Opinion – Paul Krugman: Why petulant oligarchs rule our world

A few years ago – I think it was 2015 – I had a quick lesson in how easy it is to become a horrible person. I was a guest speaker at a conference in São Paulo, and my flight was very late. The organizers, fearing that I would miss the schedule due to the famous traffic in the city, arranged for me to be met at the airport and transported by helicopter to the hotel.

So when the conference ended, a car was waiting to take me back to the airport. And just for a minute I found myself thinking, “What? Do I have to drive?”

By the way, in real life I usually take the subway.

In any case, the lesson I took away from my moment of petulance was that privilege corrupts, that it so easily engenders a sense of entitlement. And indeed, to paraphrase Lord Acton, enormous privilege corrupts enormously, in part because the very privileged are often surrounded by people who would never dare tell them they are doing wrong.

That’s why I’m not shocked by the spectacle of Elon Musk’s reputational self-immolation. Fascinated, yes; who isn’t? But when an immensely wealthy man, accustomed not only to getting what he wants but also being a much-admired icon, finds himself not only losing his aura but becoming the subject of general ridicule, of course he goes on the rampage erratically. , and thereby aggravates your problems even more.

The most interesting question is why today we are governed by such people. Because we are clearly living in the era of the petulant oligarch.

As Kevin Roose recently pointed out in the Times, Musk still has many admirers in the tech world. They don’t see him as a whiny brat, but as someone who understands how the world should be run — an ideology that writer John Ganz calls “bossism,” the belief that great people shouldn’t have to answer to, or even listen to criticism from smaller people. And the adherents of this ideology clearly have a lot of power, even if that power does not yet extend to preventing the likes of Musk from being booed in public.

But how is this possible?

It is really not surprising that technological progress and the increase in the Gross Domestic Product have not created a happy and equitable society; Pessimistic views of the future have been the subject of serious analysis and popular culture for as long as I can remember. But both social critics like John Kenneth Galbraith and speculative writers like William Gibson have generally envisioned corporatist dystopias that suppressed individuality — not societies dominated by thin-skinned egomaniacal plutocrats exercising their insecurities in public.

So what happened?

Part of the answer, of course, is the sheer scale of the concentration of wealth at the top. Even before the Twitter fiasco, many people compared Elon Musk to Howard Hughes in his waning years. But Hughes’s wealth, even measured in current dollars, paled in comparison to Musk’s, even after the recent plunge in Tesla stock. More generally, the best available estimates say that the top 0.00001% of total wealth today is nearly ten times greater than it was 40 years ago. And the immense wealth of the modern super-elite has certainly brought a lot of power, including that of acting childishly.

Furthermore, many super-rich, who as a class used to be almost secretive, have become celebrities. The archetype of the innovator who gets rich by changing the world is not new; goes back at least to Thomas Edison. But the great fortunes made in information technology have turned this narrative into a complete cult, with Steve Jobs-like or candidate-like figures everywhere you look.

Indeed, the cult of the genius entrepreneur has played a large role in the unfolding debate over cryptocurrency. FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried wasn’t selling a real product, nor, as anyone can see, are his former competitors who haven’t yet gone bankrupt: after all this time, no one has come up with any significant uses for cryptocurrency in the real world beyond of money laundering. What Bankman-Fried was selling was an image, that of the poorly dressed, messy-haired visionary who grasps the future in a way that normals cannot.

Elon Musk is not exactly in the same category. His companies produce cars that really drive and rockets that really fly. But the sales and especially the market value of his companies certainly depend, at least in part, on the strength of his personal brand, which he seems unable to stop tearing down with each passing day.

After all, Musk and Bankman-Fried could end up providing a public service by tarnishing the legend of the genius entrepreneur, who has already caused a lot of harm. For now, though, Musk’s Twitter whims are degrading what had become a useful resource, a place where some went to get information from people who actually knew what they were talking about. And a happy ending to this story seems increasingly unlikely.

Oh, and if this column gets me banned from Twitter — or if the site simply dies from mistreatment — you can follow some of what I’m thinking, along with thoughts from a growing number of Twitter refugees, on Mastodon.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves