#oligarchs

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/24/robo-lickspittle/#just-not-evenly-distributed

Billionaires don't think we're real. How could they? How could you inflict the kind of vast misery that generates billions of dollars while still feeling even a twinge of empathy for the sufferer in your extractive enterprise. No wonder Elon Musk calls us "NPCs":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/seeing-like-a-billionaire/#npcs

Ever notice how people get palpably stupider as they gain riches and power? Musk went from a cringe doofus to a world-class credulous dolt, and it seems like he loses five IQ points for every $10b that's added to his net worth. Sergey Brin used to be the kind of guy who'd pull his whole company of out China overnight after a state hack-attack on dissidents triggered his own traumatic memories of his Soviet childhood:

https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/brin-drove-google-to-pull-back-in-china/

He retired, got a hell of a lot richer through passive gains to his investment portfolio, then came back to run Google, presiding over the precipitous decline of search quality, which he responded to by telling his workers that he expected them to put in 60 hours/week:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/seeing-like-a-billionaire/#npcs

One of the strangely satisfying aspects of the Trump presidency is that every now and then, he'll pick a random billionaire (say, the CEO of Intel) and publicly call him an asshole for a couple of days, generally to prompt that particular billionaire to bend the knee to him:

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/11/intel-ceo-trump-lip-bu-tan.html

Sometimes, he'll force these billionaires to publicly humiliate themselves for him – like when he made Tim Apple hand-build a little gold participation trophy for dictators on camera and then present it to him, groveling all the while:

https://www.anildash.com/2025/09/09/how-tim-cook-sold-out-steve-jobs/

The reason this makes such great TV is that we all know that normally, these guys never have to tolerate any criticism. They live in hermetically sealed bubble of sycophancy. This is what makes them so, so stupid (it's also why Trump so so unbelievably fucking stupid). Look, I come up with stupid ideas all the time, but I've learned the hard way that if I open my teeth and let these mental farts escape from my face, the people around me will tell me that I'm an asshole and make me feel bad. Trump, on the other hand, can tell us to all inject bleach and claim that solar panels are killing bunny rabbits and everyone around him tells him he's a genius:

https://www.eenews.net/articles/fact-checking-trumps-claims-about-rabbits-caught-in-solar-projects/

He's got a button on his desk that summons Diet Cokes. This is a guy who brazenly cheats at *golf*, *on camera*, without any pushback. This is a recipe for crawling up your own asshole and dying: https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-golf-cheating-viral-video-2104940