I wonder, if I was surrounded by wealth in the same way, if I would schedule talks on my wacky ideas. The blind encouragement of insurmountable wealth must be intoxicating.
TED is a venue for middlebrow ideas by middlebrows for other middlebrows.
Same with symposia and fora with “distinguished guests” like the Dalai Lama, or Kissinger or one of the Clintons or many other officials.
They do a circuit, often have someone prepare note for them where they rarely challenge prevailing thought among the attendees and come out of it with a lot of money.
There will be some nuggets once in a while but there is rarely any groundbreaking insight like when physicists and mathematicians in the XXth century brought new ideas, challenged old ideas and often suffered indignity for some time before they were vindicated.
I suppose the kind of character traits that enable becoming super-rich probably also lend themselves to giving such talks.
Most sane people would stop working by the time they become rich, not super rich. To become a billionaire, your brain must be wired differently, and perhaps with unwavering conviction that you are right, righter than anyone else and the world owes you its attention.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -GB Shaw
I don't fully agree with the quotation from Shaw, but there's some truth to it. And I suspect a common quality of the billionaire class is ruthless unreasonableness -- and considerable luck.
My pet theory is that billionaire weirdness and AI psychosis have the same root cause: talk too much to sychophants and the human mind starts to go off the rails.
Without a reality check, the natural feedback loop that tells us we're wrong sometimes, the human mind starts to diverge into madness.
Upon reflection, I'd add some amount of spoiled child syndrome or affluenza[1]. Both of those are environments where children and adolescents are removed from consequences due to someone not telling them they're wrong or removing natural painful feedback mechanisms of reality.
You don't think he was aware of the potential to leverage Twitter to elect a friendly president and alleviate his severe regulatory challenges? That part was just a happy accident?
Are we forgetting the part where he bought twitter because of a joke, got sued over it for manipulating twitter's stock price, tried to buy his way out by buying twitter, realized it would cost too much money and tried to back out, got sued again and finally was more or less forced to follow through on the purchase?
Are these the actions of a man following a well thought out plan to elect a president?
We all know why he did it: because people wrote on and listened to twitter a lot, and he didn't like what they said. He wanted to control the conversation that was unfavourable to him.
> He wanted to control the conversation that was unfavourable to him.
Same thing Thiel is doing for political control: attempting to inherit the religious right from MAGA -perhaps on behalf of hos protegé. Thiel's plans will likely outlive the movement's leader and/or go beyond 2028, it's a race against time to establish his bona fides while the sun shines
It’s all deeply weird, and films like the Mountainhead increasingly seem like they might be more accurate than not.
There’s just clearly some limit around accumulated wealth where it detaches people further and further from reality.