There are two kinds of aphrodisiac. The first is power. A good example was provided by the late Henry Kissinger, who could hardly be described as toothsome yet was doted upon by a host of glamorous women.
The other powerful aphrodisiac is immense wealth. This has all kinds of effects. It makes people (even journalists who should know better) deferential, presumably because they subscribe to the delusion that if someone is rich then they must be clever. But its effects on the rich person are more profound: it cuts them off from reality. When they travel, writes Jack Self in an absorbing essay: “The car takes them to the aerodrome, where the plane takes them to another aerodrome, where a car takes them to the destination (with perhaps a helicopter inserted somewhere). Every journey is bookended by identical Mercedes Vito Tourers (gloss black, tinted windows). Every flight is within the cosy confines of a Cessna Citation (or a King Air or Embraer)… The ultra-rich never wait in line at a carousel or a customs table or a passport control. There are no accidental encounters. No unwelcome, unapproved or unsanitary humans enter their sight – no souls that could espouse a foreign view. The ultra-rich do not see anything they do not want to see.”
Mr Self estimates that there are currently 2,781 of these gilded creatures in the world. He divides them into two kinds: “self-made” and “second gen”. He seems to feel sorry for the latter. “To inherit a condition of unjustifiable wealth,” he writes, “means to never experience cause and effect. All external pressures are alleviated by capital: there are no consequences to missing a deadline, to not finishing a project, to dropping out or giving up. It is terrifically difficult to fail, in any normal sense.” Aw, shucks.
The self-made billionaire, however, is a different proposition entirely. He (and it’s overwhelmingly a male) has “a tendency towards aggressive megalomania” when confronted with opposition. Which brings us neatly to the Zuckerbergs, Musks and Thiels – the self-made titans of the tech world.
Consider Mark Zuckerberg, supreme leader of Meta (née Facebook), who looks like an aggressive megalomaniac from central casting. Even the Economist, that bastion of neoliberal baloney, saw through him early, with a famous cover in April 2016 portraying Zuck as the Emperor Augustus on a weathered throne. But the guy’s Augustan complex goes back further than the Economist realised. On his honeymoon in Rome in 2012, for example, he took so many photographs of Augustus that his wife joked it was as if there were three people on the trip.
Of late, though, Zuck seems to have gone off Augustus. In his new role as a part-time fashionista, he recently appeared in a T-shirt bearing the slogan “Aut Zuck aut nihil”, which classicists immediately recognised as a play on an early Roman political slogan: “Aut Caesar aut nihil” (“either Caesar or nothing”), signalling a determination to be supreme leader at any cost. At his 40th birthday party he wore a T-shirt with the slogan “Carthago delenda est” (“Carthage must be destroyed”). It’s not clear yet who plays the role of Carthage in this new scenario.
Elon Musk, for his part, doesn’t see any need for historical analogies to fuel his megalomania. As the writer Franklin Foer puts it, Musk has “long dreamed of redesigning the world in his own extreme image”. And Musk sees Donald Trump as the perfect Trojan horse for this purpose. Many other tech titans are supporting Trump. But Musk is “the one poised to live out the ultimate techno-authoritarian fantasy. With his influence, he stands to capture the state, not just to enrich himself. His entanglement with Trump will be an Ayn Rand novel sprung to life, because Trump has explicitly invited Musk into the government to play the role of the master engineer, who redesigns the American state – and therefore American life – in his own image.”
So here’s the question. Here are two individuals who totally control two organisations – Facebook and X – that have had devastating impacts on the lives of some of their users (and in Facebook’s case, whole countries such as Myanmar), as well as polluting the public sphere and undermining democracy in the west. Why has neither been held accountable for the societal damage their organisations have wrought? The answer is simple: they have the impunity that their immense wealth provides.
What I’ve been reading
Journey of discovery
Lady Baker and the Source of the Nile is an intriguing story of a Victorian mystery by Sarah Harkness.
Dissecting Donald
Timothy Burke’s Trump Essentials is a perceptive blogpost on the Maga phenomenon.
An Irish eye
A terrific essay by Henry Farrell, paying tribute to Tom Garvin and his book Preventing the Future, is about the Ireland in which he (and I) grew up.
