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It's ming boggling just how....cringe... these billionaires that want to run the world are. Makes you wonder if the personas that seek billions are correlated s
by malfist 7mo ago
It's ming boggling just how....cringe... these billionaires that want to run the world are. Makes you wonder if the personas that seek billions are correlated strongly with mental illnesses.
- bigyabai 7mo agoThey are perfectly aware of their own optics and do it because you can't escape it. See Elon with his cringeworthy Twitter takeover that still hasn't collapsed, Larry Ellison buying up the media or Tim Cook gifting the gold trophy to Trump. Nobody has the guts to boycott them anymore. Billionaires know that you depend on them for news, social media and smartphones too.
- malfist 7mo ago> still hasn't collapsed Which is why he's playing a shell game with xAI "buying" twitter and then SpaceX "buying" xAI
- bigyabai 7mo agoWell... it worked. The shareholders were made whole, Elon got his vanity project, and the only people who got the short end of the stick were the loss-leader Twitter addicts. From a game-theory perspective that's a pretty impressive political polemic to achieve with purely private capital. When the dust settles the only person to blame is Jack Dorsey, who spent his halcyon years on Twitter pumping Bitcoin and looking even more coked-out than Elon. If people can't move on to better platforms then yes, they are doomed to eternal monetization by warring moron techbro tribes.
- yoyohello13 7mo agoI think that's what bothers me the most about the last couple years. These ultra rich people are just brazenly being scumbags and there is nothing anybody can really do about it. I imagine this is what people felt like in the middle ages when their King was going senile.
- scottyah 7mo agoI think you're wrong and it's worse- there are a lot of things that many people can do about it, it's just that they choose not to.
- bigyabai 7mo agoBoth are true. Some things can be done and are simple/healthy, like escaping social media. Others are fundamentally much harder and not worth the risk/trouble/time.
- esseph 7mo ago> Some things can be done and are simple/healthy, like escaping social media. Others are fundamentally much harder and not worth the risk/trouble/time. I think the calculation is very easy, actually. Risk vs Reward. You could even use polymarket to crowdsource funds for the activity!
- sumtechguy 7mo agoI do not think it is the money that made them terrible. I know all sorts of terrible people that would do the exact same things. The only difference really is they do not have the money to execute on those ideas. Money does not make you a good or bad person. It just makes you more of who you are already.
- malfist 7mo agoI specifically did not say money makes them mentally ill, but rather the type of person that seeks to hoard so much wealth that they have billions is correlated with mental illness.
- JumpCrisscross 7mo ago> the type of person that seeks to hoard so much wealth that they have billions is correlated with mental illness Do we have any actual evidence of this? I know plenty of exorbitantly wealthy people who aren’t hoarding anything, they just didn’t sell their piece of the closely-held business they started, and they spend their time skiing, reading, travelling and taking care of their friends and family.
- john_strinlai 7mo ago>Do we have any actual evidence of this? to be fair, the original comment by malfist started with "makes you wonder", so i dont think they are asserting this as fact. >I know plenty of exorbitantly wealthy people who aren’t hoarding anything, some people would see this sentence as contradictory, and they would suggest that the thing those exorbitantly wealthy people are hoarding is money.
- JumpCrisscross 7mo ago> they would suggest that the thing those exorbitantly wealthy people are hoarding is money And I’d say they’re literally wrong. They may be hoarding capital. And yes, some wealthy people do hoard money per se. But outside the Epstein class there are lots of people we just don’t hear about because they aren’t on social media talking about how rich they are. Because while it’s fun to postulate that the rich have mental illnesses, it’s documented that social-media addiction causes them.
- fhdkweig 7mo agoTo get moderately rich doesn't require a special personality type, but obscene wealth requires breaking laws and asking forgiveness later (throwing lawyers at the problem). Not caring who you hurt while reaching for a goal is a trait of sociopathy.
- psadauskas 7mo agoRight? If I had enough money that I could make a serious dent in local or even global poverty without noticing the change in my lifestyle, and I just... chose not to, I have no idea how I could sleep at night.
- csallen 7mo agoHuge numbers (billions) of people have enough money to make massive changes to the lives of those less fortunate than them, but don't, and prefer instead to make incremental upgrades to their own lives. New rugs, more savings, first-class airline tickets, eating out a few more times a month, etc. This is just human nature. People who are at wealth level x tend to say, "I can't believe that people at wealth level x+1 aren't more generous!" all the while ignoring their own lack of desire to give generously to people at wealth levels x-1 and below.
- conception 7mo agoAaron Swartz had a good take on this - http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/handwritingwall http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/handwritingwall
- nostrademons 7mo agoI remember wrestling with this in my therapist's office when Aaron died. I had known him tangentially - we hung out in the same IRC channels, and had several mutual friends in the Cambridge/Somerville techie crowd that he would hang out in person with. As a college student and young adult I had always envied his fame, his intelligence, his money (post-Reddit acquisition), and the strength of his convictions. And yet, in that moment in early 2013, he was dead, and I was working a good job at Google (and this was 2013 Google, when it was still a nice place to work doing things that I could generally approve of). And he'd died doing the stuff that I wanted to do but had been too chickenshit to actually carry out. I think that this illustrates why the world is the way it is. All the true altruists are dead, killed for their altruism. It is adaptive, in a survival sense, to think of yourself and your own survival and not worry too much about other people. Ironically, this is what my therapist was trying to get me to realize. But I think this also goes back to the GP's point. When people at wealth level x give to people at level x-1, it doesn't raise the people at x-1 up to x. It brings the person at x down to x-1. There are more people at x-1 than x, after all; you could give everything you had away and mathematically, it would lower your net worth significantly more than it would raise theirs. And of course, it doesn't do a damn thing about the people at x+1. Why can't they donate instead, where their wealth would do an order of magnitude more good? There actually do exist people who are like that: they would rather spread their wealth around the people at wealth level x-1, joining them at that level, than raise themselves up to x+1. I've met some; most poor people are far more generous than rich people are. That is why they are poor. But then, it doesn't solve the problem of inequality, they just disappear into the masses of people at level x-1.
- fhdkweig 7mo agoYou aren't the first one to notice the correlation. It is a heavily studied subject. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wealth+and+sociopathy https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wealth+and+sociopathy
- th0raway 7mo agoIt comes down to two things. One is the well documented issue of how, when you are that rich, you are treated differently, and how that will ultimately modify your behavior. The other is the prerequisites to get to the job. Chances are you aren't fully self-made, receiving no investment. From convincing investors, to having immense faith in a project that cannot be obviously good, as otherwise you'd be building what already exists, to the personality to handle the road upward. This second effect happens in all kinds of places where you have to jumps througha lot of hoops to just get to get there. Every hoop discards candidates, and promotes different things. Sometimes in ways that make sure that nobody capable of attaining the job is fit to actually do it well. You can see the issue all over the place, once you track people's careers. Sometimes things that should be disqualifying for a role are actually requirements in practice.
- kevincox 7mo ago> To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. > - Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
- jakeydus 7mo agoThe people who would, shouldn't. The people who should, won't.
- flir 7mo agoThere's an old SF short where one of the people who won't gets forced to. Battery of psychological tests followed by "you're one of the rulers now, and you're going to hate every minute of it, but we enslave you so the rest of us have a peaceful, prosperous planet." Wish I could remember the name/author.
- SanjayMehta 7mo agoIsaac Asimov had a story where one voter was selected by Multivac to pick the leader of the world.
- rhet0rica 7mo agoTrump specifically seems to hew awfully close to the symptoms of a long-term cocaine user. The hard drift into self-congratulatory vanity parallels that of Charlie Sheen during a certain infamous interview, for example, and at least two people (Howard Dean and Carrie Fisher) identified him as having compulsive sniffing reminiscent of a cocaine habit during debates prior to his first election. Remember that Trump is not a first-generation member of the upper class; as a nepo baby, he was born out of touch and has spent his whole life falling deeper into bizarre social bubbles and media silos that were tailored by his ancestors and peers to reassure them that they're doing the right thing. In theory plutarchs should be receiving world-class education from private tutors, but being arch-Conservatives by definition, these teachers are invariably out of date on mental health, and would be forbidden from teaching it even if they had modern material. Because of this isolation the ultra-wealthy often have certain very uneducated traits around self-esteem—which can paradoxically seem like the result of poverty. They do not have access to DARE or Sesame Street to give them the confidence not to take drugs when pressured, they've never seen Mister Rogers, their biological parents were always off running a business empire, and they have no surrogate figures because their nannies probably get fired at the drop of a hat, even for defending the child's interests. Ironically, American republicanism makes this worse; in a planned aristocracy, parents internalize the belief that their children deserve "the best" because they are meant to be "the best", but without that noble lie, there is no pressure to create a positive environment for the next generation of tyrant. To make matters worse, these families never start off with healthy values to begin with—which produces a founder effect of regressive masculinity that magnifies everything else I've just mentioned.
- literalAardvark 7mo agoI think they are, and strongly. The drive to achieve that level of success often comes from weaponized poor self esteem. Well adjusted individuals just chill out after a few million and work on whatever is fun/important for them. Only rarely does this also happen to be something that can take you from 10M to 1B. (and if it can it would take a lot of work you can't be bothered to do unless it's some core value like helping the poor beat malaria)
- thatguy0900 7mo agoTrump saying recently that he hates hanging around successful people and prefers losers because he doesn't want to listen to other people's stories really speaks to the poor self esteem angle
- esseph 7mo ago“I always like to hang around with losers, actually, because it makes me feel better.” “I hate guys that are very, very successful, and you have to listen to their success stories. I like people who like to listen to my success,” he added.
- ashton314 7mo agoMost don’t seem to think about morals or quality at all: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/03/introspection-andreessen-thiel-bezos/686566/?gift=r-WTQhvnGvzuRnYYVlVjeGammJJ_5Zcl3OYUYDz_ETo&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/03/introspection-andr...
- keybored 7mo agoAren’t sociopaths strongly overrepresented among the powerful? (Assuming that) It’s a bit astonishing that we discuss things like that, go huh, and then go about our day. Effectively acquiescing to rule-by-personality disordered.
- andai 7mo agoSo, Hormozi boils it down to: > The wealthiest people in the world have: - A very big goal - Insecurity: Massive fear of never being enough - Impulse control to stay on goal This excellent list, I expand with my Daddy Issues Billionaire Archetype, which we see in basically all "ultra successful" people. (I haven't found any counter-examples yet, but I'm eagerly awaiting the first! It would be extremely valuable information.) But crucially, in the face of Unrelenting Standards, what's the difference between total collapse and astronomical success? The belief that you can do it.[0] It's not just "you need to be better than you are." It's "and I know you can." [0] Incidentally, I posted on this exact subject this morning! https://nekolucifer.substack.com/p/you-can-do-anything-if-you-believe https://nekolucifer.substack.com/p/you-can-do-anything-if-yo...
- wat10000 7mo agoImagine having $999 million and deciding it’s not enough. There’s no way a mentally healthy person could reach that conclusion.
- cyberax 7mo agoTo be fair, if I had $999 million, it'd be bugging me all the time until I got to $1B.
- zimpenfish 7mo ago> To be fair, if I had $999 million, it'd be bugging me all the time until I got to $1B. Conversely, it'd be bugging me until I got to $50M because even in my wildest fantasies, I'd find it hard to spend even $50M in the years I have left. (Obvs. the calculus would be different for someone in their 20s / with kids.)
- wat10000 7mo agoYeah, but you have to be really careful or you’ll pull the handle just a bit too much and hit $1,000,000,000.01.
- cyberax 7mo agoIt's fine, it's a nice palindromic number!