Tech Billionaires Flirt With the Guillotine
New York Times publishes dramatic warning
Are Silicon Valley billionaires tempting fate and flirting with the guillotine?
In a New York Times op-ed, Michael Hirschorn argues that tech oligarchs like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen are super-charging public anger at the wealthy. They’re doing this by flaunting their power and engaging in ever more absurd behavior that seems designed to stoke public hatred toward the rich overlords of American democracy.
The op-ed compares them to Louis XV, the French king whose flamboyant and reckless incompetence created the conditions for the French Revolution—a violent revolt against wealthy elites and the monarchy itself.
“The billionaires have only themselves to blame,” Hirschorn writes.
From the op-ed:
It’s as if the sheer scale of this wealth, which beggars even the riches of the Gilded Age, has induced a kind of class sociopathy. Peter Thiel, the crucial funder of JD Vance’s ascent, talks extensively about his desire to escape democracy (and politics generally) in favor of some kind of bizarre techno-libertarian future. Balaji Srinivasan, the investor and former crypto exec, calls for tech elites to take control of cities and states — or build their own — and run them as quasi-private entities.
Alex Karp, who along with Thiel founded the high-flying military intelligence company Palantir, shares his predictions about an apocalyptic clash of civilizations, pausing to brag, “I think I’m the highest-ranked tai chi practitioner in the business world.” In another era, this would all be laughable. But as the MAGA moment emboldens them to drop any pretense of civic virtue and just go full will-to-power, their nutty ideas are now borderline plausible. And terrifying.
Though the Network State cult is not mentioned by name, it’s a relief to see the NYT opinion section allow someone to mention Balaji Srinivasan and his plot to create private tech fascist governments. After the recent Financial Times story on the Network State, it will be harder for elite media outlets to completely ignore the issue. So, that’s progress.
In my talks over the past year, I have also mentioned the French Revolution as a frame for understanding one possibility of where things are headed. In 1789, the decadence, negligence and tyranny of the wealthy resulted a violent explosion that ended over 800 years of hereditary monarchy in France.
Hirschorn compares the conditions of pre-revolution France to what’s happening in the U.S. today:
The historian Robert Darnton described an uncannily similar moment in “The Revolutionary Temper: Paris 1748-1789,” his brilliant 2023 account of the decades leading up to the French Revolution. The preconditions were all there: suffocating top-down control of the media, rapid technological change, let-them-eat-cake behavior among the courtier class, weaponized religious bigotry, mansions with hideously de trop ballrooms.
Billionaires hold outsized influence over our political system. American politicians tend to cater to wealthy donors instead of voters. But there are only 902 billionaires in the United States, which has a population of 340 million people.
As Hirschorn points out, polls shows that the American public has become increasingly resentful of the all-powerful role the ultra-rich play in our lives.
They may have the money and the proximity to power. But We, The People, far outnumber them. When we decide we’ve had enough, we can end this very quickly—hopefully with sensible tax rates and dramatic political reform instead of guillotines.
Click here for a gift link to read “The Billionaires Have Gone Full Louis XV.”
Big Tech’s ‘Elite Victim Complex’
Last week, Financial Times columnist (and Nerd Reich subscriber!) Edward Luce called out the dark visions of Silicon Valley oligarchs:
If America’s current generation of centibillionaires are any guide, storied wealth is a one-way ticket to hell. Humanity’s only hope of saving itself is to move to Mars, according to Elon Musk. The Anti-Christ is coming, says Peter Thiel. Crypto is your only security against a collapsing US dollar, says pretty much every bitcoin pusher in the neighbourhood.
Many of today’s dystopian plutocrats are the same people who promised utopia in the earlier phases of the internet. Something chemical must have changed since then in Palo Alto’s water supply. Instead of the lure of community and being connected, we are being sold cataclysm and apocalypse.
