Careless People
(pluralistic.net)939 points by Aldipower a day ago
939 points by Aldipower a day ago
You've won the lottery, but you don't want to acknowledge that you won the lottery. You want to feel they you deserve your position through hard work and talent. You're living in a society where people are credulous, to some degree they believe that hard work and talent are related to success.
So what will happen? Everyone you hire ends up patting you on the back, telling you what a great guy you are.
> to some degree they believe that hard work and talent are related to success
Does anyone actually believe that hard work and talent are either zero or negatively correlated to success? I don't think the correlation is 1.0, but I firmly believe that it's positive for both.
Hard work and talent are related to success. But when the outcome is "become the richest person in the world", hard work and talent are a rounding error compared to luck. Does anybody really think Zuckerberg is even in the top 5% hardest working or talented people in the world? A decision as inconsequential as rewriting Facebook to a different language in the early days could have derailed the entire enterprise. There is a lot of luck involved.
I do.
108 Billion humans have ever lived on planet earth. 8 billion-ish currently.
Most of them live lives that in no way reflected on their hard work and talent, but rather their circumstances, starting with where and when they were born but encompassing a million different contingencies outside the control of their hard work or talent.
So do you think you have talent and hard work greater than 99% of those many billions? If you're posting on HN you've probably got "success" in that extreme even if you've never applied yourself or excelled in anything of any note.
It's obviously a combination of talent, hard work and luck. Usually in that order. The luck in Zuck's case was being in the right place at the right time. Obviously he made the most of it with talent and hard work.
What they want to believe is that their wealth is in proportion to their hard work and talent. But even ignoring luck, in a "tournament market", rewards are a strongly nonlinear function of inputs. Being no 2 in a market which is a natural monopoly has limited rewards.
For most of human history yes, the amount of hard work you did was negatively correlated with success. Kings, Queens, and Pharos sat on thrones while peasants built the pyramids, farmed the land, etc.
Even today high effort jobs tend to be low paying, paper shuffling, or keyboard tapping tends to pay better.
I think that, broadly speaking, hard work and talent strongly predict success. But the circumstances can dramatically affect the magnitude. I have no doubt that Zuck would've been successful in 1880, but not one of the richest people who ever lived. The leverage that comes from being an introverted hacker type was not as great then.
To add, it isn’t just hard work and talent but also the willingness to take a calculated risk when an opportunity presents itself. Most talented and hard working people I know are so risk averse that they would let multiple opportunities to make billions pass them by.
I don't personally know any people who believe that hard work and talent have zero positive correlation with success. However I know many people who believe that parents' socioeconomic status, genetics, luck, birthplace, and lack of scruples are all much more significant factors.
I choose to actively reject that mindset because doing so motivates me to focus on elements within my control, but if I'm being honest I think they are probably correct, at least from a statistical perspective.
My take: "winning the lottery" in a Facebook sense requires a floor of talent and work at the early stages, but the odds of winning don't correlate with how much talent and work exists, nor are continued talent and work required once a critical mass of success has occurred. External factors - being in the right place at the right time, having some cushion of familial wealth, etc - dominate once you're over the floor.
Neither talent nor hard work have anything to do with helping humanity.
The reality is that our measurements of success don’t correlate with “goodness”, they correlate with getting stuff done. And you can do lots of evil stuff pretty easily.
The reason so many rich people seem evil is because they are. You don’t become rich via charity. You become rich by exploiting others and siphoning their success to yourself.
It’s just plainly evident in every sector of our economy. You don’t have to pay for the bad shit you do. Look at tobacco. Tobacco is a zero-value or negative-value industry. The sheer existence of tobacco actively makes the world a worse place.
But guess what? They don’t pay for your COPD medicine. They don’t pay for your congestive heart failure. But they will happily take your money for a carton.
All bad costs are externalizer, and all profit is kept. The end result is obvious. The more good you do, the stupider you are. The more evil you do, the more money you make.
To throw some controversy onto the mix, they are related, but in the same way that [some race] is correlated to [some behaviour] in the extremes of the probability distribution, but mostly makes no difference at the overwhelming core of it.
And therefore when people say [some race] makes no difference in [some behaviour], and other people say "Why is it always [some race] when we see [some behaviour]", and others say "the observation that [some race] leads to [some behaviour] is false because 50% of the time I see [some other race] being worse than [some race] in terms of [some behaviour]" they are all completely right, but just focusing on different properties of the distribution.
So back to your example, yes, in the extremes, many people who are ultrawealthy may have had those behaviours. But by far and large those behaviours don't make much of a difference to the overwhelming majority of the population, and therefore it's likely that other factors were far more important in terms of making an ultrawealthy person becoming ultrawealthy in the first place. At best, someone who was destined to be ultrawealthy didn't make it because they didn't have those behaviours, but that's more like winning the lottery and being too forgetful to go cash it in, rather than having characteristics that will help you win the lottery in the first place.
In the case of talent and hard work, I think it works the other way: the vast majority of people will see better results in their “normal/broad-middle” lives from increases in hard work or, said otherwise, suffer negative outcomes from lapses in effort [getting fired for lack of attendance or having worse health outcomes from a lack of exercise being concrete examples].
It’s not that interesting or relevant to me whether Musk, Gates, Zuckerberg, Bezos had talent or work ethic as significant elements of their success. It is interesting and relevant to me as an adult, parent, and mentor the role that talent and hard work play in outcomes for my family and the students I mentor.
I strongly doubt it’s anything other than a positive correlation and believe that the correlation is relevant for normal people.
At school I used to play marbles. I had no skill whatsoever so I did "set ups" where I put a marble down and other kids threw theirs from a standard distance to hit it. If they missed the marble was mine. More valued marbles got more chances.
I got "marble rich" because I knew who the good players were and when one came a long I put my foot over my marble. Once you knew the trick it was impossible not to win on average and be a few marbles better off every day. Even a slight positive over a few weeks turns into a lot.
At a certain point I stopped finding this desirable and felt a bit guilty about it - the marbles were of no use to me really and it was enough to know that I had the trick of succeeding.
I wonder if this is roughly how people get wealthy in real life other than that they don't think "enough".
They become rich because 1/ they got marbles to start with 2/ they like marbles when marbles are a thing 3/ they figure out a trick nobody has figured out (and it's just a trick, not much genius in there) 4/ they want more marbles 5/ they don't care if they loose (so they can take risk)
Who should be promoted and/or given a raise?
The person working hard with the same company for 15 years with extensively proven track record and well known impact across the organization?
Or the interview candidate with 5yrs experience?
Yet every time, companies roll out the red carpet for the new guy. He’s probably at least half bluffing and the new company has little concrete evidence of his past performance.
But negative, but success is correlated to success so much that at some point work and talent are irrelevant. Let's say Zuck has an idea to make something. He has enough people around him discussing ideas that he can basically pick one he likes and it's already pre-filtered. Then he can give it to basically anytime he chooses, with arbitrary skills threshold and resource allocation. Then he's got a whole support network to make it work. And if it falls? A loss of a few millions means nothing to him and he can try again.
Every step of that is inaccessible to someone hardworking and talented. So let's say you got lucky once or was born with wealth available to you - you can skip the whole talent and work thing.
>Does anyone actually believe that hard work and talent are either zero or negatively correlated to success?
On average or for a particular person? Maybe on average there’s an effect (r=.4), so there will be many people for whom that correlation is in their individual case actually negative. Some struggle with this notion, and assume success must signal talent or hard work in individual cases. How one defines success matters a lot too. If one is comparing zuck to some random CEO, say collison, can you say zuck is more hardworking or talented? He is more successful on paper, but I doubt he is significantly more hardworking or talented.
A lot of people seem to think of success as the sum of a bunch of independent variables: positioning + insight + hard work + talent + luck - scruples ... Then, they argue about the relative magnitude of each term.
It's obviously more complex than this, but I think it's more useful to think of it as a product. You don't need a high value in any of them to succeed, but a tiny value in even one means you need an astronomical value somewhere else.
"if hard work was all you needed to get rich, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire".
The clothes I'm wearing right now were probably made by a sweatshop laborer working 12 hours a day under awful conditions, getting paid something like 1% of what I make in my tranquil 7 hour workday sitting comfortably at a computer.
I therefore think that just hard work has an almost zero correlation to success by itself.
If you add in "addressing a valuable market", then yes, hard work helps, in that more effort spent addressing that market will likely yield higher rewards. But working hard on something people don't want will not yield success, in my view.
"The horse was the best worker in the kolkhoz, but never became its chairman". Heck, there is an entirely too depressing to read (but probably mostly correct) theory about how the office politics work [0] and I imagine it roughly translates to the other fields as well. Putting lots of efforts into some random thing most likely won't make you rich and/or powerful. It's putting the effort into becoming rich and powerful that gets you there — but that takes a rather particular personality and skill set.
[0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
I think they’re like linearly correlated to a point and then other things take over.
I do think that the primary factor that can lead to billionaire status aside from luck is sort of moral flexibility / shamelessness / irrational risk tolerance above and beyond hard work and talent.
I agree with you that there is positive correlation.
I also believe those two things are correlated with genetics (and of course environment/upbringing)
Enormous numbers of humans work hard and are talented at the things they do. Hard work and talent gets you a middle-class existence, at least if you were born in the right country and with the right resources to go to university, etc.
In the case of Zuck, he basically did play a lottery ticket, and a perfect confluence of being in the right place at precisely the right time yielded some success. A million other programmers, working just as hard and just as talented, were trying to make their web app hit at that time and failed.
That's how life is. It is a lottery ticket that Zuck is super rich. And it's a strawman to act as if pointing this out means that hard work and talent don't matter.
And FWIW, the overwhelming predicate of significant business success is sociopathy. I am kind of a broken record on this, but I think Meta's entire business is basically the oxycontin of the online world, and that everyone involved should feel absolute shame about the negative value they bring to the world. Non-sociopaths would have felt shame and changed course when they realized they were getting rich on the mentally ill, conspiracies, misinformation, etc.
> Does anyone actually believe
> I firmly believe that it's positive for both.
Alright, setup an experiment and prove it. Should be easy.
Speculation is free. Can't ever be wrong in the land of uncertainty.
> You've won the lottery, but you don't want to acknowledge that you won the lottery.
Yes, but where does this drive come from?
I haven't the faintest idea, however we can extrapolate from some facts.
One fact is that they have a lot of money. Duh... But also money is the key metric to measure success, so a lot of other people flock around those who have money so that it rubs a bit off of them, that Midas touch.
Suddenly these ultrawealthy are surrounded by an endless wave of gold diggers. The immediate thing that follows is flatter, and then echo chamber.
Now imagine that goes for years and years. Slowly this metaphorical richy's whole world views -- and also how he view himself, his identity and his relationship with the things around him -- gets tied absolutely to that notion that he is right.
For this imaginary person, losing a game isn't just am innocent loss anymore. It's a direct question of his own identity.
I think this explains a lot, but I'm not psychologist so it's just a wild guess.
In addition, I think you have to be sort of selfish to become ultra-wealthy. At some point people who believe that they became rich not by their own merit would start to distribute some wealth around. While selfish and egotistical people would hoard all their wealth, compounding it into ultra-richness.
There's a trove of truth in this <lottery / denial> perspective. It happens on all levels of success. But what a profoundly different world it would be if wholesome humility was the default tendency. I'm not saying it would be a panacea, but understanding the dynamics, even intuitively, of the myriad interdependencies that allow our every action would be a humble leap in a better direction.
For me, the only thing anyone deserves is what everyone else deserves, and everything else is a form of lottery. There's simply no place for arrogance other than delusion. It's good to remember who built the foundations you've succeeded on, and if not beyond one's capacity, with a little dose of reverence, respect or something other than self immersion. Zuckerborg is a mirror for many.
Skill and effort obviously has a part in explaining success.
That aside, I can’t be the only person tired of people bringing envy politics to this forum, trying to shoehorn wealth into every single discussion involving someone who is wealthy, as if that’s the only, or even a valid, way to look at everything they do.
In order to get into Zuckerberg’s position in the first place, you need to have a highly competitive personality type. And competitive people want to win at EVERYTHING, all the time. It’s a constant compulsion. Even if they might intellectually understand the distinction between “just a game” and “actual serious time”, they don’t “feel” that distinction in their bones. They have no off switch.
I think there are some similar remarks on Bill Gates in another good memoir by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen [1]. Even on his school days, Gates was so sure he will not have a competition on Math, since he was the best at math at his school. When he went to Harvard, (which I somehow remember as Princeton(!) as pointed out by a commenter) and saw people better than him, he changed to applied math from Pure math. (Remarks are Paul's)
> I was decent in math and Bill was brilliant, but I spoke from experience at Wazzu. One day I watched a professor cover the black board with a maze of partial differential equations, and they might as well have been hieroglyphics from the Second Dynasty. It was one of those moments when you realize, I just can’t see it. I felta little sad, but I accepted my limitations. I was OK with being a generalist.
> For Bill it was different. When I saw him again over Christmas break, he seemed subdued. I asked him about his first semester and he said glumly, “I have a math professor who got his PhD at sixteen.” The course was purely theoretical, and the homework load ranged up to thirty hours a week. Bill put everything into it and got a B. When it came to higher mathematics, he might have been one in a hundred thousand students or better. But there were people who were one in a million or one in ten million, and some of them wound up at Harvard. Bill would never be the smartest guy in that room, and I think that hurt his motivation. He eventually switched his major to applied math.
Even Paul admits, he was torn between going into Engineering or Music. But, when he saw his classmate giving virtuoso performance, he thought "I am never going to as great as this." So, he chose engineering.
Maybe it is a common trait in ambitious people.
Edits: Removed some misremembered information.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Man-Memoir-Cofounder-Microsoft/d...
Huh. I remember being miles ahead of my peers in computer science in high school. When getting to college and finding people most definitely better than I was, I was incredibly excited to finally find such people, not scared away.
> Even Paul admits, he was torn between going into Engineering or Music. But, when he saw his classmate giving virtuoso performance, he thought "I am never going to as great as this." So, he chose engineering.
Coincidentally, I had a very similar experience, and made a similar decision to switch to software engineering. However, the irony is that I am also just a bad, if not worse, at software engineering. Oh well, not a day goes by that I regret my decision.
You are right. I should have looked it up.
> I was decent in math and Bill was brilliant, but I spoke from experience at Wazzu. One day I watched a professor cover the black board with a maze of partial differential equations, and they might as well have been hieroglyphics from the Second Dynasty. It was one of those moments when you realize, I just can’t see it. I felta little sad, but I accepted my limitations. I was OK with being a generalist.
> For Bill it was different. When I saw him again over Christmas break, he seemed subdued. I asked him about his first semester and he said glumly, “I have a math professor who got his PhD at sixteen.” The course was purely theoretical, and the homework load ranged up to thirty hours a week. Bill put everything into it and got a B. When it came to higher mathematics, he might have been one in a hundred thousand students or better. But there were people who were one in a million or one in ten million, and some of them wound up at Harvard. Bill would never be the smartest guy in that room, and I think that hurt his motivation. He eventually switched his major to applied math.
And to understand that there are people who are much better, to internalize it and change the major also requires some intelligence. I wish I had that insight instead of banging my head against the walls, barely passing while others sailed through and continued to Phd with half my effort.
There’s a very very similar story about Jeff bezos and physics.
https://youtu.be/eFnV6EM-wzY?si=Nc_EqhXEFJVuQWS6
I’m not making this up. Seems like a shared personality trait among these people.
It's not competition that they like. It's winning.
Competitive athletes expect to lose. They don't want to lose, but there's only one winner (or three podium spots) in any given contest. They turn "not wanting to lose" into their motivation for getting better, still knowing that they are fairly likely to lose. The competition is the point, and when they lose, they are still a little happy if they did better than they did last time.
The people who want to win regardless of the competition, regardless of the rules: we call those people bullies.
> In order to get into Zuckerberg’s position in the first place, you need to have a highly competitive personality type. And competitive people want to win at EVERYTHING, all the time.
Many competitive people want to win, but they want to win the real game, not a rigged version.
> Many competitive people want to win, but they want to win the real game, not a rigged version.
There are far, far fewer of these people than you think. Lance Armstrong was the best, and he cheated to win anyway. Barry Bonds was the best, and he cheated to win anyway. Tom Brady was the best, and he cheated to win anyway.
>Many competitive people want to win, but they want to win the real game, not a rigged version.
Apply the phrase to the staff member he lost to, and the situation makes sense. The staff member wants to win the real game (of remaining a high-salary Facebook employee), and will throw an otherwise inconsequential game of Catan to maintain that position's security.
The do anything to win mentality often includes bending the rules where they can. Someone listed some top people in their various sports below but I'd include Lebron too. Dude is the best basketball player the world has ever seen at least when considering longevity but he still flops often to get what he wants even though he doesn't need to to win. He's just going to get every edge.
Yes, that is a convenient escape hatch for justifying amoral behavior.
In my personal experience the will to win and the willingness to cheat in general correlates.
There is no real game in the fog of business development. You invent your own and see if it works.
The game of capitalism is to win by any means necessary. Rigging the game and evading the law is part of game itself. All winners play the game this way.
Reminds me of this post[0] from a few weeks ago:
>A couple years back, I got a job offer from an investment bank to help them win zero sum games against people who didn't necessarily deserve to lose. I had tried very hard to get that offer
I can recall being this way as a small child. So had I not been disciplined as a child so that I would not be a sore loser, did this blunt something that would have led to my being more "successful"?
I think that while the trait itself is fairly common the ability to bully and pressure everyone around you to give in to this level of petty and demeaning deference is quite rare. You only see it in powerful people because they're the only ones who can actually make people do this.
I have an aunt like this and she's super annoying and largely ostracized and in constant conflict with people around her, but if she had $175 billion she could probably surround herself with people who would indulge her.
Money is a potent and addictive hallucinogenic neurotoxin. We have a culture where everything is run by addicts, with predictably disastrous consequences.
A few years back (2015ish?) I read a big magazine profile of Michael Jordan in his post-basketball life and I was really surprised by how unhappy he seemed - extraordinarily competitive at everything, even casual games of golf, running up huge gambling debts, etc.
This is a guy who was the most dominant athlete of his generation, arguably the greatest the ever play the game, and yet he can't turn it off, he can't relax and rest on his laurels. The same personality quirks that drove him to win at basketball mean he can't tolerate losing in any arena.
Arguably, to be great at modern sports, you have to be good at multiple unrelated thing (On field strategy, Physical Conditioning, Actually the sport itself, playing politics, doing all of that while listening to coach), either you have that kind of drive to be the best at all of them or you'll just be a good athlete
I'm pretty sure this is the correct and intuitive reason. In a competition to be 'ever above everything else', tragically it selects for the most pathologically ruthless behaviour pattern, be it Musk or Putin. If there were a contestant even more unscrupulous than you, he'd take your place. So, as long as we allow/tolerate obscene wealth, we invariably get this. And if we try to avoid it the wrong way, we get Stalin.
The Bill Gates Chair Jump is another great example of this.
What a ridiculous video that's reading way too much into a silly 5 second clip.
Bill Gates may be competitive, but this specific event, and the whole idea that it somehow represents a shift, is completely unrelated to the current topic. People have different private and public personas, and even present different personas to different people. This is completely normal, and often the only way to cope with being a celebrity, especially for introverted personality types.
I was interested in this anecdote about the board games, but it seems like there's at least some dispute about how true or inflated this story is:
https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-board-game-c...
I think it's easy to believe a narrative like this about someone generally disliked, but the reality about basically everyone is that we have good moments and bad moments. People that are famous are constantly being watched and evaluated.
Given the inevitability of those bad moments being observed and reported, I don't think it's a good foundation for evaluating someone's character. In this case, it's mostly useful for confirming an already negative point of view.
from the article you linked, it seems that Zuck told everyone else to gang up on the next hardest player so he could win.
That they went along with it is... kind of in line with what Wynn-Williams said. Would they still have all teamed up on Zuck's opponent if Zuck hadn't been their boss?
I know a number of wealthy folks, many of them, actually really decent people. They deserve their wealth, and I have no issues with it. They tend to have somewhat different value systems than I do, but we get along, anyway.
I have learned that one word they pretty much never hear, is "No."
Even the very best of them, gets used to having every whacked-out fever dream their Id squeezes out, treated like God's Word.
People who aren't very good at self-analysis and self-control, can have real problems with it.
We are watching a bunch of very public examples of exactly this, right now.
How wealthy are the wealthy folks you know ? a quant or faang principal engineer making 1.5-2 million/year is wealthy and worked hard to get there (although, luck is still a big part of it) yet they're much closer in wealth than a fast food employee than they are to the super rich. Someone who has accumulated 50 millions of assets is wealthy, yet they'll never afford a super yacht or the lifestyle that billionaires can afford.
Multi-millionaires (not billionaires), but they are business owners and finance folks.
They own a mansion and a yacht (Bugs Bunny reference).
But you are correct. Different orbit from the ultra-wealthy. They still hang out with plebes like me.
However, if this happens to these folks, then you can bet that it also happens to the next valence level.
In the 1800s in Spain, king Ferdinand VII, was famously keen on playing billiards while being a really bad player. His opponents were known to, not only play badly, but play so that he would get easy positions to shoot.
"Así se las ponían a Fernando VII" is even nowadays a popular -though not that widely used today- expression to tell someone the task in front of them is an easy one nobody can fail.
Being ultra wealthy/famous/powerful would have a lot of negative psychological pressures that would likely effect all of us in that situation. Personal growth is difficult. Acknowledging negative parts of ourselves is difficult. Many times, we are forced to confront something negative about ourselves because of how it effects our lives and our relationships.
I think we have all had that friend at some point that was a poor sport. They were poor losers, gloating winners, and just unpleasant to play games with. Usually that person stops getting invited to game night, or you have a “come to Jesus” talk with them about their behavior. The social pressure of losing friends is a powerful motivator.
But what if that person has an unlimited supply of people that would validate, flatter, and reinforce their bad behavior? When you are thinking about who to hang out with from your unlimited rolodex, you will likely subconsciously lean towards people that make you feel validated, understood, respected, etc. Slowly, by degrees, over years, you could find yourself surrounded by sycophants, where you more and more validated and catered to, and are less and less used to hearing constructive criticism of your behavior.
It reminds me of how highly processed “junk” foods can short circuit a lot of our physiological mechanisms around overeating. Basically unlimited availability of junk food is part of why obesity is has shot up. Being ultra wealthy/famous/powerful is the highly processed food of the psyche. It doesn’t mean every rich person become psychologically unhealthy but it makes the rates of it shoot up.
> this insecure
I agree that such an event would demonstrate insecurity. I would also argue that past elites were not “that insecure”, because they put their lives at risk by waging wars. Of course, later elites figured out ways to address the downsides.
There's a frame question in this, and the history of duelling. Is your image, or self-image, in matters of honor or social status more important than your life? Is it secure or insecure to risk your life simply because of an insult? To what extent does "security" in this context boil down to the capacity for violence, rather than anything else?
But duels were instituted primarily to curb vendettas, deadly street brawls, and retaliatory assassinations that aristocrats regularly engaged in. At least with a duel, the violence was limited to one death and a settlement to the honor of all involved. It was in improvement to the situation they were facing at the time.
But the idea of honor itself was a necessity for most of history, when there was no central government to enforce contracts, punish violence, etc. Your reputation was one of the only protections you had. Whether your family was known to exact revenge to those that wronged you or as weak pushovers would affect someone’s decision to kill one of you, steal your things, or make a deal with you and keep everything for themselves.
You had to show that anything someone could gain at your expense would be outweighed by your commitment to take more back in revenge.
It's hard to speak broadly about this I think but since we already are. Military aristocrats like knights were at the least risk among combatants in an armed conflict, being better armed, armored, and more likely to be mounted compared to the levied militias or even professional soldiers, later in the early modern era.
And social norms at the time were to take them hostage and ransom them back to their family or allied higher lord if possible, so their chances of surviving a lost battle were much higher than that of the men they were leading. So even in this context they are already figuring out "ways to address the downsides."
Vs the like, the normal people who would also be called on to die in battle, but then the rest of the time would be living under the capricious and frequently violent rule of these certainly-no-more-than-average-emotionally-secure men with more or less unchecked power over their daily lives.
What we have now developed from what they had then and a lot of the dynamics are quite similar. The violence is more abstract but that's exactly what the current crop of tech billionaires is trying to change.
Being an Olympic gymnast or marathon runner or boxer is not, broadly speaking, healthy. These pursuits require you to make sacrifices that push your body to extremes, to its physical limits, and not only you are selected for a very particular set of traits, there are also lots of health and psycho-social compromises that are entailed by those traits and by your training process. That is the cost of competition.
Likewise running a company. You guys are, to be blunt, freaks. It requires very particular psychological and social conditioning to be in that place doing that thing, it demands specific types of personality traits and adaptations, and that probably doesn't make you, the successful CEO, a well-balanced, "normal" person.
Now take that person, who is a little bit alien in the first place, and ask what happens when they can choose everything about their surroundings, when they get fitted for their GERDpod https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtV33YSKOJk . They still have the same personality quirks, traumas and experiences that got them to this place, but now they're rich beyond imagining, every whim trivially achievable except power over other people (and that only minimally constrained). Like a person stuck in a perpetual state of orgasm, the question of whether they like it or not and really isn't relevant to whether we're going to be inviting them to the cookout or how they're going to behave in church. Any interaction, they're going to make it weird. Because they're weird. Their situation is weird, and the mentality that brought them to that situation is independently weird. A normal person would have pursued normal fulfilling things in life, and they chose entrepreneurial ambition.
Good point, and it made me think about a more general point about people:
It's often the same underlying trait that gives someone qualities that we like/admire but also the qualities we don't like.
When we evaluate each other, we sometimes have thoughts like "she has <good quality>, but if only she'd work on <bad quality>".
Over the years I finally realized that's not how we work. Our traits aren't always connected to isolated levers that we can pull independently.
The really good sales guy might exaggerate fibs in personal convo. The girl that moved from Germany to Mexico to start a successful hostel also has a hard impulsiveness that's hard to get along with. The really attentive mother is risk-averse to a point of absurdity. All examples of friends off the top of my head. Or me: I can find happiness anywhere that I am (good), but it also means I don't have the drive to rock the boat when I should (bad).
There doesn't necessarily exist the possibility of preserving the good part if you were to fix the bad part since the fix might require changing the underlying trait.
> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
This is very Roman Emperor behavior. Or Chinese Emperor, for that matter. It has pretty much always been the case that power and privilege lets you get away with bad behavior while simultaneously holding your subordinates to onerous standards and/or inflicting punishment on a whim.
Building a court who will steer you away from bad ideas rather than surrounding yourself with yes-men requires active effort, and enough humility to be aware of that risk.
The other constant historical trope is of course the abuse of power for sexual purposes.
>> Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy? Does anyone who fails to bend over backwards for them just end up getting exiled? Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
There is a long history of wealthy elites wanting to always win, even at games, and who want to be the center of attention.
Kaiser Wilhelm II had many of the same characteristics seen in today's ultrawealthy elites. When he commanded forces in German military exercises his side was always the side that won because it was his side.
"Wilhelm II's reign marked a departure from the more restrained leadership of his predecessors, as he sought to assert direct influence over the German Empire's governance and military affairs. This shift toward a more "personalist" system, where loyalty to the Kaiser outweighed true statesmanship, weakened the effectiveness of German leadership and contributed to its eventual strategic missteps."
Source: https://www.deadcarl.com/p/the-kaiser-and-his-men-civil-mili...
Lots of historical echos in the state of the world today.
>This shift toward a more "personalist" system, where loyalty to the Kaiser outweighed true statesmanship, weakened the effectiveness of German leadership and contributed to its eventual strategic missteps."
I'm not convinced there has ever been a positive or constructive outcome from cults of personality.
I had a conversation with one of these types. He honestly told me, "I really feel I am superior to most people". He was very frank with me. (And, in the things he did, he was actually much better than most people - he did have great talent but also spend almost all of his time on that.)
So my pet peeve theory is when they feel they are not superior and other people are better than them in activities that involve logical thinking for example, they feel extremely uncomfortable as their perception of themselves gets weaker, hence these strange behaviors.
When someone builds their whole identity around being "the smartest person in the room," any situation that challenges that (even something as trivial as losing a game) can feel like a threat to their entire self-image. It's not just ego, it's almost existential.
I think you'll see this kind of thing in many professions. Some doctors, who are highly specialized and highly trained in their field, act like they should automatically be great at skills they barely have experience with, and then get frustrated when they don't immediately excel or when people with less impressive credentials end up being better at something.
My family member who taught flying to hobbyist pilots always said physicians were the most dangerous students because of their "know-it-all" attitude.
Success has a part of skill, and a part of luck. It hurts to be reminded about skill issues.
Board games aren't as simple as time invested. I could spend my whole life studying chess, and some 13yo prodigy will handily beat me blindfolded, while juggling three other boards.
Board games cannot be conquered with wealth or a successful business. Or, rather, they can, but only by pressuring your underlings into letting you win; giving you the feeling you crave.
Naw, the rare super talented 13yo child that excells at such games will have also spend an incredible amount of time learning everything there is about it - leaving very little time to pursuit outside of that discipline to improve themselves.
There is a grain of truth to what you're saying, obviously - as Magnus has proven when he started to enter chess tournaments... Outplaying people with decades more experience. But you're also ignoring that he spend pretty much every waking moment of his thinking life playing chess.
But if you knew people were letting you win, wouldn't that ruin the feeling forever?
It seems like there must be another component, but maybe it is just that simple.
If they let me win, that is since I have power over them.
This is the more interesting answer to me because it's a reminder that everyone is playing a different game.
I used to play games to win, but now I play games to maximize the collective enjoyment of playing the game. This shift began with my spouse (who is a very sore loser) but continued with my children. I still let them lose sometimes because I want them to know how to enjoy a losing game, but I (selfishly) want them to enjoy games as much as I do, so that's my focus, and I will play to lose (as non-obviously as possible) frequently.
When I play games against good players now, I notice that I've lost a lot of skill in the kind of strategic ruthlessness required to win. I found this surprising, because playing in a way where you're trying to "fix" the outcomes for other players and modulate the mood of the game based on outcomes still requires a great deal of strategic insight and clever play. I guess the additional attention to the social and emotional dynamics must naturally reduce focus. It's kind of a shame, because you can't maximize enjoyment with a skilled player without being skilled, but I suppose the trade off is that there will always be more unskilled players who can benefit from enjoyment maximizing play than skilled players who will suffer from subpar opponents. Naturally, skilled players are already getting a lot out of the game, or else they wouldn't be playing enough to become skilled.
They think their wealth, position, etc. is a result of merit. However, they know their wealth was not earned, but given. At best, they were born into a position of privilege and simply used their existing, unearned, wealth to build more.
Losing at a board game forces them to confront the fact that they aren't any more clever than their peers. They didn't get to where they were on their wits alone; they started the game with a few routes already developed.
> And anyway, if you're playing games for fun and to bond with people, you probably shouldn't be playing tryhard optimal strategies every game, and should instead explore and experiment with more creative strategies.
Agreed. I have played some truly awful strategies in games (Azul: Queen’s Garden comes to mind) where it was clear within a round or two that it was doomed to fail; my wife / gaming partner expressed dismay that I was doggedly continuing, but to me, I had to see it through without introducing other variables so that I could definitively know (modulo luck of tile draw) that the strategy sucked. I thoroughly enjoyed losing.
EDIT: if anyone is curious, the strategy was to maximize high-point (5/6) tokens above everything else, eschewing end-round bonuses, brief tactical shifts, etc. Turns out it’s really hard to collect enough sets of them to count at game end, and you’re giving up compounding points along the way.
I know these types of people, a lot of them, but I am not one of them. I was a student at Harvard, I've dated the daughter of a film studio owner, the daughter of the then-owner of Gucci, I've worked at an Academy Award winning VFX studio, I know celebrities and CEOs, and I married an Academy Award winner. I know these people.
There is a mechanism in high wealth investment circles that seeks very ambitious and simultaneously low self knowledge individuals to invest heavily. They tend to be driven and charismatic in that drive, while being very ignorant of their negative impact on others. Many high net worth individuals see themselves in such youth, and invest in them, their ideas and their drive. They create psychopaths, and celebrate their mistakes as fuel for control of them later. This mechanism I am describing is very powerful, dominating.
I think it is part nature, part nurture.
To get where they are, they need to be quite smart, competitive, and ruthless.
As soon as they succeed, they become magnets to yes-men and people trying to ride their coat-tails.
So you end up in a position where the majority will ask "how high?" when you tell them to jump, and who will never question you.
Do that for a couple of decades, and something has to change - psychologically. You become condition to it.
>I think it is part nature, part nurture.
Really rich people aren't any different from the rest of us. You quickly realize that what sets them apart is privilege. You see behaviors in the wealthy that if they were poor they'd be locked up for. "They just let you do it if you're rich" comes to mind.
There is also a feedback effect. Most people are part of groups which aren't strongly selected for moral character, but the rich and powerful become surrounded by people who are after money and power, unless they deliberately manage to avoid that. So some of their bad behaviour is because the availability heuristic tells them that that's how most people behave, and fills them with cynicism and contempt
Surprise surprise, probably the image you had of Zuckerberg was not an intimate look into his personal life but instead a carefully crafted image created by an professional agency whose life and blood is creating neat images of famous people.
Somehow, actual real life details are starting to come out (he does seem more "daring" as of late, might be why), destroying the picture painted by the professionals for all this time.
Celebrity worship really needs to end, including the worship of the celebrity programmer. We're all humans, with a bunch of flaws, and it's easy to forget when what you're consuming is a fake impression of someone.
There is definitely a point where we need to stop assuming that people who are good at building tech companies are, by default, good at _anything_ else.
They might be, sure. But we shouldn't assume it.
I'd think the ruining society for profit part would be a red flag.
No one deserves that much more than others. No one believes they don't deserve what they have. People work backwards to justify why they need so much more power, control, and wealth than others. Worse for Zuck b/c his special shares.
The ambition/success feedback loop never stops, which is why the folks on top seem somehow less secure and content than the rest of us. Most of us figure out we probably won't be the #1 anything pretty early in our journey and stop fixating on comparison and focus on maximizing ourselves.
Most people have to make peace with not being №1, and in doing so, they actually get a shot at real contentment. But when you're at the top, the game never ends. There's always another metric to dominate, another threat to neutralize, another narrative to control.
I think it's less a new phenomenon and more a timeless one - we've just digitized the palace
Maybe you just hate to lose, which drives you to relentlessly pursue "success?"
The need to dominate can be a favorable trait for success. It can also be all consuming that you can't easily turn off. Like...ok Zuck, you won the f'ing lottery. You could spend the rest of your life on an island or helping orphans, but you still work at Facebook - why? Because he's wrapped up in it. It's a miracle Bill Gates managed to step down.
It can also be unsettling to know that, just as easily as you killed off competitors, competitors could unseat you.
So yea, you might sleep a bit easier at night if you can just win at the things you can control, like that darn Settlers of Catan game.
Also someone who reflexively accuses the other of cheating while playing a game likely has a hard time admitting they failed at something. Not an admirable trait in a leader.
> Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy?
Who says it's limited to the ultra wealthy? My network has a lot of people who have net worths of under $5-6 million USD and a lot of them are highly insecure.
I've witnessed several of them going out of their way to tear down people who are fitter or more attractive than them as well.
Look at the manbaby actions through that lens and you might get some insight.
Hmm. So highly insecure people have to "win" (however it's defined at the moment) in order to bury their insecurities for the moment, but ultra wealthy individuals 1) have more power, so they can make it so that they win more often, and 2) are noticed more (or at least by a wider circle), so when they do it, a lot more people pay attention.
>so when they do it, a lot more people pay attention.
It makes sense, media glamorizes these people and amplifies their actions, and some of the insecure folks crave attention. Look at that one guy who somehow works harder than all of us but is able to tweet all day every day...
There’s a podcast I love called Real Dictators.
It looks at loads of dictators from history - Stalin, Hitler, Saddam Hussein.
What they all have in common is a love for loyalty and subservience. And they demand loyalty and subservience be constantly proven. Often in very weird and trivial ways.
Eg. Saddam Hussein liked to have a BBQ where he would cook (but not eat) and make the food inedible spicy. Then he would force his top people to eat it while he laughed at them.
They of course had to keep up the pretence that the food was delicious and pay him lots of compliments.
We all have personal quirks which would appear silly if publicly known. But most of us are not billionares, so these quirks do not come to light, or do not seem that strange in ordinary people. "Not wanting to lose at board games" is actually quite a mild personal quirk compared to some of the things I know about myself or about my close friends. I know a guy who spends 20 minutes picking out tomatoes.
Probably have been told their whole lives that they are so smart, clever, and special, that they will (and rightly should) always win. So any loss immediately looks to them like foul play by their opponent(s). Even if it's just a casual game. Anyone telling them otherwise doesn't last long in their orbit. As they gain power, they naturally grow a bubble of sycophants who reinforce their "I always win" beliefs.
There's also no shortage of people willing to tell Zuck and Musk (from a relatively safe distance, like in public here at HN) that they're insecure manbabies born into wealth who don't deserve a fraction of the power they've managed to claw themselves. I suspect that we, and the desire to show us wrong (or at the least spite us) are also part of the equation for why the current crop of billionaires are as they are.
Not that this means we're wrong, exactly.
From an Eastern philosophy point of view, low ego with high confidence, is a skill that can be trained. It is also a skill someone can get worst at. That being said, I don't think that Zuck and Musk would have become low ego people without internet criticism, since they are on the completely wrong path.
Here on HN, we're not telling Zuck and Musk anything. We're telling each other things about Zuck and Musk. Zuck and Musk aren't dropping by to find out what we think of them, ever.
You mean "us jealous poor people who are mad that he is bright and successful".
I've known a few people in the hundreds and millions of dollars in wealth category and that seemed to be their go to response when anyone had to say anything negative about their behaviors.
In the US at least, never underestimate the amount of calvinism and prosperity gospel that has creeped into every facet of our lives.
It’s more so related to power. Once you’ve acquired enough power, it consumes most people. They don’t like having their power challenged or put in a weakened state. Many of these people are acquiring power via some form or their “genius”. Technical wunderkind, military strategy genius, etc. So that drives their ego. But, they probably know they’re not actually a genius and plenty of people could have done what they did but they got lucky. So they end up getting defensive and insecure when anything challenges their power, risks to expose their genius as a fraud, etc. They’re operating on a mental house of cards and are volatile due to it. For regular people, they seem to be triggered by small things like losing a card game but it’s probably just that, a trigger that unleashed a wave of pent up insecurity.
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
It’s possible that exact personality trait is what drove them to such success in the first place. Perhaps like an obsession with winning.
f you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
Zuck 'earning' another billion probably means nothing to him. I doubt he can even keep count. All of that sense of self-worth that people derive from their career or wealth is lost in the noise of Meta's stock price for him. But winning a board game is tangible. It's right there in front of him, as a direct result of his own actions. He can feel that.
If you couple that with him being surrounded by people who know that losing to him makes him feel good, and that Zuck is more generous when he's happy, you can see why people lose on purpose.
These guys are sort of like a type of inherited wealth. They created companies at a time where you could go public and have no accountability to a board with power.
When you take a genius and drown them in good fortune… you sometimes get a sense of personal infallibility.
The problem is also the justification stories they excrete to justify the wealth the capital machine pours on them. The whole gods choosen, superior, natural strong willed aristocratic uebermensch bottled into one cyst of sycophants. Totally unable to connect with "easily distracted by the trivial" normies, barely able to talk to the monomaniacs they once where themselves. Not a good show.
One of my favorite tweets:
> Being a billionaire must be insane. You can buy new teeth, new skin. All your chairs cost 20,000 dollars and weigh 2,000 pounds. Your life is just a series of your own preferences. In terms of cognitive impairment it's probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day
Probably he is insecure? Put too much into how much people think about him. And believes that being a big person he needs to be the best at everything, while - and this is a positive trait actually - he knows that he is not that big, needs to overcompensate and project much more than he possesses - which is a common trait on Facebook. Overreacts to the ubiquitous life experience of loss.
I think it's easy to unknowingly surround yourself with yes-men and become insulated from failure. Losing then seems like an exception to the rule, a bug.
It raises the question: where is the crack in this structural system, and how can we pry it open? Perhaps the vulnerability lies in the desire of the ultra-rich and powerful for societal respect—whether born of love or fear hardly matters. How should society respond? Mercilessly mock them.
It's weird how moments can go from "we were playing a game when.." to "The New York Times is covering a game we played 15 years ago". What I've heard from people who were in the game was that he wanted to go to bed so he was trying to negotiate a quick end to the game. There was a time at a con where I did something similar (i.e. we had to finish, we couldn't just leave the game setup and play later.)
Everything is viewed through a mirror darkly.
"HE FORCED OTHERS TO KNEEL BEFORE HIM, EVEN IN BOARD GAMES!1!" vs. "He wanted to go to bed so made a dickhead comment that would let him both win and sleep." Think back to your 20s, which feels more likely.
> If you're wildly successful at something … why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
> And anyway, if you're playing games for fun and to bond with people…
I see you answered your own question.
John Major, who was prime minister of the UK in the 90s, has talked a bit about how isolated a position like that makes you, and how unprepared he was for it. Few of the normal pressures of life apply you in a position like that: you can't get fired (not really), you don't have to accept consequences (not really), and perhaps most importantly: you don't have anyone tell you "you idiot, that's fucking mental". No one that you can just dismiss anyway.
I can't find the interview right now, it was a while ago, but I thought it was pretty interesting. Major was a man in his 50s when he became PM. Zuck was in his early 20s. You have to wonder what that does to a person. People like Zuck are more or less like child actors that made it big: everyone bends over backwards to deepthroat them and they've got a view of the world that's just delusional. I'd feel sorry if it wasn't for the highly negative and caustic effects.
The game thing is just the tip of the iceberg.
There's lots of talk in the entertainment world, from the long-term famous, about how money and fame tend to be fundamentally warping. Bill Murray said to Pete Davidson that, once it happens, nearly everyone is an asshole for about two years. People fawn all over you; they do things for you. They give you things for free. You can get things normal people can't get. If you're making a few million a year, you have economic power beyond nearly everyone you've ever known. At a certain level, travel is a whim, not a slog through TSA and airport lines. And you lose the ability to deal with pushback of any kind.
The smart ones -- the ones with some capacity for self-awareness -- course-correct. The others don't.
But in Hollywood, one assumes, the bubble is far less perfect than the one around someone like Zuck, whose power over Facebook is absolute and inviolate, and who has money and power beyond almost every other person on the planet. So there's only a very small chance of any course-correction, and thus he stays an asshole, and that assholery extends to insisting that he win at trivial board games.
At the Versailles court of the Louies there were constant parties and games, gambling and otherwise. It wasn't to bond or for fun, it was to keep the aristocracy too busy to threaten the dictatorship, as well as letting the king exert an immediate influence over them through a borderline insanity.
Infamously the first or second Versailles Louis, I forgot which, got very aggressive around the topic of toilet excretions, basically forcing aristocrats to try and handle being drunk and desperately needing both to piss and stay in his vicinity. The ceremony around the parties and the court in general over time got more and more intricate and maddening, causing the aristocracy to spend more and more resources on getting clothes and drinks and showing up at the right time and doing the right thing and being on top of the fashion of the day.
It would be weird if a late modern corporate dictator didn't apply similar tactics, since they are known to work and didn't come to an end until the guillotines rolled into town. Things like sleepovers in the office, ceremonial games, constant 'after work', oddball demands regarding clothing and behaviour, intimate surveillance and gossiping, and so on.
>Things like sleepovers in the office, ceremonial games, constant 'after work', oddball demands regarding clothing and behaviour, intimate surveillance and gossiping, and so on.
That sounds more like a cult than a company.
I don't understand why anyone would put up with that, if they had any other alternative. And most people do have alternatives.
> I don't understand why anyone would put up with that
To paraphrase McBain's answer to "how do you sleep at night?"
"On top of a pile of money with many beautiful ladies".
Louis XIV had a notably insecure childhood, with portions of the nobility were in open rebellion. When he came of age, he set about to make damn sure that they were under his thumb.
But the parallel seems lacking to me: Musk and Zuckerman can't jail recalcitrant managers.
Sure, every tyrant has a story that superficially allows some shift of blame.
They could, though. It's just that they likely would have to do something more involved than depriving them of their contracts, which is often enough to get rid of the problem and unlike an aristocracy where bloodlines and births set limits there are now institutions that produce replacements 'at scale'.
That story is disputed, to say the least.
Dex Hunter-Torricke:
>There's a story about when I was playing Mark Zuckerberg at Catan. Sarah suggests I was deliberately letting Zuckerberg win the game, and "brazenly" dismissing her strategic guidance. It's a lovely anecdote that positions our heroic narrator as some sort of principled mind surrounded by a sea of yes men or something, and that we all liked to let Zuckerberg win. Yeah, except that's not what happened at all.
Read on: https://www.threads.com/@dextorricke/post/DHCUpnssuuw/theres...
I for one don't believe it.
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
All the other comments are about Zuckerberg being an out-of-touch egomaniac, but I think this is a reflection of people.
We want our leaders to be infaliable and we use the stupidest metrics to judge people. Remember how Ed miliband eating a sandwich became a scandal? For every one person that would see losing as not a big deal, there's like ten people that will think "this guy can't win a game of settlers of Catan, and he's running the company???".
I am reminded of that joe rogan clip where he's just in awe of Elon Musk because of his Diablo rankings or something. People feed into the mythology.
It's all stupid and insane, but I don't see how anyone can look at the current state of politics or the stock market and not say that the world is full of crazy things that just run on vibes.
> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
The modern phenomenon, relative to history in general, is that upsetting an elite doesn't get you immediately killed or sold into slavery. But yes, they have always been like this. Behind every great fortune is a crime, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
i see it in local politics a lot too, people don't dare to contradict the leaders, who in turn end up believing they are right on everything, it's a sad thing really
> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
I don't think _all_ the superrich _are_ this insecure. Like, the obvious examples of this sort of behaviour are Trump (golf, in particular), Musk (video game nonsense), Zuck (this). But all three of those are very obviously fucked-up, socially maladjusted people in _other_ ways, too. Potentially the issue is more that being very rich allowed them to _get away_ with this behaviour; poor weirdos have more incentive to suppress it because people will only accept it from rich weirdos.
Though the phenomenon of "adult manbaby gets upset when not allowed to win game (especially by his partner)" is _absolutely_ out there, even for non-absurdly-rich people; see any subreddit about relationships for examples.
Nah, definitely not exclusive to men, but you do see it more from men. I think possibly at least partially because it _is_ seen as somewhat more socially acceptable from men than from women; the boy who never grew up is viewed more favourably than the girl who ditto.
> All it takes is someone insecure enough to feel that losing a game threatens their sense of worth as a person
You also need them to think that they'll get away with this behaviour, whether it be just being very rich, or because there is some societal tolerance of Homer Simpson-esque emotionally immature men, or for some other reason.
I think power sometimes leads to this kind of insecurity, but a bigger factor is that people with narcissistic personalities often succeed because ordinary people are unaccustomed to dealing with them. Narcissists often come off as unusually competent, confident, and intimidating. This leads normies to want to follow them and give them what they want.
Narcissists are always extremely insecure, usually because someone crushed their ego during childhood. (There also exist people with intact egos who are simply arrogant; I'm not talking about them. The arrogant are easy to distinguish from narcissists after you study them a bit.)
My point is that Zuck was probably very insecure before the creation of FB, and he became rich partially because he was an insecure narcissist.
It’s part of the pathology. So much so it’s violating otherwise core tenets of their culture and customs:
Look, today meritocracy and brutal honesty are absolutes, they’re considered critical, exactly to overcome biases that stand in your way. The Zuck types are 100% believers in this (heck they accelerated it), yet they still need positive affirmations like winning board games.
Most people (especially smart and opportunistic ones) fold because they know winning a private board game means nothing.
He should have eaten his own dog food and played the games inside the Metaverse where he could have had the environment ensure his desired outcome. But maybe the Metaverse itself is now a painful reminder of failure.
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
I think that successful people tend to be people who pay a lot of attention to "winning" in as many situations as possible. If you accept losing as a part of life and move on, you're not going to be successful, because you don't spend time thinking how you could've won. Of course this looks funny in situations where one cannot win, but it's really helpful when it comes to fixing your mistakes, allowing you to be successful.
> but it's really helpful when it comes to fixing your mistakes, allowing you to be successful.
It would be helpful if they'd take a loss as a learning opportunity. But as stated in the original quote they threw a tantrum and accused the opponent of cheating, taking away no lesson to improve the next time around.
Deep-seated insecurity?
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/11/08/elon-musk-almost-need...
That's interesting becasue at least with Zuckerberg, he entered a local bjj tournament under a fake name.
And tbh if you eventually do find yourself against him your going to want the opportunity to say you submitted him. No one's letting him win at a tournament
It's an old problem. Medieval kings had this problem. One way around it was the fool/jester, who could (within limits) say the things that nobody else was free to say.
People who have built empires who then surround themselves with Yes Men is probably the strongest indicator they’re about to lose it all
Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
It's always been this way, more or less.
If you look back at the ultra-wealthy in any age, you'll find just these sorts of people. It's in 20th-century literature. It's in classic literature. It's in the Bible. It's probably in ancient Greek literature, but I'm not well-versed there.
At least in the early part of the last century, there was some hope. A number of ultra-wealthy people decided that instead of building a faster steam engine or racing to pump more oil, they'd engage in benefiting society as an alternative penis-measuring contest.
They were happy to pour the equivalent of today's billions into projects like paying artists to spend 30 years documenting the fading culture of the American Indian, or funding scientific expeditions to improve our understanding of ancient history.
Today's billionaires are, instead, trying to one-up each other on getting 12-year-old girls addicted to their apps.
Yay, progress.
Given this, I don't want to imagine how much Elon Musk is suffering right now for the bullying he gets and for Tesla, which have higher stakes than a tabletop game.
And I don't feel bad for it
He doesn't care about Tesla anymore. His president will kill EV subsidies and give them to coal. He never cared about the mission of Tesla, and anyone working at Tesla who still believes in it is a sucker.
It’s a personality trait that leads him to success.
Yes Zuckerberg won the lottery. But at the same time his business acumen and ruthless personality put him in a position to win the lottery.
First person shooters were like this back before I stopped playing them online.
Get decent and dominate a few rounds? Here's a kick ban, must be cheating. Couldn't be because they keep bunching up.
you're getting the order of events backwards. it's not "Become a billionaire, then become a baby who insists they be allowed to win board games". The order is, first you're an entitled, manipulative jackass with absolutely no bottom for unethical behavior and zero tolerance for "losing", then become a billionaire by being so brazenly shitty in all areas of life and getting people to go along with you. Caveat, you have to be a white guy for this to work and it works much better if you already inherited millions from your dad.
As an exercise, apply this rule to all the other billionaires you know.
I tend to agree with you, but I also tend to believe that indeed, having a billion dollars (read: having no constraints) will tend to bring out the worst in anyone.
Another way to say this is, most people who earn obscene wealth who would be offended by the obscenity of it would work hard to give most of it away. Those who are not offended by the obscenity of it will be happy to keep it, so there's a selection bias to it.
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
Billionaires are highly psychologically disordered individuals. This is an expression of unrestrained narcissism in a "man" who has fully neglected to grow character as an individual, because his obscene wealth allows him to get through life with the emotional maturity of a teenager. Same with Musk, same with Trump, same with most other billionaires. Bill Gates is another great example.
People hate to admit it, but apparently having a billion dollars either makes one a narcissist, or it takes being a narcissist to make a billion dollars. Either way, just from the data we have in front of us, there's a very strong correlation there.
> There's Zuck, whose underlings let him win at board-games like Settlers of Catan because he's a manbaby who can't lose (and who accuses Wynn-Williams of cheating when she fails to throw a game of Ticket to Ride while they're flying in his private jet).
Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy? Does anyone who fails to bend over backwards for them just end up getting exiled? Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game? Being good at any kind of game is mostly a function of how much time and energy you've invested into it. If you claim to be an extremely hardcore worker who has any kind of family life there just aren't any leftover hours in the day for you to grind a top position in a game. And anyway, if you're playing games for fun and to bond with people, you probably shouldn't be playing tryhard optimal strategies every game, and should instead explore and experiment with more creative strategies. This is a lesson that took me a while to learn.