‘We will coup whoever we want!’: the unbearable hubris of Musk and the billionaire tech bros
Challenging each other to cage fights, building apocalypse bunkers – the behaviour of today’s mega-moguls is becoming increasingly outlandish and imperial…
In the 19th and 20th centuries, industrialists understood that giving money to existing institutions meant that it could be distributed wherever it was needed, and so they donated to hospitals, libraries and universities. JP Morgan actually bailed out the US federal government on two separate occasions. Today’s billionaire philanthropists, frequently espousing the philosophy of “effective altruism”, donate to their own organisations, often in the form of their own stock, and make their own decisions about how the money is spent because they are, after all, experts in everything.