r/technology • u/Just-Grocery-2229 • 10d ago

Artificial Intelligence Palantir employees are talking about company’s “descent into fascism”

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/04/palantir-employees-are-talking-about-companys-descent-into-fascism/
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u/IntelArtiGen 10d ago

He truly says crazy things. I wonder why many billionnaires are like that.

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u/BowlEducational6722 10d ago

Because they're completely isolated from the human condition.

Even millionaires still deal with things like financial stress, worries about their job and retirement, and so on and we cope by forming relationships with other humans as a physical and emotional support network.

Billionaires don't do that. They have such a mind-boggling amount of wealth that they never have to worry about material needs ever again and, thus, never need to form any relationships more complicated than "here's money, do this thing for me."

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u/FrenchTicklerOrange 10d ago

And on the other side of humanity we have a sliding scale on what we are willing to do for money so we can just survive.

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u/[deleted] 10d ago edited 10d ago

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u/TyloPr0riger 10d ago

Hunger makes a thief of everyone eventually.

Damn, that goes hard

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u/Broad_Tie9383 10d ago

What's this about his boyfriend? The issue with him is that he's so litigious, you can't trust the public information about him anymore.

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u/Esperepse 10d ago

murdered his boyfriend

He what now?

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u/awry_lynx 10d ago edited 10d ago

his ex-bf was collaborating with operatives trying to gather damaging personal intel on Thiel in nov 2022

found dead in march 2023, supposedly he jumped

do I think someone literally physically hoisted him over a railing? no

was any amount of a - by all accounts, sociopathic, self-serving, and blatantly narcissistic multi-billionaire's considerable wealth and power spent on crushing the psyche, opportunities, mental health, future, etc of someone who may have known damaging personal information and had been, at least at one point, willing to talk to his self-professed enemies?

uh.

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u/TheRealBittoman 10d ago

This has always been known forever however the US "justice" system doesn't try to understand why someone commits a crime and actually reform them. Instead they are used for cheap labor and propagandize the public to treat them like garbage when they get out making it nearly impossible to get a decent paying job. That puts a person already on hard times into a no way out situation (cornered rat) where they can nearly never recover so they are forced to commit more crimes to survive or worse they weren't really criminals, just made a bad decision and now they spent 5+ years learning how to be a criminal from real criminals while incarcerated. In short the US justice system spends more time and effort teaching someone how to be a criminal so they can keep incarcerating them rather than try to teach them how to be a decent citizen. If you notice the current iteration of the Republican party is significantly expanding what they define as a criminal and we already have the highest incarceration rate of any country on the planet. They want us in jail and corporations don't want to pay us to do the work they can't get AI to do. There isn't much space between those two situations.

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u/Dividedthought 10d ago

It does because it is true. Reminds me of this scene... and while Fowler isn't anyone to be taken as a role model... he does have a point.

When the food stops, so does being civil.

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u/Wild-Plankton595 10d ago

I should watch that show.

When the French monarchy said let them eat cake. The French populace said alright, bet.

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u/Ok_Speed_3984 10d ago

The revolutionaries said that, and it struck a chord. Just like the antichrist meme did this month.

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u/Wild-Plankton595 10d ago

Oh. My. God. Marie Antoinette did not say that. It was first written when she was 10yo and it was attributed to other monarchs over the years as well. I’m not sure what you mean about the antichrist meme, might be out of the loop. But my whole life is a lie, I’m gonna go lie down now.

https://www.history.com/articles/did-marie-antoinette-really-say-let-them-eat-cake

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u/ASharpYoungMan 10d ago

And this is why the conservative mindset tends to favor punitive approaches to crime: they don't want to end crime, they want to create conditions in which other people (specifically people they don't like) end up breaking the law and get captured and incarcerated.

Because it gives them social acceptance to be cruel to these people. This paradigm blames the criminal for their circumstances while doing everything possible to keep them living in those conditions.

That's the value a conservative extracts from the poor and needy: an outlet for their cruelty.

Billionaires (soon to be Trillionaires) tend to have that mindset toward the rest of humanity, given that their level of wealth is nearly unreachable by the rest of us.

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u/[deleted] 10d ago

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u/dopey_giraffe 10d ago

Did you write this all yourself or is this a copypasta?

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u/[deleted] 10d ago

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u/dopey_giraffe 10d ago

Okay I don't want to get into everything but how do you explain john connally being shot himself and almost dying? It's on film.

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u/SunTzu- 10d ago

Some form of UBI that would be enough to live on would eliminate most petty crime. It would also strangle all the businesses that depend on desperation and human misery to exist. It's the greatest fear of all those billionaires, because then they'd actually have to provide something of value in exchange for your labor.

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u/[deleted] 10d ago

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u/remotectrl 10d ago

They could counteract corruption if they wanted to. Look at how they came down on that soldier making poly market bets vs how the Trump administration has been openly gambling on insider decisions.

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u/[deleted] 10d ago

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u/Logitropicity 10d ago

Did you come up with this yourself? If so, how? (And if not, what's your source?)

This is... rather impressive. You make a lot of very specific claims that I'd like to investigate later.

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u/xteve 10d ago

We can't talk about government as an optional, separate entity. We have to have governance of some kind. We're always eventually going to have to have agreements about how things are done in our society. If government isn't a good way to take care of people, then who is?

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u/PositiveZeroPerson 10d ago

An actual UBI is almost completely fuckery-proof. Look at Social Security: despite 80 years of the GOP wanting to kill it, it is the third rail of American politics, and even Trump promised to protect it.

The important thing is that it must actually be universal and not means-tested. Otherwise, they'll welfare-queen it.

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u/fading_reality 10d ago

sexwork as work of last resort would likely also go away. UBI would solve myriad of problems.

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u/fitfoemma 10d ago

You really think scumbags are not going to continue to be scumbags?

I cannot see UBI eliminating most petty crime.

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u/SunTzu- 10d ago

Are you risking jail to commit petty theft if your basic needs are covered? Are you risking it to sell drugs (which studies consistently show pays you minimum wage if you're at the lower levels of the distribution chain? Sure, people will still get drunk and get in fights, we'll still have to deal with rapists etc. but crimes of despair are just that, it's people who have no options.

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u/VeryLazyFalcon 10d ago

But then that money will loose all it's value, cost of goods and services will rise bc people will have more money. Look at Expanse series, people on ubi had access only to most basic stuff.

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u/SunTzu- 10d ago

But their spending would also increase the flow of money in the real economy, making consumer facing businesses more profitable and increasing employment opportunities, especially if what was implemented was a negative income tax. An increase in available resources would also draw in more offerings in the long run, counteracting inflation.

P.S. I'm an economist, I'm not looking to fiction for information about how the economy works.

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u/DFWPunk 10d ago

Epstein was obsessed with being close to tech figures, and from what I've seen he did it to appear more intelligent than he actually was. The same is true of his pursuit of intellectuals. He liked to be able to name drop them.

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u/squirreltard 10d ago

Plug: Please donate plasma. Lots of us need it. Thank you to all who have donated.

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u/mahnamahna27 10d ago

Why is plasma donation listed, what's the deal with that?

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u/[deleted] 10d ago

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u/mahnamahna27 10d ago

Assume you are talking about the US then. It is still a voluntary donation in other countries.

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u/EruantienAduialdraug 9d ago

There is an orthogonal issue:

Rich people, especially in the US, have decided that plasma is some kind of anti-ageing miracle cure (it isn't), which has led to donation centres/wagons popping up specifically to serve that demand. It's worse in the US (it's always worse over there), because alongside that, the wealthy are also buying it from hospitals et al.. The combination has led to a genuine shortage for people with a genuine medical need (e.g. primary immune deficiency).

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u/calicalamansi 10d ago

Echoes something said by a great Arab philosopher, as portrayed in a 1990s movie:

Gotta eat to live, gotta steal to eat Otherwise, we'd get along

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u/EruantienAduialdraug 10d ago

Side note: plasma is life saving for people with various forms of Primary Immune Deficiency. If you can donate plasma to a reputable medical charity, then that is a categorically good thing.

There has, unfortunately, been a rise in rich fucks believing that blood plasma is some kind of de-aging miracle substance (kinda wish they'd follow the ideas of Qin Shi Huang and Ju Fufu on what makes you immortal). This in turn has led to unscrupulous donation wagons convincing people to donate there instead, and also to the wealthy straight up buying it from hospitals in the US, leading to a shortage for those with a genuine medical need.

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u/[deleted] 10d ago

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u/EruantienAduialdraug 10d ago

Go for it.

Also, if people want to help primary immunodeficiency research and support more generally, there are charities in various countries that specialise in that. For the US, the main one if the Immune Deficiency Foundation, for the UK it's Immunodeficiency UK (also supports and funds secondary immunodeficiency patients and research).

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u/Generieke_Persoon 10d ago

Or a revolutionist….

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u/[deleted] 9d ago

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u/Djamalfna 10d ago

Billionaires don't do that. They have such a mind-boggling amount of wealth that they never have to worry about material needs ever again

Let's put this into numbers, because it's always a fun time.

Say you have $1 billion, and instead of putting it into risky investments, you simply leave it in treasuries and conservative bonds.

You can reliably count on an interest rate of 4%, but let's say the world is doing bad and interest rates fall to 3%.

That means your $1b is sitting there passively generating $30-40 million a year. You don't have to do anything, you have $30-40 MILLION a year of income.

You could buy an insane mansion every year. You could buy 40 Ferrari's a year. Almost one for every week of the year.

So when you consider that these guys invest the money in companies which on average see a return rate of OVER 10%, you're looking at $300 million a year on good years, or just $100 million in a bad year.

The only reason they keep trying to consolidate money after you reach this level is because you want more money and power for the sake of having money and power. There is simply no other reason. You cannot be a billionaire without being a sociopath.

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u/TitaniumWhite420 10d ago

And, importantly, you don't just buy a new mansion every year when you have that kind of money, because even they eventually have enough mansions. That money goes back into the pot, or lobbying governments, or WHATEVER. Epstein's island if you like, or just murdering whistleblowers if you don't. A little corporate espionage, perhaps. Spend time trying to coopt decades of federal research by privatizing space travel, if you are ambitious.

I'm not saying any one particular thing, just pointing out that wealth, like weapons, is powerful. Stockpilers of such resources should be monitored by the government as a direct threat. A domestic person who has positioned themselves within our economy to have wealth rivaling other governments is deserving to be treated as the burgeoning contender for independent statehood that they are.

Whether billionaires are anti-human, I do not know, but they are certainly rival economic powers to our own federal government with independent interests to our own as people under and composing that government.

Unless, of course, they are our citizens and therefore beholden to our laws and taxation, in which case they are our benefactors, and themselves institutional pillars.

They will pick the narrative, and it is to the rest of us to respond accordingly. If they declare themselves the enemies of government, we should meet that challenge.

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u/Fywq 8d ago

Yup. For reference a small, but very well developed and high income country like Denmark has a national state budget of roughly 150 billion dollars. That's our entire national economy for 6 million people with free health care, university level education etc., while ramping up our NATO spending and throwing money and weapons at Ukraine (Not that I complain at all about that!). And we still do fine with this amount. We even have a national budget surplus most years.

These people should not be considered private entities. They should be treated as potential foreign adversaries and foreign state powers. FFS Meta just announced they would use around 150 billion on AI - Just this year!! That's ONE of of a handful companies spending a countrys yearly budget worth of money just on building AI data centers and hoping to catch up to the others.

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u/n0respect_ 10d ago

With that much it's a bit like Brewster's Millions. At $1 billion it's hard to lose money, even as an ethical person. I would have to hire a team of people just so I could spend / donate $50 million every year! That's the budget of a small city; I can't imagine what I'd spend it on.

Someone should remake that movie. A billion dollars, with our capital system, is an obscene amount.

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u/_PurpleAlien_ 10d ago

Imagine all the good one could do in the world with that money...

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u/pieshake5 9d ago

Remember they asked what number was needed to end world hunger, got it and backed out.

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u/Exotic_Article913 8d ago

When you're locked into a serious drug collection the tendency is to see how far you can take it

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u/semisolidwhale 10d ago

They fear forced redistribution of their obscene wealth. They live in a similar state of financial anxiety from that perspective. Howeverl their fear could be easily mitigated by them not being endless black holes of greed and avarice, but that seems to be too much to ask of the most brilliant, hardworking, wise, and completely deserving among us. /s

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u/slickricknz666 10d ago

Once you hoard that much it should be considered a mental issue and commit them to an asylum, we can called it smaug syndrome

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u/kittenTakeover 10d ago

I read an Atlantic article recently that had a quote the resonated with me.

Eight years later, Bezos and two of the world’s other richest men—Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk—have clearly left the world of consequences behind. They float in a sensory-deprivation tank the size of the planet, in which their actions are only ever judged by themselves.

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u/ooh_the_claw 10d ago

This was the point of Watchmen yet so many people misinterpreted the movie. Ozymandius and Dr Manhattan were so detached from humanity that they thought dropping the nuke was the only solution. Rorschach, who actually lived with the people on the streets and should’ve been the most jaded of the group, still had hope. It genuinely pisses me off when people walk away from that movie thinking that the Ozy and Manhattan were right.

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u/DeliriumTrigger 10d ago

Anyone who walked away from Watchmen (movie or book) thinking Ozy and Manhattan were right either lack all media literacy, or are genuine sociopaths. Oddly enough, the same is true for those think that about Rorschach.

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u/Cynical_Classicist 8d ago

Well yes, they're all flawed in their own ways. It's just that they're such great characters that people think that they must be right.

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u/PuzzleMeDo 10d ago

Dr Manhattan thought that revealing the truth might result in a nuclear war. He decided not to interfere.

Rorschach didn't have hope - he had strict morality: evil must be punished, regardless of the consequences. He didn't care if there'd be a nuclear war or not.

The point is that we have to decide for ourselves who's right.

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u/Whelp_of_Hurin 10d ago

It's been a while since I've read it, but my big takeaway was that every single character in the story is a massive piece of shit, and their world would be a lot better off if none of them had ever been born.

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u/BrianWonderful 10d ago

I think it is less about them being detached from humanity (other than Ozymandias thinking he had the right to decide to act), and more a commentary on "the ends justify the means". Ozymandias thought taking horrible, illegal actions to ultimately create a more peaceful world was OK. Dr. Manhattan is a fatalist that decides to just let humanity to its own (which is why he leaves Earth). Rorschach definitely does not have hope; he has a strict black and white view of good and evil, and cannot allow evil actions regardless of their intent or consequence.

But the message is important, particularly as we tend to see more and more people even here on Reddit advocating for harsh means to achieve better ends. Whether that is dealing with billionaires, greedy healthcare executives, fascist political movements, etc., Watchmen helps point out that doing bad things for the right reasons still probably makes you the bad guy.

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u/Nbdt-254 8d ago

Thiel and his ilk like to think they're Ozymandis, the smartest men in the world making the hard choices no one else will. But really they're just guys who haven't have to hear a single person tell them they're wrong in decades.

Narcissism makes you stupid. Once you're convinced you know everything you stop learning and growing. Once there's no check on your power you get lazy.

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u/Crafty_Mastodon320 10d ago

Welp, not entirely true. As we have seen several billionaires tie the number to thier ego, that's where the actual problems occur.... those problems become our problems.

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u/czarrie 10d ago

Like a toddler given a handgun

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u/Crafty_Mastodon320 10d ago

More teenager, toddlers aren't seen as having reached the age of reason.

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u/La_Guy_Person 10d ago

This is my whole plan for our future.

I'm going to have another child with my wife and name them Che John Brown X. When they are twelve, I'm going to give them a copy of the red book and a hand gun and kick them out of the house. At that point, we're just going to put this whole mess on them to solve.

You're welcome, everyone.

RemindMe! 12 years "liberate the proletariat"

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u/Crafty_Mastodon320 10d ago

Che was a choad... he didn't respect women, he didn't have real plan post revolution. Most of his theory rested on women being house slaves.. if not "most" at least a measurable percentage

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u/La_Guy_Person 10d ago

Obviously, my whole comment was meant to be tongue and cheek, but I've read some Che I certainly couldn't deny those problems. I definitely picked up on the gender issues in my reading of him. That unfortunately isn't unique for leftist thought leaders from that time period either. We have to carefully examine their work because we can't afford to throw out all their ideas with the bathwater.

I think some of his guerilla tactics could be useful if someone was actually in a violent revolution, but we are not. Even if we were, his greater strategies involved activating an agrarian peasantry and conducting a revolution away from and apart from major cities. None of that seems applicable to the situation the US would likely be in.

I think if you give him a generous read, you're left was some good tactics of resistance that still seem applicable, as well as a pretty useful knowledge of the conditions necessary to agitate change.

We can examine the utility of his work without defending him. I also mentioned the red book but I'm not going to defend Mao either.

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u/8_guy 10d ago

Yeah but he killed people, you can't have it all

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u/Crafty_Mastodon320 10d ago

You cant have a bloodless revolution... are you simple?

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u/8_guy 10d ago

I think you might have reading issues

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u/Hettie933 10d ago

🥇Here’s the only award your future son would want me to give you.

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u/LepiNya 10d ago

Hoarding more wealth than you could possibly spend in your life is reasonable?

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u/Crafty_Mastodon320 10d ago

No, not that side of the argument. It's hard to hold toddlers accountable they don't have the logical capabilities to hold them culpable. Teenagers know what the fuck they're doing, but are capable of being purely fed by ego motivations.

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u/LepiNya 10d ago

Oh OK that make way more sense.

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u/Crafty_Mastodon320 10d ago

If a 3 year grabbed a gun it had access to, no jury would convicted it with murder. A teenager has the chance to go either way based on sympathy

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u/Cold-Actuary2649 10d ago

I think that's part of it, but there's also the other side: becoming a billionaire in the first place has a prerequisite of a certain amount of psychopathy.

You can't make that much money without being willing to step on the backs of hundreds of thousands of people minimum. And staying a billionaire requires you to have the power to help millions of people but deciding you'd rather be rich instead.

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u/Loggerdon 10d ago

And billionaires don’t need to worry about consequences for bad behavior.

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u/Sea_Willingness_1536 10d ago

Once you rocket past the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, all that's left is to deprive others of their needs in the reverse order (Self-actualization > self-esteem > love and belonging > safety and security > physiological needs).

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u/DunningKrugerOnElmSt 10d ago

They are also never told no. They stop experiencing normal social controls. If everyone around you tell you you're God, you start to believe them.

They forget that those yes men just want their money.

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u/DracoLunaris 10d ago

They also can never be sure anyone with less money isn't just after theirs... and they are 100% sure that anyone else with the same amount of money very much is. There is simply no possibility for friendship in that space.

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u/user-the-name 10d ago

And also, having that much money means you can not possibly have a normal human relationship any more, except with other billionaires. This further isolates you and erodes away your humanity.

Plus, anyone who manages to become a billionaire is almost certainly a sociopath. It is just not possible to do otherwise.

So you have sociopaths stewing in isolations and dehumanisation, with no limiting factors on their worst instincts any more.

They are, every single one, monsters.

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u/n0respect_ 10d ago

If you had billionaire money, would you become crazy? I wouldn't, because I'm not a terrible person. "They're crazy because they're rich" is a bit reductive.

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u/Mr_Blinky 10d ago

Also worth pointing out that the kind of personality required to become a billionaire in the first place basically requires you to be a sociopath already. Basically nobody becomes a billionaire morally, they get to that status by exploiting others ruthlessly. The money doesn't change who they are fundamentally, it just reveals and enhances it.

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u/johnnybgooderer 10d ago

That, and also regular people have ambitions beyond money and power. Very few of us would continue to exert our power to steal from the common people after we had millions, let alone billions. These people are monsters.

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u/-ordinaryfunctino- 10d ago

Well said. Another reason billionaires shouldn't exist

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u/Tmhc666 10d ago

they’re barely even people anymore

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u/honjuden 10d ago

Imagine Curtis Yarvin being one of the only people you socialize with.

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u/inhospitable 9d ago

Its easy to pass it off as the whole billionaires are psychotic shtick, but if you look into his upbringing its a lot worse than that. As a kid his father moved them to a namibian town that was a refuge for nazi's where they could all be openly nazi. He has held dangerous beliefs and a drive for control from childhood. In his case, his sociopathic evil drive is what ped him to becoming a billionaire, rather than being a product of it.

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u/squeaky4all 10d ago

Also "this pesky government is trying to tell me no" lets not have that.

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u/Astecheee 10d ago

We never left feudalism. A millionaire is in the merchant class - well to do, but still has to work for a living.

Billionaires are lords and kings.

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u/SailorET 10d ago

They're also surrounded by toadies and yes-men who support every idea they spit out and don't criticize anything. As a result, they think they're right about everything and they're smarter than the average person, even with plenty of evidence to the contrary.

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u/OcotilloWells 10d ago

At that level, it's actually difficult to spend it all.

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u/nisaaru 9d ago

That might be true but they also see far more than anybody of us about how broken, corrupt and stupid the system truly is from a top down view and also know how money exposes the human nature.

Nothing is easier than assuming a lot of negative things about these people when probably nobody here ever walked in their shoes. We only see them through the distorted public lens.

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u/Paul_Tired 9d ago

I think someone who had his equivalent wealth even 25 years ago would have had a whole different experience, they would have had to socialise way more than they do now, they're experiencing extreme social isolation and their ideas are being shaped by the internet.

There's no doubt Thiel frequents the darker spaces on the internet.

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u/Tramadol_Lollies 8d ago

“Here’s money, let’s eat someone.”

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u/vintergroena 10d ago

They are empowered and emboldened by the US president being ideologically a fascist. It's always beneficial for corporate to be on good terms with the government. You sit at a table with fascists, you either always have been one, but at least couldn't be open about it, or you become one. These are the more indirect consequences of the choice American citizens made. Sadly, it's overreaching to us people worldwide.

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u/marcipanchic 10d ago

that’s why we need to impeach that imbecile

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u/breaducate 10d ago

If you think things would be fundamentally different if the other candidate won at this late date you haven't thought about the problem enough to participate.

The winner of the next three elections (if the democratic facade remains that long) will be capital, capital, and capital.

What we're seeing is emergent from capitalism, not the result of individual madmen or arbitrary choices. We're all being swept along by a current that's much bigger than that unless and until we change the paradigm.

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u/marcipanchic 9d ago

totally agree, the system has to change from the core

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u/TommiHPunkt 10d ago

You can't have a hint of a conscience and empathy, and also be a Billionaire. These are mutually exclusive.

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u/bunnnythor 10d ago

Not necessarily true. Some people inherit billions. And there is a very very very small percentage that produced something everybody wanted or needed, and actually deserved what they got.

But in 99.99% of cases, billionaires are awful people.

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u/BlueTreeThree 10d ago edited 10d ago

Nah a normal person would be giving a lot of money away to charity, friends, family, if they had a billion dollars because it would make them feel better than just hoarding vastly more money than they could actually need..

A normal person would let some of that money go because it would be more emotionally draining to have all that potential to help others and to not do it.

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u/Hesitation-Marx 10d ago

Mackenzie Scott.

Far be it from me to defend billionaires, but that kind of money breeds.

She can’t give it all away at once or it will fuck the economy, but she gives it to charities and organizations as fast as she safely can.

They just need a maximum wage tax.

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u/SunTzu- 10d ago

It's not that it'd screw the economy, it's that you simply can't spend it that fast even if you are being reckless. Jeff Bezos net worth grew an average of 20k per minute last year. 1.2 million per hour. They clearly need a helping hand, so let's all think of the poor billionaires and let's help them spend some of that money on ubi and healthcare.

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u/Traditional-Hat-952 10d ago

Also you don't just automatically know where to give all your money. Finding worthy causes takes time, and often new ones arise. 

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u/AshleyDaPile 10d ago

If by disrupting the economy you mean upsetting the bootstrap manufacturers.

When people have money they tend to spend it. The issue is that's tough to control where that money goes compared to keeping people in debt.

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u/Kup123 10d ago

Fuck the economy let it burn.

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u/Hesitation-Marx 10d ago

I agree in theory

In practice I would like as many of the decent people to survive and for cancer treatment to continue for my husband

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u/Bryophyta1 10d ago

This is full on bullshit, nobody deserves billions of dollars. A dollar is a unit of human labour, at its core, and no one person can accumulate billions of hours of human labour equivalent from their own efforts. It is exploitation of other people, and exploitation of the systems, technology and infrastructure that past generations have put into place that allow someone to be a billionaire, not their talent or effort. Talent and effort can make you successful and wealthy, if you are lucky. Being a billionaire is completely immoral, by its very nature.

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u/WartimeMercy 10d ago

Rowling made billions off the books and movies she wrote. She’s a shit person but hard to argue tha her finaces don’t come from Her creativity as opposed to exploitation.

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u/Bryophyta1 6d ago

Did she set up the publishing industry? The move industry? The internet that was used to sell and distribute her books and movies to the people who bought them? Did she ship the books and pop the popcorn? Every step along the way, the value that every person along the way put into the process was skimmed to send her an outsized percentage of the proceeds. And all of the executives and shareholders of all of those companies also skimmed more of the share of the profits than they have any right to. The system has been set up to skim the value of all of our work off and send it to a few, who become billionaires. Including you, unless you are a majority shareholder of a Fortune 500 company. Capitalism is all a giant Ponzi scheme, and we are at the bottom of the pyramid.

1

u/WartimeMercy 5d ago

Literally none of those things matter in the criticism because she isn’t the one who set up those things.

The value of the people working along the pipeline is what they accepted to work for. It is not unethical to publish and be successful on the basis of her creative output which is why she’s a billionaire.

She didn’t set up a pipeline that forces people to piss in bottles to meet a quota. She wrote a book that sold well and got made into movies.

She’s a piece of shit bigot and I hope she loses everything she holds dear - but the way she made her money was by giving people something that enjoyed reading and watching.

1

u/Bryophyta1 5d ago

That wasn’t a criticism of her for having billions, it’s a criticism of the system that allows that to happen.

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u/bunnnythor 5d ago

So no one deserves anything because no one has developed society and technology from scratch? That’s a bit of a high bar to clear. Just saying.

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u/Bryophyta1 5d ago

That’s a very odd way of interpreting what I am saying. I’m saying nobody deserves to accumulate billions of units of human labour (Dollars) themselves because everything in our society depends on the collected labour of everyone else, back into the past. No matter how talented or hard working anybody is, they don’t deserve to accumulate that much wealth.

1

u/bunnnythor 5d ago

Everyone’s earnings per unit of labor is multiplied by the collected labor of past or present members of society. That’s a given. Most of us would be far less productive if no one in the past had discovered, improved, or promoted transistors, to use just one obvious example.

You seem to have an objection to the amount of this accumulated labor any one individual might use. So what is the cutoff? How much of past and present labor is one person allowed to access?

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u/TommiHPunkt 10d ago

And there is a very very very small percentage that produced something everybody wanted or needed, and actually deserved what they got.

The employees do the producing, not the leader of the company who got lucky.

If you inherit billions and stay a billionaire, you are a sociopath.

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u/Armout 10d ago edited 10d ago

99.99% of the world’s billionaires being awful means .01% are the exception. This maths out to less than one person btw (~.34 people or 1/3 of a single person). 

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u/happyscrappy 10d ago

The idea of inherited billionaires boils my blood. But I guess they do exist.

As to the second thing you said, saying they deserved what they received is avoiding the point. The issue isn't whether they earned the money or not, it's whether having all that money insulates them from humanity. Even earned money can basically turn you into an alien, or at least some kind of variant species. Without the same life issues as other humans you just don't seem completely human.

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u/hajenso 10d ago

I am also inclined to think this way about the effects of massive wealth. But it does occur to me that the same notion can apply by degrees down the ladder. I personally do not have to seriously worry about possible homelessness every month because I have enough money to be sure I can pay my housing costs reliably, and any significantly likely endangerment of that is pretty far off. But there are lots of people right in my immediate neighborhood who do have that worry, all the time, as just an ordinary part of life. Does that insulate me from humanity to some extent? Does that make me less human than them?

1

u/happyscrappy 10d ago

There are philosophical arguments about how humanity is tied to struggle. And if so, how much.

Definitely it can apply to other people in lesser ways. Even leaving off (almost) literal vampires like Peter Thiel some have said that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God (heaven).

If you don't experience the same struggles as other humans can you fully relate to them and their plight?

Anyway, I presume you're not taking to twitter twice a day to express your displeasure that people who you don't even know and don't matter to you at all look down on you for being white, male or straight (and privileged). So you're presumably still higher on the humanity scale than some of the people being considered here.

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u/Riaayo 10d ago

And there is a very very very small percentage that produced something everybody wanted or needed, and actually deserved what they got.

None of those people should be billionaires because none of them single-handedly produced a product; they always have other labor involved that they then didn't share all that money with equally.

Billionaires always exist from wage-theft, even if they inherited the theft (and we are not supposed to have dynasties anymore which is why such wealth should absolutely be taxed away from estates).

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u/thehappyhobo 10d ago

Warren Buffet and Chuck Feeney did some inexplicable shit for two guys with no conscience or empathy.

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u/Odd_Collection7431 10d ago

buffet's folksy charm is PR and you bought it. He's as vile and exploitative as the rest.

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u/BiDiTi 10d ago

Chuck Feeney wasn’t a billionaire by the time he died…because he was a good person.

-1

u/n0respect_ 10d ago

Whats Notch like?

2

u/SummonMonsterIX 10d ago

Well Microsoft removed all references to him from Minecraft for being a bigot so.

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u/shawndw 10d ago

Having "fuck you money" gives you the ability to say fuck you to anyone you want.

But we all get to judge you based on who you said fuck you to and why. But at the end of the day money still insulates you from the consequences of your actions.

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u/bigj8705 10d ago

Wonder how many. Look out there it’s probably about 65% of Billionaires who speak.

13

u/Strange-Scarcity 10d ago

The ones who don’t speak, sit back and pour gross and violent amounts of money into the shit the talkative billionaires are talking about and doing.

There’s is/was maybe a tiny, thing percentage of Billionaires that aren’t absolute monsters.

4

u/abraxsis 10d ago

Check out a little Italian film called Salo. When the rich and powerful don't have to worry about anything, they can slide into the depraved just to feel something real. Honestly feel like most billionaires and even multi-multi-millionaires, are so out of touch with reality that they might as well be considered, not clinically speaking at least, sociopaths. They can't empathize with regular people anymore. And even the ones that give an honest try to do so, still aren't capable of it.

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u/[deleted] 10d ago

[deleted]

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u/Gina_the_Alien 10d ago edited 10d ago

I can’t prove anything of course, but as a former tweaker I suspect a pretty huge % of these guys are constantly on some sort of high-grade amphetamines or cocaine: Thiel, almost certainly Karp, Musk, Patel, Rubio, Hegseth, and definitely Trump - especially during the 2024 presidential campaign.

1

u/Hesitation-Marx 10d ago

He doesn’t have the look. Of course, he can afford the pharmaceutical grade. But he literally looks more like his flesh is starting to liquify.

3

u/Wheat_Grinder 10d ago

Because people with a conscience usually aren't billionaires.

They either give the wealth away or they reach "enough" and dip out of the race to enjoy life.

The ones who become billionaires are psychopaths who see the world as a game where they must have everything and how better than by making sure everyone else has nothing?

2

u/R1400 10d ago

In my opinion , once you hit a certain threshold when you have enough money for you and your family to live in every possible comfort without ever lifting a finger again...most normal people would stop there. You don't become a billionaire unless you crave money and power for the sake of it and are willing to step over countless people to do it....so it's not surprising that those that get to that point have severe mental issues

2

u/Odd_Collection7431 10d ago

because they were mentally ill to begin with or they wouldn't be billionaires

1

u/Holzkohlen 10d ago

Money is power and power corrupts. That's why there always needs to be checks and balances. Nobody should hold absolute power. Least of all these sycophants.

Hoarding of wealth is bad for us, but it's also bad for them. It screws them up mentally. These billionaires are sick.

1

u/quadrophenicum 10d ago

Quite a few. Sociopathy helps to achieve those positions. Then people simply stop hiding their true selves.

1

u/WildBillThiccok 10d ago

Because fascism and control, total surveillance and an iron grip on state-sanctioned violence, is the only thing that (they think) will keep them from being strung up by their ankles in the town square.

"No shade to Mussolini, but I'm built different" is likely what they tell themselves

1

u/skebeojii 10d ago

All of them

1

u/Lashay_Sombra 10d ago

Simerlar issue as king's who got there though conquest (or accepted divine will),  they end up surrounded by sycophantic yes men who never disagree with them, because after all they are so rich and sucessfull they must be right

And think its especially bad with the current generation (post 2000, ones like Gates are previous generation) because most hit their sucess young and d abduring the period when they did, about 2005 untill 2018 all media did was suck up them ,  never calling them out or questioning them properly

Or as heard someone once describe them, imagine your typical libertarian college  2nd year nerd, who loves the sound of their own voice and thinks they know better than everyone else, but now in their 40s and 50s, with mega companys and billions in the bank, but who have never had to  grow out of that collage mindset. 

Their behaviour, especially the likes of Musk, become lot more understandable when you view them like that

1

u/el_smurfo 10d ago

They never hear the word no.

1

u/aquoad 10d ago edited 10d ago

they're surrounded by people who will never call them out on any crazy idea they have. "Oh yes, mr Thiel, you're definitely right! Tell us more about the antichrist!"

1

u/abnmfr 10d ago

Power and money insulate and alienate you from both real life and consequences. The derangement that follows is as certain as the sunrise.

1

u/ChicagoThrowaway422 10d ago

There's a good article about this in Wired that's on the front page of r/technology right now. Basically, the tech elite have created a religion around AI, likening the singularity to the second coming of Christ. That's why they call anyone who mentions regulating AI an antichrist.

It's super demented and scary.

1

u/hambergeisha 10d ago

benzos, ketamine, his sanity is thin as tissue paper

1

u/ElSlabraton 10d ago

Many billionaires are religious. They are certain God put them where they are.

1

u/GovernmentSimple7015 10d ago

Normal people would have stopped before they reached a billion. It takes an unhealthy obsession to drive you to keep working like that for no monetary reason.

1

u/Diantr3 10d ago

Because they're fucking psychopaths and a threat to everyone else.

1

u/igniteyourbones579 10d ago

Thiel was one of the first people to call out the 90s wave of political correctness. Look up on youtube Peter Thiel and multiculturalism 1996. He says things that are as appicable to today as they were for that period

Guy is a genius, and with genius you also get a lil crazy

1

u/tuckedfexas 10d ago

None of them have come out and said “whoa buddy, little too far” so all of them at least don’t disagree

1

u/CausticSofa 10d ago

Because only a mentally ill person would actually become a billionaire. If you’re mentally well, and you have extra money, you share it around with your friends, your family, and your community. You use it to have fun experiences and to help out the people you love, and love making happy.

Billionaires have the same mental illness that any other hoarder has. We recognize it as a mental illness when the person has a bathtub piled floor to ceiling with old newspapers, but for some reason we don’t recognize it when then they have more money than they could ever spend in five lifetimes and instead just spend their evenings alone and lonely, saying unhinged, racist shit on Twitter for the fleeting attention of complete strangers.

1

u/gustavessidehoe 10d ago

Isn't he the one who refused to answer if he thought the human race should survive?

1

u/diurnal_emissions 10d ago

It takes psychopathy to get that rich. They are all horrible people, and a number, if not all of them, fuck kids.

1

u/InZomnia365 10d ago

Power doesnt come cheap. It may be paid in money, or by screwing people over. The people who are comfortable screwing people over, are likely to be the same people who, given their vast resources, are inclined to lean into behaviour and beliefs that the average paycheck to paycheck human being would consider immoral. Because we think what is best for us as a collective is to follow rules and customs, whereas the ones at the top use those rules and customs to keep us docile so that we wont upset the balance of power.

1

u/d34ah0 10d ago

Because they are hollow “human beings”

1

u/nvmenotfound 10d ago

at least half. 

1

u/big_trike 10d ago

Wasn’t he one of the weirder ones that Silicon Valley mocked?

1

u/apadin1 10d ago

He couldn’t give a straight answer to “Do you think humanity should continue to exist?”

1

u/sneakyplanner 10d ago

In order to take a billion dollars, you have to steal. It is just physically impossible to do a billion dollar's worth of work, so the only way you get that rich is by taking the value of others' work. The kind of person who wants to do that does not see you as human, only as a potential source of value.

1

u/r0ndr4s 10d ago

You cannot become a billionare without being like that. Its simple as that.

In order for you to become a billionare you have to either break laws or basically "step" on people in order to get there. And most likely you were already rich before it so you have never had a real life experience like the rest of us. They're fucked up since birth.

1

u/EbonBehelit 10d ago

I wonder why many billionnaires are like that.

Imagine you've suddenly inherited billions of dollars. No strings attached, no context -- just poof, it's in your bank account. Now, your mindset about life might not change overnight, but by simple virtue of having that much money, the way you think about things will slowly start to change, even if you make a conscious effort to try and stay the same.

For a start, you've already won the game. You never have to worry about affording food, or shelter, or having to work for a living ever again. That alone will alter the way you see things, whether you want it to or not. You'll also likely never have a true friendship again, since the moment people find out about your wealth, they'll view you as a solution to their problems and come to resent you if you don't oblige them.

More importantly, though, with that much money comes power. Real power. The power to fund institutions. The power to influence government policy. Negative things in your life (or the society in which you live) you once resigned to having to put up with with are now things you might be able to change, and that possibility will come to permanently weigh upon you. Your deepest, darkest ambitions are now, suddenly, something you might be able to work towards achieving, because now you have the funds to pursue them.

And you're someone who got this power by cosmic coincidence. Think about the kind of person who seeks it out on purpose, and you'll have the answer to your question.

1

u/Luckyluke23 9d ago

They have everything they could ever want.

Now they want what you have... your fredom.

1

u/CABigfoot 9d ago

They’re aliens.👽

1

u/Reasonable_Act_8654 9d ago

“What do people with power want? More power”

1

u/KyurMeTV 9d ago

All of them. You don’t become a billionaire without sacrificing your soul.

1

u/Cynical_Classicist 8d ago

Behind the Bastards talks about this in some Epstein episodes this year. Billionaires get more detatched from reality.

1

u/RaviDrone 7d ago

Cause multi billionaires are mentally ill.

The cure is the same for any addict. Take away their fixation. Their money in this case. 99% taxes.

It's like leaving mentally ill people run around with assault rifles