Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News! I just had a long chat with a good friend who was basically an OG in Tesla world. We talked about all kinds of Tesla topics trying to understand where Tesla would be going ... [continued]
It is impossible for someone to have his level of wealth, his lifestyle, and not begin to exhibit signs of mental illness. First, the wealth. Nothing has value to him. Why would it? Very few things have carry a dollar amount he can’t swallow. Seriously, we’re talking like aircraft carriers!
Second, look at the other triple-digit billionaires. They’re focused on what they do. Bezos runs Amazon and all the stuff it does. Schmuck runs Meta and all that. Thiel is pretty focused on Palatir. Meanwhile Musk “runs” how many companies? And people legit believe that he’s actually running them. Professional journalists will say he’s a super genius while reporting on the absolute bat-shit stuff he does and says. Oh, and don’t get me started on all the times he’s publicly bragged working his employees to the bone as if that’s a sign of good leadership! All of this is to say, he’s believing his own press.
I grew up around the wealthy. They are all insane, the wealthier they are the crazier they get.
I believe that the correlation has to do with a sort of mental miscalibration. I think that the human brain uses feedback from its community to calibrate it’s judgment of what’s real and what’s not and what’s right and what’s wrong. The rich don’t get honest feedback from their community. The people they spend the most time with either work for them or want something from them, so no one is honest to their faces. Not really. They say crazy shit and get feedback that it’s wisdom, from people who fully know that it’s crazy. They act in inappropriate ways and everyone behaves like it’s fine. They lose the ability to judge their own behavior, beliefs and self-awareness, and because they’re constantly treated like the smartest person in the room, they start to believe that they are, even if they know consciously that they’re not.
Meanwhile, their peer group is undergoing the same thing, so they are all insane too. My experience is that they mostly don’t actually like each other that much, because another known fact about the human brain is that it’s able to detect delusions in others, but not itself. The rich are fully aware that the other wealthy people around them are delusional, and on top of that that many of those delusional people are in competition with each other. And yet they will socialize with each other and act like everything is hunky-dory and friendly (just like the drama drama drama in every other community). I’ve watched wealthy people, more than once, socialize with other wealthy people and just be totally cool and friendly, only to just spew the most venomous crap as soon as the other person is gone. Also, there’s a pecking order. The dude who’s worth $20 million usually want something from the guy who’s worth $120 million, and that guy usually wants something from the lady who’s sitting on $3.2 billion. So it’s not like they can even get honest (but crazy) feedback from each other.
If it sounds like “hey, that would make people paranoid and isolated” it DOES! Being wealthy is super toxic for the mental health of the wealthy person, we are living in the consequences.
It is impossible for someone to have his level of wealth, his lifestyle, and not begin to exhibit signs of mental illness. First, the wealth. Nothing has value to him. Why would it? Very few things have carry a dollar amount he can’t swallow. Seriously, we’re talking like aircraft carriers!
Second, look at the other triple-digit billionaires. They’re focused on what they do. Bezos runs Amazon and all the stuff it does. Schmuck runs Meta and all that. Thiel is pretty focused on Palatir. Meanwhile Musk “runs” how many companies? And people legit believe that he’s actually running them. Professional journalists will say he’s a super genius while reporting on the absolute bat-shit stuff he does and says. Oh, and don’t get me started on all the times he’s publicly bragged working his employees to the bone as if that’s a sign of good leadership! All of this is to say, he’s believing his own press.
I grew up around the wealthy. They are all insane, the wealthier they are the crazier they get.
I believe that the correlation has to do with a sort of mental miscalibration. I think that the human brain uses feedback from its community to calibrate it’s judgment of what’s real and what’s not and what’s right and what’s wrong. The rich don’t get honest feedback from their community. The people they spend the most time with either work for them or want something from them, so no one is honest to their faces. Not really. They say crazy shit and get feedback that it’s wisdom, from people who fully know that it’s crazy. They act in inappropriate ways and everyone behaves like it’s fine. They lose the ability to judge their own behavior, beliefs and self-awareness, and because they’re constantly treated like the smartest person in the room, they start to believe that they are, even if they know consciously that they’re not.
Meanwhile, their peer group is undergoing the same thing, so they are all insane too. My experience is that they mostly don’t actually like each other that much, because another known fact about the human brain is that it’s able to detect delusions in others, but not itself. The rich are fully aware that the other wealthy people around them are delusional, and on top of that that many of those delusional people are in competition with each other. And yet they will socialize with each other and act like everything is hunky-dory and friendly (just like the drama drama drama in every other community). I’ve watched wealthy people, more than once, socialize with other wealthy people and just be totally cool and friendly, only to just spew the most venomous crap as soon as the other person is gone. Also, there’s a pecking order. The dude who’s worth $20 million usually want something from the guy who’s worth $120 million, and that guy usually wants something from the lady who’s sitting on $3.2 billion. So it’s not like they can even get honest (but crazy) feedback from each other.
If it sounds like “hey, that would make people paranoid and isolated” it DOES! Being wealthy is super toxic for the mental health of the wealthy person, we are living in the consequences.