The Perils of the Billionaire Bubble

Elon Musk and Donald Trump can try to bend reality, but reality tends to snap back.

Photo by Braedon McLeod on Unsplash

It’s been a little more than a year since I started my gig as Academic Dean at the Fletcher School. Looking back the biggest surprise — and let me stress here that it should not have been remotely surprising, given that I’m a political scientist, but sometimes I can be a bit thick — is how even a minute amount of power and status affects how colleagues treat you. Conversations that a year earlier would have been candid and blunt have become a bit more clipped. I don’t think I cut a particularly intimidating figure, but my administrative title matters, and my colleagues have reacted to that by being more circumspect.

This shift is understandable, but there is a danger that comes with it. Even within the academy, speaking truth to power can be a difficult thing. And without people willing to tell me that I have made/will make a mistake, a very scary feedback loop emerges. If no one tells me if I’ve made a mistake, that makes it easier for me to persuade myself that I am doing a great job, which in turn makes me more confident that I can take on more responsibility and power, which makes it even tougher for colleagues to offer constructive criticism, and then the cycle recurs.

The phenomenon I’m describing does not just apply to middle management. As I explained in The Ideas Industry, if you think speaking truth to power is hard, try speaking truth to money. Henry Farrell recently emphasized this point as well: “Old style princes were notorious for their tendencies to deranged behavior, which came not just from their inbreeding, but their power, and the unwillingness and inability of others to contradict or check them. So too, modern princes.” In other words, the dangerous feedback loop that I have encountered is several orders of magnitude worse for the wealthiest and most well-known people on the planet: Elon Musk and Donald Trump. And this past week each of their psychic self-confidence bubbles popped.

The evidence for the flatter that Musk and Trump receive is not hard to find. The 2022 Twitter lawsuit revealed a trove of text messages directed to Musk from other powerful people sucking up to him. One CEO tells him that he’s Batman. An investor tells him, “You are totally right. I 100% agree with you.” As the Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel concluded at the time, “What is so illuminating about the Musk messages is just how unimpressive, unimaginative, and sycophantic the powerful men in Musk’s contacts appear to be.”

As for Trump, the first chapter of Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s Regime Change captures the post-2024 transition vibe: “Every day he was receiving obsequious phone calls and visits from world leaders, dignitaries, and business tycoons…. Close aides could not recall Trump ever being so contented as he was in those two warm winter months in Palm Beach after the election. His victory was broadly accepted as legitimate—in a way that it never had been the first time…. Trump was also getting something that he had never had before: a grudging acknowledgment of legitimacy from the small club of former presidents.”

The thing is, their positive feedback loops have now crashed into reality. As much as they try to distort things they are being confronted with negative feedback that simply cannot be wished away.

Trump is confronting this problem along multiple dimensions. There’s his approval rating, which continues —as predicted — to trend downward. The Economist has Donald Trump’s net approval rating falling to a new record low of 25 points under water. Then there are his policy failures, which Jonathan Lemire summarized in the Atlantic:

Recent months have delivered a reckoning for Trump, who has crashed hard against some real limits. The war in Iran, a conflict that he’d once thought would take only a few weeks, hit the five-month mark today. The U.S. casualty count is growing, weapons stockpiles are running low, and gas prices are again surging. Trump desperately wants the war to end. He is receiving conflicting guidance from his advisers—escalate, some urge, as others tell him to cut and run—and has become just the latest U.S. president to be humiliated by hard-liners in Tehran.

Trump is also flailing domestically. His approval numbers have sunk, and Republicans are finally, in small doses, beginning to defy him. Trump has demanded that the Senate blow up the filibuster to pass the SAVE Act, which would make voting more difficult and require voters to provide proof of citizenship. But Republicans have refused. Although the legislation seems dead, Trump called yesterday for Republicans to stay in Washington to work on it, potentially saddling them with unpopular (and doomed) votes while also preventing them from returning home to campaign ahead of the midterms. Strategists from both parties predict that at least one chamber of Congress will flip to the Democrats, allowing the party to stall whatever is left of the president’s legislative agenda and open investigations into his administration and allies.

Perhaps the biggest negative feedback that Trump received over the past week was his widely panned speech at the rescheduled White House Correspondents Association. CNN’s Kaitlin Collins told Jon Stewart that, “What was most surprising to me was the room was filled with a lot of his staffers, his cabinet, his allies, Republicans in Congress… it was so quiet in the rook during the president’s remarks.”

Trump, in trying failing to tell jokes, left himself wide open for actual comedians to roast him mercilessly:

As for Musk, well, his efforts to influence the culture have not worked out well as of late. He is still extremely wealthy but his companies are hitting some rough patches in the stock market.

It is his sit-down interview with the Economist’s Zanny Minton Beddoes, however, that has been the catalyst for him revealing his own bubble. You can watch/listen to the whole thing here, but this clip is particularly revealing:

Note that when Beddoes pushes back on Musk’s assertions, he slows down and stumbles through his answers, falling back on the same fake, unpersuasive talking points.

Now maybe my observations are wrong. TNR’s Greg Sargent and Toby Buckle see the interview as an example of Musk flexing his power: “as he sits there smugly abusing Beddoes in his edgelordy leather jacket, you can see something remarkable unfolding in real time…. he’s visibly sensing his growing power to communicate with fascistic tropes to like-minded Western- and white-civilizational warriors everywhere.”

I guess I see it differently: the negative feedback that Musk received after the interview caused him to lose it over on his hellsite:

I have no illusions that either Trump or Musk will ever face a true reckoning for the their actions. But I do think the self-knowledge that they’ve gained over the past week will haunt them more than they will ever reveal. A part of them has become aware that they might not be the strategic geniuses that their sycophants had proclaimed. And no matter how much they’ll deny it, that recognition of fallibility will trouble them for the rest of their days.