The billionaires are sad

Uh oh: The Met Gala’s Embrace of Jeff Bezos Causes a Backlash.

In Bezos, however, progressive protesters have seemingly found a perfect foil: a singular figurehead whose rightward political drift, $250 billion bankroll and anti-union efforts have made him an object of scorn on the left.

Shocking to find out fashion has taken the side of the wealthy. Well, at least us poors will always have fine dining. 🙄

Bending the knee

It’s yet another example of how much these tech billionaires just don’t get it.

Musk thinks empathy is weakness. Andreesen thinks introspection is for dummies. Thiel thinks there’s an antichrist. And Zuckerberg thinks that gold chain looks good on him.

Woof.

I gave up on ‘em when they all bent the knee to the President and decided to do the bootlicking hokey pokey at Mar-A-Lago, the inauguration, and the White House. They brought him gifts and did that whole “you’re such a strong leader” circlejerk. Gross. Especially since we all know they don’t actually respect him at all.

Watching all that, I couldn’t help but think, “Wow, I thought you guys had f*ck you money. I mean, what’s the point of having all that money if you’ve still gotta kiss another man’s a**?

Turns out they don’t actually have f*ck you money. You know who really has f*ck you money? Me! That’s right. People with no money, we’ve got the real f*ck you money.

They live in fear of losing everything. I’ve got nothing to lose! They have to protect shareholders. I don’t gotta protect 💩. My couch has a goddamn hole in it. Take it away, please. They can’t lose their government contracts. The only contract I have is with Time Warner Cable. Go ahead, cancel it. I’ll just turn to Fios.

What is anyone gonna do to me that two decades of pursuing standup comedy hasn’t already done? You think I’m afraid of people taking my stuff away? Get in line behind Fannie Mae, my uncle, DraftKings, my weed dealer, and…the list goes on.

If you wanna know the truth, ask someone deeply in debt. They’ll tell you what’s really happening as the bigwigs insist the emperor’s clothes are fabulous. No wonder they’re tryna break into the Met Gala. They’re used to pretending ugliness is actually haute couture.

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It’s never enough

Know what? I think these billionaires are actually sad.

See, the rest of us, we have the fantasy that if we just had all that money, we wouldn’t be sad anymore. But these guys got all that money and now they’re like, “Damnit, I’m still sad.” And they did all that evil stuff to get the money, so they’re actually sad and guilty.

So they think, “I gotta go live on Mars. That’s where my daddy will have loved me, on Mars. If I live on Mars and buy my wife huge lips, then I’ll be happy. Just my huge-lipped wife and me…up there on Mars…next to my big rocket…living foreverrrrrr. Now that oughta do it.”

The latest oligarch to make a MAGA pivot is Sergey Brin. After once backing liberal causes, he’s veering hard right. The Google co-founder praised 🍊, donated to Republicans, and spent $57 million to try to block a California billionaire tax.

Sergey Brin and his girlfriend, Gerelyn Gilbert-Soto, at a White House dinner last year. Will Oliver/EPA, via Alamy

Some are blaming his new girlfriend, who checks a lot of Huberboxes:

✅ “Gut health influencer”
✅ “holistic health coach”
✅ “clean meat enthusiast”
✅ appeared on reality television series “Vanderpump Rules”

One more and it’s MalibuBingo™️!

Brin is pissy because he theorizes California is on the verge of turning Soviet:

I fled socialism in 1979 and know the devastating, oppressive society it created in the Soviet Union. I don’t want California to end up in the same place.

Fact check: In 1979, the top marginal federal income tax rate for the wealthiest Americans was 70%. Now, it’s 37%. So how about we go back to the tax rate that made America so desirable to Brin’s family?

🚔 Wait, why are you dragging me out of this party at a crypto titan’s estate? I didn’t even get to taste the hors d’– [security tosses me onto the pavement]

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Silicone valley of the dolls

Alright, let’s get into the 👄↔️ thing.

Normally, I wouldn’t go hard in the paint on someone’s physical appearance. But Lauren Sanchez wasn’t born like this. She chose to look this way.

So it feels like fair game to mock the choices she’s made to turn her appearance into some sort of Abramovicesque avant-garde art project. At this point, it’s not really about beauty anymore, right? It’s just her going, “Look what I can afford to do to my face.”

Bezos digs it, though. In fact, he even put a sculpture of her on the front of his yacht.

And that’s got me wondering: Every time she gets plastic surgery, do they have to update this sculpture? Is there some fed-up sculptor in Paris who gets a call every six months and replies, “Sacre bleu, I cannot do it. No, c’est impossible. I cannot make ze lips bigger. The whole ship will capseeeeeeeize. C’est impossiiiiiiible.”

AI on the warpath

Meanwhile, the AI they’re bankrolling is about to take over the economy, ruin careers, and maaaaaybe destroy the world.

Even the safe jobs ain’t safe: lawyers, coders, accountants. A buddy of mine is a lawyer and he is terrified: “Man, I don’t even know what the future’s gonna be like. I don’t know if my job’s gonna exist. I don’t know how I’m gonna get paid. I don’t know what will come next.”

Listening to that, I couldn’t help but think, “Oh, wow, everyone is just gonna live the life of a struggling comedian. All this time, I thought I was falling behind. Turns out I’m a prepper!”

Him: “I don’t know how I’m gonna pay rent.”
Me: “That’s the wrong question. The right question is how are we gonna pay rent?”
(He’s my roommate now.)

Welcome to the chaos, everyone.

I don’t mind it that much. While the rest of the world was building equity, I was building a tolerance for uncertainty. And that increasingly feels like a superpower. We are all freelancers now.

Viva disruption?

Some advice to the tech overlords

A lesson I learned from Pablo Escobar documentaries, Cocaine Cowboys, The Wire, etc. is that smart gangsters give back to the community. They build soccer fields, set up charity basketball games, hand out Thanksgiving turkeys, etc.

It’s strategic. People don’t snitch on someone who built their kid’s playground. They cheer ‘em on.

Well, as we all can see, y’all are basically a bunch of gangsters. Yet you seemingly do nothing but extract. Instead, try doing something (anything!) kind – in public – occasionally so people don’t constantly resent you.

Like, at least the Sacklers were building museum wings while killing off half of Appalachia. (I know, you tech guys don’t understand or appreciate aesthetics, but just imagine you’re AI art and fake it.)

And no, bankrolling a gala for other elites doesn’t count.

You don’t have to stop constructing rockets, doomsday bunkers, and new bodies for your partners. Just pretend to care about some kinda philanthropy effort too. It’s basic cartel etiquette.

And if you’re not sure how to do it, ask one of your ex-wives. They seem to clock all this just fine.

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5-spotted

❝❞ Inside the Gay Tech Mafia: Gay networks seem naturally aligned to the dynamics of venture funding, where established wealth meets emerging talent.

“One of the key things to realize is that gays are different than straights in many different ways,” says a longtime gay venture capitalist. “Gays are cross-generational.” While straight people tend to spend more time with people their own age, “that is not true with gay men. I can hang out with someone at an event who is 18 years old, and Peter [Thiel] might also be there.”

❝❞ Frank Bruni on what family ownership meant for newspapers.

That often made the bottom line less important than tradition, pride, honor. Bezos doesn’t have the same investment in The Post that the Grahams did or that the Sulzbergers do in The Times. Often, little hedges against pure capitalism and the profit motive are a good thing.

❝❞ Is hating on snake oil…racist?

Among the items the Chinese railroad workers brought with them to the States were various medicines — including snake oil. Made from the oil of the Chinese water snake, which is rich in the omega-3 acids that help reduce inflammation, snake oil in its original form really was effective, especially when used to treat arthritis and bursitis. The workers would rub the oil, used for centuries in China, on their joints after a long hard day at work. The story goes that the Chinese workers began sharing the oil with some American counterparts, who marveled at the effects.

❝❞ The Anti-Intellectualism of the Silicon Valley Elite.

Tech oligarchs have erected a new cognitive technology designed to fry users’ brains after they’ve effectively lobotomized themselves with a real-world version of the same process. Our tech lords have long made a practice of outsourcing their thinking to the many people (and technologies) devoted to digesting difficult material and summarizing it for them. In their working lives, they then proceed to surround themselves with yes men and peers who affirm everything they say; the beta version of the cringy displays of great-leader sycophancy that break out in every Trump cabinet meeting was perfected in the boardrooms of Silicon Valley.

❝❞ Jacob Riis on 🔨ing:

When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.

Thanks for reading. Stay strong. Leave a comment or reply with feedback. I notice. Bye.

-Matt