16 Comments
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CL's avatar

Fascinating. We’ve been watching as the billionaires seem increasingly detached from reality - and even becoming odd and non-tethered to common sense. All the billionaires have increasingly wacko theories and bizarre lives. Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk, Thiel - each weirder than the last. This article starts to explain what full detachment from society does to you …

Elizabeth's avatar

They are detached from reality because people treat them like they are super human. However super humans don’t sit on piles of money while others starve. They don’t tell workers to keep working when a coworker drops dead. Change the tax laws we would still see greed but not the destructive behavior we see now.

Sam Ray's avatar

Or, those mentioned were always this way & they just stopped trying hide it.

wiredog's avatar

Eventually Louis XVI and his wife had to face reality.

Pope Buck I's avatar

And ended up face down in a basket.

Alan Vanneman's avatar

"Bezos, has become literally insensitive to public opposition to anything he says or does."

Well, yeah, but he has also become literally very sensitive to Trump's opposition to anything he says or does. This is why he says that Trump II is "more mature", which is very likely the precise opposite of what he really thinks. The world is becoming a place dominated by centi-billionaires living under the thumb of autocrats who can crush them, autocrats like Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi, and Vladimir Putin. It's an interesting development.

Paul Stone's avatar

Good point! Bezos is doing everything he can to protect Blue Origin. And his ego is tied up in that project.

Adrian Bergeron's avatar

Autocrats of any flavor all fail eventually, which is great, but sadly, the rest of humanity has to deal with the mess until the fall. Maybe allowing crazy narcissists to have any power is an awful mistake.

LM's avatar

Leona Helmsley. Howard Hughes. Hetty Green. Marie Antoinette. King Ludwig II. Caligula. God knows how many other kings, queens, emperors, sultans, tsars, satraps, pashas, khans, and pharaohs. There are folk tales and Greek myths about this. We’ve known this since forever. At various times humans have taken the reins of political economy in hand to tame them. Now we in the U.S. are back to the long tradition of using the sovereign state as a piggy bank. The GOP wishes to avoid all this inconvenient universal knowledge.

Krispy's avatar

He is still beholden to the lawless lecher just like pootey’s oligarchs are.

Gordon Reynolds's avatar

Money just really fucks with some people’s heads. Mackenzie can handle it, Jeff can’t.

Alan Neff's avatar

(In Spock's voice.) "Fascinating. Immunity from quotidien vicissitudes > inability to empathize."

(In Bones's voice.) "He's dead, Jim. Dead to the struggles of of the rest of us."

Ken Kovar's avatar

Heel turn is a great way to put it 😡 And just how detached these ultra rich people can become is a real problem 😎

Sam Ray's avatar

Coincidence malignant narcissists, sociopaths, & psychopaths are literally insensitive too?

https://samray.substack.com/p/its-the-malignant-narcissist-billionaires-d68

Jack B's avatar

Ha, I think Bezos' reaction to the "moment of sharing" to be perfectly normal. We have all experienced the quick "hi, how are you" turn into a rendition of everything that went wrong for the day. I suspect it may be a tossup as to who was the most lacking in empathy.

What most of us don't have is staff who efficiently get us out of that situation. Also if we are a bit rude we won't get written up in an Atlantic hit piece.

As to the "isolated from reality" that is a problem we all face from time to time.