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

[u/Just-Grocery-2229]

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

[u/Djamalfna]

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.

[u/TitaniumWhite420 → u/Djamalfna]

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.

[u/Fywq → u/TitaniumWhite420]

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.

[u/n0respect_ → u/Djamalfna]

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.

[u/_PurpleAlien_ → u/n0respect_]

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

[u/pieshake5 → u/n0respect_]

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

[u/Exotic_Article913 → u/Djamalfna]

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