In one interview, Mush called it the "empathy exploit".
This is the kind of person who would benefit from being raised and humanised in a village where people co-operate. Because then, as countless others have discovered, bluster and insults work only until the self-aggrandising narcissist meets someone not only bigger, but with better principles, and an actual leader of people.
There is a reason why many satisfying movie plots involve a final, usually violent comeuppance served to a self-aggrandising narcissist.
that's a stretch: andreessen got wealthy because he worked for the UIUC group in a project which turned out super popular, super funded by Jim Clark, and got massive explosion in worth. there's no sociopathy involved from him back then.
Musk made a company that jumpstarted some wealth and invested in other things which exploded.
Toto Wolff is a gazillionaire because he too made some pretty incredibly timed investments.
point is, extreme wealth results from some combination of work, timing luck, strategy, and sociopathy, but they're not all required to span the space of wealthy people.
i think your observation is consistent with the giving pledge thing of warren buffett and others, that they accrued massive wealth but want to give it away.
Yeah, that's the thing; once you have a billion dollars, you are set for many lifetimes of extremely comfortable living. Allowing a single person to suffer while you have more wealth than you can spend in a dozen (or more) lifetimes is pretty cruel. I mean, I don't really see how it is significantly different than hoarding.
I've never had billions of dollars and realistically I probably won't ever have billions of dollars, but I would certainly like to think that I'd keep enough for myself to keep myself thoroughly entertained, and then give the rest away somehow.
Of course, I've never been tested with this. Maybe if I was gifted billions of dollars I'd be as evil as the rest of the billionaires.
"Better to just not think about it" feels like the majority sentiment and a lot of people's path to their own (albeit less) success. We’ve got lots of modern phrases like "don’t listen to the haters" or "you do you" or things like imposter syndrome to support it.
Yes. One of the most important things to learn is how to introspect and actually FEEL the pain that surfaces when you do. That's how healing begins. If you never do that, you're stuck in whatever destructive patterns you use to avoid that introspection forever.
It turns out that when you actually allow yourself to feel those things, it gives your nervous system the ability to metabolize and process them.
I also think it is important to learn to feel and to separate the feeling from the acting on the feelings. In my mind this is what distinguishes an adult from a child. Sadly, I know many adults who have never learned this lesson (including members of my own family), so it's probably not a very good legal definition, although I like it as a practical one.
I sometimes encounter this phenomenon among college students in my job as a professor. Most college students have learned some form of it, but not all of them. I often think "somebody should teach them those skills" but it has always felt like it was out of scope for _me_ to be the one teaching them. I'm supposed to be teaching computer science. On the other hand, being unable to act rationally on stimulus is ultimately self-sabotaging, and will they be able to absorb my lessons if they can't get past little things like the way I look or the way I dress? This is not a hypothetical: any faculty member whose courses solicit end of semester feedback gets comments like "I didn't like his class because he seemed smug" or "I could not concentrate because I hated her accent" and nonsense like that.
I think they're reflexive people and for Andreessen the long period where he was massively invested in the shadiest crypto companies required pushing a culture of conformity.
A lot of Andreessen's investments were essentially pyramid schemes and the greatest threat to those investments was intellectual honesty & introspection.
Under that pressure from him and others a lot of the tech world shifted towards being more tribal. We saw a huge shift away from intellectual honesty and critiquing actions & ideas on their merits to instead a culture of fiercely defending founders and relentless hype.
I also believe that's why they shifted towards the political rightwing, because the more tribalist approach is presently rewarded on that side.
One of many, many, many stupid things he's said.