I often wonder if there’s an absurdity threshold for American-style capitalism. A boundary which, if crossed, would be a bridge too far for a populace otherwise willing to suspend disbelief by way of the meritocracy myth.
As John Steinbeck famously put it, explaining why Americans often exhibit an instinctual aversion to socialism, “I guess the problem [is] we [don’t] have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone’s a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.”
A decade or so ago, when I first ventured into the seedy world of “finance Twitter,” I stumbled across a brilliant encapsulation of the same dynamic. A netizen with a Gordon Gekko avatar used Chris Farley’s legendary decaffeinated coffee crystals sketch to illustrate Americans’ self-delusion about their place in the economy — and what their reaction might be if they ever wake up to the reality that nearly everyone’s labor, not capital.
In the sketch — one of the most famous in Saturday Night Live‘s storied history — Farley plays an unsuspecting diner at a nice restaurant. When he’s told, by a waiter, that he’s on hidden camera and that he’s drinking instant coffee rather than freshly-brewed regular java, he initially expresses incredulity. Disbelief quickly morphs into rage as he tries to process the brazen betrayal of trust. Then he loses his mind. Here’s the clip:
“When you find out you were labor all along,” read the caption penned by the netizen with the Gekko avatar.
Notwithstanding the social upheaval witnessed during the summer of 2020 — which remains difficult to categorize given the impossibility of disaggregating the furor into its racial and economic components — Americans by and large persist in the fantasy that they’re capital by nature and labor only by circumstance. And circumstance is always attributed to bad luck rather than the system itself.
I don’t hold out much hope anymore for a mass awakening. But it’s possible, I suppose, that the minting of the world’s first trillionaire will give some Americans pause.
This week, Bloomberg confirmed that SpaceX’s latest tender offer will give employees and investors a chance to sell at $421 a share, valuing the company at roughly $800 billion ahead of an IPO tentatively expected next year. According to a separate Bloomberg report, the public offering may value the company at up to $1.5 trillion.
An IPO at that valuation would make Musk’s personal stake worth some $625 billion. Add that to the $470 billion he was worth as of December 12 and you get… well, a trillionaire.
The figure below shows you the net worth gain for select billionaires from the onset of the pandemic through this week.
Since late February of 2020, the world’s 10 wealthiest men have gained $1.7 trillion between them on paper.
For context — and yes, I realize we’re all thoroughly desensitized to these sorts of statistics by now — that’s more than half the GDP of the entire continent of Africa, home to 1.5 billion people. Musk alone has gained one whole South Africa in net worth since early 2020.
I’ve written voluminously over the past five years about the world’s “god risk.” Here’s how I put it in August of 2020:
When we combine the exponential nature of wealth creation in a capitalist system with modern market structure and embed that self-feeding loop in a world that’s becoming ever more dependent on the companies owned by the world’s richest, the read-through is that these fortunes will become so large, so fast, that the people associated with them will become gods.
Fast forward five years, and it’s fair to call that prophecy borne out. The very same self-fulfilling dynamics which concentrated almost all wealth in the accounts of a figurative handful of people pre-pandemic have now created a scenario where the vast majority of the world’s wealth belongs to a literal handful of human beings.
In 2024, I wrote that the same “god risk” had become more acute given what was likely to be a very tight correlation between wealth accumulation and control over AI technology. We’re now seeing that on a weekly basis — the fortunes of the world’s richest routinely rise and fall by tens of billions in the space of just a few days depending on the ebb and flow of the AI narrative.
Coming full circle, I wonder if society — and particularly American society given the concentration of this dynamic among American companies and their founders — will ever wake up to the inherent peril. This isn’t about yachts or Lamborghinis. It’s about agency. And the extent to which none of us will have any before long.
We will eat cake and like it. Perhaps.
A tiny subset of the population has had great success in getting the vast majority to focus on race, gender and culture wars while they’ve been winning – with little opposition – the one that really matters, the class war.
If I were to be granted authorship of the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, there would be an entry for those who hold onto and strive to multiply vast wealth that they can in no way reasonably utilize for themselves in the context of a society where too many are barely able to maintain food security, let alone financial security.
Agreed about the distraction…feeling racially and morally superior appeals emotionally to people more than feeling helpless and inferior.
Re: DSM. Narcissistic Personality d/o and/or Antisocial Personality Disorder(aka sociopathy ) probably have it covered given the symptoms of lack of empathy, entitlement, grandiose sense of self, etc
Aristotle: When too much wealth accretes to the top, social order will collapse?
Not if humanoid robots with rifles patrol the streets.
Humans can live without electricity.
The very wealthy have the same problem as Cesar, they have to be in the room with other people at a certain point.
When humanoid robots are patrolling the streets there will be no society.
If this continues, more and more of us will be…LIVIN IN A VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER!
Quote of the week by Luke Gromen, “The elites are going to sacrifice the People to finance building their God in a box.”
It’s taken me a long while to realize that the argument that always boils down to “but Capitalism has given us all a better quality of life and is the best system to entice and sustain motivation” just completely overlooks that Capitalism has a major inherent flaw. It was pretty much inevitable that Capitalism, as practiced in the US, would become “shareholder Capitalism” and convince people that wealth aggregation of obscene proportions juxtaposed with abject poverty and need is ok. The ‘argument’ is really quite basic and simple when it’s framed as a flaw, it puts most of the rest of the arguments aside.
It is not like this is a new problem. Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations warns of the capture of government by the merchant class and had suggestions as to how to avoid this.
Do people ‘rise up’ anymore? I know Americans will attend demonstrations with their Starbucks latte in hand, but will people actually risk their own lives in support of a general uprising? Even in spots like civil war Syria and present-day Gaza, there seems to be insufficient will to stand up to an armed military force even when the alternative is starvation and death. No more “give me liberty or give me death”. No more “Liberty, equality, justice, or death”. Maybe humans have become domesticated.
One thing to remember in all this is that death is a terminal genetic disease that will eventually take each and every one of us, including Trump, Musk, Ellison and all their kith and kin. Good riddance to all and to all and good night.
There would need to be a movement, the movement would need progenation and leadership. Heretofore, there has not been such a pro-human movement. In fact, those that would seek to further the fascist oligarchy (aka anti-human movement) have created the MAGA movement to capitalize on this current socio-cultural dynamic. The “regular/everyday” people who support MAGA have fallen prey to the lie that they are a part of such a pro-human movement, when it is obvious to any clear thinking person they have become pawns of the very thing they think they are fighting against.