Great wealth brings great isolation, and a siege mentality.
The most expensive car is worth only around $30 million and the most expensive watch, $ 55 million. If you’re a billionaire, neither will make you stand out in a ‘crowd’ of 3,000-plus other billionaires, collectively worth over $16 trillion. But stand out you must, because ‘esteem’ or ‘status’ is the fourth rung of the human hierarchy of needs.
You could buy a mansion, but the costliest on the market is worth some $300 million. On a good day, Elon Musk makes twice as much. Yachts are a better bet. The costliest is rumored worth $4.8 billion — just shy of Trump’s net worth — and even relatively modest ones, like Jeff Bezos’s $500 million ‘Koru,’ cost many thousands of dollars per hour to maintain. There’s no return on investment here, only loss, and if you’re brave enough to bleed dollars without noticing, sociologists will now place you a bove the ‘haves’ as a ‘have-yacht.’
Their website mentions “building startup communities that float on the ocean with any measure of political autonomy.
Read together, “new ideas for government” and political autonomy” suggest a real estate analogue of cryptocurrency.
‘Ghost in the Machine’, offers a peek inside the money-making empires of tech moguls. For example, when Facebook Live faced the problem of livestreamed suicides, its chief technology officer sent an internal memo:
“Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still we connect people. The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is defacto good.”
To ordinary mortals, who satisfy Maslow’s fourth level of needs with a new bag or a pair of shoes, these ideas and attitudes may be troubling, but it’s important to be acquainted with them, to understand the forces shaping our world.
