7 ms·

Is the 1 percenters getting dumber or acting like it? Like 10 years ago, I felt like Andreesen and Elon were thought leaders. Now they sound like idiots. Did

Is the 1 percenters getting dumber or acting like it? Like 10 years ago, I felt like Andreesen and Elon were thought leaders. Now they sound like idiots. Did I or did they change? Did I grow up and they changed to a younger audience and what I used to enjoy was just a different kind of stupid?

artyom 7mo ago
A little bit of both? I don't think they were thought leaders but they were often correct and also at the right point in time. Also, power corrupts. That's a tale as old as time, I have found no evidence that somehow tech-bros are immune to it.
newyankee 7mo ago
The way I suspect they think is this. A pyramid is always going to be there, it is better we reinforce and consolidate our power at top with the friendlies below and make it sound like that is the best option for everyone.
lijok 7mo ago
They changed. You wouldn’t believe it but those most impacted by the mental rot that social media can induce - are the ultra wealthy.
- croes 7mo ago
  I doubt that. The only thing social media removed was scruples and shame. People were ashamed to say such dumb things and now they think they have some kind of deeper knowledge. Their thinking didn’t change.
  - monknomo 7mo ago
    I think they also suddenly had to deal with a bunch of people being mean to them, and telling them they were wrong, which drove them a little mad. Sort of an oppositional defiant thing, filtered through immense wealth and power
    - secos 7mo ago
      This. I remember many a time pmarca getting so upset and just blocking everyone who disagreed with him on Twitter. It was the weirdest thing.
      - estebank 7mo ago
        Blocking people that annoy him on Twitter is the only humanizing thing about him. Deciding that someone has annoyed you enough on that platform that you don't care to ever hear from them ever again is the only thing that made that platform usable when you have any minimal audience. "I've known you for all of 10 seconds and enjoyed not a single one of them" followed by blocking is good, actually. That doesn't make you any more correct or wrong, of course.
    - estebank 7mo ago
      After one becomes wealthy, social media easily becomes the only place where anyone says no to them. When everyone who surrounds you tells you "you're absolutely right, let me get that for you", you atrophy the muscle that let's you course correct when you're making a mistake, and when someone disagrees with you it feels that much stronger. Wealth is not the only way this can happen, you see it with notoriety and power who have gotten used to " being right" (Dawkins comes to mind), and now this experience is being "democratised" by LLMs.
  - enraged_camel 7mo ago
    They can finally say "retard" openly. They have been openly gloating about this! So yes, I agree: previously they felt constrained. They no longer do.
    - Animats 7mo ago
      "Retarded" is an euphemism. It was preceded by "mentally disabled", "feeble-minded", and "idiot". Renaming doesn't help. Agnews, in Santa Clara CA, was successively called The Great Asylum for The Insane, Agnews Insane Asylum, Agnews Mental Hospital, Agnews Developmental Center, and Oracle's Santa Clara campus.
- _fat_santa 7mo ago
  I have a tangential theory to this. Being rich != being famous. There are tons of extremely wealthy people out there that keep a very low profile. Sure they might be well known within their circle but ask the average person and they have no clue who that person is. I would say this is the case for like 90-95% of billionaires. Musk, Andreessen, Zuck and others were all in this camp 10 years ago but they all decided that simply being rich wasn't enough, they wanted to be famous. These folks have all the resources and connections to become famous so they can get on all the podcasts, write op-eds, and are guaranteed to get the best reach on social media and thus the most eyeballs on their content and the most attention paid to them. But when you go from making a few media appearances a year to constantly making media appearances in one way or another is that you need more "content" so to speak. Just like a comedian needs more content if they are going to do a 1hr special versus a 10min set at a comedy club. The problem for all these guys is they have a few genuinely insightful ideas mixed in with a ton of cooky and out of touch ideas. Before they could safely stick to the genuinely insightful ideas but as they've made more and more appearances, they have to reach for some of those other ideas. They don't realize that their cooky ideas sound very different than their few insightful ideas. They think all their ideas are insightful based on the feedback they have been getting for the past decade or so.
  - aworks 7mo ago
    I need to reread it but Paul Fussell makes the case that old wealth is inconspicuous and secure (and maybe inherited) versus nouveau riche which is about visible luxury, branding, and showy consumption. I don't remember if he mentions the need to promote ideas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class:_A_Guide_Through_the_American_Status_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class:_A_Guide_Through_the_Ame...
    - deadbishop 7mo ago
      Paul Fussel’s Class was an interesting read
    - bluecheese452 7mo ago
      Meh dynastic families which are about as old money as you can get have some of the most ostentatious displays of wealth. They sit on thrones, wear crowns, and preside over public celebrations.
- j2kun 7mo ago
  Elon was always problematic. His increasing social media use removed the natural filters that prevented people from seeing it.
  - piker 7mo ago
    I'm not defending Musk, but "problematic" used in this type of context is one of those words that says more about the speaker than it does the subject.
    - joleyj 7mo ago
      It seems to me to be saying that the person finds Elon Musk’s behavior problematic. What else are you reading into it?
    - lokar 7mo ago
      I think you can forgive it as a rhetorical device when speaking to a really broad audience.
      - CamperBob2 7mo ago
        IMO it's best to use fewer thought-terminating cliches in that case, not more. Unless one is simply engaging in a Reddit-style call-and-response exercise. To me, Musk crossed from "maverick" to "problematic" around 2018, when he tried to insert himself into the Thai cave rescue operation and ended up slinging accusations of pedophilia on Twitter. At this point, he has unlocked many more specific adjectival achievements, and those are the ones that should be invoked whenever Musk's behavior is the topic. (Which it isn't here.)
    - rhines 7mo ago
      I feel like taking issue with a word, even when used in a perfectly valid situation, is something worth reflection. Like fair enough if you've heard problematic used in ways you disagree with before, but maybe respond to those comments, not one where you agree with its use. Unless you actually do mean to defend Musk and don't think lying to investors, calling people pedos for saving kids, delaying public infrastructure, doing Nazi salutes, etc. etc. is problematic.
- consumer451 7mo ago
  I often wonder if tech billionaire psychosis might lead to a "Great Filter" event for our species. They have entirely unchecked power, lack of empathy, and gleeful ignorance of everything our species has done that their success rests upon.
  - Henchman21 7mo ago
    They haven't even read the scifi that positions AI as an obvious resource trap. Sure, let's devote all our resources to birthing an AI. Do we think if its smarter than us we can contain it? Do we think it will help us by default? Have we not thought through the basics of what we're attempting?
TrackerFF 7mo ago
They've just become hype-men for their own investments.
foobiekr 7mo ago
You realized they were always shitheels. Musk was a complete visible fraud long before 2016.
- guzfip 7mo ago
  Indeed, he always seems like an obnoxious media attention whore to me long before he got into politics. I tend to have a negative view of celebrities who did cameos for the Simpsons far past its peak lol
- anthonypasq 7mo ago
  Elon is a social dumbass with the emotional maturity of an edgy 14 year old boy, but calling him a fraud I'd say is false and unproductive.
  - foobiekr 7mo ago
    He is absolutely a fraud. He has been lying about many things for more than a decade to boost his stock. He has more in common with Trevor Milton than anyone else.
    - CamperBob2 7mo ago
      An atheist might call Franklin Graham or Jerry Falwell a fraud, but the people who fill the stadiums and pews keep coming back, year after year, decade after decade, generation after generation. They are obviously getting something positive out of the experience. Same with Musk and the stock market. At some point, victim-blaming may be the only rational explanation left. His followers are rubes falling for a fraud, yes, but it can hardly be considered involuntary or exploitative at this point. The rubes have become rich simply by sticking together under Musk's benevolent gaze, dominating financial discourse in the broader market. It will continue to work for them, right up until it doesn't.
  - marcusverus 7mo ago
    [flagged]
  - 7mo ago
iugtmkbdfil834 7mo ago
Money can buy greater latitude with mistakes. Mistakes that would have been career ending for low level employee, is an amusing anecdote to be remembered at a gathering or in a book. There are definitely some idiots with more money than sense, but reality tended to correct that fast. Now, it seems, they get rescued ( vide not that old case of Summers running to safe VC bank ).
vishnugupta 7mo ago
> Did I or did they change? I’d say both. They ran out of novel things to say which is expected of anyone because there’s only so many non trivial things one could say. But then unlike normal people they didn’t stop talking because being rich they are bored and they want to be in the limelight all the time. So they end up talking nonsense. You also changed, you are now wiser and have developed BS detector.
- ssimpson 7mo ago
  > They ran out of novel things to say which is expected of anyone because there’s only so many non trivial things one could say. But then unlike normal people they didn’t stop talking because being rich they are bored and they want to be in the limelight all the time. So they end up talking nonsense. Why do they always feel like they need to pull stuff out of their butts to make themselves sound like they know what is going on? In some ways I think it's related to the stock market "just meet the next quarterly goal" kind of thinking. Who cares if you don't come up with something pithy to say for a few years. Have big impacts over time instead of tons of little ups and downs all the time.
  - palmotea 7mo ago
    > Why do they always feel like they need to pull stuff out of their butts to make themselves sound like they know what is going on? Massive, unconstrained egos? They think they're hot shit, because they surround themselves with yes men. I'm reminded of this: > Beneath the grand narrative Musk tells, when he takes things over, what does he actually have the people under him do? What is the theory of action? > He has people around him who are just enablers. All these Silicon Valley people do. All his minions. And they are minions — they’re all lesser than he is in some fashion, and they all look up to him. They’re typically younger. They laugh at his jokes. Sometimes when he apologizes for a joke, which is not very often, he’ll say that the people around him thought it was funny. > When he was being interviewed at Code Conference once, he had a couple of them there. He told a really bad joke, and they all went like: Ha-ha-ha-ha. And I was like: That’s not funny — I’m sorry, did I miss the joke? And they looked at me like I had three heads. (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-kara-swisher.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...)
AndrewKemendo 7mo ago
They have always been dumb. Richistan describes the pure unalloyed depravity the rich live in really well: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/512029.Richistan https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/512029.Richistan People are just finally able to see how dumb they are I’ve seen this in action and in person multiple times and it’s absolutely fucking horrifying watching how ignorant, useless and totally out of touch with reality the Rich are , yet still can crush people via the police state whenever they want Chris Hedges did a good video on this recently: https://youtu.be/EJ-OSJ7J64w https://youtu.be/EJ-OSJ7J64w
frereubu 7mo ago
These people are almost unimaginably wealthy to the point where they're effectively unchallenged if they're not directly challenging the state (and even then they win quite a few rounds). "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
tdb7893 7mo ago
A decade ago wasn't Musk talking about Hyperloop? He sounded like an idiot to many people then, too. His companies were good at the time but once he talked about anything else I feel like it was pretty clear who he was. I don't think this is new though, Henry Ford was famously into anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and even owned a newspaper to spread hateful nonsense (history might not repeat itself but it apparently does rhyme). I'm sure if there was more recordings of robber barons of the past you would see the same dumb nonsense you see now.
- laserlight 7mo ago
  > A decade ago wasn't Musk talking about Hyperloop? Yep, and he claimed that he would colonize Mars soon.
Rover222 7mo ago
[flagged]
georgemcbay 7mo ago
IMO they were always the way that they are now, they just didn't broadcast it in public. Before social media started running society off the rails people like this would generally hold back their controversial opinions to avoid alienating a chunk of the public. Now they realize they can say whatever they want and the 40% of people that glaze them for it are worth more to their ego than the downside of alienating everyone else.
donkyrf 7mo ago
There's the whole "billionaire bubble" thing, where they get surrounded by folks who have an economic interest in keeping the billionaire happy... but I'd posit there's another big change -- tech billionaires didn't used to have any cultural or political juice. This meant that even if they had some weird / bad takes, they kept them quiet. Media consolidation has really helped weird billionaires move the Overton window, so that their weird/bad takes become "acceptable", and then they start admitting them publicly.
- vrganj 7mo ago
  I think they miscalculated though. Their vile views still aren't acceptable, they just get broadcasted more now. This won't have the effect they hope for. It'll just expose them as the frauds they are.
jjulius 7mo ago
This has always been the case with the massively wealthy. They may be incredibly smart in their specific line of business, which leads them to an enormous amount of wealth and fame. Because our culture likes to lionize success stories, we collectively lean hard into putting people like that on pedestals and giving them more opportunities to speak their minds. Their own egos get inflated as a result, and a feedback loop ensues - they think everything they do is great because, collectively, our culture wants everything they do to be great. But the simple fact is, nobody's a genius in all areas. We all have our areas of expertise, but none of us can be trusted to speak wisely about all things all the time. At the same time, as others have said, your BS detector has matured.
- palmotea 7mo ago
  > This has always been the case with the massively wealthy. They may be incredibly smart in their specific line of business, which leads them to an enormous amount of wealth and fame. ... Their own egos get inflated as a result, and a feedback loop ensues - they think everything they do is great because, collectively, our culture wants everything they do to be great. This doesn't just apply to the wealthy, but more lowly people too: see "Engineer's disease." People like Musk and Adreessen are getting hit by a double-whammy: they're software engineers (the stupidest and most arrogant class of engineers) AND they're massively wealthy.
  - ryandrake 7mo ago
    In undergrad I had a buddy who was a political science major, and he put it pretty bluntly one day: "Do you engineers realize how arrogant you sound when you're talking about things you have no clue about?" 20 year old me just laughed and thought to myself "lol liberal arts majors" but now that I'm older and more grown up, he was totally right and I see it all around me in the industry. Especially here on HN.
  - wolvesechoes 7mo ago
    Yep, STEM people asked why we need humanities. And now they are starting to hold hot debates that strangely resemble things that humanities discussed centuries ago. One curious thing. My country was erased from maps for 123 years (Poland). During that time, universities in all three occupied parts could freely teach engineering, physics, math or biology. Occupiers didn't care, they even wanted to have access to talent pool of specialists educated on these universities. On the other hand, teaching of history, philosophy etc. was highly controlled and restricted. One can wonder - if humanities are so useless for the society, why did they even bother?
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
roncesvalles 7mo ago
All the rich are on ketamine.
moregrist 7mo ago
When you reach a certain level of wealth and power, it seems like it’s very easy to surround yourself with people who only tell you how brilliant and successful you are. This creates an echo chamber where you don’t get reality checks, and when you do they’re easy to brush off as some form of “sour grapes,” after all if the person telling you that you’re wrong was so great they’d have your level of wealth. I think it takes a really extraordinary person to avoid this. As far as I can tell, most of the modern Silicon Valley titans are not extraordinary in this respect.
- skdhfkdjfhsjk 7mo ago
  It doesn't even take that much wealth or power. Look at Vox Day. In my internet wanderings I recently found myself commenting on one of his posts for the completely benign purpose of helping to expand upon his "sigma" theory, as I felt it was incomplete and needed improvement. His followers immediately attacked me, displaying 100% cult-like yes-man behavior. Most responses were essentially, "You disagree? Then you didn't read it carefully enough. Go back and read it again and STFU, loser." It was really spooky. He's got this self-reinforcing belief system where "people who agree with Vox" are called "sigmas", who are respectable, but "people who disagree with Vox" are defined to be "gammas", who are useless and wrong people who are held in contempt and derision. Some of those guys are really nasty characters. I tore them all a new asshole, and even Vox seemed to realize on some level that I was right as he didn't really have much of a response. (Search for the word "flamethrower" in the comments if anyone wants to find that article and read the posts, it's hilarious.)
jacquesm 7mo ago
A bit of both. You became more attuned to what really does and does not make sense and they rotted a bit further. But 10 years ago it was pretty visible for both Musk and Andreessen.
ohrus 7mo ago
Thinking any one person is a 'thought leader' is, generally, a dumb thing to think. You grew up.
jbmchuck 7mo ago
'Thought leader' has always been a code word for 'bullshit artist'.
kmeisthax 7mo ago
It's both. Back then[0], the ultra-wealthy had whole teams of PR managers - people devoted to doing the verbal equivalent of making sure they were lit with perfect 5500K portrait lighting at every angle. In other words, DLSS 5 but for personality. In order to sustain that kind of shitty magic trick, the PR team needs to completely control everything they say. This is a lot of effort. The moment the ultra wealthy slip up - that they reveal that they're a normal shitty person with a severe case of affluenza - the illusion shatters. And social media has made it both very easy and addictive for rich people to indulge in their worst vices. So now instead of fundamentally soulless people engaging in virtue signalling to pretend to be human, you have fundamentally soulless people engaging in vice signalling, because suddenly these p-zombies been given access to a machine that finds them fellow p-zombies to validate themselves with. Furthermore, once you see this happen a few times, your mental default changes. Now you assume every wealthy person is an asshole until proven otherwise. Even if Elon Musk might be saying something poignant about space travel or AI safety, you've seen enough Cybertrucks and "X Æ A-12"s and "autistic" Nazi salutes to know that he's a moron. You, personally, were ignoring the latter to focus on the former, because you were probably smarter than him. But he's shoved the latter in your face to the point where it's undeniable. > Did I grow up and they changed to a younger audience and what I used to enjoy was just a different kind of stupid? No, you're thinking of MAD Magazine. Notably, it's still possible for an emotionally mature adult to still enjoy that kind of humor. But emotionally mature adults tend to not enjoy manchildren. [0] 10 years ago was 2016, which is probably not as far back as you were thinking.
johngossman 7mo ago
In the late 1990s I went to a RealNetworks developer conference and Andreesen, then at Netscape, was a keynote speaker. I was curious and open to his insights, but his talk was so vapid (I remember he kept giggling) and arrogant that I eventually walked out. I remember he kept bragging about Netscape's next big project (something after Netscape 5 maybe?) and how it was going to wipe Microsoft out permanently. Only a few years later did I realize whatever it was never shipped, it turned out to be vaporware.
- wodenokoto 7mo ago
  Fair enough. But the software eats the world essay did change the world. Maybe he was lucky, but I still think he managed to position himself in order to be heard with that essay. Maybe I am naive.
  - tsunamifury 7mo ago
    You should look into the person Marc hired to research and validate that for him (basically write it) Ro Venkatesh. His essays are quite titilating. And you can immediately see it was Ro's idea not Marc's.
    - michaelcampbell 7mo ago
      I seem to recall he had a cadre of people actually writing the browser, too. (Also Indian, as I remember, but it's been awhile.) It could be a faulty memory, but I've never thought much of the guy after I heard that, and he continues to not impress.
  - bcooke 7mo ago
    How do you think it changed the world? I don’t think that was an especially prescient thing to say/write at that time. The idea that software was poised to continue to grow in 2011 was pretty obvious to most people. It is true that some companies were undervalued and many VCs and other folks were scarred from the dotcom bust. But if you go back and read it, you might notice that a lot of the companies and software he discussed and predictions along with them failed to be true or lasting. I think mostly it was a good catchphrase.
johannes1234321 7mo ago
There is a shift in society on what can be said and what they keep private. Back then you would pull stings in background, now you can bribe thenUS president in public. Also: Back in the days™ statements where edited by marketing people and others before publication. Now people blast out stuff on their own via "social media"
azinman2 7mo ago
They got radicalized, which was intensional from the right. Further, wealth and time has shifted the hippy ethos of the valley to libertarianism. It’s amazing how often becoming rich makes one into a libertarian :)
andrepd 7mo ago
To add to the answers given already, there's the matter of the sheer scale of wealth these people have (especially relative to e.g. median worker wages). The richest people on earth in the 80s were a bunch of discreet Japanese CEOs with 5 or 6 billion$ to their name. They were very rich, sure, and surely could influence politics with their wealth. But Elon Musk has 850 billion dollars. That's 850,000,000,000$. An amount so mind-boggingly impossible to imagine that you need analogies such as these https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c96F7D57CzI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c96F7D57CzI. And these people got it not as a CEO of a quiet car company or such, but as owners of media and tech empires with a reach and influence Ted Turner could only dream about. It's a qualitative leap.
scottious 7mo ago
I remember when Elon came up with the hyper loop idea and everybody I worked with at the time thought it was revolutionary. These were very smart people who were fooled. In hindsight, how could we all have fell for this? What a profoundly stupid idea, but I distinctly remember at the time it felt right. I guess what I'm saying is that I think a lot of people just wised up and started seeing through his B.S.
- simianwords 7mo ago
  I genuinely don't know how the mental model of such a person works where they look at Elon who got multiple world changing bets right but they focus on the ones that were wrong.
  - scottious 7mo ago
    I feel like a lot of the ideas are over-attributed to him. Tesla already existed, electric cars aren't really a revolutionary idea. He's a hype man and he does the hype stuff well. Cybertruck was a pretty unmitigated disaster. self-driving is not really working out as he promised. I still remember arguing with people in 2020 who thought you'd be able to sleep in your car in a few years. Seems like Waymo is beating them to robo-taxis. Hyperloop was a bad idea. Starlink + reusable rockets... alright, not bad, but not exactly a "world changing bet". Seems far more hyped than anything. So he gets credit for just combining the idea of reusable rockets to send satellites into space? okay fine. He had a lot of money and threw a lot at the wall to see what stuck. If I were a betting man, I'd bet against his "next big idea". He'll over-promise and under-deliver.
    - Animats 7mo ago
      Space-X's success is due to Gwynne Shotwell, who really is a rocket scientist. Musk didn't originate Tesla's car concept. He did, however, promote into a large scale business. That's the real achievement. Promotion isn't enough, though. I heard Shai Agassi of Better Place speak once. That was the Israeli guy with the car battery swap startup. He was really good looking, a great speaker, and his 10x growth per year business plan was utter bullshit. Better Place went bust. It wasn't a totally unworkable idea; there are successful battery swap operations in China. But he spent time and money schmoozing with heads of state and setting up demo centers in multiple countries, while not delivering much. (More fundamental problem: battery swapping is a bet against fast charging and battery progress, which appears to be a losing bet.)
NoLinkToMe 7mo ago
The question is what you think now of their old opinions. If you think the same, they have changed. If you think differently, you have changed. If I look at Elon and Marc's interviews from 10-15 years ago I am still roughly 80% in agreement, 20% disagreement. I feel the same about what they used to say today, as I did back then. Now I'm 20% in agreement (they definitely still have interesting thoughts) and 80% absolutely disgusted (with both, but particularly Musk). So I genuinely think they changed in this regard.
- danans 7mo ago
  > Now I'm 20% in agreement (they definitely still have interesting thoughts) and 80% absolutely disgusted (with both, but particularly Musk). > So I genuinely think they changed in this regard Everyone has changed. You, me, Musk, Andreesen. But in that time, the disparity between them and "us" in wealth and even more importantly, political power, has ballooned. Their increasing power has fueled their sense of infallibility and inevitability. It's not yet clear what these changes will engender in us. We are more numerous and divergent in perspectives and interests.
asdff 7mo ago
I think people get dumber as they age. I feel like I'm probably dumber than me 10 years ago. No one wants to admit it, but I sense it in myself and I think I can see it in other people. I feel like peak brain is probably like 22 years old if we are being honest. Yeah you might still be doing dumb kid stuff but you are at the age where you just have this energizer bunny inside. You can just go to the library and churn multiple all day and night sessions. Sleep in one day and perfectly recovered. I "know" more now but I'm definitely slower than when I was younger. Would be great if we didn't spend so much time faffing in school on stupid stuff and got into our strides in our career maybe 5-10 years earlier. When I think about my first research job, that could have probably been done in middle school vs undergrad. Wasn't really any more challenging than when I worked part time in a restaurant in terms of the tasks. I probably could have been working on some thesis under an advisor for my hs years instead of being stretched thin over the boilerplate curriculum. And then I probably could enter the workforce at 18 and have enough to get up to speed on the job pretty fast. By 22 I'd be in management right at the peak of my mental faculties and skill buildup.
- NegativeK 7mo ago
  I certainly thought I was smarter when I was younger.
  - asdff 7mo ago
    Are you saying you haven't felt increased mental fatigue and "slowness" while aging? What is your secret? Certain supplements? Blood boy?
    - skdhfkdjfhsjk 7mo ago
      [flagged]
- krunck 7mo ago
  > I feel like peak brain is probably like 22 years old Ah, but peak wisdom? Much later.
acdha 7mo ago
You definitely got wiser—we all do—but I think there’s also a big shift in both what they think they can say safely in public and the sycophantic reinforcement they get on social media. Rich guys have always had that problem to some extent but it used to be less public—nothing like Musk just tossing out some inane insight while high and getting hundreds of thousands of fans applauding. Human brains don’t handle that well, and you can tell these guys haven’t had to defend an idea rigorously in years. Another factor seems to be the way corporate valuations have become increasingly untethered from actual value. It’s not like there isn’t historical precedent for people getting rich by luck but thinking they’re geniuses, but the tech world has become really weird about that in ways which amplify the previous no-filter point: it’s one thing to be, say, a Netscape millionaire but parlaying that into billionaire status really gets into the point where they never have to hear unwanted criticism and are guaranteed to be treated as sources of wisdom regardless of the applicability of their experience.
duxup 7mo ago
I believe in some form of the Twitter poisoning theory: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/11/opinion/trump-musk-kanye-twitter.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Q1A.ymaC.vJKjOcT2Qhm0&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/11/opinion/trump-musk-kanye-... It seems to explain some of the weirdest of hang ups and strange / desperate choices.
- Henchman21 7mo ago
  All of what currently ails western society online is likely to be a russian psyop. All of it. We've left ourselves open to direct manipulation.
  - CamperBob2 7mo ago
    No, we did this to ourselves. Blaming Russia is the easy way out... even when it's likely true, as in the trajectory of Trump's career. A healthy, rational society would be much harder to bamboozle -- by Russians or demagogues or preachers or billionaires or anyone else -- than Americans have proven to be. Over the last 10-20 years, many events that I thought would serve to immunize us to BS have fed an addiction instead.
  - IAmGraydon 7mo ago
    Not all, but much. Years ago here on HN I said that social media is a weapon more powerful than nuclear fission and we created it and handed it to our enemies in exchange for a small group of people becoming extremely wealthy. I was promptly downvoted. It’s the closest thing to a mind control device that’s ever been created, and sites like Reddit, Facebook, and even HN openly allow bot traffic in exchange for either dollars or a claim of “open discourse”. HN hates the solution to this problem even more than they hate the problem, so I won’t even start the debate.
- CamperBob2 7mo ago
  That's a nice essay from Lanier. Operant conditioning is certainly something everybody on HN has experienced, watching the numbers next to their posts go up and down.
- 7mo ago
fuzzfactor 7mo ago
>Did I or did they change? >>Andreessen and his cronies are making large claims about what human beings want and need. Could very well be a moving target according to what they need from human beings at the time.
pjjpo 7mo ago
Both Andreeson and Elon knew exactly how to take advantage of the times to make money. Both are true "failed" billionaires, Netscape and "PayPal" as the examples. Latter in quotes since Musk didn't contribute much more than getting fired immediately. So yes, you are the stupid, and the world has not gone towards better, or even different.
cptskippy 7mo ago
> Is the 1 percenters getting dumber or acting like it? I feel like their messages are designed to derail people's train of thought. People start to realize that technology isn't fulfilling and they need to re-access their lives? Nah... introspection is a modern invention and that act of reflection is actually the source of your discontent. Stop thinking about it and just go with the flow, you'll be much happier when you stop concerning yourselves with the state of the environment, other people's well being, if your work is fulfilling, or the fact that you have no retirement.

artyom 7mo ago

A little bit of both? I don't think they were thought leaders but they were often correct and also at the right point in time. Also, power corrupts. That's a tale as old as time, I have found no evidence that somehow tech-bros are immune to it.

newyankee 7mo ago

The way I suspect they think is this. A pyramid is always going to be there, it is better we reinforce and consolidate our power at top with the friendlies below and make it sound like that is the best option for everyone.

lijok 7mo ago

They changed. You wouldn’t believe it but those most impacted by the mental rot that social media can induce - are the ultra wealthy.

croes 7mo ago
I doubt that. The only thing social media removed was scruples and shame. People were ashamed to say such dumb things and now they think they have some kind of deeper knowledge. Their thinking didn’t change.
- monknomo 7mo ago
  I think they also suddenly had to deal with a bunch of people being mean to them, and telling them they were wrong, which drove them a little mad. Sort of an oppositional defiant thing, filtered through immense wealth and power
  - secos 7mo ago
    This. I remember many a time pmarca getting so upset and just blocking everyone who disagreed with him on Twitter. It was the weirdest thing.
    - estebank 7mo ago
      Blocking people that annoy him on Twitter is the only humanizing thing about him. Deciding that someone has annoyed you enough on that platform that you don't care to ever hear from them ever again is the only thing that made that platform usable when you have any minimal audience. "I've known you for all of 10 seconds and enjoyed not a single one of them" followed by blocking is good, actually. That doesn't make you any more correct or wrong, of course.
  - estebank 7mo ago
    After one becomes wealthy, social media easily becomes the only place where anyone says no to them. When everyone who surrounds you tells you "you're absolutely right, let me get that for you", you atrophy the muscle that let's you course correct when you're making a mistake, and when someone disagrees with you it feels that much stronger. Wealth is not the only way this can happen, you see it with notoriety and power who have gotten used to " being right" (Dawkins comes to mind), and now this experience is being "democratised" by LLMs.
- enraged_camel 7mo ago
  They can finally say "retard" openly. They have been openly gloating about this! So yes, I agree: previously they felt constrained. They no longer do.
  - Animats 7mo ago
    "Retarded" is an euphemism. It was preceded by "mentally disabled", "feeble-minded", and "idiot". Renaming doesn't help. Agnews, in Santa Clara CA, was successively called The Great Asylum for The Insane, Agnews Insane Asylum, Agnews Mental Hospital, Agnews Developmental Center, and Oracle's Santa Clara campus.
_fat_santa 7mo ago
I have a tangential theory to this. Being rich != being famous. There are tons of extremely wealthy people out there that keep a very low profile. Sure they might be well known within their circle but ask the average person and they have no clue who that person is. I would say this is the case for like 90-95% of billionaires. Musk, Andreessen, Zuck and others were all in this camp 10 years ago but they all decided that simply being rich wasn't enough, they wanted to be famous. These folks have all the resources and connections to become famous so they can get on all the podcasts, write op-eds, and are guaranteed to get the best reach on social media and thus the most eyeballs on their content and the most attention paid to them. But when you go from making a few media appearances a year to constantly making media appearances in one way or another is that you need more "content" so to speak. Just like a comedian needs more content if they are going to do a 1hr special versus a 10min set at a comedy club. The problem for all these guys is they have a few genuinely insightful ideas mixed in with a ton of cooky and out of touch ideas. Before they could safely stick to the genuinely insightful ideas but as they've made more and more appearances, they have to reach for some of those other ideas. They don't realize that their cooky ideas sound very different than their few insightful ideas. They think all their ideas are insightful based on the feedback they have been getting for the past decade or so.
- aworks 7mo ago
  I need to reread it but Paul Fussell makes the case that old wealth is inconspicuous and secure (and maybe inherited) versus nouveau riche which is about visible luxury, branding, and showy consumption. I don't remember if he mentions the need to promote ideas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class:_A_Guide_Through_the_American_Status_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class:_A_Guide_Through_the_Ame...
  - deadbishop 7mo ago
    Paul Fussel’s Class was an interesting read
  - bluecheese452 7mo ago
    Meh dynastic families which are about as old money as you can get have some of the most ostentatious displays of wealth. They sit on thrones, wear crowns, and preside over public celebrations.
j2kun 7mo ago
Elon was always problematic. His increasing social media use removed the natural filters that prevented people from seeing it.
- piker 7mo ago
  I'm not defending Musk, but "problematic" used in this type of context is one of those words that says more about the speaker than it does the subject.
  - joleyj 7mo ago
    It seems to me to be saying that the person finds Elon Musk’s behavior problematic. What else are you reading into it?
  - lokar 7mo ago
    I think you can forgive it as a rhetorical device when speaking to a really broad audience.
    - CamperBob2 7mo ago
      IMO it's best to use fewer thought-terminating cliches in that case, not more. Unless one is simply engaging in a Reddit-style call-and-response exercise. To me, Musk crossed from "maverick" to "problematic" around 2018, when he tried to insert himself into the Thai cave rescue operation and ended up slinging accusations of pedophilia on Twitter. At this point, he has unlocked many more specific adjectival achievements, and those are the ones that should be invoked whenever Musk's behavior is the topic. (Which it isn't here.)
  - rhines 7mo ago
    I feel like taking issue with a word, even when used in a perfectly valid situation, is something worth reflection. Like fair enough if you've heard problematic used in ways you disagree with before, but maybe respond to those comments, not one where you agree with its use. Unless you actually do mean to defend Musk and don't think lying to investors, calling people pedos for saving kids, delaying public infrastructure, doing Nazi salutes, etc. etc. is problematic.
consumer451 7mo ago
I often wonder if tech billionaire psychosis might lead to a "Great Filter" event for our species. They have entirely unchecked power, lack of empathy, and gleeful ignorance of everything our species has done that their success rests upon.
- Henchman21 7mo ago
  They haven't even read the scifi that positions AI as an obvious resource trap. Sure, let's devote all our resources to birthing an AI. Do we think if its smarter than us we can contain it? Do we think it will help us by default? Have we not thought through the basics of what we're attempting?

TrackerFF 7mo ago

They've just become hype-men for their own investments.

foobiekr 7mo ago

You realized they were always shitheels. Musk was a complete visible fraud long before 2016.

guzfip 7mo ago
Indeed, he always seems like an obnoxious media attention whore to me long before he got into politics. I tend to have a negative view of celebrities who did cameos for the Simpsons far past its peak lol
anthonypasq 7mo ago
Elon is a social dumbass with the emotional maturity of an edgy 14 year old boy, but calling him a fraud I'd say is false and unproductive.
- foobiekr 7mo ago
  He is absolutely a fraud. He has been lying about many things for more than a decade to boost his stock. He has more in common with Trevor Milton than anyone else.
  - CamperBob2 7mo ago
    An atheist might call Franklin Graham or Jerry Falwell a fraud, but the people who fill the stadiums and pews keep coming back, year after year, decade after decade, generation after generation. They are obviously getting something positive out of the experience. Same with Musk and the stock market. At some point, victim-blaming may be the only rational explanation left. His followers are rubes falling for a fraud, yes, but it can hardly be considered involuntary or exploitative at this point. The rubes have become rich simply by sticking together under Musk's benevolent gaze, dominating financial discourse in the broader market. It will continue to work for them, right up until it doesn't.
- marcusverus 7mo ago
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- 7mo ago

iugtmkbdfil834 7mo ago

Money can buy greater latitude with mistakes. Mistakes that would have been career ending for low level employee, is an amusing anecdote to be remembered at a gathering or in a book. There are definitely some idiots with more money than sense, but reality tended to correct that fast. Now, it seems, they get rescued ( vide not that old case of Summers running to safe VC bank ).

vishnugupta 7mo ago

> Did I or did they change? I’d say both. They ran out of novel things to say which is expected of anyone because there’s only so many non trivial things one could say. But then unlike normal people they didn’t stop talking because being rich they are bored and they want to be in the limelight all the time. So they end up talking nonsense. You also changed, you are now wiser and have developed BS detector.

ssimpson 7mo ago
> They ran out of novel things to say which is expected of anyone because there’s only so many non trivial things one could say. But then unlike normal people they didn’t stop talking because being rich they are bored and they want to be in the limelight all the time. So they end up talking nonsense. Why do they always feel like they need to pull stuff out of their butts to make themselves sound like they know what is going on? In some ways I think it's related to the stock market "just meet the next quarterly goal" kind of thinking. Who cares if you don't come up with something pithy to say for a few years. Have big impacts over time instead of tons of little ups and downs all the time.
- palmotea 7mo ago
  > Why do they always feel like they need to pull stuff out of their butts to make themselves sound like they know what is going on? Massive, unconstrained egos? They think they're hot shit, because they surround themselves with yes men. I'm reminded of this: > Beneath the grand narrative Musk tells, when he takes things over, what does he actually have the people under him do? What is the theory of action? > He has people around him who are just enablers. All these Silicon Valley people do. All his minions. And they are minions — they’re all lesser than he is in some fashion, and they all look up to him. They’re typically younger. They laugh at his jokes. Sometimes when he apologizes for a joke, which is not very often, he’ll say that the people around him thought it was funny. > When he was being interviewed at Code Conference once, he had a couple of them there. He told a really bad joke, and they all went like: Ha-ha-ha-ha. And I was like: That’s not funny — I’m sorry, did I miss the joke? And they looked at me like I had three heads. (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-kara-swisher.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...)

AndrewKemendo 7mo ago

They have always been dumb. Richistan describes the pure unalloyed depravity the rich live in really well: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/512029.Richistan https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/512029.Richistan People are just finally able to see how dumb they are I’ve seen this in action and in person multiple times and it’s absolutely fucking horrifying watching how ignorant, useless and totally out of touch with reality the Rich are , yet still can crush people via the police state whenever they want Chris Hedges did a good video on this recently: https://youtu.be/EJ-OSJ7J64w https://youtu.be/EJ-OSJ7J64w

frereubu 7mo ago

These people are almost unimaginably wealthy to the point where they're effectively unchallenged if they're not directly challenging the state (and even then they win quite a few rounds). "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

tdb7893 7mo ago

A decade ago wasn't Musk talking about Hyperloop? He sounded like an idiot to many people then, too. His companies were good at the time but once he talked about anything else I feel like it was pretty clear who he was. I don't think this is new though, Henry Ford was famously into anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and even owned a newspaper to spread hateful nonsense (history might not repeat itself but it apparently does rhyme). I'm sure if there was more recordings of robber barons of the past you would see the same dumb nonsense you see now.

laserlight 7mo ago
> A decade ago wasn't Musk talking about Hyperloop? Yep, and he claimed that he would colonize Mars soon.

Rover222 7mo ago

[flagged]

georgemcbay 7mo ago

IMO they were always the way that they are now, they just didn't broadcast it in public. Before social media started running society off the rails people like this would generally hold back their controversial opinions to avoid alienating a chunk of the public. Now they realize they can say whatever they want and the 40% of people that glaze them for it are worth more to their ego than the downside of alienating everyone else.

donkyrf 7mo ago

There's the whole "billionaire bubble" thing, where they get surrounded by folks who have an economic interest in keeping the billionaire happy... but I'd posit there's another big change -- tech billionaires didn't used to have any cultural or political juice. This meant that even if they had some weird / bad takes, they kept them quiet. Media consolidation has really helped weird billionaires move the Overton window, so that their weird/bad takes become "acceptable", and then they start admitting them publicly.

vrganj 7mo ago
I think they miscalculated though. Their vile views still aren't acceptable, they just get broadcasted more now. This won't have the effect they hope for. It'll just expose them as the frauds they are.

jjulius 7mo ago

This has always been the case with the massively wealthy. They may be incredibly smart in their specific line of business, which leads them to an enormous amount of wealth and fame. Because our culture likes to lionize success stories, we collectively lean hard into putting people like that on pedestals and giving them more opportunities to speak their minds. Their own egos get inflated as a result, and a feedback loop ensues - they think everything they do is great because, collectively, our culture wants everything they do to be great. But the simple fact is, nobody's a genius in all areas. We all have our areas of expertise, but none of us can be trusted to speak wisely about all things all the time. At the same time, as others have said, your BS detector has matured.

palmotea 7mo ago
> This has always been the case with the massively wealthy. They may be incredibly smart in their specific line of business, which leads them to an enormous amount of wealth and fame. ... Their own egos get inflated as a result, and a feedback loop ensues - they think everything they do is great because, collectively, our culture wants everything they do to be great. This doesn't just apply to the wealthy, but more lowly people too: see "Engineer's disease." People like Musk and Adreessen are getting hit by a double-whammy: they're software engineers (the stupidest and most arrogant class of engineers) AND they're massively wealthy.
- ryandrake 7mo ago
  In undergrad I had a buddy who was a political science major, and he put it pretty bluntly one day: "Do you engineers realize how arrogant you sound when you're talking about things you have no clue about?" 20 year old me just laughed and thought to myself "lol liberal arts majors" but now that I'm older and more grown up, he was totally right and I see it all around me in the industry. Especially here on HN.
- wolvesechoes 7mo ago
  Yep, STEM people asked why we need humanities. And now they are starting to hold hot debates that strangely resemble things that humanities discussed centuries ago. One curious thing. My country was erased from maps for 123 years (Poland). During that time, universities in all three occupied parts could freely teach engineering, physics, math or biology. Occupiers didn't care, they even wanted to have access to talent pool of specialists educated on these universities. On the other hand, teaching of history, philosophy etc. was highly controlled and restricted. One can wonder - if humanities are so useless for the society, why did they even bother?

deleted 7mo ago

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roncesvalles 7mo ago

All the rich are on ketamine.

moregrist 7mo ago

When you reach a certain level of wealth and power, it seems like it’s very easy to surround yourself with people who only tell you how brilliant and successful you are. This creates an echo chamber where you don’t get reality checks, and when you do they’re easy to brush off as some form of “sour grapes,” after all if the person telling you that you’re wrong was so great they’d have your level of wealth. I think it takes a really extraordinary person to avoid this. As far as I can tell, most of the modern Silicon Valley titans are not extraordinary in this respect.

skdhfkdjfhsjk 7mo ago
It doesn't even take that much wealth or power. Look at Vox Day. In my internet wanderings I recently found myself commenting on one of his posts for the completely benign purpose of helping to expand upon his "sigma" theory, as I felt it was incomplete and needed improvement. His followers immediately attacked me, displaying 100% cult-like yes-man behavior. Most responses were essentially, "You disagree? Then you didn't read it carefully enough. Go back and read it again and STFU, loser." It was really spooky. He's got this self-reinforcing belief system where "people who agree with Vox" are called "sigmas", who are respectable, but "people who disagree with Vox" are defined to be "gammas", who are useless and wrong people who are held in contempt and derision. Some of those guys are really nasty characters. I tore them all a new asshole, and even Vox seemed to realize on some level that I was right as he didn't really have much of a response. (Search for the word "flamethrower" in the comments if anyone wants to find that article and read the posts, it's hilarious.)

jacquesm 7mo ago

A bit of both. You became more attuned to what really does and does not make sense and they rotted a bit further. But 10 years ago it was pretty visible for both Musk and Andreessen.

ohrus 7mo ago

Thinking any one person is a 'thought leader' is, generally, a dumb thing to think. You grew up.

jbmchuck 7mo ago

'Thought leader' has always been a code word for 'bullshit artist'.

kmeisthax 7mo ago

It's both. Back then[0], the ultra-wealthy had whole teams of PR managers - people devoted to doing the verbal equivalent of making sure they were lit with perfect 5500K portrait lighting at every angle. In other words, DLSS 5 but for personality. In order to sustain that kind of shitty magic trick, the PR team needs to completely control everything they say. This is a lot of effort. The moment the ultra wealthy slip up - that they reveal that they're a normal shitty person with a severe case of affluenza - the illusion shatters. And social media has made it both very easy and addictive for rich people to indulge in their worst vices. So now instead of fundamentally soulless people engaging in virtue signalling to pretend to be human, you have fundamentally soulless people engaging in vice signalling, because suddenly these p-zombies been given access to a machine that finds them fellow p-zombies to validate themselves with. Furthermore, once you see this happen a few times, your mental default changes. Now you assume every wealthy person is an asshole until proven otherwise. Even if Elon Musk might be saying something poignant about space travel or AI safety, you've seen enough Cybertrucks and "X Æ A-12"s and "autistic" Nazi salutes to know that he's a moron. You, personally, were ignoring the latter to focus on the former, because you were probably smarter than him. But he's shoved the latter in your face to the point where it's undeniable. > Did I grow up and they changed to a younger audience and what I used to enjoy was just a different kind of stupid? No, you're thinking of MAD Magazine. Notably, it's still possible for an emotionally mature adult to still enjoy that kind of humor. But emotionally mature adults tend to not enjoy manchildren. [0] 10 years ago was 2016, which is probably not as far back as you were thinking.

johngossman 7mo ago

In the late 1990s I went to a RealNetworks developer conference and Andreesen, then at Netscape, was a keynote speaker. I was curious and open to his insights, but his talk was so vapid (I remember he kept giggling) and arrogant that I eventually walked out. I remember he kept bragging about Netscape's next big project (something after Netscape 5 maybe?) and how it was going to wipe Microsoft out permanently. Only a few years later did I realize whatever it was never shipped, it turned out to be vaporware.

wodenokoto 7mo ago
Fair enough. But the software eats the world essay did change the world. Maybe he was lucky, but I still think he managed to position himself in order to be heard with that essay. Maybe I am naive.
- tsunamifury 7mo ago
  You should look into the person Marc hired to research and validate that for him (basically write it) Ro Venkatesh. His essays are quite titilating. And you can immediately see it was Ro's idea not Marc's.
  - michaelcampbell 7mo ago
    I seem to recall he had a cadre of people actually writing the browser, too. (Also Indian, as I remember, but it's been awhile.) It could be a faulty memory, but I've never thought much of the guy after I heard that, and he continues to not impress.
- bcooke 7mo ago
  How do you think it changed the world? I don’t think that was an especially prescient thing to say/write at that time. The idea that software was poised to continue to grow in 2011 was pretty obvious to most people. It is true that some companies were undervalued and many VCs and other folks were scarred from the dotcom bust. But if you go back and read it, you might notice that a lot of the companies and software he discussed and predictions along with them failed to be true or lasting. I think mostly it was a good catchphrase.

johannes1234321 7mo ago

There is a shift in society on what can be said and what they keep private. Back then you would pull stings in background, now you can bribe thenUS president in public. Also: Back in the days™ statements where edited by marketing people and others before publication. Now people blast out stuff on their own via "social media"

azinman2 7mo ago

They got radicalized, which was intensional from the right. Further, wealth and time has shifted the hippy ethos of the valley to libertarianism. It’s amazing how often becoming rich makes one into a libertarian :)

andrepd 7mo ago

To add to the answers given already, there's the matter of the sheer scale of wealth these people have (especially relative to e.g. median worker wages). The richest people on earth in the 80s were a bunch of discreet Japanese CEOs with 5 or 6 billion$ to their name. They were very rich, sure, and surely could influence politics with their wealth. But Elon Musk has 850 billion dollars. That's 850,000,000,000$. An amount so mind-boggingly impossible to imagine that you need analogies such as these https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c96F7D57CzI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c96F7D57CzI. And these people got it not as a CEO of a quiet car company or such, but as owners of media and tech empires with a reach and influence Ted Turner could only dream about. It's a qualitative leap.

scottious 7mo ago

I remember when Elon came up with the hyper loop idea and everybody I worked with at the time thought it was revolutionary. These were very smart people who were fooled. In hindsight, how could we all have fell for this? What a profoundly stupid idea, but I distinctly remember at the time it felt right. I guess what I'm saying is that I think a lot of people just wised up and started seeing through his B.S.

simianwords 7mo ago
I genuinely don't know how the mental model of such a person works where they look at Elon who got multiple world changing bets right but they focus on the ones that were wrong.
- scottious 7mo ago
  I feel like a lot of the ideas are over-attributed to him. Tesla already existed, electric cars aren't really a revolutionary idea. He's a hype man and he does the hype stuff well. Cybertruck was a pretty unmitigated disaster. self-driving is not really working out as he promised. I still remember arguing with people in 2020 who thought you'd be able to sleep in your car in a few years. Seems like Waymo is beating them to robo-taxis. Hyperloop was a bad idea. Starlink + reusable rockets... alright, not bad, but not exactly a "world changing bet". Seems far more hyped than anything. So he gets credit for just combining the idea of reusable rockets to send satellites into space? okay fine. He had a lot of money and threw a lot at the wall to see what stuck. If I were a betting man, I'd bet against his "next big idea". He'll over-promise and under-deliver.
  - Animats 7mo ago
    Space-X's success is due to Gwynne Shotwell, who really is a rocket scientist. Musk didn't originate Tesla's car concept. He did, however, promote into a large scale business. That's the real achievement. Promotion isn't enough, though. I heard Shai Agassi of Better Place speak once. That was the Israeli guy with the car battery swap startup. He was really good looking, a great speaker, and his 10x growth per year business plan was utter bullshit. Better Place went bust. It wasn't a totally unworkable idea; there are successful battery swap operations in China. But he spent time and money schmoozing with heads of state and setting up demo centers in multiple countries, while not delivering much. (More fundamental problem: battery swapping is a bet against fast charging and battery progress, which appears to be a losing bet.)

NoLinkToMe 7mo ago

The question is what you think now of their old opinions. If you think the same, they have changed. If you think differently, you have changed. If I look at Elon and Marc's interviews from 10-15 years ago I am still roughly 80% in agreement, 20% disagreement. I feel the same about what they used to say today, as I did back then. Now I'm 20% in agreement (they definitely still have interesting thoughts) and 80% absolutely disgusted (with both, but particularly Musk). So I genuinely think they changed in this regard.

danans 7mo ago
> Now I'm 20% in agreement (they definitely still have interesting thoughts) and 80% absolutely disgusted (with both, but particularly Musk). > So I genuinely think they changed in this regard Everyone has changed. You, me, Musk, Andreesen. But in that time, the disparity between them and "us" in wealth and even more importantly, political power, has ballooned. Their increasing power has fueled their sense of infallibility and inevitability. It's not yet clear what these changes will engender in us. We are more numerous and divergent in perspectives and interests.

asdff 7mo ago

I think people get dumber as they age. I feel like I'm probably dumber than me 10 years ago. No one wants to admit it, but I sense it in myself and I think I can see it in other people. I feel like peak brain is probably like 22 years old if we are being honest. Yeah you might still be doing dumb kid stuff but you are at the age where you just have this energizer bunny inside. You can just go to the library and churn multiple all day and night sessions. Sleep in one day and perfectly recovered. I "know" more now but I'm definitely slower than when I was younger. Would be great if we didn't spend so much time faffing in school on stupid stuff and got into our strides in our career maybe 5-10 years earlier. When I think about my first research job, that could have probably been done in middle school vs undergrad. Wasn't really any more challenging than when I worked part time in a restaurant in terms of the tasks. I probably could have been working on some thesis under an advisor for my hs years instead of being stretched thin over the boilerplate curriculum. And then I probably could enter the workforce at 18 and have enough to get up to speed on the job pretty fast. By 22 I'd be in management right at the peak of my mental faculties and skill buildup.

NegativeK 7mo ago
I certainly thought I was smarter when I was younger.
- asdff 7mo ago
  Are you saying you haven't felt increased mental fatigue and "slowness" while aging? What is your secret? Certain supplements? Blood boy?
  - skdhfkdjfhsjk 7mo ago
    [flagged]
krunck 7mo ago
> I feel like peak brain is probably like 22 years old Ah, but peak wisdom? Much later.

acdha 7mo ago

You definitely got wiser—we all do—but I think there’s also a big shift in both what they think they can say safely in public and the sycophantic reinforcement they get on social media. Rich guys have always had that problem to some extent but it used to be less public—nothing like Musk just tossing out some inane insight while high and getting hundreds of thousands of fans applauding. Human brains don’t handle that well, and you can tell these guys haven’t had to defend an idea rigorously in years. Another factor seems to be the way corporate valuations have become increasingly untethered from actual value. It’s not like there isn’t historical precedent for people getting rich by luck but thinking they’re geniuses, but the tech world has become really weird about that in ways which amplify the previous no-filter point: it’s one thing to be, say, a Netscape millionaire but parlaying that into billionaire status really gets into the point where they never have to hear unwanted criticism and are guaranteed to be treated as sources of wisdom regardless of the applicability of their experience.

duxup 7mo ago

I believe in some form of the Twitter poisoning theory: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/11/opinion/trump-musk-kanye-twitter.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Q1A.ymaC.vJKjOcT2Qhm0&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/11/opinion/trump-musk-kanye-... It seems to explain some of the weirdest of hang ups and strange / desperate choices.

Henchman21 7mo ago
All of what currently ails western society online is likely to be a russian psyop. All of it. We've left ourselves open to direct manipulation.
- CamperBob2 7mo ago
  No, we did this to ourselves. Blaming Russia is the easy way out... even when it's likely true, as in the trajectory of Trump's career. A healthy, rational society would be much harder to bamboozle -- by Russians or demagogues or preachers or billionaires or anyone else -- than Americans have proven to be. Over the last 10-20 years, many events that I thought would serve to immunize us to BS have fed an addiction instead.
- IAmGraydon 7mo ago
  Not all, but much. Years ago here on HN I said that social media is a weapon more powerful than nuclear fission and we created it and handed it to our enemies in exchange for a small group of people becoming extremely wealthy. I was promptly downvoted. It’s the closest thing to a mind control device that’s ever been created, and sites like Reddit, Facebook, and even HN openly allow bot traffic in exchange for either dollars or a claim of “open discourse”. HN hates the solution to this problem even more than they hate the problem, so I won’t even start the debate.
CamperBob2 7mo ago
That's a nice essay from Lanier. Operant conditioning is certainly something everybody on HN has experienced, watching the numbers next to their posts go up and down.
7mo ago

fuzzfactor 7mo ago

>Did I or did they change? >>Andreessen and his cronies are making large claims about what human beings want and need. Could very well be a moving target according to what they need from human beings at the time.

pjjpo 7mo ago

Both Andreeson and Elon knew exactly how to take advantage of the times to make money. Both are true "failed" billionaires, Netscape and "PayPal" as the examples. Latter in quotes since Musk didn't contribute much more than getting fired immediately. So yes, you are the stupid, and the world has not gone towards better, or even different.

cptskippy 7mo ago

> Is the 1 percenters getting dumber or acting like it? I feel like their messages are designed to derail people's train of thought. People start to realize that technology isn't fulfilling and they need to re-access their lives? Nah... introspection is a modern invention and that act of reflection is actually the source of your discontent. Stop thinking about it and just go with the flow, you'll be much happier when you stop concerning yourselves with the state of the environment, other people's well being, if your work is fulfilling, or the fact that you have no retirement.