#plutocrats

The branches of innovation at which modern-day, billionaire-positive America excels most remarkably are things like bailouts, monopolies, executive compensation, luxury-home design, and fraud. Especially fraud. From the president on down, the United States is home to the world’s greatest innovators in fraud, endlessly cranking out new models of stock-market hype, toxic securities, bogus bond ratings, and fake inventions. We develop amazing new forms of insider trading; of make-believe currencies; of junk fees and dynamic pricing. We dream up self-serving ideologies that everyone momentarily believes. Forms of populism that strengthen the ruling class—and forms of antipopulism that strengthen it even more. These things have made America a kind of Renaissance Florence of fraud, a civilization in which everyone wants to become a billionaire by way of some creative new rip-off.

Un-elected co-conspirators

You have a group of the wealthiest people on the planet saying that they want to take control of our city,” he said. “Do these handful of billionaires and tech folks own it, or do we? It’s not more complicated than that.

« Self-absorption is common these days, but Musk embodies a particular brand of narcissism found among certain kinds of techno-plutocrats who assume that their wealth is evidence of competence in almost any field. After all, if you’ve made a zillion dollars inventing an app, how hard can anything else be? And although it is a truism at this point to observe that Trump is narcissistic, one thing that binds Trump and Musk and many others is their sense that their talent and inherent greatness have been dismissed by experts. Much like ordinary citizens who have “done their own research” and yet are furious that doctors won’t listen to them, Trump and Musk seem constantly angry that their wealth and power can gain them anything except respect. »