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wodenokoto

Is the 1 percenters getting dumber or acting like it?

Like 10 years ago, I felt like Andreesen and Elon were thought leaders. Now they sound like idiots.

Did I or did they change?

Did I grow up and they changed to a younger audience and what I used to enjoy was just a different kind of stupid?

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In the late 1990s I went to a RealNetworks developer conference and Andreesen, then at Netscape, was a keynote speaker. I was curious and open to his insights, but his talk was so vapid (I remember he kept giggling) and arrogant that I eventually walked out. I remember he kept bragging about Netscape's next big project (something after Netscape 5 maybe?) and how it was going to wipe Microsoft out permanently. Only a few years later did I realize whatever it was never shipped, it turned out to be vaporware.

Fair enough. But the software eats the world essay did change the world. Maybe he was lucky, but I still think he managed to position himself in order to be heard with that essay.

Maybe I am naive.

You should look into the person Marc hired to research and validate that for him (basically write it) Ro Venkatesh. His essays are quite titilating. And you can immediately see it was Ro's idea not Marc's.

I seem to recall he had a cadre of people actually writing the browser, too. (Also Indian, as I remember, but it's been awhile.)

It could be a faulty memory, but I've never thought much of the guy after I heard that, and he continues to not impress.

How do you think it changed the world? I don’t think that was an especially prescient thing to say/write at that time. The idea that software was poised to continue to grow in 2011 was pretty obvious to most people. It is true that some companies were undervalued and many VCs and other folks were scarred from the dotcom bust.

But if you go back and read it, you might notice that a lot of the companies and software he discussed and predictions along with them failed to be true or lasting.

I think mostly it was a good catchphrase.

It coined a catchy phrase but the essay just described a change that was happening, I don't think it effected any change itself.

They changed. You wouldn’t believe it but those most impacted by the mental rot that social media can induce - are the ultra wealthy.

I doubt that. The only thing social media removed was scruples and shame. People were ashamed to say such dumb things and now they think they have some kind of deeper knowledge.

Their thinking didn’t change.

I think they also suddenly had to deal with a bunch of people being mean to them, and telling them they were wrong, which drove them a little mad.

Sort of an oppositional defiant thing, filtered through immense wealth and power

This. I remember many a time pmarca getting so upset and just blocking everyone who disagreed with him on Twitter. It was the weirdest thing.

Blocking people that annoy him on Twitter is the only humanizing thing about him. Deciding that someone has annoyed you enough on that platform that you don't care to ever hear from them ever again is the only thing that made that platform usable when you have any minimal audience.

"I've known you for all of 10 seconds and enjoyed not a single one of them" followed by blocking is good, actually. That doesn't make you any more correct or wrong, of course.

After one becomes wealthy, social media easily becomes the only place where anyone says no to them. When everyone who surrounds you tells you "you're absolutely right, let me get that for you", you atrophy the muscle that let's you course correct when you're making a mistake, and when someone disagrees with you it feels that much stronger.

Wealth is not the only way this can happen, you see it with notoriety and power who have gotten used to " being right" (Dawkins comes to mind), and now this experience is being "democratised" by LLMs.

They can finally say "retard" openly. They have been openly gloating about this! So yes, I agree: previously they felt constrained. They no longer do.

"Retarded" is an euphemism. It was preceded by "mentally disabled", "feeble-minded", and "idiot". Renaming doesn't help.

Agnews, in Santa Clara CA, was successively called The Great Asylum for The Insane, Agnews Insane Asylum, Agnews Mental Hospital, Agnews Developmental Center, and Oracle's Santa Clara campus.

I have a tangential theory to this.

Being rich != being famous. There are tons of extremely wealthy people out there that keep a very low profile. Sure they might be well known within their circle but ask the average person and they have no clue who that person is. I would say this is the case for like 90-95% of billionaires.

Musk, Andreessen, Zuck and others were all in this camp 10 years ago but they all decided that simply being rich wasn't enough, they wanted to be famous. These folks have all the resources and connections to become famous so they can get on all the podcasts, write op-eds, and are guaranteed to get the best reach on social media and thus the most eyeballs on their content and the most attention paid to them.

But when you go from making a few media appearances a year to constantly making media appearances in one way or another is that you need more "content" so to speak. Just like a comedian needs more content if they are going to do a 1hr special versus a 10min set at a comedy club.

The problem for all these guys is they have a few genuinely insightful ideas mixed in with a ton of cooky and out of touch ideas. Before they could safely stick to the genuinely insightful ideas but as they've made more and more appearances, they have to reach for some of those other ideas. They don't realize that their cooky ideas sound very different than their few insightful ideas. They think all their ideas are insightful based on the feedback they have been getting for the past decade or so.

I need to reread it but Paul Fussell makes the case that old wealth is inconspicuous and secure (and maybe inherited) versus nouveau riche which is about visible luxury, branding, and showy consumption. I don't remember if he mentions the need to promote ideas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class:_A_Guide_Through_the_Ame...

Paul Fussel’s Class was an interesting read

Meh dynastic families which are about as old money as you can get have some of the most ostentatious displays of wealth. They sit on thrones, wear crowns, and preside over public celebrations.

On official occasions.

British aristos tend to be outdoor sorts. Range Rover and a Barbour jacket.

QEII was always in wellies whenever she was off the clock.

There's also differences between fame, infamy, popularity and elite social status, which is probably not all that clear to newly-minted billionaires that are already lacking in the social skills department.

I think Musk definitely financed many of his ventures on his personal brand. The amount of capital he could raise because of his public persona as some kind of Tony Stark, made all the difference.

Same for Andreessen, a VC's success is built on his ability to raise capital and pick winners. His whole strategy, like Musk, was also on building a public persona to raise capital and get people to believe in his picks.

> Being rich != being famous.

> decided that simply being rich wasn't enough, they wanted to be famous

While these are true, the real detail is that these people were never satisfied with being rich -- they wanted to be powerful. And influence is what makes one powerful. Being rich goes a certain distance: once you have f you money, the only thing worth buying to gain more power is fame.

They also truly believe they have all the right ideas, and the validation that comes from being platformed for a financial success (often right-place-right-time type luck, but sometimes combined with genuine skill or insight in a relevant field) hardens them to all criticism.

> They also truly believe they have all the right ideas, and the validation that comes from being platformed for a financial success

Not only that, but they clearly surround themselves with sycophants who always tell them they're absolutely right. Imagine what it's like to go 10 years without anyone having the guts to tell you you're wrong or your ideas are actually stupid. What would that do to your ego?

The silent ones have also gone insane though. You don't get to see it as much, but they're the people promoting bad policies and funding delusional projects behind the scenes. Every so often one of them will make a public statement or political contribution which reveals that they have also been spending way too much time online.

Elon was always problematic. His increasing social media use removed the natural filters that prevented people from seeing it.

I'm not defending Musk, but "problematic" used in this type of context is one of those words that says more about the speaker than it does the subject.

It seems to me to be saying that the person finds Elon Musk’s behavior problematic. What else are you reading into it?

I think you can forgive it as a rhetorical device when speaking to a really broad audience.

IMO it's best to use fewer thought-terminating cliches in that case, not more. Unless one is simply engaging in a Reddit-style call-and-response exercise.

To me, Musk crossed from "maverick" to "problematic" around 2018, when he tried to insert himself into the Thai cave rescue operation and ended up slinging accusations of pedophilia on Twitter.

At this point, he has unlocked many more specific adjectival achievements, and those are the ones that should be invoked whenever Musk's behavior is the topic. (Which it isn't here.)

I feel like taking issue with a word, even when used in a perfectly valid situation, is something worth reflection. Like fair enough if you've heard problematic used in ways you disagree with before, but maybe respond to those comments, not one where you agree with its use. Unless you actually do mean to defend Musk and don't think lying to investors, calling people pedos for saving kids, delaying public infrastructure, doing Nazi salutes, etc. etc. is problematic.

Taking issue with this use of "problematic" says a lot about the speaker too.

"Problematic" is just vague. It's not that much more writing to specify the actual problems.

It's a rhetorical device that dates back to the ancient Greeks (meiosis). It's absolutely a lot more writing to enumerate the ways in which Elon Musk is problematic.

In a sane world it would read that way. Unfortunately, we live in a world where such nondescript descriptors (“problematic”, “objectionable”, “unprofessional”, “toxic”, “extremist”, “far-$SIDE”, a few others depending on usage) have been used, and overused, to accuse or smear people without taking on much of a burden of proof or making any statements specific enough to be falsifiable.

They now provoke instinctive revulsion when used in culture-war-adjacent contexts even when, as here, their usage is entirely legitimate (you presuppose a vague but mutually understood allegation rather than nebulously introducing a fresh one). I think only “controversial” has escaped this fate, but it might be too weak for your purposes.

(To be clear, I am only trying to explain why your phrasing might cause your interlocutor to momentarily recoil even when—as in my case—they don’t actually have any problem with the contents of your statement. What you do with this explanation is up to you: I don’t believe these terms are short-term salvageable at this point, but neither will I begrudge others their choice of hopeless cause; I certainly have my own fair share of those.)

Just because you've been programmed to associate "problematic" with "liberals" and then further trained to think that people who use the word "problematic" are in fact problems, that's on you, the larger zeitgeist you don't see, and the people programming you.

He was always a nutcase. So unhinged he got booted out of PayPal. Then the shenanigans and retconing of him as a Tesla founder. His unrealistic promises he never realised over the years at Tesla. The pedo guy thing. The HyperLoop bullshit. It was not as obvious because he still had some filters but it was already visible if you were paying attention. Problematic is a good description of what he was.

You are just moving the goalposts to criticize a position without being required to provide a reason. You could pick any phrase and mark it as beneath intelligent discourse. You are choosing “problematic” because you don’t like the implication.

Musk is easy to laugh at and to criticize. Problematic encompasses his lying, pettiness, racism, sexual weirdness, ego and fraud as well as anything. Regardless of the proportions of specific traits, as a whole, he’s a problematic individual. That’s perfectly cromulent.

I honestly think there's more going on here. It seems to be primarily the vain billionaires that are going off the deep end. I experimented with stimulants when I was young and I remember being shocked at how they changed my personality. I went from pretty stoic to wanting to fight people over the slightest perceived insult. I can't help but think these billionaires with their expensive implants, hair and skin treatments, blood boys, etc. are on some life-extending or performance enhancing stimulants that are affecting their state of mind.

We know that to be the case with Musk. He's admitted it. Andreessen, don't know.

I often wonder if tech billionaire psychosis might lead to a "Great Filter" event for our species. They have entirely unchecked power, lack of empathy, and gleeful ignorance of everything our species has done that their success rests upon.

They haven't even read the scifi that positions AI as an obvious resource trap. Sure, let's devote all our resources to birthing an AI. Do we think if its smarter than us we can contain it? Do we think it will help us by default? Have we not thought through the basics of what we're attempting?

> Did I or did they change?

I’d say both.

They ran out of novel things to say which is expected of anyone because there’s only so many non trivial things one could say. But then unlike normal people they didn’t stop talking because being rich they are bored and they want to be in the limelight all the time. So they end up talking nonsense.

You also changed, you are now wiser and have developed BS detector.

> They ran out of novel things to say which is expected of anyone because there’s only so many non trivial things one could say. But then unlike normal people they didn’t stop talking because being rich they are bored and they want to be in the limelight all the time. So they end up talking nonsense.

Why do they always feel like they need to pull stuff out of their butts to make themselves sound like they know what is going on? In some ways I think it's related to the stock market "just meet the next quarterly goal" kind of thinking. Who cares if you don't come up with something pithy to say for a few years. Have big impacts over time instead of tons of little ups and downs all the time.

> Why do they always feel like they need to pull stuff out of their butts to make themselves sound like they know what is going on?

Massive, unconstrained egos? They think they're hot shit, because they surround themselves with yes men.

I'm reminded of this:

> Beneath the grand narrative Musk tells, when he takes things over, what does he actually have the people under him do? What is the theory of action?

> He has people around him who are just enablers. All these Silicon Valley people do. All his minions. And they are minions — they’re all lesser than he is in some fashion, and they all look up to him. They’re typically younger. They laugh at his jokes. Sometimes when he apologizes for a joke, which is not very often, he’ll say that the people around him thought it was funny.

> When he was being interviewed at Code Conference once, he had a couple of them there. He told a really bad joke, and they all went like: Ha-ha-ha-ha. And I was like: That’s not funny — I’m sorry, did I miss the joke? And they looked at me like I had three heads. (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...)

My theories:

a) most people achieve social capital through relationships. Rich people gain it by distinguishing themselves among their already distinguished peers. Even if being obnoxious is what’s making you famous, you’re still more famous than anyone you know.

b) The cadre of rich people you’ve actually heard of self-select for craving attention and validation. Like most people, they aren’t good enough at anything to be famous organically, and like many of those people, are also insecure about their profound lack of specialness. But, few people have the money to buy the attention they crave.

I also think being a billionaire warps one's world view. Almost everybody around a billionaire sucks up to them just to get a sip from the firehose of their wealth. Its gotta be hard to stay grounded.

This has always been the case with the massively wealthy. They may be incredibly smart in their specific line of business, which leads them to an enormous amount of wealth and fame. Because our culture likes to lionize success stories, we collectively lean hard into putting people like that on pedestals and giving them more opportunities to speak their minds. Their own egos get inflated as a result, and a feedback loop ensues - they think everything they do is great because, collectively, our culture wants everything they do to be great.

But the simple fact is, nobody's a genius in all areas. We all have our areas of expertise, but none of us can be trusted to speak wisely about all things all the time.

At the same time, as others have said, your BS detector has matured.

> This has always been the case with the massively wealthy. They may be incredibly smart in their specific line of business, which leads them to an enormous amount of wealth and fame. ... Their own egos get inflated as a result, and a feedback loop ensues - they think everything they do is great because, collectively, our culture wants everything they do to be great.

This doesn't just apply to the wealthy, but more lowly people too: see "Engineer's disease."

People like Musk and Adreessen are getting hit by a double-whammy: they're software engineers (the stupidest and most arrogant class of engineers) AND they're massively wealthy.

In undergrad I had a buddy who was a political science major, and he put it pretty bluntly one day: "Do you engineers realize how arrogant you sound when you're talking about things you have no clue about?" 20 year old me just laughed and thought to myself "lol liberal arts majors" but now that I'm older and more grown up, he was totally right and I see it all around me in the industry. Especially here on HN.

Yep, STEM people asked why we need humanities. And now they are starting to hold hot debates that strangely resemble things that humanities discussed centuries ago.

One curious thing. My country was erased from maps for 123 years (Poland). During that time, universities in all three occupied parts could freely teach engineering, physics, math or biology. Occupiers didn't care, they even wanted to have access to talent pool of specialists educated on these universities. On the other hand, teaching of history, philosophy etc. was highly controlled and restricted.

One can wonder - if humanities are so useless for the society, why did they even bother?

There is a shift in society on what can be said and what they keep private. Back then you would pull stings in background, now you can bribe thenUS president in public.

Also: Back in the days™ statements where edited by marketing people and others before publication. Now people blast out stuff on their own via "social media"

You realized they were always shitheels. Musk was a complete visible fraud long before 2016.

Indeed, he always seems like an obnoxious media attention whore to me long before he got into politics.

I tend to have a negative view of celebrities who did cameos for the Simpsons far past its peak lol

Elon is a social dumbass with the emotional maturity of an edgy 14 year old boy, but calling him a fraud I'd say is false and unproductive.

He is absolutely a fraud. He has been lying about many things for more than a decade to boost his stock. He has more in common with Trevor Milton than anyone else.

An atheist might call Franklin Graham or Jerry Falwell a fraud, but the people who fill the stadiums and pews keep coming back, year after year, decade after decade, generation after generation. They are obviously getting something positive out of the experience.

Same with Musk and the stock market. At some point, victim-blaming may be the only rational explanation left. His followers are rubes falling for a fraud, yes, but it can hardly be considered involuntary or exploitative at this point. The rubes have become rich simply by sticking together under Musk's benevolent gaze, dominating financial discourse in the broader market. It will continue to work for them, right up until it doesn't.

He's been lying through his teeth for the better part of two decades, "fraud" is true and productive.

> Elon is a social dumbass with the emotional maturity of an edgy 14 year old boy, but calling him a fraud I'd say is false and unproductive.

Given the massive string of lies he spun about "full self driving" over the last decade or more, I don't think so.

Even before his recent political turn when he got widely vilified, I didn't trust him because of his record.

Obnoxious, egocentric, very low EQ, and with almost no moral values, absolutely. Fraud? Not sure. He did make a lot of outlandish predictions, but on the other hand, Tesla revolutionized EVs (forcing everyone to follow suit), and SpaceX revolutionized space tech. He can't take credit for the technical achievements in either, but he did have the tenacity to push both through. Can't say many other people would have done that.

It sort of proves his point that he was trying to make the number of HN comments who are diminishing his (and Elon, I’ll also wrap Steve Jobs) accomplishments and contributions. The fact that so many so called “intellectuals” on HN can’t admit and even see what Elon has done with Tesla and SpaceX is just bat shit crazy to me. SpaceX made space travel and commerce possible. It’s the next big industrial resolution but limitless and unconstrained by resources.

I try to live my life as stoic as possible and simply. I don’t mean simply in terms of luxury lifestyle, or wealth. I mean mindset, common man approach simple. There is great power in it. That’s why the hardest working, smelly, and sweaty people are some of the happiest. Yet, the most intellectual people contemplating every single decision and living a life of pessimism and group think are perpetually miserable.

I believe in some form of the Twitter poisoning theory:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/11/opinion/trump-musk-kanye-...

It seems to explain some of the weirdest of hang ups and strange / desperate choices.

All of what currently ails western society online is likely to be a russian psyop. All of it. We've left ourselves open to direct manipulation.

No, we did this to ourselves. Blaming Russia is the easy way out... even when it's likely true, as in the trajectory of Trump's career.

A healthy, rational society would be much harder to bamboozle -- by Russians or demagogues or preachers or billionaires or anyone else -- than Americans have proven to be. Over the last 10-20 years, many events that I thought would serve to immunize us to BS have fed an addiction instead.

Not all, but much. Years ago here on HN I said that social media is a weapon more powerful than nuclear fission and we created it and handed it to our enemies in exchange for a small group of people becoming extremely wealthy. I was promptly downvoted.

It’s the closest thing to a mind control device that’s ever been created, and sites like Reddit, Facebook, and even HN openly allow bot traffic in exchange for either dollars or a claim of “open discourse”. HN hates the solution to this problem even more than they hate the problem, so I won’t even start the debate.

That's a nice essay from Lanier. Operant conditioning is certainly something everybody on HN has experienced, watching the numbers next to their posts go up and down.

https://archive.is/sSfGI

Thinking any one person is a 'thought leader' is, generally, a dumb thing to think.

You grew up.

These people are almost unimaginably wealthy to the point where they're effectively unchallenged if they're not directly challenging the state (and even then they win quite a few rounds). "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

I think people get dumber as they age. I feel like I'm probably dumber than me 10 years ago. No one wants to admit it, but I sense it in myself and I think I can see it in other people. I feel like peak brain is probably like 22 years old if we are being honest. Yeah you might still be doing dumb kid stuff but you are at the age where you just have this energizer bunny inside. You can just go to the library and churn multiple all day and night sessions. Sleep in one day and perfectly recovered. I "know" more now but I'm definitely slower than when I was younger.

Would be great if we didn't spend so much time faffing in school on stupid stuff and got into our strides in our career maybe 5-10 years earlier. When I think about my first research job, that could have probably been done in middle school vs undergrad. Wasn't really any more challenging than when I worked part time in a restaurant in terms of the tasks. I probably could have been working on some thesis under an advisor for my hs years instead of being stretched thin over the boilerplate curriculum. And then I probably could enter the workforce at 18 and have enough to get up to speed on the job pretty fast. By 22 I'd be in management right at the peak of my mental faculties and skill buildup.

I certainly thought I was smarter when I was younger.

Are you saying you haven't felt increased mental fatigue and "slowness" while aging? What is your secret? Certain supplements? Blood boy?

> I feel like peak brain is probably like 22 years old

Ah, but peak wisdom? Much later.

Only because we don't allow ourselves to get serious until we hit like 25 years old imo, and only barely then. Imagine a 22 year old raised among Shaolin monks. Probably would be the wisest person you will ever meet.

I'm not sure. There's value from teachings, but there's a certain type of wisdom that only comes from lived experience. Kind of like in software development - a new grad can read Designing Data Intensive Systems and memorize all the answers for "design Facebook/Twitter/YouTube/etc." interview questions, but someone who actually built a platform with millions of users is going to have a different level of understanding. In my life, I can say that no amount of learning from others prepared me for what I learned about myself during my first relationship.

All the more reason to start earlier, so you have more lived experience on the job by your mental peak at 22. Instead your lived experience is playing Halo or something like that by that point. Or wasting time flipping burgers. Wish I could have dumped all the hours I did in restaurant work in highschool into research. The door was shut though until I got into undergrad even though I was a hard worker and could have picked it up then. A lot of parallels between food service and lab work, I learned after the fact.

Ah if you look at it from the perspective of doing research or other deep intellectual work by 22, I can see your point. Certainly if that is the peak of human mental capability (not something I can argue for or against but I'll take it as true) you ideally would pursue a focused education up to that point that allows you to dive deep into a challenging problem. IMO this is different from wisdom however, and in fact pursuing the variety of experiences and interactions with others that you need to build wisdom will distract from the focus on your research subject.

>fact pursuing the variety of experiences and interactions with others that you need to build wisdom will distract from the focus on your research subject.

I'm not saying go into the cave and toil. You would still do all the stuff you do socially. Just your academic and professional subject matter would be tailored like it is when you reach undergrad and drop certain subjects in favor of your specialty. You still socialize a ton as a researcher in undergrad and grad school and beyond. Research is very much a collaborative effort too, unlike a lot of jobs or academic learning up to that point. That being said I don't think some magic threshold is reached with that when you reach 32 vs 22. Some people famously lack any social skills all their life. Some people are socialable straight out of the womb. This isn't a linear process.

So you don't think wisdom is a thing that people acquire as they age?

I can tell you from experience that 22 year old people are generally lacking in wisdom. A few of them have a little bit, but overall 22 year olds are just as stupid as teenagers.

Most people don't have much wisdom by age 22. They do have plenty of hubris though.

If we're speaking about mental capabilities, there's nothing that I could do at 22 that I can't do now being over 50. If anything my wisdom gained from experience makes me more valuable and capable now. Everything you learn makes you stronger, and 22 year olds have not learned much by age 22.

I think wisdom is pretty unevenly learned and its not a guarantee 32 or 42 year olds or 82 year olds have it either. See our well aged POTUS. Either way you don't need wisdom to start working. So many of the "best" minds in various fields started working in that field at like 16, maybe dropped out of college and dug right in. Their initial intellect or specific circumstances allowed them to skip the normal path but really I think a lot of people would have a lot more success if more were allowed to start on real work earlier, and weren't being held back by process like this.

Again, just kind of sucks that you finally hit your stride in your career right as you feel your body and faculties declining with age. I don't think we get senile as soon as people notice you are definitely senile. I think it is a constant slide.

It seems like you think you have it all figured out, but you don't.

>So many of the "best" minds in various fields started working in that field at like 16,

Name them. Also, child prodigies exist but that doesn't mean the rest of us are dummies. You'd also be hard-pressed to find a child prodigy or someone like that as you suggest that is "at the top of their field" that doesn't think someone else is better than they are. There is no real "at the top of their field" in anything.

The only thing that I can detect that has diminished in my old age is my patience for pointless internet interactions like this one. I have better things to do. Goodbye.

> It seems like you think you have it all figured out, but you don't.

This is a better summation of you than him

> overall 22 year olds are just as stupid as teenagers

It's interesting to start by saying that "wisdom is something you accumulate with time", and right after implying that "being 22 is just the same as being 14" (not mentioning the fact that there was apparently a need to be disrespectful to them).

Pretty sure I know a few people "as stupid as teenagers" who would immediately see how this is a stupid take (and who may feel a need to say that this stupid and condescending take probably came from a "grumpy old man").

IMO they were always the way that they are now, they just didn't broadcast it in public.

Before social media started running society off the rails people like this would generally hold back their controversial opinions to avoid alienating a chunk of the public.

Now they realize they can say whatever they want and the 40% of people that glaze them for it are worth more to their ego than the downside of alienating everyone else.

> Is the 1 percenters getting dumber or acting like it?

I feel like their messages are designed to derail people's train of thought.

People start to realize that technology isn't fulfilling and they need to re-access their lives? Nah... introspection is a modern invention and that act of reflection is actually the source of your discontent. Stop thinking about it and just go with the flow, you'll be much happier when you stop concerning yourselves with the state of the environment, other people's well being, if your work is fulfilling, or the fact that you have no retirement.

A decade ago wasn't Musk talking about Hyperloop? He sounded like an idiot to many people then, too. His companies were good at the time but once he talked about anything else I feel like it was pretty clear who he was.

I don't think this is new though, Henry Ford was famously into anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and even owned a newspaper to spread hateful nonsense (history might not repeat itself but it apparently does rhyme). I'm sure if there was more recordings of robber barons of the past you would see the same dumb nonsense you see now.

> A decade ago wasn't Musk talking about Hyperloop?

Yep, and he claimed that he would colonize Mars soon.

A bit of both. You became more attuned to what really does and does not make sense and they rotted a bit further. But 10 years ago it was pretty visible for both Musk and Andreessen.

I remember when Elon came up with the hyper loop idea and everybody I worked with at the time thought it was revolutionary. These were very smart people who were fooled.

In hindsight, how could we all have fell for this? What a profoundly stupid idea, but I distinctly remember at the time it felt right.

I guess what I'm saying is that I think a lot of people just wised up and started seeing through his B.S.

I genuinely don't know how the mental model of such a person works where they look at Elon who got multiple world changing bets right but they focus on the ones that were wrong.

I feel like a lot of the ideas are over-attributed to him. Tesla already existed, electric cars aren't really a revolutionary idea. He's a hype man and he does the hype stuff well. Cybertruck was a pretty unmitigated disaster. self-driving is not really working out as he promised. I still remember arguing with people in 2020 who thought you'd be able to sleep in your car in a few years. Seems like Waymo is beating them to robo-taxis. Hyperloop was a bad idea.

Starlink + reusable rockets... alright, not bad, but not exactly a "world changing bet". Seems far more hyped than anything. So he gets credit for just combining the idea of reusable rockets to send satellites into space? okay fine.

He had a lot of money and threw a lot at the wall to see what stuck. If I were a betting man, I'd bet against his "next big idea". He'll over-promise and under-deliver.

Space-X's success is due to Gwynne Shotwell, who really is a rocket scientist.

Musk didn't originate Tesla's car concept. He did, however, promote into a large scale business. That's the real achievement.

Promotion isn't enough, though. I heard Shai Agassi of Better Place speak once. That was the Israeli guy with the car battery swap startup. He was really good looking, a great speaker, and his 10x growth per year business plan was utter bullshit. Better Place went bust. It wasn't a totally unworkable idea; there are successful battery swap operations in China. But he spent time and money schmoozing with heads of state and setting up demo centers in multiple countries, while not delivering much.

(More fundamental problem: battery swapping is a bet against fast charging and battery progress, which appears to be a losing bet.)

In general, people who focus on the many things he got wrong or lied about, will all at least admit that he got a few things right.

But the people who focus on his successes always seem to downplay, blame-shift and defend when it comes to his negative side. They'll never admit he was wrong about anything. It's the same worship / cult of personality that affects politics too.

Name a person who say he was right about everything. I can name a person who say he was wrong about everything (my sibling comment)

I really dislike Elon as a person, but didn't the hyperloop POC work? I admittedly haven't followed it in long time.

Definitely not. The companies that were prototyping it all went bankrupt. The "Vegas Loop" is just a tunnel with Tesla car traffic in it and I don't even think they're fully self driving! Very very underwhelming. Not even remotely close to the "NY to DC in 29 minutes" which he promised.

We would have been much better off with investment in tried-and-true boring old trains.

The Vegas Loop was the Boring Company (building tunnels), not Hyperloop. You might be confusing the two projects.

Anyone who assumes they won't be fooled is setting themselves up for disaster.

The biggest of Musk's warning signs, for me, was the hype. Hype can drown out valid criticism. When the hype is big enough, valid criticism ends up being drowned out by rage based, critical rhetoric that's in a screaming match with proponents.

(The worst part about being hype averse is that I can end up averse to legitimately exciting things.)

> Hype can drown out valid criticism

It's funny you mention that because I remember at the time of HyperLoop somebody said "what about just ... trains?" and we all scoffed at it as if trains were some outdated technology

Let's just say I'm on team trains now.

> I remember when Elon came up with the hyper loop idea and everybody I worked with at the time thought it was revolutionary.

When I first saw it, my thoughts were 1) it can't possibly be that cheap, and 2) the turning radius!

It's not that it can't be done. It's that it would probably cost like the very expensive Chūō Shinkansen maglev, which really does work. And has all those necessary things Musk hand-waved, such as emergency access shafts in case there's trouble deep under a mountain, cross-tunnel connections for emergencies, fire suppression...

Money can buy greater latitude with mistakes. Mistakes that would have been career ending for low level employee, is an amusing anecdote to be remembered at a gathering or in a book.

There are definitely some idiots with more money than sense, but reality tended to correct that fast. Now, it seems, they get rescued ( vide not that old case of Summers running to safe VC bank ).

They have always been dumb. Richistan describes the pure unalloyed depravity the rich live in really well:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/512029.Richistan

People are just finally able to see how dumb they are

I’ve seen this in action and in person multiple times and it’s absolutely fucking horrifying watching how ignorant, useless and totally out of touch with reality the Rich are , yet still can crush people via the police state whenever they want

Chris Hedges did a good video on this recently: https://youtu.be/EJ-OSJ7J64w

The way I suspect they think is this. A pyramid is always going to be there, it is better we reinforce and consolidate our power at top with the friendlies below and make it sound like that is the best option for everyone.

All the rich are on ketamine.

>Did I or did they change?

>>Andreessen and his cronies are making large claims about what human beings want and need.

Could very well be a moving target according to what they need from human beings at the time.

To add to the answers given already, there's the matter of the sheer scale of wealth these people have (especially relative to e.g. median worker wages). The richest people on earth in the 80s were a bunch of discreet Japanese CEOs with 5 or 6 billion$ to their name. They were very rich, sure, and surely could influence politics with their wealth.

But Elon Musk has 850 billion dollars. That's 850,000,000,000$. An amount so mind-boggingly impossible to imagine that you need analogies such as these https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c96F7D57CzI. And these people got it not as a CEO of a quiet car company or such, but as owners of media and tech empires with a reach and influence Ted Turner could only dream about. It's a qualitative leap.

You definitely got wiser—we all do—but I think there’s also a big shift in both what they think they can say safely in public and the sycophantic reinforcement they get on social media. Rich guys have always had that problem to some extent but it used to be less public—nothing like Musk just tossing out some inane insight while high and getting hundreds of thousands of fans applauding. Human brains don’t handle that well, and you can tell these guys haven’t had to defend an idea rigorously in years.

Another factor seems to be the way corporate valuations have become increasingly untethered from actual value. It’s not like there isn’t historical precedent for people getting rich by luck but thinking they’re geniuses, but the tech world has become really weird about that in ways which amplify the previous no-filter point: it’s one thing to be, say, a Netscape millionaire but parlaying that into billionaire status really gets into the point where they never have to hear unwanted criticism and are guaranteed to be treated as sources of wisdom regardless of the applicability of their experience.

They've just become hype-men for their own investments.

They got radicalized, which was intensional from the right. Further, wealth and time has shifted the hippy ethos of the valley to libertarianism.

It’s amazing how often becoming rich makes one into a libertarian :)

When you reach a certain level of wealth and power, it seems like it’s very easy to surround yourself with people who only tell you how brilliant and successful you are.

This creates an echo chamber where you don’t get reality checks, and when you do they’re easy to brush off as some form of “sour grapes,” after all if the person telling you that you’re wrong was so great they’d have your level of wealth.

I think it takes a really extraordinary person to avoid this. As far as I can tell, most of the modern Silicon Valley titans are not extraordinary in this respect.

It doesn't even take that much wealth or power. Look at Vox Day. In my internet wanderings I recently found myself commenting on one of his posts for the completely benign purpose of helping to expand upon his "sigma" theory, as I felt it was incomplete and needed improvement. His followers immediately attacked me, displaying 100% cult-like yes-man behavior. Most responses were essentially, "You disagree? Then you didn't read it carefully enough. Go back and read it again and STFU, loser."

It was really spooky. He's got this self-reinforcing belief system where "people who agree with Vox" are called "sigmas", who are respectable, but "people who disagree with Vox" are defined to be "gammas", who are useless and wrong people who are held in contempt and derision. Some of those guys are really nasty characters.

I tore them all a new asshole, and even Vox seemed to realize on some level that I was right as he didn't really have much of a response.

(Search for the word "flamethrower" in the comments if anyone wants to find that article and read the posts, it's hilarious.)

It's both. Back then[0], the ultra-wealthy had whole teams of PR managers - people devoted to doing the verbal equivalent of making sure they were lit with perfect 5500K portrait lighting at every angle. In other words, DLSS 5 but for personality. In order to sustain that kind of shitty magic trick, the PR team needs to completely control everything they say. This is a lot of effort.

The moment the ultra wealthy slip up - that they reveal that they're a normal shitty person with a severe case of affluenza - the illusion shatters. And social media has made it both very easy and addictive for rich people to indulge in their worst vices. So now instead of fundamentally soulless people engaging in virtue signalling to pretend to be human, you have fundamentally soulless people engaging in vice signalling, because suddenly these p-zombies been given access to a machine that finds them fellow p-zombies to validate themselves with.

Furthermore, once you see this happen a few times, your mental default changes. Now you assume every wealthy person is an asshole until proven otherwise. Even if Elon Musk might be saying something poignant about space travel or AI safety, you've seen enough Cybertrucks and "X Æ A-12"s and "autistic" Nazi salutes to know that he's a moron. You, personally, were ignoring the latter to focus on the former, because you were probably smarter than him. But he's shoved the latter in your face to the point where it's undeniable.

> Did I grow up and they changed to a younger audience and what I used to enjoy was just a different kind of stupid?

No, you're thinking of MAD Magazine. Notably, it's still possible for an emotionally mature adult to still enjoy that kind of humor. But emotionally mature adults tend to not enjoy manchildren.

[0] 10 years ago was 2016, which is probably not as far back as you were thinking.

The question is what you think now of their old opinions. If you think the same, they have changed. If you think differently, you have changed.

If I look at Elon and Marc's interviews from 10-15 years ago I am still roughly 80% in agreement, 20% disagreement. I feel the same about what they used to say today, as I did back then.

Now I'm 20% in agreement (they definitely still have interesting thoughts) and 80% absolutely disgusted (with both, but particularly Musk).

So I genuinely think they changed in this regard.

> Now I'm 20% in agreement (they definitely still have interesting thoughts) and 80% absolutely disgusted (with both, but particularly Musk).

> So I genuinely think they changed in this regard

Everyone has changed. You, me, Musk, Andreesen. But in that time, the disparity between them and "us" in wealth and even more importantly, political power, has ballooned. Their increasing power has fueled their sense of infallibility and inevitability.

It's not yet clear what these changes will engender in us. We are more numerous and divergent in perspectives and interests.

'Thought leader' has always been a code word for 'bullshit artist'.

There's the whole "billionaire bubble" thing, where they get surrounded by folks who have an economic interest in keeping the billionaire happy... but I'd posit there's another big change -- tech billionaires didn't used to have any cultural or political juice. This meant that even if they had some weird / bad takes, they kept them quiet.

Media consolidation has really helped weird billionaires move the Overton window, so that their weird/bad takes become "acceptable", and then they start admitting them publicly.

I think they miscalculated though. Their vile views still aren't acceptable, they just get broadcasted more now.

This won't have the effect they hope for. It'll just expose them as the frauds they are.

Both Andreeson and Elon knew exactly how to take advantage of the times to make money. Both are true "failed" billionaires, Netscape and "PayPal" as the examples. Latter in quotes since Musk didn't contribute much more than getting fired immediately.

So yes, you are the stupid, and the world has not gone towards better, or even different.

A little bit of both? I don't think they were thought leaders but they were often correct and also at the right point in time.

Also, power corrupts. That's a tale as old as time, I have found no evidence that somehow tech-bros are immune to it.

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