Comment by TheAceOfHearts

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?

Yes. As a kid, I read a legend that one of the Charlemagne's knights got so annoyed for losing a game of chess that he killed his opponent with the chessboard.

>> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Right? I had a sort of respect for the Zuck, same partner for a long time, seems nice to his children, does charity… And then he gets one of those mega yachts and he can’t stand loosing at board games. So disappointing.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

I think it's less a new phenomenon and more a timeless one - we've just digitized the palace

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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

https://x.com/Merman_Melville/status/1088527693757349888

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Deep-seated insecurity?

https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/11/08/elon-musk-almost-need...

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.

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.

> Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy

It makes a better story in a tell-all memoir?

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

People who have built empires who then surround themselves with Yes Men is probably the strongest indicator they’re about to lose it all

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.

At my work, we play much much better board games than Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride. I feel for Zuck and his colleagues.

they know deep down that they don't deserve their status which makes them insecure and needing to constantly defend the narrative that they are in fact better.

you'll see this behavior fade in the presence of someone who they themselves perceive as superior by whichever metric

Maybe you just hate to lose, which drives you to relentlessly pursue "success?"

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.

> 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.

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

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 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.

used to be such accusations were grounds to seek satisfaction in a duel.. might be time to revive that practice

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.

> 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?

Deep running narcissism, bordering on sociopathy or psychopathy.

Many many many years ago I used to like playing Scrabble (knockoff) on Yahoo Games.

I quit playing completely when my opponent accused me of cheating because I made a high point move and was winning.

Because they are psychopaths and sociopaths.

Anyone with a conscience would worry about having the work of your lifetime being used in genocide. Zuck isn't like that. He doesn't care. What he cares is winning at board games.

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