New Rolling Stone piece from Alex Morris, focusing heavily on our very good friends and the tech billionaires they’re buddies with.
(Also, that’s a pretty clever alternate title)
Longer read than I had realized but worth every word. Very well done.
In other words, we may eventually reach a sort of wealth singularity, a point when the wealth of a few grows so exponentially that it basically reaches the point of infinity.
I actually question whether or not this has already happened. The wealthy already have access to enough money that they don’t actually need to sell assets - to give anything up - in order to get credit. Just taking away Elon’s money doesn’t make him stop being Elon. It doesn’t take away his connections, his charisma, his loyal follower base, etc. Even if he did get taken down in court any financial consequence wouldn’t actually hurt his power base nearly as much as the reputational shift (see also Orange Man). Their net worth may not be literally infinite, but I can’t think of any additional power or prestige they could command if it was.
“And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.”
– William Gibson, Count Zero