Trickle down is a useful lie

We live in a vacuum up economy

Reading my recent post on the oligarchy might have left some of you wondering where it leaves the richest in the world.

Those in the global top 10 are all recent “new money” upstarts. So is that disrupting the old money power structures?

Well, yes and no. The key point is that this really is “new money”. It’s wealth that’s far more notional and digital than the leafy expanses of the land and other real things owned by generations of gentry.

Elon Musk is ‘the richest man in the world’. But about 60% of that wealth is held in shares in the various companies he operates. The value of all those shares has been vastly inflated by the vicissitudes of financial chicanery on what is now largely a world stock market casino. That casino, many serious analysts point out, is set to blow in the not too distant future.

Tesla’s stock market value is currently about eight times the physical assets it actually owns. The vast majority of X’s value is similarly ‘non-physical’. It’s about what people think its vast propaganda machine is worth, or will be worth in the future.

Even convicted bitcoin fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried's net worth was estimated to be up to US$32 billion at its peak. Both that notional wealth, and its downfall, came from just sending imaginary numbers from one set of computers to another and having big hair. It was a bold attempt to follow on from where Musk’s big early earner - PayPal - left off, and which paid for Elon to also have hair. But Sam didn’t cash out before the mood music stopped. Oh, and he broke a load of laws back when that still sort of mattered.

I’m not saying all of Musk’s wealth and/or hair is a fraud, that it doesn’t exist, or that he’ll necessarily end up in prison (although he might…). But, like the rest of our economy, his notional wealth and hair has been coiffed with imaginary money via the largely unproductive activities of the internet and the financial jiggery-pokery we laughably call our financial system. The same goes for all the nouveau ultra riche.

Jeff Bezos is super rich and doesn’t need hair because we all use his online shopping and shipping system. He doesn’t own most of what it sells, or the means of its production. Jensen Huang of NVIDIA is super rich, rather than just rich. He has actual factories, but because his chipsets fuel the explosion of mind-numbing computer games, the imaginary money bitcoin bubble and what people insist on calling “Artificial Intelligence”. Again, it’s just not built on the same real bedrock that old money comes from.

Technology has made the middle men of history some of the most powerful people in the world. Let’s see how that plays out.

Probably, they’re going to destruction-test the theory that “a rising tide lifts all boats” by drowning our cities and homelands. Maybe that’s what they really mean by ‘trickle down’.

How multi-generational their funny money becomes, of course, remains to be seen. But my money’s on it not lasting as long as the Duke of Westminster’s unbroken 400 year lolly scramble.

Sure, there are even a very few cashing in their bitcoin to a ‘greater fool’ and turning the cash into real property. And the super rich are buying up plenty of land and other stuff. But Elon Musk’s dynasty currently consists of a dozen or so scattered children with various women he doesn’t live with. The only one we’ve heard from publicly says they don’t know him and don’t want to. And if he lives long enough he seems to intend to blow it all on phallic rockets to the wastelands of Mars anyway.

I’m not hating on single parent families. I come from one. But I also know that my English family is consequently not unified enough to have visited me in New Zealand once in two decades. It’s not a great basis for jointly managing a multi-billion dollar fortune for centuries to come.

And, of course, we probably don’t have centuries of any kind of serious wealth left. The ballooning numbers of the absurdly rich are another indication of screaming unsustainability.

Up until the early 70’s there were only a handful of billionaires on Earth, even allowing for inflation. Since then, the world’s population has doubled. There are now around 3,000 billionaires. Need I remind you that we’re on a planet of finite resources, which are currently depleting rapidly?

This is looking increasingly like collecting up all the jewelry on the Titanic, while setting fire to the lifeboats with cigars.

See those aged billionaires with beauty queens on their arms. They have a retreat island in the Pacific, a yacht and a bunch of rich, deeply twisted offspring all over the world.

Are they happy?

Yes.

Well, as happy as narcissistic, psychopathic arseholes are ever going to be. They’ve won. That whole “money can’t buy you happiness” thing is another suspiciously convenient lie they tell us all to stop us asking for our share. It's as if Marie Antoinette had thought about what she was saying a bit more, and said: “Too much cake is not good for you, so leave it all to me, nom, nom, nom.”

But go ahead. Stay on X. Buy from Amazon. After all, what could possibly go wrong?