Memo #13: America Deserves Better Billionaires
Why is the modern billionaire class so uninspiring?
Hi there,
If you’re in the US and follow national politics at all, this is probably what comes to your mind when you hear the word “Billionaires” – a perennially frustrated Bernie Sanders yelling “Billionaires shouldn’t exist”.
The most common criticism of Billionaires usually comes in this flavor - that billionaires have too much power.
In this short memo, I’d like to make a case for why that critique gets it exactly backward. The American Billionaire Class, if anything, is too neutered and emaciated.
Consider the House of Medici – one of the wealthiest families in Europe during the 15th century – who single-handedly funded and empowered much of the Italian Renaissance movement.
From its wiki page,
The Medici family can claim to have funded the invention of the piano and opera, financed the construction of Saint Peter's Basilica and Santa Maria del Fiore, and were patrons of Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Machiavelli and Galileo among many others in the arts.
Today, you may confuse a billionaire with a homeless man who’s about to ask you for change because he hasn’t eaten in two days.
So, to put it bluntly, what the f**k happened to our billionaires?
With the exception of Elon Musk who’s trying to make humans a multi-planetary species, our billionaires are not pursuing anything ambitious and inspiring – they’re not going for moonshots.
Allow me to present to you three distinct undercurrents driving this shift.
Long Tech. Short Humanities.
The newly minted billionaires are almost all engineers. They made their money writing lines of code. And while engineers are good at optimization problems, they’re bad at everything else. They do not have a strong grasp of history or society because they have spent their lives preoccupied with abstract machines and systems.
Engineers also tend to have a singular focus on function over form. Aesthetics is a mere afterthought. Nowhere is this better realized than in MIT’s campus architecture. For instance, the home of the Computer Science department at MIT – Stata Center – stands in apparent chaos inviting nothing but bewilderment from the uninitiated.
Because engineers are optimizers, engineer-billionaires stick to optimization only. When Bill Gates was asked why he’s doing philanthropy, he answered with one word, “optimization”.
Long Redistribution. Short Creation.
The American ethos that once used to take pride in innovation and wealth creation, is now increasingly tempted by the prospects of redistribution. Socialism, one of the most disastrous and murderous movements of the 20th century, is now in vogue again. Look no further than the protestors who set up a physical guillotine in front of Jeff Bezos’ house (with a good chance that they bought this guillotine prop from Amazon itself).
Our politicians may not have any plans for employment or wealth creation, but they do have plans for taxing the billionaires. And that alone is their entire platform.
Given this shift in cultural and political sentiments, it is no surprise that our billionaires would rather keep their heads low. Ambition is easily mistaken for vanity. Just look at the absolute vitriol Elon tends to get because he aims high and doesn’t apologize for it in the same breath.
Long Statistics. Short Calculus.
Peter Thiel accurately diagnoses our cultural moment. Interviewing with Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, he says,
The Medievals believed in the weakness of the will but power of the intellect.
The Moderns believe in the power of the will but weakness of the intellect.
Further, Thiel says, “We don't believe in intellectual agency. We may believe in some kind of mechanistic process – “the wisdom of the crowds” or “Big Data” or “AI”. But we don’t believe in the mind.”
This undercurrent in our society is well exemplified in a mathematical trend – substituting Statistics in place of Calculus. Calculus is an exact science. Statistics is not. To use Theil’s framework of definite vs. indefinite, Calculus assumes the world is definite, but Statistics assumes it is “indefinitely indefinite” – so you don’t even know what you don’t know. The only course of action is to therefore hedge against all possible risks.
On the contrary, 17th-century astronomer Johannes Kepler used Newtonian mechanics to precisely calculate the orbits of different planets of our solar system. In today’s age, we would rather trust an AI to do the calculations for us.
We stopped believing in the mind and intellectual agency when we substituted Calculus with Statistics.
Our billionaires are obviously competent. They are exceptional operators, technologists, and businessman. So it’s worth asking if signing “The Giving Pledge” really the best they can do? Do they not trust themselves to do anything more ambitious and inspiring with their resources?
America, the land that gave rise to this new crop of tech-billionaire class, merits more from them. America deserves better billionaires.
See you next week,
Ayush
I totally agree with you - Elon is one of the only ones pulling a Medici.. if only Steve Jobs lived a bit longer! The modern common-man hates egotistical people but it is mostly the case that believing one has the ability to do something awesome is a prerequisite for doing something awesome
Agreed. In his interview with Joe Rogan, Elon Musk said that Warren Buffet had the most boring job in the world - determining whether to allocate more capital to Coke or to Pepsi.