GEIST: “‘… run for president, again.’ So Anand, I’ll let you flesh out the case a little bit here. That’s sort of the top line. But we can start with Elon Musk and what he’s doing at Twitter. It appears to be a game to him. But letting Donald Trump back in the room, Kanye was posting again yesterday as well. What does it all add up to?”
GIRIDHARADAS: “You know, first of all, I think something we often forget as Americans is that billionaires exist as a class of people who have that much money at our collective pleasure, right? It is a policy choice to allow some people to accumulate that much money, hundreds of billions of dollars, in the case of people in the United States before everybody has the chance to live with dignity, right? Other countries make that choice very differently. We have chosen historically to heavily prioritize having billionaires over having dignity for all people. And that’s a choice, I would just start by saying that we could make differently in the future. And so I wrote the piece to try to remind people of that choice we have. And last week was remarkable. I mean, I’ve written about billionaires for years and talked about these issues on this show. But it was hard to imagine a week when there was so many spectacular reminders of the way in which this kind of billionaire classes is inconsistent with democracy as we live in. Elon Musk is — is you know, is a sort of adolescent in his 50s. Everybody can see that. I don’t think anybody would say Elon Musk is a normal 51-year-old man, who has bought this platform that he himself calls a global Town Square, certainly functions has that kind of social importance. And because of what is so evidently his own feeble limitations, he’s just not — he’s a limited man. His limitations become all our problem. They ramify into all of our lives, they start to, you know, unleash anti-Semitism because he wants Kanye back on the platform. And Kanye announces, shalom when he comes back after his — his big anti-Semitism benders in recent years. And he brings back Donald Trump, who’s — who’s kind of unleashed the — the — the — the white nationalist demons in this country on that platform and off in ways that are obviously have caused us to come to the brink of losing our democracy. Elon Musk’s big idea is let’s bring him back. He’s gutted the company. Photos of him from the company at a so-called code meeting show that there’s basically like no women left working around him. It’s just a big sausage fest in there working — you know, in the team that he has remaining around him. And then, you know, the rest of the week was — was Jeff Bezos doing this big song and dance about philanthropy, while then an hour later his company lays off thousands of people, thousands of people right before Thanksgiving, going home having to tell their kids, mommy or daddy doesn’t have a job anymore because of this guy who’s apparently giving money away to help people I guess, like us who don’t have jobs. You have Sam Bankman-Fried, an incredible example of someone who had these — he wasn’t even into philanthropy in this moment, he was still just making money and telling us that simply the way he was making money was going to help all of us. He was going to smash the system, man, he was going to bring down the big banks, and he was going to create this new era of finance for everyone. You could all get in on the crypto thing, and he just lost everyone’s money. He makes the big banks look good by comparison. And then of course, Trump, who I always have appreciated — he’s not even necessarily an actual billionaire — but I’ve always appreciated the nakedness. Unlike some of these other guys he doesn’t do a very good job of pretending that he’s for the public benefit. He certainly ran on a campaign of smashing the system in 2016, but — but he is very nakedly revealing what I think is true of this group in general, which is that their existence as — as billionaires is sort of antithetical to our flourishing as a democracy.”
[It’s a little curious that Ghiridharadas doesn’t mention other billionaires like Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, William Buffett, Bill Gates, Jamie Dimon, etc, as “antithetical to our flourishing as a democracy.” Heck, Bloomberg tried to buy the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020. And Musk and Kanye are the threats to democracy? Come on, man — Ed]
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