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> There's Zuck, whose underlings let him win at board-games like Settlers of Catan because he's a manbaby who can't lose (and who accuses Wynn-Williams of cheat

• js8 2y ago
  > Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon? Yes. As a kid, I read a legend that one of the Charlemagne's knights got so annoyed for losing a game of chess that he killed his opponent with the chessboard.
  • laserlight 2y ago
    > this insecure I agree that such an event would demonstrate insecurity. I would also argue that past elites were not “that insecure”, because they put their lives at risk by waging wars. Of course, later elites figured out ways to address the downsides.
    • pjc50 2y ago
      There's a frame question in this, and the history of duelling. Is your image, or self-image, in matters of honor or social status more important than your life? Is it secure or insecure to risk your life simply because of an insult? To what extent does "security" in this context boil down to the capacity for violence, rather than anything else?
      • 542354234235 2y ago
        But duels were instituted primarily to curb vendettas, deadly street brawls, and retaliatory assassinations that aristocrats regularly engaged in. At least with a duel, the violence was limited to one death and a settlement to the honor of all involved. It was in improvement to the situation they were facing at the time. But the idea of honor itself was a necessity for most of history, when there was no central government to enforce contracts, punish violence, etc. Your reputation was one of the only protections you had. Whether your family was known to exact revenge to those that wronged you or as weak pushovers would affect someone’s decision to kill one of you, steal your things, or make a deal with you and keep everything for themselves. You had to show that anything someone could gain at your expense would be outweighed by your commitment to take more back in revenge.
    • giraffe_lady 2y ago
      It's hard to speak broadly about this I think but since we already are. Military aristocrats like knights were at the least risk among combatants in an armed conflict, being better armed, armored, and more likely to be mounted compared to the levied militias or even professional soldiers, later in the early modern era. And social norms at the time were to take them hostage and ransom them back to their family or allied higher lord if possible, so their chances of surviving a lost battle were much higher than that of the men they were leading. So even in this context they are already figuring out "ways to address the downsides." Vs the like, the normal people who would also be called on to die in battle, but then the rest of the time would be living under the capricious and frequently violent rule of these certainly-no-more-than-average-emotionally-secure men with more or less unchecked power over their daily lives. What we have now developed from what they had then and a lot of the dynamics are quite similar. The violence is more abstract but that's exactly what the current crop of tech billionaires is trying to change.
• tux3 2y ago
  Success has a part of skill, and a part of luck. It hurts to be reminded about skill issues. Board games aren't as simple as time invested. I could spend my whole life studying chess, and some 13yo prodigy will handily beat me blindfolded, while juggling three other boards. Board games cannot be conquered with wealth or a successful business. Or, rather, they can, but only by pressuring your underlings into letting you win; giving you the feeling you crave.
  • ffsm8 2y ago
    Naw, the rare super talented 13yo child that excells at such games will have also spend an incredible amount of time learning everything there is about it - leaving very little time to pursuit outside of that discipline to improve themselves. There is a grain of truth to what you're saying, obviously - as Magnus has proven when he started to enter chess tournaments... Outplaying people with decades more experience. But you're also ignoring that he spend pretty much every waking moment of his thinking life playing chess.
  • sampullman 2y ago
    But if you knew people were letting you win, wouldn't that ruin the feeling forever? It seems like there must be another component, but maybe it is just that simple.
    • johannes1234321 2y ago
      If they let me win, that is since I have power over them.
      • IggleSniggle 2y ago
        This is the more interesting answer to me because it's a reminder that everyone is playing a different game. I used to play games to win, but now I play games to maximize the collective enjoyment of playing the game. This shift began with my spouse (who is a very sore loser) but continued with my children. I still let them lose sometimes because I want them to know how to enjoy a losing game, but I (selfishly) want them to enjoy games as much as I do, so that's my focus, and I will play to lose (as non-obviously as possible) frequently. When I play games against good players now, I notice that I've lost a lot of skill in the kind of strategic ruthlessness required to win. I found this surprising, because playing in a way where you're trying to "fix" the outcomes for other players and modulate the mood of the game based on outcomes still requires a great deal of strategic insight and clever play. I guess the additional attention to the social and emotional dynamics must naturally reduce focus. It's kind of a shame, because you can't maximize enjoyment with a skilled player without being skilled, but I suppose the trade off is that there will always be more unskilled players who can benefit from enjoyment maximizing play than skilled players who will suffer from subpar opponents. Naturally, skilled players are already getting a lot out of the game, or else they wouldn't be playing enough to become skilled.
• ryandrake 2y ago
  Probably have been told their whole lives that they are so smart, clever, and special, that they will (and rightly should) always win. So any loss immediately looks to them like foul play by their opponent(s). Even if it's just a casual game. Anyone telling them otherwise doesn't last long in their orbit. As they gain power, they naturally grow a bubble of sycophants who reinforce their "I always win" beliefs.
  • vintermann 2y ago
    There's also no shortage of people willing to tell Zuck and Musk (from a relatively safe distance, like in public here at HN) that they're insecure manbabies born into wealth who don't deserve a fraction of the power they've managed to claw themselves. I suspect that we, and the desire to show us wrong (or at the least spite us) are also part of the equation for why the current crop of billionaires are as they are. Not that this means we're wrong, exactly.
    • enaaem 2y ago
      From an Eastern philosophy point of view, low ego with high confidence, is a skill that can be trained. It is also a skill someone can get worst at. That being said, I don't think that Zuck and Musk would have become low ego people without internet criticism, since they are on the completely wrong path.
    • exe34 2y ago
      For £1M/year after tax, I'd tell Zuck anything he wants to hear from 9 to 5, excluding weekends, bank holidays and 28 days of annual leave. We all have a price really.
      • esafak 2y ago
        You could make more than that without compromising yourself. Aim higher.
        • exe34 2y ago
• mherkender 2y ago
  I think it's easy to unknowingly surround yourself with yes-men and become insulated from failure. Losing then seems like an exception to the rule, a bug.
• amarcheschi 2y ago
  Given this, I don't want to imagine how much Elon Musk is suffering right now for the bullying he gets and for Tesla, which have higher stakes than a tabletop game. And I don't feel bad for it
  • aredox 2y ago
    He doesn't care about Tesla anymore. His president will kill EV subsidies and give them to coal. He never cared about the mission of Tesla, and anyone working at Tesla who still believes in it is a sucker.
    • generic92034 2y ago
      So, why is he not selling all his Tesla stocks, then?
      • solumunus 2y ago
        One cannot simply sell all of their stock if they own that much. I don’t think Elon cares about Tesla as a vision anymore, but does he care about being “the richest man in the world” or at least one of them. Absolutely, and TSLA is the reason that’s true.
      • Balinares 2y ago
        That's not how it works. You can't sell without someone buying from you, and if you're selling everything then buyers will know your stock is worthless and will not exactly be rushing to take you up on the offer, except at whatever severely depressed prices will generate a profit margin from liquidating your assets. He's much better off propping up the stock with a bit more grifting for as long as that will last and living off loans taken with stocks as the collateral.
      • amarcheschi 2y ago
        I think they don't have to pay the same amount of taxes if they use the stock as collateral for getting loans Chances are there are some considerations which I don't know about
• Jevon23 2y ago
  In order to get into Zuckerberg’s position in the first place, you need to have a highly competitive personality type. And competitive people want to win at EVERYTHING, all the time. It’s a constant compulsion. Even if they might intellectually understand the distinction between “just a game” and “actual serious time”, they don’t “feel” that distinction in their bones. They have no off switch.
  • throw__away7391 2y ago
    I think that while the trait itself is fairly common the ability to bully and pressure everyone around you to give in to this level of petty and demeaning deference is quite rare. You only see it in powerful people because they're the only ones who can actually make people do this. I have an aunt like this and she's super annoying and largely ostracized and in constant conflict with people around her, but if she had $175 billion she could probably surround herself with people who would indulge her.
    • TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
      Money is a potent and addictive hallucinogenic neurotoxin. We have a culture where everything is run by addicts, with predictably disastrous consequences.
      • dgfitz 2y ago
        s/money/power Money is a means to an end.
    • rightbyte 2y ago
      The two sour losers I know just refuse to play any game at all. Cooperative games or team games they think are kinda fine though of they are "forced to". They just can't handle being targeted as individuals. Maybe Zuckerberg has a lack of self reflection?
      • 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
• anal_reactor 2y ago
  > If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game? I think that successful people tend to be people who pay a lot of attention to "winning" in as many situations as possible. If you accept losing as a part of life and move on, you're not going to be successful, because you don't spend time thinking how you could've won. Of course this looks funny in situations where one cannot win, but it's really helpful when it comes to fixing your mistakes, allowing you to be successful.
  • Extasia785 2y ago
    > but it's really helpful when it comes to fixing your mistakes, allowing you to be successful. It would be helpful if they'd take a loss as a learning opportunity. But as stated in the original quote they threw a tantrum and accused the opponent of cheating, taking away no lesson to improve the next time around.
• jcgrillo 2y ago
  used to be such accusations were grounds to seek satisfaction in a duel.. might be time to revive that practice
• bmitc 2y ago
  > If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game? Deep running narcissism, bordering on sociopathy or psychopathy.
• deleted 2y ago
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• aredox 2y ago
  Because they are psychopaths and sociopaths. Anyone with a conscience would worry about having the work of your lifetime being used in genocide. Zuck isn't like that. He doesn't care. What he cares is winning at board games.
• pjc50 2y ago
  > Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon? This is very Roman Emperor behavior. Or Chinese Emperor, for that matter. It has pretty much always been the case that power and privilege lets you get away with bad behavior while simultaneously holding your subordinates to onerous standards and/or inflicting punishment on a whim. Building a court who will steer you away from bad ideas rather than surrounding yourself with yes-men requires active effort, and enough humility to be aware of that risk. The other constant historical trope is of course the abuse of power for sexual purposes.
• deleted 2y ago
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• genezeta 2y ago
  In the 1800s in Spain, king Ferdinand VII, was famously keen on playing billiards while being a really bad player. His opponents were known to, not only play badly, but play so that he would get easy positions to shoot. "Así se las ponían a Fernando VII" is even nowadays a popular -though not that widely used today- expression to tell someone the task in front of them is an easy one nobody can fail.
• TrackerFF 2y ago
  I think it is part nature, part nurture. To get where they are, they need to be quite smart, competitive, and ruthless. As soon as they succeed, they become magnets to yes-men and people trying to ride their coat-tails. So you end up in a position where the majority will ask "how high?" when you tell them to jump, and who will never question you. Do that for a couple of decades, and something has to change - psychologically. You become condition to it.
  • pixl97 2y ago
    >I think it is part nature, part nurture. Really rich people aren't any different from the rest of us. You quickly realize that what sets them apart is privilege. You see behaviors in the wealthy that if they were poor they'd be locked up for. "They just let you do it if you're rich" comes to mind.
  • ajb 2y ago
    There is also a feedback effect. Most people are part of groups which aren't strongly selected for moral character, but the rich and powerful become surrounded by people who are after money and power, unless they deliberately manage to avoid that. So some of their bad behaviour is because the availability heuristic tells them that that's how most people behave, and fills them with cynicism and contempt
• Mountain_Skies 2y ago
  He should have eaten his own dog food and played the games inside the Metaverse where he could have had the environment ensure his desired outcome. But maybe the Metaverse itself is now a painful reminder of failure.
• teekert 2y ago
  Right? I had a sort of respect for the Zuck, same partner for a long time, seems nice to his children, does charity… And then he gets one of those mega yachts and he can’t stand loosing at board games. So disappointing.
  • diggan 2y ago
    Surprise surprise, probably the image you had of Zuckerberg was not an intimate look into his personal life but instead a carefully crafted image created by an professional agency whose life and blood is creating neat images of famous people. Somehow, actual real life details are starting to come out (he does seem more "daring" as of late, might be why), destroying the picture painted by the professionals for all this time. Celebrity worship really needs to end, including the worship of the celebrity programmer. We're all humans, with a bunch of flaws, and it's easy to forget when what you're consuming is a fake impression of someone.
    • exe34 2y ago
      > crafted image created by an professional agency whose life and blood is creating neat images of famous people Melon should fire his!
      • immibis 2y ago
        Probably did.
    • maxehmookau 2y ago
      There is definitely a point where we need to stop assuming that people who are good at building tech companies are, by default, good at _anything_ else. They might be, sure. But we shouldn't assume it.
  • Swoerd123 2y ago
    Imagine being so spineless, so utterly desperate for power, that you’re willing to contort your public persona just to appease a man who made lying a brand. Zuckerberg didn’t just sell out—he gift-wrapped his integrity and hand-delivered it to Cheetolini.
• krapp 2y ago
  > Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon? The modern phenomenon, relative to history in general, is that upsetting an elite doesn't get you immediately killed or sold into slavery. But yes, they have always been like this. Behind every great fortune is a crime, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
• deleted 2y ago
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• astura 2y ago
  Many many many years ago I used to like playing Scrabble (knockoff) on Yahoo Games. I quit playing completely when my opponent accused me of cheating because I made a high point move and was winning.
  • doubled112 2y ago
    First person shooters were like this back before I stopped playing them online. Get decent and dominate a few rounds? Here's a kick ban, must be cheating. Couldn't be because they keep bunching up.
• Spooky23 2y ago
  These guys are sort of like a type of inherited wealth. They created companies at a time where you could go public and have no accountability to a board with power. When you take a genius and drown them in good fortune… you sometimes get a sense of personal infallibility.
• croisillon 2y ago
  i see it in local politics a lot too, people don't dare to contradict the leaders, who in turn end up believing they are right on everything, it's a sad thing really
• cess11 2y ago
  At the Versailles court of the Louies there were constant parties and games, gambling and otherwise. It wasn't to bond or for fun, it was to keep the aristocracy too busy to threaten the dictatorship, as well as letting the king exert an immediate influence over them through a borderline insanity. Infamously the first or second Versailles Louis, I forgot which, got very aggressive around the topic of toilet excretions, basically forcing aristocrats to try and handle being drunk and desperately needing both to piss and stay in his vicinity. The ceremony around the parties and the court in general over time got more and more intricate and maddening, causing the aristocracy to spend more and more resources on getting clothes and drinks and showing up at the right time and doing the right thing and being on top of the fashion of the day. It would be weird if a late modern corporate dictator didn't apply similar tactics, since they are known to work and didn't come to an end until the guillotines rolled into town. Things like sleepovers in the office, ceremonial games, constant 'after work', oddball demands regarding clothing and behaviour, intimate surveillance and gossiping, and so on.
  • hermitcrab 2y ago
    >Things like sleepovers in the office, ceremonial games, constant 'after work', oddball demands regarding clothing and behaviour, intimate surveillance and gossiping, and so on. That sounds more like a cult than a company. I don't understand why anyone would put up with that, if they had any other alternative. And most people do have alternatives.
    • hylaride 2y ago
      > I don't understand why anyone would put up with that To paraphrase McBain's answer to "how do you sleep at night?" "On top of a pile of money with many beautiful ladies". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO0JaecRWy0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO0JaecRWy0
      • hermitcrab 2y ago
        People with the skills to earn lots of money can generally also get well paid jobs at companies not run by sociopaths.
• lordnacho 2y ago
  You've won the lottery, but you don't want to acknowledge that you won the lottery. You want to feel they you deserve your position through hard work and talent. You're living in a society where people are credulous, to some degree they believe that hard work and talent are related to success. So what will happen? Everyone you hire ends up patting you on the back, telling you what a great guy you are.
  • mercacona 2y ago
    I wish I could upvote you twice.
  • sokoloff 2y ago
    > to some degree they believe that hard work and talent are related to success Does anyone actually believe that hard work and talent are either zero or negatively correlated to success? I don't think the correlation is 1.0, but I firmly believe that it's positive for both.
    • latency-guy2 2y ago
      > Does anyone actually believe > I firmly believe that it's positive for both. Alright, setup an experiment and prove it. Should be easy. Speculation is free. Can't ever be wrong in the land of uncertainty.
      • overgard 2y ago
        Yes, it's totally sensible that someone would setup an experiment to prove a conjecture in a comment thread that will be forgotten in a couple hours. Totally reasonable ask.
        • latency-guy2 2y ago
          Guess there's nothing we can do then. Beliefs are all that matter.
    • ajb 2y ago
• benterix 2y ago
  I had a conversation with one of these types. He honestly told me, "I really feel I am superior to most people". He was very frank with me. (And, in the things he did, he was actually much better than most people - he did have great talent but also spend almost all of his time on that.) So my pet peeve theory is when they feel they are not superior and other people are better than them in activities that involve logical thinking for example, they feel extremely uncomfortable as their perception of themselves gets weaker, hence these strange behaviors.
  • HexPhantom 2y ago
    When someone builds their whole identity around being "the smartest person in the room," any situation that challenges that (even something as trivial as losing a game) can feel like a threat to their entire self-image. It's not just ego, it's almost existential.
• klabb3 2y ago
  It’s part of the pathology. So much so it’s violating otherwise core tenets of their culture and customs: Look, today meritocracy and brutal honesty are absolutes, they’re considered critical, exactly to overcome biases that stand in your way. The Zuck types are 100% believers in this (heck they accelerated it), yet they still need positive affirmations like winning board games. Most people (especially smart and opportunistic ones) fold because they know winning a private board game means nothing.
• bsenftner 2y ago
  I know these types of people, a lot of them, but I am not one of them. I was a student at Harvard, I've dated the daughter of a film studio owner, the daughter of the then-owner of Gucci, I've worked at an Academy Award winning VFX studio, I know celebrities and CEOs, and I married an Academy Award winner. I know these people. There is a mechanism in high wealth investment circles that seeks very ambitious and simultaneously low self knowledge individuals to invest heavily. They tend to be driven and charismatic in that drive, while being very ignorant of their negative impact on others. Many high net worth individuals see themselves in such youth, and invest in them, their ideas and their drive. They create psychopaths, and celebrate their mistakes as fuel for control of them later. This mechanism I am describing is very powerful, dominating.
• DragonStrength 2y ago
  No one deserves that much more than others. No one believes they don't deserve what they have. People work backwards to justify why they need so much more power, control, and wealth than others. Worse for Zuck b/c his special shares. The ambition/success feedback loop never stops, which is why the folks on top seem somehow less secure and content than the rest of us. Most of us figure out we probably won't be the #1 anything pretty early in our journey and stop fixating on comparison and focus on maximizing ourselves.
  • HexPhantom 2y ago
    Most people have to make peace with not being №1, and in doing so, they actually get a shot at real contentment. But when you're at the top, the game never ends. There's always another metric to dominate, another threat to neutralize, another narrative to control.
• RiceRichardJ 2y ago
  > If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game? It’s possible that exact personality trait is what drove them to such success in the first place. Perhaps like an obsession with winning.
• _1tem 2y ago
  We all have personal quirks which would appear silly if publicly known. But most of us are not billionares, so these quirks do not come to light, or do not seem that strange in ordinary people. "Not wanting to lose at board games" is actually quite a mild personal quirk compared to some of the things I know about myself or about my close friends. I know a guy who spends 20 minutes picking out tomatoes.
  • Arainach 2y ago
    There is a huge difference between not wanting to lose and getting angry when someone doesn't let you win.
• preommr 2y ago
  > If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game? All the other comments are about Zuckerberg being an out-of-touch egomaniac, but I think this is a reflection of people. We want our leaders to be infaliable and we use the stupidest metrics to judge people. Remember how Ed miliband eating a sandwich became a scandal? For every one person that would see losing as not a big deal, there's like ten people that will think "this guy can't win a game of settlers of Catan, and he's running the company???". I am reminded of that joe rogan clip where he's just in awe of Elon Musk because of his Diablo rankings or something. People feed into the mythology. It's all stupid and insane, but I don't see how anyone can look at the current state of politics or the stock market and not say that the world is full of crazy things that just run on vibes.
• KeithBrink 2y ago
  I was interested in this anecdote about the board games, but it seems like there's at least some dispute about how true or inflated this story is: https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-board-game-careless-people-sarah-wynn-williams-2025-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-board-game-c... I think it's easy to believe a narrative like this about someone generally disliked, but the reality about basically everyone is that we have good moments and bad moments. People that are famous are constantly being watched and evaluated. Given the inevitability of those bad moments being observed and reported, I don't think it's a good foundation for evaluating someone's character. In this case, it's mostly useful for confirming an already negative point of view.
  • achenet 2y ago
    from the article you linked, it seems that Zuck told everyone else to gang up on the next hardest player so he could win. That they went along with it is... kind of in line with what Wynn-Williams said. Would they still have all teamed up on Zuck's opponent if Zuck hadn't been their boss?
  • palata 2y ago
    Sure, one single anecdote doesn't say much. But at this point it would be hard to say that Zuck is not a toxic individual. Not everyone is toxic.
• rsynnott 2y ago
  > Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon? I don't think _all_ the superrich _are_ this insecure. Like, the obvious examples of this sort of behaviour are Trump (golf, in particular), Musk (video game nonsense), Zuck (this). But all three of those are very obviously fucked-up, socially maladjusted people in _other_ ways, too. Potentially the issue is more that being very rich allowed them to _get away_ with this behaviour; poor weirdos have more incentive to suppress it because people will only accept it from rich weirdos. Though the phenomenon of "adult manbaby gets upset when not allowed to win game (especially by his partner)" is _absolutely_ out there, even for non-absurdly-rich people; see any subreddit about relationships for examples.
  • mwigdahl 2y ago
    That phenomenon is certainly not exclusive to men. All it takes is someone insecure enough to feel that losing a game threatens their sense of worth as a person.
    • rsynnott 2y ago
      Nah, definitely not exclusive to men, but you do see it more from men. I think possibly at least partially because it _is_ seen as somewhat more socially acceptable from men than from women; the boy who never grew up is viewed more favourably than the girl who ditto. > All it takes is someone insecure enough to feel that losing a game threatens their sense of worth as a person You also need them to think that they'll get away with this behaviour, whether it be just being very rich, or because there is some societal tolerance of Homer Simpson-esque emotionally immature men, or for some other reason.
• phaedrus441 2y ago
  I think you'll see this kind of thing in many professions. Some doctors, who are highly specialized and highly trained in their field, act like they should automatically be great at skills they barely have experience with, and then get frustrated when they don't immediately excel or when people with less impressive credentials end up being better at something. My family member who taught flying to hobbyist pilots always said physicians were the most dangerous students because of their "know-it-all" attitude.
• alfiedotwtf 2y ago
  People who have built empires who then surround themselves with Yes Men is probably the strongest indicator they’re about to lose it all
• thesuperbigfrog 2y ago
  >> Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy? Does anyone who fails to bend over backwards for them just end up getting exiled? Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon? There is a long history of wealthy elites wanting to always win, even at games, and who want to be the center of attention. Kaiser Wilhelm II had many of the same characteristics seen in today's ultrawealthy elites. When he commanded forces in German military exercises his side was always the side that won because it was his side. "Wilhelm II's reign marked a departure from the more restrained leadership of his predecessors, as he sought to assert direct influence over the German Empire's governance and military affairs. This shift toward a more "personalist" system, where loyalty to the Kaiser outweighed true statesmanship, weakened the effectiveness of German leadership and contributed to its eventual strategic missteps." Source: https://www.deadcarl.com/p/the-kaiser-and-his-men-civil-military https://www.deadcarl.com/p/the-kaiser-and-his-men-civil-mili... Lots of historical echos in the state of the world today.
  • mrguyorama 2y ago
    >This shift toward a more "personalist" system, where loyalty to the Kaiser outweighed true statesmanship, weakened the effectiveness of German leadership and contributed to its eventual strategic missteps." I'm not convinced there has ever been a positive or constructive outcome from cults of personality.
• HexPhantom 2y ago
  I think it's less a new phenomenon and more a timeless one - we've just digitized the palace
• 542354234235 2y ago
  Being ultra wealthy/famous/powerful would have a lot of negative psychological pressures that would likely effect all of us in that situation. Personal growth is difficult. Acknowledging negative parts of ourselves is difficult. Many times, we are forced to confront something negative about ourselves because of how it effects our lives and our relationships. I think we have all had that friend at some point that was a poor sport. They were poor losers, gloating winners, and just unpleasant to play games with. Usually that person stops getting invited to game night, or you have a “come to Jesus” talk with them about their behavior. The social pressure of losing friends is a powerful motivator. But what if that person has an unlimited supply of people that would validate, flatter, and reinforce their bad behavior? When you are thinking about who to hang out with from your unlimited rolodex, you will likely subconsciously lean towards people that make you feel validated, understood, respected, etc. Slowly, by degrees, over years, you could find yourself surrounded by sycophants, where you more and more validated and catered to, and are less and less used to hearing constructive criticism of your behavior. It reminds me of how highly processed “junk” foods can short circuit a lot of our physiological mechanisms around overeating. Basically unlimited availability of junk food is part of why obesity is has shot up. Being ultra wealthy/famous/powerful is the highly processed food of the psyche. It doesn’t mean every rich person become psychologically unhealthy but it makes the rates of it shoot up.
• mcpar-land 2y ago
  One of my favorite tweets: > Being a billionaire must be insane. You can buy new teeth, new skin. All your chairs cost 20,000 dollars and weigh 2,000 pounds. Your life is just a series of your own preferences. In terms of cognitive impairment it's probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day https://x.com/Merman_Melville/status/1088527693757349888 https://x.com/Merman_Melville/status/1088527693757349888
• AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  It's an old problem. Medieval kings had this problem. One way around it was the fool/jester, who could (within limits) say the things that nobody else was free to say.
• ninetyninenine 2y ago
  It’s a personality trait that leads him to success. Yes Zuckerberg won the lottery. But at the same time his business acumen and ruthless personality put him in a position to win the lottery.
• ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
  I know a number of wealthy folks, many of them, actually really decent people. They deserve their wealth, and I have no issues with it. They tend to have somewhat different value systems than I do, but we get along, anyway. I have learned that one word they pretty much never hear, is "No." Even the very best of them, gets used to having every whacked-out fever dream their Id squeezes out, treated like God's Word. People who aren't very good at self-analysis and self-control, can have real problems with it. We are watching a bunch of very public examples of exactly this, right now.
  • nartho 2y ago
    How wealthy are the wealthy folks you know ? a quant or faang principal engineer making 1.5-2 million/year is wealthy and worked hard to get there (although, luck is still a big part of it) yet they're much closer in wealth than a fast food employee than they are to the super rich. Someone who has accumulated 50 millions of assets is wealthy, yet they'll never afford a super yacht or the lifestyle that billionaires can afford.
    • ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
      Multi-millionaires (not billionaires), but they are business owners and finance folks. They own a mansion and a yacht (Bugs Bunny reference). But you are correct. Different orbit from the ultra-wealthy. They still hang out with plebes like me. However, if this happens to these folks, then you can bet that it also happens to the next valence level.
    • ido 2y ago
      the principle engineer may have a lot of money but also still has a job with a boss and thus probably still hears (or know they can potentially hear) "no".
• sgarland 2y ago
  > And anyway, if you're playing games for fun and to bond with people, you probably shouldn't be playing tryhard optimal strategies every game, and should instead explore and experiment with more creative strategies. Agreed. I have played some truly awful strategies in games (Azul: Queen’s Garden comes to mind) where it was clear within a round or two that it was doomed to fail; my wife / gaming partner expressed dismay that I was doggedly continuing, but to me, I had to see it through without introducing other variables so that I could definitively know (modulo luck of tile draw) that the strategy sucked. I thoroughly enjoyed losing. EDIT: if anyone is curious, the strategy was to maximize high-point (5/6) tokens above everything else, eschewing end-round bonuses, brief tactical shifts, etc. Turns out it’s really hard to collect enough sets of them to count at game end, and you’re giving up compounding points along the way.
• conductr 2y ago
  It’s more so related to power. Once you’ve acquired enough power, it consumes most people. They don’t like having their power challenged or put in a weakened state. Many of these people are acquiring power via some form or their “genius”. Technical wunderkind, military strategy genius, etc. So that drives their ego. But, they probably know they’re not actually a genius and plenty of people could have done what they did but they got lucky. So they end up getting defensive and insecure when anything challenges their power, risks to expose their genius as a fraud, etc. They’re operating on a mental house of cards and are volatile due to it. For regular people, they seem to be triggered by small things like losing a card game but it’s probably just that, a trigger that unleashed a wave of pent up insecurity.
• apercu 2y ago
  > Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy? Who says it's limited to the ultra wealthy? My network has a lot of people who have net worths of under $5-6 million USD and a lot of them are highly insecure. I've witnessed several of them going out of their way to tear down people who are fitter or more attractive than them as well. Look at the manbaby actions through that lens and you might get some insight.
  • AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    Hmm. So highly insecure people have to "win" (however it's defined at the moment) in order to bury their insecurities for the moment, but ultra wealthy individuals 1) have more power, so they can make it so that they win more often, and 2) are noticed more (or at least by a wider circle), so when they do it, a lot more people pay attention.
    • apercu 2y ago
      >so when they do it, a lot more people pay attention. It makes sense, media glamorizes these people and amplifies their actions, and some of the insecure folks crave attention. Look at that one guy who somehow works harder than all of us but is able to tweet all day every day...
• ubermonkey 2y ago
  The game thing is just the tip of the iceberg. There's lots of talk in the entertainment world, from the long-term famous, about how money and fame tend to be fundamentally warping. Bill Murray said to Pete Davidson that, once it happens, nearly everyone is an asshole for about two years. People fawn all over you; they do things for you. They give you things for free. You can get things normal people can't get. If you're making a few million a year, you have economic power beyond nearly everyone you've ever known. At a certain level, travel is a whim, not a slog through TSA and airport lines. And you lose the ability to deal with pushback of any kind. The smart ones -- the ones with some capacity for self-awareness -- course-correct. The others don't. But in Hollywood, one assumes, the bubble is far less perfect than the one around someone like Zuck, whose power over Facebook is absolute and inviolate, and who has money and power beyond almost every other person on the planet. So there's only a very small chance of any course-correction, and thus he stays an asshole, and that assholery extends to insisting that he win at trivial board games.
• onion2k 2y ago
  f you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game? Zuck 'earning' another billion probably means nothing to him. I doubt he can even keep count. All of that sense of self-worth that people derive from their career or wealth is lost in the noise of Meta's stock price for him. But winning a board game is tangible. It's right there in front of him, as a direct result of his own actions. He can feel that. If you couple that with him being surrounded by people who know that losing to him makes him feel good, and that Zuck is more generous when he's happy, you can see why people lose on purpose.
• zzzeek 2y ago
  you're getting the order of events backwards. it's not "Become a billionaire, then become a baby who insists they be allowed to win board games". The order is, first you're an entitled, manipulative jackass with absolutely no bottom for unethical behavior and zero tolerance for "losing", then become a billionaire by being so brazenly shitty in all areas of life and getting people to go along with you. Caveat, you have to be a white guy for this to work and it works much better if you already inherited millions from your dad. As an exercise, apply this rule to all the other billionaires you know.
  • ModernMech 2y ago
    I tend to agree with you, but I also tend to believe that indeed, having a billion dollars (read: having no constraints) will tend to bring out the worst in anyone. Another way to say this is, most people who earn obscene wealth who would be offended by the obscenity of it would work hard to give most of it away. Those who are not offended by the obscenity of it will be happy to keep it, so there's a selection bias to it.
• jonplackett 2y ago
  There’s a podcast I love called Real Dictators. It looks at loads of dictators from history - Stalin, Hitler, Saddam Hussein. What they all have in common is a love for loyalty and subservience. And they demand loyalty and subservience be constantly proven. Often in very weird and trivial ways. Eg. Saddam Hussein liked to have a BBQ where he would cook (but not eat) and make the food inedible spicy. Then he would force his top people to eat it while he laughed at them. They of course had to keep up the pretence that the food was delicious and pay him lots of compliments.
• JKCalhoun 2y ago
  > If you're wildly successful at something … why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game? > And anyway, if you're playing games for fun and to bond with people… I see you answered your own question.
• miiiiiike 2y ago
  It's weird how moments can go from "we were playing a game when.." to "The New York Times is covering a game we played 15 years ago". What I've heard from people who were in the game was that he wanted to go to bed so he was trying to negotiate a quick end to the game. There was a time at a con where I did something similar (i.e. we had to finish, we couldn't just leave the game setup and play later.) Everything is viewed through a mirror darkly. "HE FORCED OTHERS TO KNEEL BEFORE HIM, EVEN IN BOARD GAMES!1!" vs. "He wanted to go to bed so made a dickhead comment that would let him both win and sleep." Think back to your 20s, which feels more likely.
  • bix6 2y ago
    I don’t understand why people try and justify or defend these tech villains. What has Mark done to defend you? Besides harvest and sell your data.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • miiiiiike 2y ago
      I don't care about Mark Zuckerberg. I don't use Facebook, Instagram, or anything else Meta. I avoid it all, actually. I'll turn around on you: Why defend people who will distort every utterance just to score points on whatever is in the public's cross-hairs at the moment? Why support it? Why defend it? Saying that a statement isn't accurate isn't the same as defending or holding water for the subject of the statement. If Zuckerberg said "the sky was blue" and another person started saying "Zuckerberg is a liar, so obviously the sky can't be blue" you're not defending Zuckerberg by stating that the sky is blue. The world is in a perpetual information war. People and groups are constantly trying to make their version of reality stick by using every bullshit rhetorical tool at their disposal against whatever person or thing they deem a valid target. I'm sick of it, almost everyone is sick of it.
      • bix6 2y ago
        This is a tell all memoir from someone who was abused and witnessed abuse at Meta and it seems your response is to call one portion hyperbole instead of focusing on the broader issue. You clearly know Meta is a bad actor since you intentionally avoid their products, yet you go out of your way to stick up for a claim that you also don’t know the truth about?
• tayo42 2y ago
  That's interesting becasue at least with Zuckerberg, he entered a local bjj tournament under a fake name. And tbh if you eventually do find yourself against him your going to want the opportunity to say you submitted him. No one's letting him win at a tournament
• paulcole 2y ago
  > Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy It makes a better story in a tell-all memoir?
• dreamcompiler 2y ago
  I think power sometimes leads to this kind of insecurity, but a bigger factor is that people with narcissistic personalities often succeed because ordinary people are unaccustomed to dealing with them. Narcissists often come off as unusually competent, confident, and intimidating. This leads normies to want to follow them and give them what they want. Narcissists are always extremely insecure, usually because someone crushed their ego during childhood. (There also exist people with intact egos who are simply arrogant; I'm not talking about them. The arrogant are easy to distinguish from narcissists after you study them a bit.) My point is that Zuck was probably very insecure before the creation of FB, and he became rich partially because he was an insecure narcissist.
• siavosh 2y ago
  It raises the question: where is the crack in this structural system, and how can we pry it open? Perhaps the vulnerability lies in the desire of the ultra-rich and powerful for societal respect—whether born of love or fear hardly matters. How should society respond? Mercilessly mock them.
• reaperducer 2y ago
  Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon? It's always been this way, more or less. If you look back at the ultra-wealthy in any age, you'll find just these sorts of people. It's in 20th-century literature. It's in classic literature. It's in the Bible. It's probably in ancient Greek literature, but I'm not well-versed there. At least in the early part of the last century, there was some hope. A number of ultra-wealthy people decided that instead of building a faster steam engine or racing to pump more oil, they'd engage in benefiting society as an alternative penis-measuring contest. They were happy to pour the equivalent of today's billions into projects like paying artists to spend 30 years documenting the fading culture of the American Indian, or funding scientific expeditions to improve our understanding of ancient history. Today's billionaires are, instead, trying to one-up each other on getting 12-year-old girls addicted to their apps. Yay, progress.
• ModernMech 2y ago
  > If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game? Billionaires are highly psychologically disordered individuals. This is an expression of unrestrained narcissism in a "man" who has fully neglected to grow character as an individual, because his obscene wealth allows him to get through life with the emotional maturity of a teenager. Same with Musk, same with Trump, same with most other billionaires. Bill Gates is another great example. People hate to admit it, but apparently having a billion dollars either makes one a narcissist, or it takes being a narcissist to make a billion dollars. Either way, just from the data we have in front of us, there's a very strong correlation there.
• ashoeafoot 2y ago
  The problem is also the justification stories they excrete to justify the wealth the capital machine pours on them. The whole gods choosen, superior, natural strong willed aristocratic uebermensch bottled into one cyst of sycophants. Totally unable to connect with "easily distracted by the trivial" normies, barely able to talk to the monomaniacs they once where themselves. Not a good show.
• tasuki 2y ago
  At my work, we play much much better board games than Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride. I feel for Zuck and his colleagues.
• xivzgrev 2y ago
  The need to dominate can be a favorable trait for success. It can also be all consuming that you can't easily turn off. Like...ok Zuck, you won the f'ing lottery. You could spend the rest of your life on an island or helping orphans, but you still work at Facebook - why? Because he's wrapped up in it. It's a miracle Bill Gates managed to step down. It can also be unsettling to know that, just as easily as you killed off competitors, competitors could unseat you. So yea, you might sleep a bit easier at night if you can just win at the things you can control, like that darn Settlers of Catan game. Also someone who reflexively accuses the other of cheating while playing a game likely has a hard time admitting they failed at something. Not an admirable trait in a leader.
• arp242 2y ago
  John Major, who was prime minister of the UK in the 90s, has talked a bit about how isolated a position like that makes you, and how unprepared he was for it. Few of the normal pressures of life apply you in a position like that: you can't get fired (not really), you don't have to accept consequences (not really), and perhaps most importantly: you don't have anyone tell you "you idiot, that's fucking mental". No one that you can just dismiss anyway. I can't find the interview right now, it was a while ago, but I thought it was pretty interesting. Major was a man in his 50s when he became PM. Zuck was in his early 20s. You have to wonder what that does to a person. People like Zuck are more or less like child actors that made it big: everyone bends over backwards to deepthroat them and they've got a view of the world that's just delusional. I'd feel sorry if it wasn't for the highly negative and caustic effects.
• archagon 2y ago
  Deep-seated insecurity? https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/11/08/elon-musk-almost-needed-sfpd-wellness-check-after-breakdown-getting-booed-at-dave-chappelle-show/amp/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/11/08/elon-musk-almost-need...
• emmelaich 2y ago
  That story is disputed, to say the least. Dex Hunter-Torricke: >There's a story about when I was playing Mark Zuckerberg at Catan. Sarah suggests I was deliberately letting Zuckerberg win the game, and "brazenly" dismissing her strategic guidance. It's a lovely anecdote that positions our heroic narrator as some sort of principled mind surrounded by a sea of yes men or something, and that we all liked to let Zuckerberg win. Yeah, except that's not what happened at all. Read on: https://www.threads.com/@dextorricke/post/DHCUpnssuuw/theres-a-story-about-when-i-was-playing-mark-zuckerberg-at-catan-sarah-suggests-?hl=en https://www.threads.com/@dextorricke/post/DHCUpnssuuw/theres... I for one don't believe it.
• throaway1989 2y ago
  Maybe you just hate to lose, which drives you to relentlessly pursue "success?"
• dfxm12 2y ago
  They think their wealth, position, etc. is a result of merit. However, they know their wealth was not earned, but given. At best, they were born into a position of privilege and simply used their existing, unearned, wealth to build more. Losing at a board game forces them to confront the fact that they aren't any more clever than their peers. They didn't get to where they were on their wits alone; they started the game with a few routes already developed.
• mapt 2y ago
  Being an Olympic gymnast or marathon runner or boxer is not, broadly speaking, healthy. These pursuits require you to make sacrifices that push your body to extremes, to its physical limits, and not only you are selected for a very particular set of traits, there are also lots of health and psycho-social compromises that are entailed by those traits and by your training process. That is the cost of competition. Likewise running a company. You guys are, to be blunt, freaks. It requires very particular psychological and social conditioning to be in that place doing that thing, it demands specific types of personality traits and adaptations, and that probably doesn't make you, the successful CEO, a well-balanced, "normal" person. Now take that person, who is a little bit alien in the first place, and ask what happens when they can choose everything about their surroundings, when they get fitted for their GERDpod https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtV33YSKOJk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtV33YSKOJk . They still have the same personality quirks, traumas and experiences that got them to this place, but now they're rich beyond imagining, every whim trivially achievable except power over other people (and that only minimally constrained). Like a person stuck in a perpetual state of orgasm, the question of whether they like it or not and really isn't relevant to whether we're going to be inviting them to the cookout or how they're going to behave in church. Any interaction, they're going to make it weird. Because they're weird. Their situation is weird, and the mentality that brought them to that situation is independently weird. A normal person would have pursued normal fulfilling things in life, and they chose entrepreneurial ambition.
  • hombre_fatal 2y ago
    Good point, and it made me think about a more general point about people: It's often the same underlying trait that gives someone qualities that we like/admire but also the qualities we don't like. When we evaluate each other, we sometimes have thoughts like "she has <good quality>, but if only she'd work on <bad quality>". Over the years I finally realized that's not how we work. Our traits aren't always connected to isolated levers that we can pull independently. The really good sales guy might exaggerate fibs in personal convo. The girl that moved from Germany to Mexico to start a successful hostel also has a hard impulsiveness that's hard to get along with. The really attentive mother is risk-averse to a point of absurdity. All examples of friends off the top of my head. Or me: I can find happiness anywhere that I am (good), but it also means I don't have the drive to rock the boat when I should (bad). There doesn't necessarily exist the possibility of preserving the good part if you were to fix the bad part since the fix might require changing the underlying trait.
• mihaaly 2y ago
  Probably he is insecure? Put too much into how much people think about him. And believes that being a big person he needs to be the best at everything, while - and this is a positive trait actually - he knows that he is not that big, needs to overcompensate and project much more than he possesses - which is a common trait on Facebook. Overreacts to the ubiquitous life experience of loss.
• jrvieira 2y ago
  they know deep down that they don't deserve their status which makes them insecure and needing to constantly defend the narrative that they are in fact better. you'll see this behavior fade in the presence of someone who they themselves perceive as superior by whichever metric