Mammon category archive

Afterthought:

In thes new Gilded age, might it be possible that some persons have been allow to accumulate more wealth than is good for them, or for everybody else?

That someone has somehow become a “social media influencer” is no guarantee of credibility. Or integrity.

(Perhaps especially integrity.)

One more time, “social” media isn’t.

After discussing the theory that we are living in some sort of simulation, Jonathan Wolf concedes that most of us are not, but some of us, most notably Elon Musk. Here’s big of his article:

So, I’m fairly confident that most of us are not living in a simulation. I do think Elon Musk has entered his own simulated reality though.

Extremely rich people are often susceptible to the same affliction. We do not live in a pure meritocracy. Some unmeritorious people still get lucky, some very meritorious people get unlucky, and almost everyone is very, very good at certain things while simultaneously being terrible at others. For the extremely wealthy, though, it’s easy to build walls around themselves inside of which they know more about everything than everyone else.

In related news, Chris Williams takes a slightly less charitable view:

This man goes out of the way daily to prove that meritocracy is bunk.

Follow the links to see each writer’s reasoning.

PoliticalProf sees historical precedent for Elon Musk’s arbitrary and capricious antics at Twitter.

Methinks his theory sheds some light on the mindset of the Musk.

Freebie frolics.

Liz Dye comments on the guilty verdict against the Trump Organization for tax fraud. It is delightful reading. A snippet:

The jurors were unconvinced by the Trump Organization’s argument that the 15-year scheme to compensate high-level employees using pre-tax dollars was perpetrated on the company by nefarious executives simply seeking to stiff Uncle Sam and the New York Department of Taxation and Finance out of their rightful share.

Andreas Kluth posits that Elon Musk, many of his fellow filthy rich, and their admirers, see them as Randian superheroes. He suggests that this is not a positive thing. A snippet:

Rand’s protagonists, such as the architect Howard Roark in “Fountainhead” or the Capitalist Übermensch John Galt in “Atlas Shrugged,” are cartoons of what Musk and his ilk aspire to be. They’re uncompromising, ultramasculine and hyper-individualistic visionaries. They’re in it for themselves, powered by an unapologetic egocentrism that rejects the serf morality of ordinary pencil pushers in their cubicle farms.

That might explain why Tesla founder Musk, Amazon titan Jeff Bezos and quite a few other hard-driving — and almost invariably male — tech tycoons adulate Ayn Rand.

Via Job’s Anger.

Afterthought:

I spent many years as a corporate trainer, doing mostly management training. Based on how Musk has been exercising his stewardship (sewership?) of Twitter, I venture that he could benefit from the “Basic Supervisory Skills” course that I used to teach to newly promoted supervisors.

I also had the privilege to work for a number of good bosses who were an absolute pleasure to work for (and with, because a good boss knows how to make you feel as if you are working with him or her, not just for him or her); I also had three really bad ones.

I would not nominate Musk for the former category.

For an interesting take on what happened at the FTX crypto exchange, listen to Bad Voltage episode 3X52.

For a look behind the scenes at FTX, see this story from the Washington Post via SFGate.