In our recent post on rich guys doing stupid things, I quoted Paul Campos, who wrote:
We worship billionaires in this society now like Stalin or Mao or Hitler were worshiped in their societies. Vladimir Putin scores eight goals when he plays hockey against professional Russian hockey players because that’s the way the world works I guess . . .
But the highlight of the thread were two comments.
I met an English guy on (the original) Ithaca who had set up a cafe there, and he claimed that the locals cheated like hell at backgammon and thought it was better to win by cheating because it required more skill than winning through playing by the rules.
This reminds me of Dan Luu’s explanation of how you can cheat at Codenames.
And from Somebody:
Pretty much nobody worships billionaires as a class. Most people worship at least one billionaire; that’s THEIR billionaire. Think old school paganism. Pantheon of gods, but a tribe will focus on one. A lot of immigrant Chinese Americans worship Elon Musk. Maybe it’s Donald Trump, or Kanye West, or Beyonce, or Taylor Swift, or Charlie Munger, or Warren Buffet, or Steve Jobs, etc.
I like that framing. Except that I’ve never heard of Charlie Munger, but I guess that’s part of the point.
Who’s the billionaire I worship? Bob Dylan. Or, if he doesn’t have an actual billion dollars, I guess I can go with Paul McCartney. Back in the day, I knew a lot of people who worshipped Steve Jobs. Go on the internet, and you’ll see lots of Elon Musk and Donald Trump worshippers.
I mean, sure, I know that all these people are mortal. By “worship,” I mean that my favorite celebrity billionaires have done amazing, wonderful, inimitable things and I’m always rooting for them. Not necessarily in all aspects of their lives–I seem to recall reading that Bobby Z. wasn’t much of a father, for example–but, then again, Zeus and the gang didn’t have such tidy domestic situations either. People can worship Donald Trump in the sense of following him to the ends of the conceptual earth, supporting him on whatever latest policy twist or fake story he comes up with this week, while still finding him somewhat comical and even a bit despicable in his business dealings. Or you can worship Lebron James, admiring him for his amazing basketball skills, his physical conditioning, his Jordanesque will to win, etc., without wanting to look too carefully into his social life or those rumors of performance-enhancing drugs. And so on.
And it does seem that these celebrity billionaires live in their own Olympian plane (on their literal private planes) and only sometimes descend to Earth in order to involve us in their petty battles.
Fifty years ago, this wasn’t the case! There were rock stars, movie stars, sports stars, media stars, political stars, not so many business stars. There was Howard Hughes but he was a weirdo, not a god. Forty years ago there was Lee Iacocca, but he was a self-promoting businessman–a kind of big-budget Ron Popeil or Crazy Eddie–not an independent source of power like the modern celebrated business leaders.
Also, it can be fun to be talked about–or, at least, it can sound like fun until it happens to you. So you get boring billionaires such as investor Bill Ackman who decides he’d like to enter the pantheon as a minor god (ok, in his mind I’m sure he’s a major god), so he starts staging publicity stunts. And . . . it works! Because he’s a billionaire. But he’s gotta keep doing newsworthy things or else he’ll be forgotten. Maybe he could pay to build a really tall building somewhere and put his name on it? Or try his hand coaching an NFL team? I dunno.
Anyway, this “pantheon of celebrity billionaires” idea? I like it. It accurately captures something real about our society, something that’s relatively new.
What is as usual left out of these discussions is the role of the media. 40 years ago, it wasn’t the case that any utterance of a rich person about any topic that they are completely unqualified to comment on was a news story. But guess what, 90% of our media is owned by billionaires who think they are geniuses and surround themselves with lickspittels.
And 40 years ago, whatever shady and corrupt dealings the rich may have been involved in:
if a rich guy has showed Nazi salutes and promoted child porn, that guy would have been ostracized from polite company.
“Pretty much nobody worships billionaires as a class. Most people worship at least one billionaire”
I strongly disagree. I think most regular people don’t care about billionaires (and I bet you don’t “worship” Bob Dylan and whatever admiration you feel for him is not a function of his wealth; it’s weird that you would make such a baseless claim.)
It’s mostly a media and elite obsession, and it’s definitely a class phenomenon. And it’s absolutely not normal and shouldn’t be normalized!
Piglet:
Regarding my use of the term “worship,” read the longest paragraph of my above post.
I agree with you that my admiration to Dylan has nothing to do with his wealth.
I think claiming that fascistic tendencies and exploitative sexual habits were going to get you ostracised from “polite society” (read financial elite) historically shows a deep lack of familiarity with the histories of ruling classes.
+1
Fascistic tendencies: hopefully all the learned folks here are familiar with The Business Plot and Smedley Butler. Full acknowledgment by Congress that yes, a cadre of America’s most wealthy men really were trying to overthrow FDR because of The New Deal, followed by a collective shrug since those were the same men who elected the Congressmen.
Sexual exploitation: Cuba before the revolution. The wealthy men of America vacationed in Cuba, smoking the best cigars, drinking the best rum, and sexually exploiting the prettiest underage girls, nearly enslaving the rest of the population in the process. (Any belief that ordinary Cubans would have been better off without the revolution is ahistorical. They may be dirt poor, but the literacy rate, health care, infant mortality, and life expectancy are all better in Cuba than they are in the U.S.)
Frankly I can’t believe this bullshit. It recalls “Trump is nothing special the GOP was always like this” wisdom that we have been treated to for so many years and that I thought we had finally left behind us.
So if you think you are smart, tell us which rich guys performed Nazi salutes *in public in front of the cameras* and run a child porn publication network *in public for everybody to see* 40 years ago without suffering consequences?
Cynicism is a really really bad guide in these dark times. The cynics are unable to see how dramatically things have changed for the worse within the last few years, and their pretend tough talk really serves to minimize and downplay rather than reveal the depravity of the ruling class, and ultimately to minimize the outrage that we all ought to direct against them.
Which is also why I take issue with the OP, which kind of makes billionaire worship sound normal and cute (based on no evidence btw – it’s simply not true!)
Matt Skaggs:
you are telling me that fascism existed in the 1930s? Guess what I was aware of that… your examples completely miss what my comment was about, which for some reason refers to “40 years ago” as a reference… reading comprehension really helps you know…
Piglet:
Without responding one way or another to the rest of your comment, let me just clarify in response to your last paragraph. I don’t think billionaire worship is “cute” and I don’t really know what it means for it to be “normal.” I’m bothered by it: I’m not happy about all this billionaire worship.
Also I think that things have changed in the past few decades, that rich investors and businessmen are rock stars in a way that was not true in my youth. I think there’s been a cultural change in who the culture heroes are (indeed, not so many actual rock stars are culture heroes any more), and I think this is interesting and important, hence my post.
Piglet:
Matt’s point, I think, is that we have overcome worse things before, and we can do so again.
Maybe you should read a history book instead of going with whatever rage bait the media feeds you. Also, focus on more important things, like the economic suffering and repression.
“The nation was on the brink. Mobs burned Black churches to the ground. Courts threw thousands of people into prison for opinions they voiced—in one notable case, only in private. Self-appointed vigilantes executed tens of thousands of citizens’ arrests. Some seventy-five newspapers and magazines were banned from the mail and forced to close. When the government stepped in, it was often to fan the flames.”
What time period was this? 1917-1921. Read “American Midnight” by Adam Hochshild. ICE is nothing compared to this.
To Matt Skags–before the Cuban revolution of 1958, Cuba was the fourth-wealthiest country in Latin America. It had more TVs per capita than anywhere else in Latin America. (Cuban TV people, who fled Castro, were instrumental in developing Spanish-language broadcasts from LA to Buenos Aires.). The infant mortality rate was lower than in Spain, Portugal or Greece. Supporters of the Cuban dictatorship like to pretend that pre-Castro Cuba was an impoverished island, like Haiti. It was not.
In:
Yeah, it’s too bad the people running Cuba in the 1950s were so damn greedy and violent. It seems like some better outcome could have been possible.
Almost all of these billionaires got that way because of things they did (excel at sports, music, innovative ideas, luck). Perhaps it is of recent vintage that achieving these things could earn you billions (inflation adjusted, of course). Maybe it was much rarer in the past to become that wealthy – we certainly had the Rockerfellers, et al but there were far fewer of them. As inequality has grown, the group at the top has become larger, enough so that we could each have our own favorite billionaire. I guess I’m seeing this as a natural outgrowth of high inequality. The fact that these people get worshipped I find less notable than the fact that they have become so very rich compared with everyone else. Also, the idea of hero worship has been discussed in terms of scientists on this blog. Is “scientist as hero” any different than “billionaire as hero?” Most of the scientists are not billionaires, so I think there is a difference. Perhaps the phenomenon is not about money but about notoriety. In a world of input overload, a few rise to the top and are seen to do not wrong – it is much easier to worship someone as infallible than to have to deal with the messy business of thinking of them as human.
So, I guess I’m wondering whether these times are different because of inequality or technological changes (with attendant scarcity of time and attention) rather than wealth per se.
Dale:
Sure, but there were always successful businessmen, even if they weren’t billionaires. But 50 years ago I don’t think they had the celebrity glamour and fame of Steve Jobs or even Bill Gates. Perhaps one issue is that the modern-day plutocrats are so rich that they can individually have huge political influence. In the past, the chairmen of GM, Citibank, etc., had to use their institutions in order to access power, whereas richies now can just write personal checks.
It seems to me that people like Howard Hughes were major celebrities. Maybe J. Paul Getty too, but I don’t know how public he was. Then there were the Rockefellers and T. Boone Pickens, but again I am not sure how public they were. But Hughes for sure was a celebrity. Wikipedia says he dated, among others, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Katharine Hepburn, and Gloria Vanderbilt. (Gloria Vanderbilt might also qualify as a celebrity billionaire, adjusted for inflation)
Gdanning:
I agree that Hughes was a celebrity billionaire, but I don’t think he was a culture hero like Steve Jobs, and he was considered kind of a special case, not part of a pantheon.
I guess its part of who I associate with on the internet but Billionaires are universally derided and people are literally calling for guillotines. There are no “favorite billionaires” among my friends and acquaintances. A lot of people made stickers with Luigi Mangione dressed as a saint though.
Same. The idea that any individual should be able to amass so much wealth is grotesque. For example, considering that Dylan might be a billionaire kind of makes me like him less (or it’s a situation where I separate my appreciation for his work from him as a person). At some point, what are you going to do with all that money? If hoarding it is someone’s answer rather than sharing, I think less of them as a person.
But I do agree that billionaire worship is a thing in our culture, and it’s interesting to consider why that is.
You are mistaking wealth with money. The distinction is not trivial.
You should find less sociopathic internet company.
Teddy Roosevelt had the right idea about billionaires (millionaires, in his day):
“It tires me to talk to rich men. You expect a man of millions, the head of a great industry, to be a man worth hearing; but as a rule they don’t know anything outside their own business.”
(Attributed to Roosevelt, but I can’t immediately find the source.”
Typo:
(Attributed to Roosevelt, but I can’t immediately find the source.)
I’ve heard a lot about how the US legal system is a core part of what keeps the society running but something that’s always bothered me is how frequently cases settle and how the solution is almost always to pay some money. Turns every crime into a fine. The sacklers didn’t go to jail. Neither did prince andrew. They just paid. Every time a company commits a crime the people who cause it are hidden and faceless. The company settles. The eventual consequence is that the people with the most money can just buy anything and secondary systems arise as a consequence of that narrative because it is repeatedly reinforced.
So yeah, billionaires are about as superhuman as one can conceivably be. Might as well worship them I suppose.
Yeah, it’s like Neurips, as discussed in our recent thread.
Agreed. I like the framing of moving the person down across the economic ladder. In some sense we’ve collectively decided that the worst crime is being born poor.
If you haven’t read it, I’d recommend reading The Fever by Wallace Shawn https://wischik.com/lu/senses/fever.html . It’s a tad long so if you’re pressed for time I’d say just read the last few paragraphs, starting with: “All right, go ahead. Go ahead. Say it.”
Sanjeev:
Yes, I’ve read that piece by Shawn. Indeed, I think I saw him perform part of it once, many years ago.
It’s not surprising to me that billionaire worship is part of American culture. Hey, you too can be one of them, if you just try hard enough! I suppose there are worse things one can worship, but it is a sad state of affairs indeed that everyone knows who Steve Jobs was, but no one knows who Claude Shannon was, or Dennis Ritchie, or …, without whom Steve would have been just another privileged kid who took LSD and imagined beautiful gadgets.
Hi Eric. I’d like to build on your comment, applying a social identity lens (which is my usual shtick). I think what you get absolutely right here is that the heroes we choose are reflections of the communities that we wish to be a part of. In fact, any hero worship should be best understood as a group phenomenon, where those who are seen to be the best exemplars of our group/tribe/clan are granted heightened influence and reverence.
Andrew is musing about a possible societal shift, and my hunch would be that an upshot in billionaire businessman (sic?) worship would be a symptom of parts of the Western World increasingly embracing wealth generation as a value. This is perhaps especially true in America, whose national mythology is entangled with the mythology of capitalism. In this environment, wealth generation and depictions of wealth become potent cues for credibility and insight.
Trump, to address the elephant in the room, has been so successful in generating a following because he operates boldly at the intersection of capitalism, ethnicity, nationalism, and religiosity – all of which are powerful collective orientations for a large number of Americans.
If this piques anyone’s interest, I couldn’t recommend these sources enough:
Turner, J. C. (1991). Social Influence. Buckingham, UK, Open Psychology Press.
Haslam, S. A., et al. (2011). The New Psychology of Leadership: Identity, Influence and Power. Hove, UK, Psychology Press.
I heard someone on a podcast doing silly Bob Dylan impressions and it kinda made me rethink things.
I always liked the music a lot, and I guess I’d just defaulted to taking him very seriously, but in retrospect Like a Rolling Stone (the song I associate the most with Dylan) is just so petulant. I just don’t think of Bob as a very serious character anymore, and I think it fits better. Anyway the scale of his character seems really small compared to the other people in that list.
I think One Headlight (Jakob Dylan) has aged quite a bit better, but also it isn’t tied into the whole counterculture whatnot.
[Without any intention of claiming a relationship of any kind beyond a mere curiosity, I will quote here the relevant passage from The Tales of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov]
And the day came to pass that there was a country where there were enormous riches, such that everyone was rich. However, their way and behavior was quite disturbing–strange and weird. For everything by them was conducted according to wealth. The value of each and everyone’s status was according to his wealth. That whoever has such and such thousands or tens-of-thousands has one status, and whoever has such and such [an amount of money] has another status. And so forth–the entire structure of [societal] value by them was aligned with the money each person had. And whoever has such and such thousands and tens-of-thousands – in keeping with the sum which had been determined by them – he is king. And similarly they had flags, that whoever has this much money is with this flag and has this particular status of that flag; and whoever has this much money is with another flag and has there the certain status of that flag, according to the value of his money. It had been determined by them how much money one should have to be considered of this flag with this particular status, and how much money another should have to be considered with another flag and its certain status. And so the level and status of each and everyone was completely according to the money, as had been determined by them. Furthermore, it was fixed by them, if he has [only] this much money he is a plain human, whereas if he has even less than this, he is an animal or bird, etc. So, by them they had wild animals and fowl, that is, if he has just this little money, he is called a human lion; and in a similar vein other wild animals and birds, etc., that in line with the small amount of money, he is just an animal or bird, etc. For the main thing by them was money, and the status and level of everyone was only according to the money.
Now, it was heard in the world that there is such a country, and the Ba’al Tefilah would sigh deeply over this and would say, “Who knows how far they can go and err through this?” Some men from the Prayer Meister’s retinue were present, and did not ask his opinion at all, but went there to that country to restore them to the good. For they [the Ba’al Tefilah’s associates] had great pity on them about having gone so off in the lust for money; especially since the Ba’al Tefilah had said that they could go further and further astray, therefore these people went to that country. Perhaps they could restore them from their nonsense.
[So, the Ba’al Tefilah’s people] entered the country and approached one of them who was apparently a low-status person whom they called an animal. And they began to talk with him, that truthfully money is not a purpose at all, and the main purpose is only serving Hashem, and so forth. But he did not listen to them at all, because it was already rooted in their thinking that the main thing is only money. And so did they chat with another, and he too did not listen. And they wanted to talk with him more, but he replied, “I have no more time to talk with you.” They asked him, “Why?” He replied, “Because we all must leave the country and go to another country, for we have seen that the main goal is only money, therefore it has become ingrained in us that we must go to such a country where they make money (that is, there, there is a kind of earth from which they make gold and silver). Therefore we all must now go to that country.”
It also got into them that they wanted to have stars and constellations too, that is, whoever has so much and so much money, according to the amount they had determined for it, he should be a star, because since he has so much money he must have the power of the star, because the star generates the gold, because the fact that there is earth from which they make gold is, after all, due to the star that generates such earth there from which they make gold. Since the man has so much gold, he must have the power of the stars, therefore he himself is a star. And likewise they said they wanted to have constellations too. That is, when someone would have so much and so much money, however much they had determined for it, he should be a constellation. And likewise they made for themselves angels, all according to money. Until they agreed that they should have gods too, that whoever would have very much money, so many and so many thousands and myriads, however much they had determined for this, he would be a god, because since God gives him so much money, he himself is a god.
Thank you Nadav, most interesting. It’s a shame that Jewish writings like these are not better known.