I wonder, if I was surrounded by wealth in the same way, if I would schedule talks on my wacky ideas. The blind encouragement of insurmountable wealth must be intoxicating.
It’s all deeply weird, and films like the Mountainhead increasingly seem like they might be more accurate than not.
There’s just clearly some limit around accumulated wealth where it detaches people further and further from reality.
Same with symposia and fora with “distinguished guests” like the Dalai Lama, or Kissinger or one of the Clintons or many other officials.
They do a circuit, often have someone prepare note for them where they rarely challenge prevailing thought among the attendees and come out of it with a lot of money.
There will be some nuggets once in a while but there is rarely any groundbreaking insight like when physicists and mathematicians in the XXth century brought new ideas, challenged old ideas and often suffered indignity for some time before they were vindicated.
Most sane people would stop working by the time they become rich, not super rich. To become a billionaire, your brain must be wired differently, and perhaps with unwavering conviction that you are right, righter than anyone else and the world owes you its attention.
Without a reality check, the natural feedback loop that tells us we're wrong sometimes, the human mind starts to diverge into madness.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -GB Shaw
I don't fully agree with the quotation from Shaw, but there's some truth to it. And I suspect a common quality of the billionaire class is ruthless unreasonableness -- and considerable luck.
In fact, I could speculate that humanity might benefit from slowing down progress on most non-medical industries right now.
/s
;-)
How quickly we forget how censored twitter was before he bought it
About as quickly as he forgot “comedy is legal again” when people started criticizing him.
Same thing Thiel is doing for political control: attempting to inherit the religious right from MAGA -perhaps on behalf of hos protegé. Thiel's plans will likely outlive the movement's leader and/or go beyond 2028, it's a race against time to establish his bona fides while the sun shines
Are these the actions of a man following a well thought out plan to elect a president?