Spoiler alert: If you are playing “Am I the Assh–e?” and you’re a billionaire or even just super rich and powerful, the answer is probably yes.
This is not just because you missed an important exit on the morality highway, the one singer Billie Eilish rightly flagged when she asked, “If you’re a billionaire, why are you a billionaire?”
Of course, if you are a billionaire, you probably missed her point too. You probably think you’re a billionaire because you deserve to be one, because you are brilliant, talented, charming, devastatingly attractive and smell like a spring morning in the Alps. You know, all those things the slavering sycophants around you say you are in the hope that you will slice off a teensy-weensy bit of the pie and send it their way.
In fact, you probably think the fact that you are a billionaire is itself the only necessary proof that you deserve to be a billionaire.
But, I’m sorry to tell you, if you think that, you’re wrong.
Because the problem with the “I deserve all this,” thesis is the fact that you don’t. No one does. Furthermore, thinking that you do in a world in which so many are struggling is a pretty terrible thing to think. You may have worked hard. You may have achieved some remarkable things. But do you really need more than 400 times the amount the average college-educated American makes in their lifetime? Really?
Take a look around you. Look at the kind of gajillionaire robber barons we are saddled with today. Spend a little time reading about the power barons of our moment. (For the record, I once wrote a book about them called “Superclass.” I’d recommend it but in retrospect, I was far too kind to them and their ilk.)
What Donald Trump may see as a new Gilded Age will very likely be known as the Age of Assh—s.
Do I really have to do the math for you? Elon Musk. Jeff Bezos. Peter Thiel. Marc Andreessen. Mark Zuckerberg. Rupert Murdoch. The Ellisons. All those slimy Russian oligarchs. The billionaires in the Trump administration from Charles Kushner to Linda McMahon. The president himself.
Jeffrey Epstein. Jeffrey Freaking Epstein! Jeffrey Epstein’s friends. Or the just very rich, powerful and odious. Bill Clinton. The Andrew formerly known as a prince. RFK, Jr. The faceless but powerful others who were Jeffrey Epstein’s defenders.
Is Larry Summers really one of the elites by which our age will be judged? People are going to want to take a shower after reading the history of our times.
There has never been a moment when the literal meaning of the term “insanely wealthy” was clearer. Musk wants to go to Mars, presumably only with white people and the family of mini-mes he is breeding. Bezos is having one of the world’s most embarrassing public mid-life crises. (A hot tip, Jeff: naming your new AI company after Prometheus may not send the message you think it is sending.) Peter Thiel is obsessed with the anti-Christ and yet, doesn’t seem even a little pit perturbed by the actions of Trump or some of the other folks he hangs around with. All those other AI titans who seem to think they are the only ones who can make the right choices for a technology that could end mankind as we know it? Not all there, folks! Mad with power or devoid of conscience and perspective.
While virtually every other era in history has been plagued by super f–ked-up people with far too much wealth and power, you have to admit, there really seems to be something especially off about our contemporary crew. Oh, sure, Nero fiddled—or was misrepresented by enemies who paid off their historian friends—and Henry Ford was an anti-Semitic Hitler-lover, but we’ve had the Koch brothers and Carlos Slim and Harlan Crow and Betsy DeVos and Eric Prince and Oleg Deripaska and… countless more we’ve never heard of but who have eyes-wide-open supported leaders like Trump because they cut their taxes.
That’s nothing new. It’s a very power-elite kind of thing to do. But they are doing it on a whole new scale these days. Take Elon Musk’s trillion dollar Tesla compensation deal. Did you know that the average person in the world makes just under $10,000 a year? (That’s a number that is heavily skewed by developed countries. The average per capita GDP in sub-Saharan Africa is $2000 a year.) Elon’s getting what would support the livelihoods of 100 million people in the world at large—or 500 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, where he is from.
That is being an assh–e on a whole new scale. In defense of the assh—s, however, I’m not sure the fact that we have so many powerful jerks running around isn’t more an indictment of what we have come to tolerate in our society? So some of it is on us. It’s something we need to fix.
Not that I recommend eating the rich. As our president alone illustrates, the ones that aren’t just tasteless can be toxic.
The post Opinion: We’re All Stuck in Trump’s Swamp of Bad, Bad, Very Bad Billionaire F–kery appeared first on The Daily Beast.
