The Billionaires Despise You: Welcome Their Scorn
Segrey Brin bought a mansion in Tahoe on the Nevada side. Mark Zuckerberg decamped to the Chlamidya Cove, I mean Indian River Island outside of Miami. The Silicon Valley vulture capitalists are threatening to join. They'd all rather wave to each other from their city-block sized compounds. "Oh look! It's Jeff Bezos and his AI programmed blow up doll of a second wife, Lauren." They are threatening to move to New York too, where they threatened to leave just last year if Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor. And anyway, he wants the same kind of wealth tax.
Remember Mayor Mamdani! The Wall Street titans were practically red-faced. Texas even announced they were going to create their own haven for them by building a stock exchange in Dallas. They warned of a complete collapse of Manhattan. Bill Ackman, the utterly embarrassing hedge fund ghoul produced reams of online social media posts threatening to leave on the hour, every hour. He went nowhere.
Elon set this tone of "the noisy billionaire Goodbye-Cruel-World" protest. He had already run to Austin, befouling that eccentric laid back city with his brand of abrasive incompetent techno-flab. Texas offered Elon the sort of irresponsible "We're for Sale" society billionaires have come to love. Joe Rogan and a constellation of the worst podcasters you never listen to also followed him there to create a utopia. Gravitating perhaps to proximity with Alex Jones, a man who saw in the Newtown families an opportunity to torture people who lost their six year olds to gun violence.
No one wants to pay their taxes, do they? But rarely have people for whom money is meaningless found so much meaning in a number they will barely miss. They have set about to spend tens of millions in political spending to stand up a campaign aimed at complaining about paying taxes for social good. Not even remotely self-aware. No, I kid. They see it as "investment." Buying off some politicians and bamboozling the public to save more on a wealth tax is just "smart business." The kind that helps you buy your ninth mansion and second yacht.
So how should the public react? Simple! "Fuck. You. There's the door."
There's one cherished thing you possess that a billionaire wants and which they cannot purchase. It's a like a Indiana-Jones totem deep in a jungle of limitless value. They cannot acquire it for all the money in the world. Do you know what it is? Okay I'll tell you. It's your approval and admiration. That's the secret.
When you despise a billionaire you lay waste their personal sense of dignity. Money is meaningless to them. They can gas up the finest private jet and travel to any glamorous shopping district in the world. They can eat any fine food and look out on any vista. They can have multiple homes, appointed in opulent luxury. They want for nothing.
But you know what they also do late at night? They have burner accounts. They lurk online reading comments about themselves. They even hilariously respond sometimes forgetting that they are posting from the wrong account. They get into extremely irrational online fights with internet randos. When they are asked about issues, they answer with a suspiciously deep knowledge of contemporary internet memes and conspiracies that normal people are caught up on.
In other words, the billionaires are experiencing a deep, oceanic sadness. What does it matter to have the billions on a collapsing planet? How many gold dusted hamburgers can you eat? If all you drink is $500 per bottle wine, then at some point it just tastes like...wine. So they try their hand at "Government of One" also known as philanthropy. But the public has become wise to the fact that philanthropy has become an "opt-out" of the wider shared social contract. America has descended into a modern feudalism with these beknighted oligarchs ruling their transnational fiefdoms with their dollars, rather than participating as equals in our shared reality.
They get very upset when we shrug at their philanthropy! They become peevish and small-minded. These billionaires are used to be fêted in their own companies and family businesses. They are insulated with multiple layers of "yes-people" who validate their every stray thought. But what they design as a utopian existence of constant praise eventually becomes a panic room without ventilation. There was a reason that the in Greek mythology Zeus would done the rags and roam the countryside. Even this all-powerful God was bored on Mount Olympus. He wanted to see what the fuss of life was all about.
Edward Arlington Robinson captured the corrosive ennui of ultra wealth in his poem Richard Cory.
Robinson captured an essential truth about life as a sort of bell curve. A certain amount of material comfort raises ones spirits. The certainty of housing, the meaningful sense of one's self from a vocation, the ability to travel and provide for family, raise one's spirits. But after a certain point, the money becomes a sort of form of gravity so concentrated it leads to the unstable and extreme contours of a Black Hole. Anxiety. Depression. Envy. Rage. Madness. The happiness curve plunges down to a level not dissimilar to the grindingly poor. Both search for exits.
The more we confidently and openly despise billionaires, the more they will lose. The planet is collapsing ecologically. Societies are lonelier and more isolated than ever. The public is frazzled and exhausted by the stream of incompetence and insanity exploding from the unstable house-of-cards world the billionaires built. But our most powerful weapon requires nothing more than simply refusing to praise them. Refusing to credit them. Refusing to give them the approval they desperately crave.
One aspect of the revelations of the nauseating Epstein files is that these very rich men are mediocre minds living sorry mediocre lives. They can barely spell and they give off a depressed and anxious vibe. They go to a trashy creepy island with a man who exudes disgusting sleaziness, all to do awful things to children and young women which somehow they determined would be "fun."
These men are scrambling. They tell us "I didn't know anything about it." I find this so fascinating. Even if you take it on their own terms. This means you willingly hung out with a truly grotesque man who looks like a creep. At an abode that was disturbing and shambolic, nothing you would see in Architectural Digest. Of course, I assume they all knew what Epstein did and they participated quite enthusiastically. But I digress. What we see in the Epstein files is how gross their supposedly "rich lives" were. By contrast we can see how normal people live rich and meaningful lives full of love and laughter and even good taste.
This is our superpower to combat billionaires. Let them know, as the Silicon Valley public relations writer Kara Swisher put it, that you oligarchs are so wealthy "that all you have is money." Our every reaction of contempt, bemusement, and mockery weakens them further. They want the public interviews. The Aspen Forum. Davos. They see what you write on line about them as they have a massive PR staff combing through online impressions. How do we know? Well, this week (February 20, 2026) Bill Gates was set to give a keynote address at an AI summit in New Delhi. He was chased from the main stage by the public backlash he has received from being in the Epstein files. This is a sign of their collapsing power.
Billionaires thrive when we spread stories of their overwhelming power. When we talk hopelessly about how they rig democratic elections, purchase politicians, sandbag our legislatures, and gobble up our cultural treasures, they smirk with satisfaction. But when we make fun of them, as we so often do with Elon Musk, it's as if they are approaching you at a cash register in your own boutique.
You say to them: "Put your Black Card away, you can't afford anything here." Their faces form into an icy stare and their hand balls into a tight fist. As you wave to them, they storm off: "You haven't seen the last of me!"
