Mod: There is only so much you should need to stomach from these extreme examples of trust fund trash.Is America’s infatuation with billionaires finally coming to an end? (AlterNetlink): It has long been evident that Elon Musk is a moron, at least to those willing to see it. Well before the Tesla CEO overpaid for Twitter in the throes of a tantrum, there was a chorus of mostly-ignored people pointing out, repeatedly, that Musk's mental maturity appeared to have stagnated around the sixth grade.
There was the time he rolled out a "ingenious" idea for tunnel-based transportation, only to have people point out that the subway has been around for over a century. Or the time he tried to push a useless and overly complicated plan to rescue a group of
Thai children trapped in a cave. Or the time shortly after that when, still angry at being dismissed, he falsely accused the man who actually did save the children of being a pedophile. Or the time he acted like such an idiot on
Joe Rogan's podcast that
Tesla stock took a dive. Or the time he named his actual child
X Æ A-12.
There are infinitely more examples. (His childish feud with rapper
Azealia Banks is a personal favorite.) Yet somehow, no matter how often
Musk has shown his ass in public, the damage to his reputation was fleeting. The business and tech press would be startled at his dumb behavior, but within 48 to 72 hours, it was all forgotten and
Musk went back to being covered as if he were a genius, if perhaps an eccentric one.
Such is the power of the
American mythology of the billionaire. The infatuation with our richest capitalists is related to, but in many ways goes even beyond, the illusion that the
U.S. is a meritocracy. The notion that to be very rich must also mean you're brilliant permeates our society, justifying both ridiculously low taxes on the wealthiest
Americans and the undue influence they exert over our political system.
It's a social fiction that dates back to the
Gilded Age and has covered up the intellectual deficits of many famous
Americans. (
Henry Ford comes to mind.) But it's gotten a lot more juice in the past few decades, as the new class of tech billionaires, starting with
Bill Gates of
Microsoft and
Steve Jobs of
Apple, forged the image of the singular mastermind who, with little education and limited resources, remakes the world through the sheer power of their intelligence.
This presumption that wealth equals brains has so permeated our society that it's sometimes hard to see how pervasive it is. But the past couple of years — and indeed, just the past couple of months — have really done a number on the belief that having a fat bank account somehow inoculates one from being a dumbass.
Watching
Musk lay waste to
Twitter, for no discernible reason beyond his desire to impress the biggest losers on the internet, has been a wake-up call. It's hard to imagine there will be the same mass forgetting of who
Musk really is that we saw after all his previous public face-plants.
But it's not just Musk. The same process is unfolding for the single person who has benefited more than any other from the myth that money means you're smart: Donald Trump.
Mod: More at the link.
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