<
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/25/we-will-coup-whoever-we-want-the-unbearable-hubris-of-musk-and-the-billionaire-tech-bros>
"Even their downfalls are spectacular. Like a latter-day Icarus flying too
close to the sun, disgraced crypto-god Sam Bankman-Fried crashed and burned
this month, recasting Michael Lewis’s exuberant biography of the convicted
fraudster –
Going Infinite – into the story of a supervillain. Even his
potential sentence of up to 115 years in prison seems more suitable for a
larger-than-life comic book character – the Joker being carted off to Arkham
Asylum – than a nerdy, crooked currency trader.
But that’s the way this generation of tech billionaires rolls. The Elon Musk we
meet in Walter Isaacson’s biography posts selfies of himself as Marvel comic
character Doctor Strange – the “Sorcerer Supreme” who protects the Earth
against magical threats. Musk is so fascinated with figures such as Iron Man
that he gave a tour of the SpaceX factory to the actor who plays him, Robert
Downey Jr, and the film’s director, Jon Favreau. As if believing he really has
acquired these characters’ martial arts prowess, in June Musk challenged fellow
übermensch Mark Zuckerberg to “a cage match” after Zuck launched an app to
compete with the floundering Twitter. Musk and Zuck exchanged taunts in the
style of superheroes or perhaps professional wrestlers. “I’m up for a cage
match if he is,” tweeted Musk. “Send Me Location,” responded Zuck from
Instagram’s Threads.
Billionaires, or their equivalents, have been around a long time, but there’s
something different about today’s tech titans, as evidenced by a rash of recent
books. Reading about their apocalypse bunkers, vampiric longevity strategies,
outlandish social media pronouncements, private space programmes and virtual
world-building ambitions, it’s hard to remember they’re not actors in a reality
series or characters from a new
Avengers movie."
Via Kenny Chaffin.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
