Can't Tech Billionaires Just Make Their Money and Fuck Off?

Image: Badly edited by author

If I had even a million bucks to my name, you would likely not hear from me ever again.

See ya later.

Isn't that the point? I always figured that was the reason to chase copious amounts of money. It provides comfort and luxury, a life free of the burden of bills and mortgages, of stress and work. Whether it buys happiness… well, that's another story. But, reflecting on our tech overlords over the last decade and how they've acted, that appears to be a really dumb assertion.

Instead of disappearing to enjoy a quiet life sleeping on a mattress of $100 bills, they continue to force themselves into the limelight, desperate to keep themselves relevant, desperate to feel worshipped by the bootlickers.

While the ethics of his company and its effects on consumerism and the environment are questionable, Jeff Bezos almost did it right. He sold a bunch of Amazon shares, effectively retiring. He picked up a younger (albeit slightly plastic) model wife. He got on his yacht and went partying for a bit. I say almost because, unfortunately, his ego can't allow him to stay out of the spotlight. Not when the other richest men are still around! These days, he exerts his political influence on the Washington Post (a paper he owns) despite neutering the readership by doing so. And no doubt, behind the scenes, he's still greasing palms and passing brown envelopes of money to keep things well-suited to him and his interests. It’s an all too common past time.

Take Elon Musk. I guess when your wealth is over $477 billion, the money became irrelevant a long time ago, nothing more than numbers on his accountant's spreadsheets. He's a great example of someone who made a success of himself. He's an entrepreneur who lived the dream of turning ideas into shitloads of money (or pushing others out of their own company to make their idea successful). But he can't call it quits. Somewhere along the way, he became addicted to it. Addicted to the control, the power, the notoriety, the fame, the worship. Slowly but surely, his pursuit surpassed money and instead focused on the dick-swinging contest, where the goal is to outdo the other billionaire elites on who has the most power, the most influence and the most famous friends.

The result is where we are now; a slow but steady consolidation of power right at the top, what many are referring to as our tech oligarchy.

Tech overlords have weaselled their way into a Presidential candidate's inner circle and now find themselves heading up new departments, being a sounding board for the President, seemingly gaining the power to do whatever they want, and firing off not one, but two Nazi salutes at the inauguration because why not. (On that point, nobody accidentally does the Nazi salute. The only defence I've got for him is perhaps he keyed a line of ketamine before he went on stage and his autism went turbo?) We’re facing a slightly surreal, slightly dystopian(?) outlook for the next four years, provided Trump doesn't get bored or upset with his tech bro playthings before then. It happened last time.

I don't know what to make of what's happened recently. It's still processing. You can probably tell with how scattered this post is. There’s lots to consider. But it's obvious that the people who control platforms with unprecedented societal influence that reach billions of people every day, who decide how they run, what they promote (or don't) and how the algorithm works, should not be so closely tied to the President and his whims. They shouldn't be able to influence policy or regulations or neuter investigations or hamstring antitrust so it becomes even more ineffective because, guess what, all that does is crush their competition, which serves to make them even richer and even more powerful. When we embolden egotistical, power hungry tech CEOs to do as they please — I mean they already do, but this is on another level — I don't think the outcome is going to be good for any of us.

At Trump's inauguration, he had three of the world's richest people in his box: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. It might have been the highest concentration of wealth per square foot in the history of humanity. Some estimates suggest that the total wealth on display of the billionaire tech founders in attendance was more than $1 trillion. Yes, over one thousand billion. I think being richer than the bottom half of entire countries combined is disgusting. I can't even understand why it's something to aspire to — no person, no matter what they have achieved or brought to society, should be that wealthy. They clearly don’t want to spend their riches fixing fundamental problems in the world, so why can't they leave us be? Life is hard enough without a handful of filthy-rich assholes sticking their nose into matters that affect our much-less-rich lives. And yet, here they are, on our screens, in our news and in our governments, like a stain on the planet.

Back to my point – why can't they just make their money and fuck off?

Why do we have to be subjected to their opinions, their ideas, to them telling us what our future is going to be like and for us to be grateful for it, to see them bowed down to on podcasts like they are some god-like immortals, to see them standing on the stage with the Trump exerting political influence? They're not good people. They're not cool people. They are not even interesting to listen to. They don't offer anything these days that isn't clearly self-serving. And yet, we give them the oxygen they crave so badly.

I apologise for the rambling rant. I honestly don't know what the point of this piece was meant to be. I'm just so over it right now, and things have felt a bit hopeless of late. The tech industry sucks, the Internet sucks, social media sucks, and the whole thing is now hedged on generative AI being more than just the next Internet of Things.

The only crumb I'm holding onto is that the story of ego and greed leading to downfall is as old as time. We can only hope their story plays out the same way. Or that they really do figure out how to live on Mars and they take their billionaires-club into outer space and leave the rest of us to live (or die) in peace.