Beware, a group of capricious oligarchs has taken over our world

A few years ago, I think it was 2015, I got a quick lesson in how easy it is to become a horrible person.

I was invited as a speaker at an event in São Paulo, Brazil, and my flight had been considerably delayed.

The organizers, fearful that the city's notorious traffic jams would prevent me from arriving at the time allotted for my speech, sent a person to pick me up at the airport and take me by helicopter to the hotel's rooftop.

Later, when the conference ended, there was a car waiting to take me back to the airport.

And for a moment, I wondered, “But what is this?

What do I have to go back by car?

By the way, on a daily basis I move mainly by subway.

In any case, the lesson I learned from my moment of pettiness is that privilege corrupts, that it's all too easy to be led to believe that you have certain rights.

And certainly, to paraphrase

Acton, great privileges are very corrupting, partly because those who enjoy them are often surrounded by people who would never dare tell them they are misbehaving.

Which is why I am not at all surprised by the self-immolation spectacle of Elon Musk's reputation.

Of course it fascinates me, who doesn't?

But when a filthy wealthy man, who is not only used to getting whatever he wants, but is also a much-admired icon, finds that he has not only lost his aura, but is also widely laughed at, for Of course he's going to attack without rhyme or reason, making his problems worse by doing so.

The more interesting question is why we are now ruled by this class of people.

Clearly, we are living in the era of the fussy oligarch.

recently pointed out

, Musk continues to have many admirers in the tech world.

They don't see him as a whiny brat, but as someone who understands how to run the world, an ideology writer John Ganz calls

, the belief that the big don't have to be accountable to the little, let alone confront the little. to your criticisms.

And it's clear that those who embrace this ideology have a lot of power, even if that power still doesn't go as far as keeping guys like Musk safe from public booing.

But how is this possible?

The truth is that it is not surprising that technological progress and the increase in gross domestic product have not created an equitable and happy society.

As far back as I can remember, pessimistic visions of the future have always been a staple of both serious analysis and popular culture.

But social critics like John Kenneth Galbraith, like speculative writers like William Gibson, generally envisioned corporatist dystopias that suppressed individuality, not societies dominated by thin-skinned egotistical plutocrats who flaunt their insecurities in the public square.

So what has happened?

Part of the answer, no doubt, lies in the scale of concentration of wealth at the top.

Even before the Twitter fiasco, many were comparing Elon Musk to Howard Hughes in his waning years.

But Hughes's net worth, even measured in today's dollars, was tiny compared to Musk's, even after the recent plunge in Tesla shares.

More generally, the best available estimates suggest that the share of total wealth held by the top 0.00001% today is almost ten times greater than it was four decades ago.

And with the immense wealth of the modern super-elite comes a great deal of power, including the power to behave like children.

Beyond this, many of the mega-rich, who as a class used to be quite low-key, have now become celebrities.

The archetype of the innovator who gets rich while changing the world is not of today;

it goes back at least to Thomas Edison.

But the huge fortunes in the information technology industry have turned this story into a full-blown cult, and everywhere you look you see people aspiring to be or look like the next Steve Jobs.

Indeed, the cult of the entrepreneurial genius has played a key role in the rolling debacle of cryptocurrency.

FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried was not selling a real product and, as far as is known, neither are its former competitors who have not yet gone bankrupt.

After all this time, no one has found meaningful real-world uses for cryptocurrencies outside of money laundering.

What Bankman-Fried was selling was an image, that of a wild-haired, scruffy-looking visionary who captures the future in a way ordinary people can't see.

Musk doesn't quite fall into the same category.

His companies produce cars that really drive the roads and rockets that really fly.

But the sales, and especially the market value of his companies, undoubtedly depend, at least in part, on the strength of his personal brand, and he seems incapable of not shredding it further with each passing day.

In the end, Musk and Bankman-Fried may end up providing a public service, tarnishing the legend of the entrepreneurial genius who has done a lot of wrong.

For now, though, Musk's bragging rights on Twitter are degrading what had become a useful resource, a place some of us went to for information from people who actually knew what they were talking about.

And it seems increasingly unlikely that this story will have a happy ending.

Oh, and if I get kicked out of Twitter for this column, or if the platform ends up being abused to its death, you can follow some of what I think, along with what a growing number of Twitter refugees are thinking, on Mastodon.

Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize Winner in Economics.

© The New York Times, 2022. Translation of News Clips

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