But it is perfectly in line with the sort of thinking that drives men to become billionaires in the first place. It may sound absurd to us, the little people without an Ultra Success Mindstate, who have accepted that our fate is bound to the fate of this planet. In the same way that every good billionaire has an armored escape room in each home and a helicopter on call to whisk them away from any sinking yacht, so too do they expect to have a way off Earth if things go bad here.
Let’s call this what it is: they are making plans to get the hell out of here. They are not motivated by a love of technology, or even a belief in the universe as a business opportunity. It is not a coincidence that the richest people in America are funding a new space race. Why give your fortune to others when you could instead increase the amount of time that you have to luxuriate in your own revolting wealth, a brain in a vat being endlessly stimulated by an army of servants who exist only for your own all-important pleasure? It’s difficult to spend all those billions in only a hundred years on Earth. This is why billionaires are so obsessed with funding technology to extend their own lifespans. And once you’ve bought everything else, the most alluring prize is life itself. The one thing they cannot accept is being told that they cannot buy something. Extremely rich people, as a rule, have come to believe that everything is for saleĮxtremely rich people, as a rule, have come to believe that everything is for sale. His true motivations, I’m afraid, are more sinister.
Imagining Bezos as a lizard person incapable of feeling human emotion is actually the most generous interpretation of his behavior. This, from a man who has bulletproof glass in his office and a seven-figure tab for personal security, seems rather disingenuous – I’m sure that leaving all that cash piled up in an unlocked room open to the public would get rid of it quite efficiently.
Build a bunch of space rockets! I simply can’t see any other way to get all of these cumbersome gold bars out of my personal vault. What would you do with $200bn? Cure diseases? End hunger? Eradicate poverty in an entire nation? Nah. That is basically it.” I admire the honesty of the sheer inhumanity this quote displays. The most revealing quote from any rich person in the past decade came out of Bezos’s mouth in 2018, when he told an interviewer: “The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. This is a conclusive demonstration of the fact that if you want the Bezos fortune to do any good, the first thing you must do is to take it away from Jeff Bezos. In the space of a single year, his ex-wife has become an infinitely greater philanthropist than Bezos himself has in the past quarter-century. His logistics-addled brain has never been able to process the kindergarten concept “To whom much is given, much is required”. Bezos, thus far, has nothing on the humanitarian side of his ledger. Yet he also had the good sense to build a bunch of public libraries, to create the appearance of some redeeming qualities. A century ago, Andrew Carnegie hired private armies to smash and shoot his employees when they went on strike. Few men in history have been able to match his icy ability to simultaneously accumulate grotesque mountains of wealth while showing no impulse to even pretend to have an obligation to the greater good.
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