online combat with their critics. Musk bought off an American president and it wasn’t enough; Bezos is trying now. What they can’t seem to accrue—not Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Altman, Peter Thiel, or Mark Andreessen—is broad popularity and respect. (...)
The tech oligarchs understand this well enough. As insulated as they are, they are uneasy because they have to keep straining for attention and approval. If they, outwardly, shun the left-leaning, college-educated cognoscenti, they’d still, like Donald Trump, prefer some kind of affirmation. Much of Trump’s career can be understood through the lens of a Queens boy trying to get Manhattan to take him seriously. Most troubling for the oligarchs is that it’s not just the Times editorial board turning from them—it might be Wall Street, too. The bond traders are second-guessing them. Trump found his “liberation day” tariffs were not, in fact, going to liberate the world. They were going, instead, to crash the economy until Trump beat a hasty retreat. The tariffs are one kind of failure; the various business pivots of the tech elite are another. AI, in the end, might be too big to fail, treated by the federal government like the development of nuclear weapons. But there is no real business model otherwise: AI costs many billions of dollars and there’s no way to recoup on these losses unless ChatGPT or Claude subscriptions start costing individuals thousands of dollars per month. If Amazon, in the early years, lost money, it always had a road to profitability that seems indefinitely foreclosed to AI. One can detect a subtle angst: AI must happen because Silicon Valley is otherwise out of ideas. There are few great leaps forward left. AI cannot stack up to the invention of the internet or the personal computer, or even the introduction of the iPhone. Zuckerberg is chasing AI too, now that the Metaverse is emptied out. All the billions in the world can’t buy a new idea. Nor, after a while, validation. Musk’s retreat from the White House is proof enough of that. Tesla is losing to Chinese electric vehicles and will probably keep losing. Mars, meanwhile, remains uninhabitable, and always will be. The space-age billionaires cannot even match the achievements of the federal government in the analog age: fifty-six years ago, we put men on the moon, and neither Musk nor Bezos appear especially capable of replicating that feat. Instead, Bezos shoots his fiancé and a few fading celebrities into the lower reaches of outer space and begs for accolades. All anyone will remember of that voyage is the round of mockery aimed at Katy Perry, who wishes, more than almost anyone on Earth, it was still the year 2010 and not 2025. The “girl boss” and “lean in” era is as dead as techno-optimism. The Facebook whistleblower’s book is outselling Sheryl Sandberg these days, and will be for a while longer."
