Ever wonder what we would have thought of Henry Ford if he hadn't spent the second half of his life promoting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? I kinda feel like Elon Musk would have ended up as the "world's greatest innovator" if he'd only known to keep his fucking mouth shut.
Krugman hypothesized that when people become billionaires that they can’t square their own sense of infallibility with the fact that they can’t really change the world around them exactly to the specs they want, so it’s a small leap from there to “It’s gotta be a cabal running things” rather than the more hopeless but logical “I guess the world is complex and stably self-sustaining”. Most of us are ok with the latter because we don’t think of ourselves as demigods.
I'll accept that for certain people, not for all billionaires. - Sheldon Adelson threw all his money behind Israel. - J Paul Getty threw all his money behind owning art. - Warren Buffett mostly seems to be interested in making more money. - Melinda Gates apparently convinced Bill to "do something useful with it" like cure malaria - Cornelius Vanderbilt imagined a world without rules and acted accordingly - Jeff Bezos and Paul Allen mostly seem(ed) interested in acquiring toys Julia Philips has a "Yiddish" saying in You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again: "People regard wealth three ways - as blood, to nourish; as semen, to create; and as shit to be thrown away." Elon Musk wants to be adulated because he was never loved as a kid. Elon Musk is Buddy Pine as Syndrome.