We all know he’s wrong. The problem isn’t that he is wrong, it’s that we have elevated the wealthy into a status where they can be wrong, have no correction, and make decisions whole clothe which negatively affect the rest of us. All while being insulated from their negative world view.
Tim Dillon said summarized it pretty well - can't remember or find the exact quote. Something to the effect of:
"Look around at all these things I have - how could I be wrong when I have so much?"
And that's how you get the Andreessen's and Musk's of the world stating these nonsensical things as truth. In their minds, financial success is the ultimate yardstick. The fact that they have so much wealth is a testament that their way of thinking is always right.
You don't need to look very hard to see this is what they really believe. Elon has done extremely silly things like claiming he was the best Path of Exile player in the world because he paid several people grind his account to a high-level. Having enough money to pay someone to play the game for you, is the same as being good at the game, in his mind.
What I took from the video game thing is that he thought he could fool people.
It's very obvious to gamers when someone hasn't played, it actually doesn't matter whether you have high level gear.
There's things you can't buy with money, and respect is one of them. He fundamentally doesn't understand how status works. He could, for free, just put out a video where he says "look at me, I'm a busy CEO, but I play this game even though I'm bad at it".
> In their minds, financial success is the ultimate yardstick.
In a loopy recursive way, it is. Cost gates what we can do and become. Paying back your costs to extend your runway is the working principle behind biology, economy and technology. I am not saying rich people are always right, just that cost is not so irrelevant to everything else. I personally think cost satisfaction explains multiple levels, from biology up.
Related to introspection - it certainly has a cost for doing it, and a cost for not doing it. Going happy go lucky is not necessarily optimal, experience was expensive to gain, not using it at all is a big loss. Being paralyzed by rumination is also not optimal, we have to act in time, we can't delay and if we do, it comes out differently.
That may or may not be true in aggregate, but for extreme outliers it's impossible to separate from survivorship bias. Are Musk and Andreeson really the most skilled entrepreneurs in the world or are they just good enough for luck to propel them to stratospheric success?
If you look at the entire entirety of understood history of biology:
The most ruthless always wins
That is to say if I go into a village and kill all the adults and teenagers and steal all the kids who are scared to be killed by me, then I will win in the probably two successive generations that I’ve been able to successfully brainwashing into thinking I’m some kind of God.
That is until somebody kills me and then takes over the structure. For example there are no dictatorships that last past the third generation
That is literally and unambiguously how all life operates
There are intermediary cooperation periods. But if you look at the aggregate time periods including how galaxies form it’s all straight up brute force consumption
Also doesn't help that wealth means they can own newspapers or social media to promote their shitty takes as gospel, and have armies of regular Joe fanbois, that kiss their ass and tell us how wise they are...
Yes. One of the most important things to learn is how to introspect and actually FEEL the pain that surfaces when you do. That's how healing begins. If you never do that, you're stuck in whatever destructive patterns you use to avoid that introspection forever.
It turns out that when you actually allow yourself to feel those things, it gives your nervous system the ability to metabolize and process them.
I think you have put this in a correct, concise manner which I agree with entirely.
The smaller version of same phenomena I see in enterprises where musings of non/barely technical leadership of a tech org is not only considered as go-to strategy but also why previous plans and implementations which were so obviously crappy not totally replaced yet.
I've taken the position that anything the ultra-wealthy say is likely wrong, and every decision they take will negatively affect society, unless and until its corroborated by an unbiased source with expertise in the subject matter.
I think the ultra-wealthy are just operating under what they think they need to tell people in order to get the outcomes they want. You're only going to hear the truth - or something correct - if its to their benefit.
I used to think this but I think that's only true for the low-profile wealthy folks. And they voice their opinion indirectly, like through owning media companies.
The people that feel the need to be loud and in the public eye aren't necessarily playing 4d chess. It's really just an ego thing for them.
The wealthy who keep a low-profile are the smarter one's.
Yes, deciding to be famous AFTER becoming rich is a choice, and arguably not optimally intelligent.
Many in these positions get there by being really good/smart/lucky at something once and then having a war chest of capital to deploy for life.
It doesn't mean they are a polymath genius with unique worthwhile insights into all facets of the human experience. In fact, it may almost be the opposite. The hyper focus and hustle required to attain what they do often requires withdrawing from the wider world, not being particularly well read, and living in a socioeconomic/political/work bubble.
The ultra-wealthy are no different from anyone else. However the effects of their decisions - both good and bad - tend to be much larger than what most of us can do.
Yes, they are different: People who care about others are less likely to become ultra rich. You become ultra rich by mostly caring about your cut and your profits.
While there are exceptions with people who were lucky and were at the right spot at the right time, there is a different distribution of character traits compared to society at large.
I invite you to expand on your blanket statement. I posit that the ultra-wealthy are necessarily and unavoidably transformed by the lived experience of having that level of wealth: virtually any logistical inconvenience you and I currently relate to can be monied away; the proportion of strangers and near-strangers that want to interact with you deferentially and transactionally jumps; the consequences for many of your mistakes become invisible to you.
edit: I don't mean just to shoot you down here--I think there's a counterargument to be made here. It might start with "those folks really are the same as us, responding and acting as we ourselves would when dropped into that environment and surroundings". That would hinge on observing the actions and behaviors of someone who, having lived a life as a billionaire, has lost or forsworn that level of fortune and whose lives we might now judge as in the range of "normal". I think that'll be hard to find; the wealthy making public pledges to give away 99% of their wealth are still ludicrously wealthy, and to my knowledge all make that commitment to do so around when they die--not before.
I agree that the consequences are greater.
There seem to be at least two perspectives on whether wealth makes you different:
1. In 1926, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that the rich “are different from you and me,” and Ernest Hemingway supposedly retorted, “Yes, they have more money.”
2. Kurt Vonnegut's obituary for Joseph Heller...
True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.
I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel ‘Catch-22’
has earned in its entire history?”
And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”
And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”
And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
Not bad! Rest in peace!”
Or, as Cyndi Lauper sang it, 'Money Changes Everything'
I'm of the latter persuasion, that wealth influences one's personality in important ways.
The nature of the ultra wealthy is obviously no different than the rest of us - but the nurture and environment they live is in extremely different. That they live so isolated from the broader human community, are so disconnected from routine discomforts, and so shielded from any kind of consequences is an obvious difference from the rest of us. It’s no wonder they develop sociopathic tendencies when they are materially rewarded for such behavior and have no empathy for the way the rest of us must live.
>The ultra-wealthy are no different from anyone else
The ultra wealthy are very different from anyone else. First of all, their games is about power, everyone else's is survival and making the rent. Second they have armies of ass kissers. Third, they have no job and can even own politicians. And of course their wealth isolates them from repercursions anyone else would face, and puts their experience way out of phase with the regular people.
And we should also account for the sociopathic drive that made them rich in the first place (sociopaths are overrepresented in higher status positions).
I really like the way you put it: “It’s okay to be wrong. We’re all wrong from time to time. What’s not okay is not having a way to be corrected by the outside world for a specific reason: being at the top of the political pyramid, being ultra-wealthy and surrounded by flattery, etc"
You're right, but we've never devised any system that prevents this from happening. Every single organization leads to a concentration of wealth and power. And even those ideally conceived to have counterbalancing forces, eventually are corrupted and subverted. It seems to be the steady state of reality.
Because rich people have both the power and motivation to define it in a manner in which they still win. Wealth can be education. Wealth can be contacts. Wealth can be properties. Wealth can be businesses. Wealth can be in other countries.
It's a lovely idea, but that system will have to be enforced by a power structure... which will always tend to grant itself special privileges. And even before such corruption, without inherited wealth, there will still be entrenched institutions that control resources, and have a continuity of leadership, that will always be looking out for themselves and their in-group. It's just natural.
Immense wealth or power should be difficult to hold on to. Until our policymakers understand that we'll have to occasionally resort to the Luigi method.
To put it another way, the problem is not what this idiot is saying on some popdcast, the problem is that people are listening to it. For example, in the case of this blogger, listeninngn and then taking the time to publish a web page about what was said, hoping to make money from readers
You're correcting him by commenting on a popular article arguing he's wrong. So it appears he has been "corrected" rather broadly and vocally
He's free to choose what to believe. He's not "insulated from his negative world view". If you're correct and introspection is to his benefit and he chooses to forgo it, it's his loss.
So I don't know what you're upset about.
I think his broader point is that people are too introspective in modern times and its paralyzing. For instance, I remember reading a blog that argues that argues PTSD doesn't exist historically. People saw terrible things, buried their children and suffered unimaginable pain but there were no concept of PTSD. He argues that its not because it was taboo (virtually every other topic that was taboo was extensively documented), so perhaps there was less introspection.
That has been the case for a vast swathe of time across history. It hurts because we had a nice couple of decades where it seemed that, not only was this not the case, but that we were directionally accelerating away from it.
Not just elevated them, but effectively given them a free pass for anything they do.
Musk slanders a cave diver trying to rescue trapped children as a paedo? No problem! The courts said it's fine. It's just a joke bro, you should be laughing.
Andreeson frontruns pump and dump shitcoins on retail investors via coinbase et al? Don't worry about it! Conning and scamming is fine now. The dog either eats or gets eaten.
We are far too kind to people being visibily obnoxious people because they are rich.
He is wrong about almost everything, and especially about introspection.
But he got lucky and wrote a good-enough-for-the-time browser at just the right time.
Now, he mistakes his luck and his F_U_Money for skill and intelligence. And why wouldn't he? He can simply walk away from any situation that makes it seem he is wrong.
And the broader problem in society is nearly the entire populace has been conditioned to ignore the factors of luck and mistake monetary success with hard work and wisdom, when in fact those people are often no more than massively amplified fools.
The massive follies of most these current robber barons makes the case for taxing them out of existence. Once someone has enough money that they and their family cannot spend it in multiple lifetimes of excessive luxury, the only reason to have more is power. We should ramp up tax rates so those people cannot accumulate that power.
Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. A society that fails to manage that fact of human nature dooms itself.
Yes. I mean calling them out and people take personal offense as if they are receiving handouts from them or they are that rich. They don't give a damn about anyone or anything for that matter
The penultimate sentence of this fantastic 1997 interview with Trump has stayed with me since I read it: "Trump, who had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury, an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul."
A salient comment on the current times. But I'll extend it beyond just wealthy people. We have given every soul a platform. At first glance, that seems like a good thing. But we've given everyone a platform where they can accumulate large followings and express a great many opinions completely unchallenged. In reality, we've built force multiplier tools that enable the dissemination of all takes, good and bad, at a rather alarming rate. And, I would argue, the average joe is a bit gullible and easy to indoctrinate. Society, largely speaking, does not receive enough education and protections against these types of indoctrination platforms that we've made. That celebrities, ultra wealthy individuals, bad actors, and random dumbasses can all use and abuse to sell some physical or cognitive junk.
It’s really heartening to see that “eat the rich” is finally becoming a consistent message on HN
Technology truly can be used by the dispossessed in order to reclaim power from the billionaire psychopath class
But it requires those of us who know how to wield technology to stop looking to rich people to fund us, and start organizing from the ground up in order to take them down
Step one is that all of us blue collar technologists need to get organized
I’ve tried it and failed, but maybe now is the time
Americans are weird creatures in this regard. Give them 5% of their compensation / 0.0001% of a company in stock/options and suddenly they think they have become Big Capital.
If you need to work to collect a wage to pay your expenses, you are still labor, sorry if that hurts peoples feelings, but it shouldn't.
John Steinbeck: “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires”
These terms are all pretty flexible - blue collar in 1950 is extremely different than blue collar in 2026.
What category would you place the following 99% of human people:
You you will lose your ability to eat and have housing if you do not show up to a place (even if it’s at your rented apartment) and spend hours doing on what someone else wants you to do
Having your body worn out before you can retire assumes retirement as a concept exists, which it doesn’t in the US. “Retirement” aka living without working, as a blue collar worker, was a middle class fantasy that only existed for an extremely small minority of people from 1949-1985.
For the majority of working people in the world they never had any type of retirement like this and for anybody who did it was a very temporary period in western society.
So while it might’ve been true in the past that the body was the first thing to break, now it’s just “can you maintain your own financial status in the future given your previous work history.”
Everybody at this point understands that there is no possible job you could as an 18-year-old in 2026 that you will be able to retire from and live comfortably in your twilight years from 65-80 with the earnings and “investments” made in the preceding 50 years of work.
Beyond that if I look around at least the “western” world there are very few of those jobs left that totally destroy your body - military, mining, construction etc… still have a lot of that (My body is ruined from 17 years of military) but it’s a shrinking group
For example most of agriculture is being done mechanically compared to 100 years ago, similarly for manufacturing lines humans are a minority in a manufacturing line at this point
I remember back in the 1990s it would take a work party of three families to cut and bail hay in Texas. I was on one of those crews for at least a couple years as a kid. Literally nobody does that anymore it’s all mechanical bailers and silege wrapping machines
Google and Microsoft employees already tolerate terrible software and immoral contract deals. It's not like you can count on them growing a conscience over working for an evil company.
Organizing years ago would have been huge for software developers but unfortunately I do think it is too late now, given the onset of AI (weakens the collective by improving individual productivity since not every developer will be onboard) and just the current political landscape. The NLRB has been gutted.
there was a before the nlrb and there were unions then. would you expect union organizers for a tech workers union to be assassinated? would you expect members of a tech workers union to be gunned down en masse? if no, then the political landscape has been so much worse than now, and unions have managed to form.
If you believe you are incapable of actually doing anything then you are correct, and you should just go ahead and submit yourself to whatever power structure you think will benefit you the most
Of course you're not here to argue, there's no precedent for what you're suggesting. Nobody has fought against Apple, Google or Microsoft and taken home a significant victory.
This leads me to believe that the power structures can't be fixed. There is no amount of protesting that can coerce private capital to take humanity's best interests to heart, that's the tragedy of the commons. There is no guerilla warfare you can wage on a totalitarian platform like iOS or Windows; you simply lose in the end, because you are malware and the OEM is always right.
Movements like GNU/FOSS win because they don't even acknowledge the existence of corporate technology. They don't "fight" against anyone or make multi-billion dollar nemeses because it is a waste of volunteer hours that could go towards building something wonderful.
this is so funny for me to read. a few years ago, i would see programmers saying they can negotiate better deals for themselves than a union could. now you're saying it's already over, programming as a skill has a future valuation that's heading to zero.
i advise against being so sure of your ideas. maybe you think platform holders have all the cards--test it. if they fight efforts to unionize, that tells a different story.
Individuals can negotiate insane labors deals for themselves. Go ask the best-paid person you know how they got their pay package, it usually entails some form of schmoozing. Unions are for bringing the bottom-rung up to par, not for raising the top bar further.
> if they fight efforts to unionize, that tells a different story.
You are describing an industry that has outsourced intelligent labor to India and Pakistan for more than 25 years. The efforts to unionize would be like trying to save America's auto industry in 2004.
The fatalistic view that "platform holders have all the cards" and that "programming as a skill has a future valuation that's heading to zero" is a common psychological barrier in labor struggles. Oppressed or subordinate groups often suffer from a "diffuse, magical belief in the invulnerability and power of the oppressor"[0].
However, theories of political and social power argue the exact opposite: the power of any ruling class or corporation is actually quite fragile because it depends entirely on the cooperation, obedience, and skills of its subordinates. If highly skilled individuals like blue-collar technologists and programmers collectively withdraw our human resources, skills, and knowledge, we can severely disrupt or paralyze the systems that enrich the platform holders.
In the late 1990s I went to a RealNetworks developer conference and Andreesen, then at Netscape, was a keynote speaker. I was curious and open to his insights, but his talk was so vapid (I remember he kept giggling) and arrogant that I eventually walked out. I remember he kept bragging about Netscape's next big project (something after Netscape 5 maybe?) and how it was going to wipe Microsoft out permanently. Only a few years later did I realize whatever it was never shipped, it turned out to be vaporware.
Being rich != being famous. There are tons of extremely wealthy people out there that keep a very low profile. Sure they might be well known within their circle but ask the average person and they have no clue who that person is. I would say this is the case for like 90-95% of billionaires.
Musk, Andreessen, Zuck and others were all in this camp 10 years ago but they all decided that simply being rich wasn't enough, they wanted to be famous. These folks have all the resources and connections to become famous so they can get on all the podcasts, write op-eds, and are guaranteed to get the best reach on social media and thus the most eyeballs on their content and the most attention paid to them.
But when you go from making a few media appearances a year to constantly making media appearances in one way or another is that you need more "content" so to speak. Just like a comedian needs more content if they are going to do a 1hr special versus a 10min set at a comedy club.
The problem for all these guys is they have a few genuinely insightful ideas mixed in with a ton of cooky and out of touch ideas. Before they could safely stick to the genuinely insightful ideas but as they've made more and more appearances, they have to reach for some of those other ideas. They don't realize that their cooky ideas sound very different than their few insightful ideas. They think all their ideas are insightful based on the feedback they have been getting for the past decade or so.
I need to reread it but Paul Fussell makes the case that old wealth is inconspicuous and secure (and maybe inherited) versus nouveau riche which is about visible luxury, branding, and showy consumption. I don't remember if he mentions the need to promote ideas.
I doubt that. The only thing social media removed was scruples and shame.
People were ashamed to say such dumb things and now they think they have some kind of deeper knowledge.
After one becomes wealthy, social media easily becomes the only place where anyone says no to them. When everyone who surrounds you tells you "you're absolutely right, let me get that for you", you atrophy the muscle that let's you course correct when you're making a mistake, and when someone disagrees with you it feels that much stronger.
Wealth is not the only way this can happen, you see it with notoriety and power who have gotten used to " being right" (Dawkins comes to mind), and now this experience is being "democratised" by LLMs.
Blocking people that annoy him on Twitter is the only humanizing thing about him. Deciding that someone has annoyed you enough on that platform that you don't care to ever hear from them ever again is the only thing that made that platform usable when you have any minimal audience.
"I've known you for all of 10 seconds and enjoyed not a single one of them" followed by blocking is good, actually. That doesn't make you any more correct or wrong, of course.
There is a shift in society on what can be said and what they keep private. Back then you would pull stings in background, now you can bribe thenUS president in public.
Also: Back in the days™ statements where edited by marketing people and others before publication. Now people blast out stuff on their own via "social media"
They ran out of novel things to say which is expected of anyone because there’s only so many non trivial things one could say. But then unlike normal people they didn’t stop talking because being rich they are bored and they want to be in the limelight all the time. So they end up talking nonsense.
You also changed, you are now wiser and have developed BS detector.
> They ran out of novel things to say which is expected of anyone because there’s only so many non trivial things one could say. But then unlike normal people they didn’t stop talking because being rich they are bored and they want to be in the limelight all the time. So they end up talking nonsense.
Why do they always feel like they need to pull stuff out of their butts to make themselves sound like they know what is going on? In some ways I think it's related to the stock market "just meet the next quarterly goal" kind of thinking. Who cares if you don't come up with something pithy to say for a few years. Have big impacts over time instead of tons of little ups and downs all the time.
> Why do they always feel like they need to pull stuff out of their butts to make themselves sound like they know what is going on?
Massive, unconstrained egos? They think they're hot shit, because they surround themselves with yes men.
I'm reminded of this:
> Beneath the grand narrative Musk tells, when he takes things over, what does he actually have the people under him do? What is the theory of action?
> He has people around him who are just enablers. All these Silicon Valley people do. All his minions. And they are minions — they’re all lesser than he is in some fashion, and they all look up to him. They’re typically younger. They laugh at his jokes. Sometimes when he apologizes for a joke, which is not very often, he’ll say that the people around him thought it was funny.
> When he was being interviewed at Code Conference once, he had a couple of them there. He told a really bad joke, and they all went like: Ha-ha-ha-ha. And I was like: That’s not funny — I’m sorry, did I miss the joke? And they looked at me like I had three heads. (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...)
This has always been the case with the massively wealthy. They may be incredibly smart in their specific line of business, which leads them to an enormous amount of wealth and fame. Because our culture likes to lionize success stories, we collectively lean hard into putting people like that on pedestals and giving them more opportunities to speak their minds. Their own egos get inflated as a result, and a feedback loop ensues - they think everything they do is great because, collectively, our culture wants everything they do to be great.
But the simple fact is, nobody's a genius in all areas. We all have our areas of expertise, but none of us can be trusted to speak wisely about all things all the time.
At the same time, as others have said, your BS detector has matured.
> This has always been the case with the massively wealthy. They may be incredibly smart in their specific line of business, which leads them to an enormous amount of wealth and fame. ... Their own egos get inflated as a result, and a feedback loop ensues - they think everything they do is great because, collectively, our culture wants everything they do to be great.
This doesn't just apply to the wealthy, but more lowly people too: see "Engineer's disease."
People like Musk and Adreessen are getting hit by a double-whammy: they're software engineers (the stupidest and most arrogant class of engineers) AND they're massively wealthy.
He is absolutely a fraud. He has been lying about many things for more than a decade to boost his stock. He has more in common with Trevor Milton than anyone else.
These people are almost unimaginably wealthy to the point where they're effectively unchallenged if they're not directly challenging the state (and even then they win quite a few rounds). "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
A bit of both. You became more attuned to what really does and does not make sense and they rotted a bit further. But 10 years ago it was pretty visible for both Musk and Andreessen.
Money can buy greater latitude with mistakes. Mistakes that would have been career ending for low level employee, is an amusing anecdote to be remembered at a gathering or in a book.
There are definitely some idiots with more money than sense, but reality tended to correct that fast. Now, it seems, they get rescued ( vide not that old case of Summers running to safe VC bank ).
A decade ago wasn't Musk talking about Hyperloop? He sounded like an idiot to many people then, too. His companies were good at the time but once he talked about anything else I feel like it was pretty clear who he was.
I don't think this is new though, Henry Ford was famously into anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and even owned a newspaper to spread hateful nonsense (history might not repeat itself but it apparently does rhyme). I'm sure if there was more recordings of robber barons of the past you would see the same dumb nonsense you see now.
The way I suspect they think is this. A pyramid is always going to be there, it is better we reinforce and consolidate our power at top with the friendlies below and make it sound like that is the best option for everyone.
When you reach a certain level of wealth and power, it seems like it’s very easy to surround yourself with people who only tell you how brilliant and successful you are.
This creates an echo chamber where you don’t get reality checks, and when you do they’re easy to brush off as some form of “sour grapes,” after all if the person telling you that you’re wrong was so great they’d have your level of wealth.
I think it takes a really extraordinary person to avoid this. As far as I can tell, most of the modern Silicon Valley titans are not extraordinary in this respect.
IMO they were always the way that they are now, they just didn't broadcast it in public.
Before social media started running society off the rails people like this would generally hold back their controversial opinions to avoid alienating a chunk of the public.
Now they realize they can say whatever they want and the 40% of people that glaze them for it are worth more to their ego than the downside of alienating everyone else.
There's the whole "billionaire bubble" thing, where they get surrounded by folks who have an economic interest in keeping the billionaire happy... but I'd posit there's another big change -- tech billionaires didn't used to have any cultural or political juice. This meant that even if they had some weird / bad takes, they kept them quiet.
Media consolidation has really helped weird billionaires move the Overton window, so that their weird/bad takes become "acceptable", and then they start admitting them publicly.
People are just finally able to see how dumb they are
I’ve seen this in action and in person multiple times and it’s absolutely fucking horrifying watching how ignorant, useless and totally out of touch with reality the Rich are , yet still can crush people via the police state whenever they want
It's both. Back then[0], the ultra-wealthy had whole teams of PR managers - people devoted to doing the verbal equivalent of making sure they were lit with perfect 5500K portrait lighting at every angle. In other words, DLSS 5 but for personality. In order to sustain that kind of shitty magic trick, the PR team needs to completely control everything they say. This is a lot of effort.
The moment the ultra wealthy slip up - that they reveal that they're a normal shitty person with a severe case of affluenza - the illusion shatters. And social media has made it both very easy and addictive for rich people to indulge in their worst vices. So now instead of fundamentally soulless people engaging in virtue signalling to pretend to be human, you have fundamentally soulless people engaging in vice signalling, because suddenly these p-zombies been given access to a machine that finds them fellow p-zombies to validate themselves with.
Furthermore, once you see this happen a few times, your mental default changes. Now you assume every wealthy person is an asshole until proven otherwise. Even if Elon Musk might be saying something poignant about space travel or AI safety, you've seen enough Cybertrucks and "X Æ A-12"s and "autistic" Nazi salutes to know that he's a moron. You, personally, were ignoring the latter to focus on the former, because you were probably smarter than him. But he's shoved the latter in your face to the point where it's undeniable.
> Did I grow up and they changed to a younger audience and what I used to enjoy was just a different kind of stupid?
No, you're thinking of MAD Magazine. Notably, it's still possible for an emotionally mature adult to still enjoy that kind of humor. But emotionally mature adults tend to not enjoy manchildren.
[0] 10 years ago was 2016, which is probably not as far back as you were thinking.
I think introspection can sometimes turn into rumination: obsessively remembering and reliving past mistakes. It is the latter that is harmful to people, but particularly founders.
This is especially true if you believe your mistakes are due to an internal flaw, because then you can't even learn from them. If you believe you are too damaged to be a good leader, then you will never lead.
I confess that I'm pretty good at letting go of my own mistakes. I can somehow learn from them without blaming myself for making them. That means I'm able to make a lot of mistakes without taking emotional damage. And that lets me try new things without fear.
Does that mean I'm less introspective than the average person? I don't think so, but I don't know.
This whole scenario is just the logical conclusion of American anti-intellectualism. The need for intellectuals doesn't really go away, but rather we start assuming that "good at making money" = "has ideas worth listening to, on any topic." Not really surprising that many of these people are also frequent critics of academia and professors.
Shoe Button Complex as coined by Buffet and Munger. I see this all the time from even mildly successful people. Suddenly the Early Bitcoin Adopter is now a Macro Economist and a Relationship Guru.
Also a product of the US stock market going up and to the right for the last couple of decades. It's very easy to convince yourself that you are some great perceptor of the world because you've been getting 30% CAGR on your portfolio for the last few many years.
But in hindsight it was always more likely to be green than red, and you could handily beat the market average if you had any kind of tech tilt at all, which many of these people naturally did. This applies to private equity too. I think a lot of mediocre tech VCs ended up with green books because the tide was just rising so fast; if you invested in any Stanford/Berkeley/MIT person who walked through your doors, it was impossible to end up in the red.
I'm not talking about fawning, I'm talking about taking the "intellectual" thoughts of rich people as seriously as academics/intellectuals. The notion of taking John Rockefeller's ideas on metaphysics seriously would have been seen as strange by his contemporaries.
What's kind of unique about the US is the way poor or middle-class people idolize the rich. As the saying goes, everyone feels like a temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
My parents told me story about their trip to the US. They went on a boat tour in Miami and when the boat passed the homes of some rich people, the tour guide proudly announced the price of each building. The US tourists on the bus applauded! My parents were shocked.
What does this uneducated greedy clown know about anything? He just happened to be born in 1955 US in a time of money.
Meditation was around way before Freud in eastern cultures. For once. Other cultures around the world had similar things about introspection. Just because his greedy ass doesn't want to face his own demons, he frames it as we don't need it
I'm curious how Andreessen came to this motto. Introspection is just a feedback loop, where you evaluate your actions, and adjust for when going forward. Not too unlike a control loop.
Maybe the current AI landscape is a symptom of that mentality - that everyone should just pour as much money and resources into it, never look back, never measure, just keep pushing forward. If you start asking questions, you're in doubt. If you're in doubt, you're a roadblock for progression.
“It tires me to talk to rich men. You expect a man of millions, the head of a great industry, to be a man worth hearing; but as a rule they don't know anything outside their own business.”
Often I'm not even entirely convinced they know a lot about their own business either. It seems like the ones who make the cartoonishly large amounts of money are the ones who got lucky to hire decent people early on.
And the people that fawn all over every single word they say think they'll eventually have the same money as well. But in the end they'll just be dumber.
I have a personal belief that this is a result of the "can-do" attitude that pervades not only American society currently; but virtually all of American history.
A small group of colonies managed to win a war against what was considered at one point the globe's strongest empire. Throughout the history-narrative of America there is a prevailing sense that the underdog can always overcome their circumstances and win the day. That most Americans (myself included) have a semi-deluded sense they "can achieve anything they put their minds to" is a direct manifestation of that narrative-history. It's also why there is so much rampant anti-intellectualism here; think about it, if you can do and are capable of anything - why would you *ever* listen to an expert's opinion? It's also why libertarian-ism is so popular; why would you want the rest of society dragging you down when you yourself are capable of so much more?
I want to be clear as well, there *are* benefits to the can-do attitude, but at this point the cons outweigh the pros, and we are seeing that play out in American society. I'd also like to acknowledge that the current situation is the result of many different factors; but that this one is largely overlooked due to the assumption that it's positives outweigh it's negatives.
Well, yes and no. A can do attitude is needed to imagine taking over fighting a global British empire. All around the world people needed to muster up that courage. That said, equating the outcome of that with smartness was bound to happen. That said, they leadership got co-opted by money outcomes is where the downfall happened, IMO
I think there's something to this. And while America has always had this can-do attitude (just look at the number of self help books), it does seem to be in another gear recently. I don't know what caused it, but I think there have been a number of indicators: Trump ignoring Congress and introducing wild tariffs, Musk firing half of Twitter's staff and then later repeating this with DOGE, the quick roll-out of LLMs. There seems to be this prevailing attitude of "we can just do stuff, damn the consequences".
It appears to come with a lot of corruption and anti-intellectualism. Like you say there are also benefits to this. I think the break through of mRNA vaccines was an early indicator. I just hope we can steer this attitude back to a more optimistic world-view instead of the blatant self serving one that is currently prevailing.
> Host David Senra, apparently delighted, congratulated Andreessen on developing what he called a "zero-introspection mindset."
It's easy to have a zero-introspection mindset if the consequences of having zero introspection are absorbed by the many zeroes on Andreessen's bank account.
Of course he is. In fact in that same podcast Andreessen makes a point using historical evidence and what is history but collective introspection?
I do agree that too much introspection can be negative and that it's hard or even impossible to understand your decisions and motives until some time has passed.
I’m convinced that he meant rumination, not introspection. There’s simply no way to be “high agency” without some level of introspection. Rumination is essentially a kind of excessive introspection that leads to paralysis.
There's a balance to be had between introspection and taking action. People tend to have a bias for one or the other (action bias vs thinking bias.)
Those who act would do well to think a bit more, and those who think a lot need help taking action.
I recently launched an app that can help in either case (Wiseday on the app store.)
It lets you print a daily page that can both be used to introspect, as well as an execution aid to help you actually take consistent action towards your goals.
Andreessen is a virus ("Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Marc Andreessen") and has a virus' motivations: grow without thinking -- maybe the host dies, maybe it doesn't, but just grow.
For me too much deep introspection does lead to depression. I am fully capable of diving into my navel, and it turns out to be a deep dark pit. Doing anything productive, or even just fun, is a cure for me. I often read the news, feel miserable about the state of the world, and then go outside and do yardwork, get my body in motion, and very soon feel much better about the world and my place in it. For me introspection isn't bad in itself, but binging on it is, as with food.
Introspection is not doomscrolling though. Being tugged around by short-lived stimuli from a feed is the opposite of deep self-reflection.
In order to go from reading the news to going outside and doing yardwork, you need to have a thought along the lines of "this doesn't feel good - I should do something else". That is introspection.
I think this conclusion in itself is more introspection than reading the news. After all most news events are external and whether you read about them or not doesn't make any difference. Its really more the opposite of introspection.
How does Marc Andreessen know that he has no introspection if the doesn't have introspection to evaluate whether he has introspection? How can he discuss his lack of introspection in a whole-ass interview about his lack of introspection if he lacks the introspection to evaluate his lack of introspection?
You're absolutely right! His sentence about not really needing introspection and the right approach being "Move forward. Go." should be read as the Zen koan it is and carefully introspected on. This is the secret of enlightenment. True enlightenment is no-mind: it's not just zero introspection, it's zero of every dualistic craving. Pure action, without anyone being "there" to act: it's about walking the path, not just sitting and reflecting on it.
Certainly not the earliest example and can be interpreted in many ways but one of my favorite ancient examples of “introspection” is the phrase “Know Thyself” inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.
This blog post and all the comments in response feel very tautological. I think Marc has a fairly simple point here, which is don't spend time dwelling on the past. Learn from the past, take away information about how things can be improved, but then make a plan (for whatever it is that you are building/doing) and move forward with that plan.
In the podcast, he basically lays out that the A16Z thesis is that there is not enough technology, information, and intelligence in the world, so they are going out and investing in companies/ideas that can make an impact in these areas. That requires learning from the past, but not dwelling on it. Seems like a very sensible and positive approach to me.
Introspection is the conscious examination of one’s own mental, emotional, and cognitive processes to improve self-awareness. I think Marc's critique here is a lot of what can be learned about past mistakes is outside of an individual's own failings.
I was recently reading a post about how the Claude Code leak and Boris Cherny had the following to say..
"Mistakes happen. As a team, the important thing is to recognize it’s never an individuals’s fault — it’s the process, the culture, or the infra.
In this case, there was a manual deploy step that should have been better automated. Our team has made a few improvements to the automation for next time, a couple more on the way."
When complex systems fail often there is more than one thing that went wrong. Uncovering what those things are is important, so that you can address them and prevent them from happening again. Once fixed, it is on to the next task and no need to dwell on the past.
Weak article. It never really tries to reconstruct what Andreessen meant, just takes a narrow quote, reads it in the least charitable way, and then spends most of its energy tearing down that version with loaded rhetoric.
The comments only reinforce that impression: most are some variation of “rich guy, therefore idiot.” This is more pile-on than discussion.
Which makes me curious about what Marc actually meant. The quote itself raises eyebrows.
EDIT:
From checking in with Claude about his talk.
> So the thing he was arguing against was specifically what he sees as a modern therapeutic culture — the expectation that people should examine their motives, feel guilty about their actions, and look backward. He wasn't framing it as a philosophical position so much as a practical one about founder effectiveness.
I have a theory that a large fraction of the population is not conscious. They go about their lives, they still work and think and have emotions in some form, but they don't actually experience. In other words, they're P-zombies. (Note: I do NOT support any actual action based on this idea. This certainly doesn't suggest that it would be morally acceptable to do anything to that group that wouldn't be acceptable to do to the rest.)
This is by analogy to mental imagery. For a long time, there was a debate over whether people actually saw mental imagery in some real sense, or whether it was just a way of describing more symbolic thought. These days the general consensus seems to be that it varies, where someone might see extremely lifelike images, or more vague images, or none at all.
Since it's all about internal experience, people had a hard time understanding that their experience wasn't necessarily the same as everyone else's. The same might be true of consciousness.
This started out as mostly a joke or a thought experiment, but more and more I'm thinking it might actually be true. Statements like Andreessen's really push me in that direction. It's such a baffling statement... unless Andreessen is a P-zombie, then it makes perfect sense. And if he is, he probably thinks this whole consciousness idea is just a weird analogy for perception, and thinks we're a bunch of weirdos for acting like his statement isn't something obvious.
>The only access anyone has to those questions is through something like introspection: either their own, or someone else’s honest reports of their experience, or the accumulated testimony of literature and philosophy...
I'm broadly sympathetic to the point in this article but it's trying to slip in literature and philosophy with honest first hand reports of introspection is underhanded. There's no reason to expect them to be any less guilty of motivated reasoning than Marc Andreesen
I think Andreessen's comments were borne of hyperbole and as a (deliberate) overcorrection against certain Bay Area rationalist types whose 10,000 word navel gazing screeds border on schizoidal personality disorder.
I have watched these people expend literally years getting into hypothetical arguments with strawmen they believe are active participants in their community when, at best, they are occasional lurkers, and will erect entire superstructures of theory and belief that make utterly no sense to those outside of their rationalist cult.
Lesswrong and motteizen type users fall squarely into this category, who also tend to cleave towards the pro-AI side of the spectrum now that, as with the rest of their lives, they are able to delegate the production of logorrhea at scale to the machine.
These people are mentally unwell, and reading their proclamations is not too dissimilar to browsing a deep web trans community discussing esoteric gender theory, or even merely the slashdot comment section in 2016 - just with an extra ten paragraphs of fluff and vapidity as if they had been fed on a steady diet of the New Yorker; none of which has any correlation whatsoever to material sensate reality. No wonder there is such reverence for the hyperreality of LLM literary hallucination in these circles...
Personally I cleave to the extremes of the hyperintrospective portion of the spectrum, so no, I think taken at face value his comments are absurd.
Nonetheless you need to understand the dark and less visited corners of the mental landscape whence these ideas and his (putative) target audiences were borne (Bay Area rationalism), and the strategic nature of this communication which is more intended to send a message to certain sects rather than reveal anything genuine about himself or others.
At these echelons communication takes on a different character. You must understand if you speak at this level.
>But he has since been wrong about a great many things.
Basically summarizes any billionaire. Society still seems to drink the kool-aid of billionaires. People think a guy has a billion dollars because he’s a genius. In all cases it was some small amount of intelligence with a whole lot of luck.
My hope is in the decades to come we wake up to the fact these guys are lucky wealth-hoarders and they get too much time on every podcast you can think of.
Counterpoint -- Yes he's wrong and obviously so. But is some rich dude saying something stupid worthy of platforming?
It almost feels to me like acting as though a famous person being gasp wrong about something is implicitly suggesting that this is somehow surprising?
We should be surprised and write essays when the smartest people we know say something silly. Just because somebody's bank account has some zeroes in it doesn't mean it should be worthy of our focus.
These people have profoundly inflated egos, platforming them if only for the express purpose of mocking them mercilessly in front of the entire world is absolutely worth it.
These people are insanely powerful forces in the modern world. Of course we should talk about them (and usually how
Wrong, shortsighted, and self-serving they are).
Marc Andreessen has been too wealthy for too long, and has lost perspective.
Billionaires are modern day monarchs, divorced from the experience of hoi polloi. I don’t say this (in this present moment) out of simple complaint or sloganeering, though both are easily applied. The argument I’m making is that gaining and/or living with sufficiently ludicrous wealth—orders of magnitude beyond what most of us plebs would retire on—leads _inextricably_ to living a life that is so utterly different that people lose completely the understanding of what the majority of the population actually does with their days. It almost doesn’t matter if the person who gains this level of wealth was “good” or “bad” or whatever qualifier you want to apply.
This isn’t a new or a fresh take. It’s a tale as old as…well, I’m comparing to monarchy. But it bears restating, because the folks that are empowered to make sweeping changes to the systems that we all live under cannot actually relate to what most of those changes feel like. This is less of an individual moral failing than a structural one—though when the structure is being driven by the selfsame individuals, I guess there’s plenty of blame to go around.
It isn’t so surprising that someone raised with generational wealth would have such blinders—and in fact I find that fairly forgivable on the individual basis, though damning of the system that allows that to happen while there’s still people unhoused and unfed.
Perhaps more surprising (and maybe serving as a warning to the rest of us) is that it’s visibly possible to have and to then lose that perspective and ability to relate. This is most visible with folks whose public work precedes their extreme wealth. Jerry Seinfeld still writes comedy—but it doesn’t hit like his earlier works, since there isn’t a shared reality. Our own Paul Graham’s earlier essays have aged, but a fair number of them still ring true; his more recent works barely make a blip here, and with reason.
Marc Andreessen might be right for himself. Or he might be dead wrong. But his advice and writings are effectively useless to the rest of us either way. There’s no shared “there” there.
The problem with certain intellectual pursuits is that it becomes its own little sub culture with its own little sub culture celebrities.
You see, High School never ended. Things can still get lame in the “real world”. The “geeks” need to shut up and go back to the geek table and be more humble. The whole lot of us have demonstrated limited ability on how to be decent.
To quote Rick James:
”They should have never given you developers money. Fuck your Ping Pong table, fuck. Your. Ping. Pong. Table!”
The problem is with the media pouring endless attention on these tech bros and bestowing the mantel of expertise in every field on them - philosophy, politics, religion, sociology.
So now they spout their mouth off and the media hangs on their every word and debates it.
Marc Andreessen is wrong about many things that may be worth arguing against, but not here: this was completely idiotic take that doesn't deserve anything but contempt.
And it's not like you could convinced his followers that this take is wrong, anyone gullible enough to take such an insane take at face value is very unlikely to read your rebuttal.
> But he has since been wrong about a great many things.
This is true for almost all of the tech bros / influencers / CEOs. Being right once and getting rich does not make them smarter or better than anyone. Unfortunately our society doesn‘t view it that way - hence here we are, stuck with the Elons and Thiels of the world. And it‘s hurting us yet they’re on a pedestal
This notion that CEOs are geniuses is just patently false. They are average, and mostly distinguish themselves only in their arrogance and avarice. I would bet the IQ of the average HN reader to be higher than the average C-Suite exec.
He’s right in that business success is largely correlated with sociopathy, it helps you focus on the goal of maximizing your own wealth without worrying about the messy details of how other human beings are affected.
Going back four hundred years, it would have never occurred to anyone that humans shouldn’t be slaves or that the environment will be irrecoverably destroyed if everyone pillages it for their own business needs.
"A fragment of Solon’s poetry describes a situation in which many of the poor “have arrived in foreign lands/sold into slavery, bound in shameful fetters.”"
"In 594 BC, Solon was appointed archon of Athens. His solution to his city’s strife was to cancel both public and private debts and end debt slavery."
> or that the environment will be irrecoverably destroyed if everyone pillages it for their own business needs
Pliny the Elder: "We taint the rivers and the elements of nature, and the air itself, which is the main support of life, we turn into a medium for the destruction of life."
(The same is true for introspection. It's certainly not a modern invention. Andreessen asserts it's an 1800s/1900s invention, but Shakespeare's fucking famous for "to be or not to be, that is the question"!)
> Going back four hundred years, it would have never occurred to anyone that humans shouldn’t be slaves or that the environment will be irrecoverably destroyed if everyone pillages it for their own business needs.
Thats catagorically wrong on both levels.
Common land was regulated and had a ton of bylaws to make sure that people didn't take the piss. There was lots of work done to improve the soil, (leaving fallow, crop rotation, fertilising, etc etc)
As for anti-slavery, there was a whole multi century effort to fight against surfdom.
The Quakers and other more radical religious types condemned it as unchristian,
Well a lot of Eastern religions do talk about sustainability 1000s of years back. Just because it was never part of Abrahamic faiths and their offshoot cultures which took over the world, does not mean that humans did not think this way
I think that is too little credit to previous humans: people objecting to slavery were around four hundred and more years ago. Similarly, concerns about environmental destruction are also old.
What we're seeing is the culmination of these three ideas:
1. Prosperity theology [1]. This idea took hold in early Protestantism. Even if you're not religious, it's had an undeniable impact on the West (including the so-called "Protestant work ethic"). The idea is that you are essentially blsssed by God if you are rich. This was a huge departure from Catholic dogma. If Jesus was real and came back in Texas today he'd get hung at a Communist terrorist;
2. The myth of meritocracy. This is a core tenet of capitalism that the wealthy are that way because they deserve to be; and
#. In the US in particular, hyper-individualism. Specifically, the destruction of any kinf of collectivism. This shields people from the impacts of their actions and any kind of accountability.
People who find success tend to get high on their own supply and they have no one around them to correct their behavior. Instead they have a cadre of slavishly sycophantic yes men.
There's a common refrain that it takes three generations to go from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves. The vast majority of fortunes are lost, or at least significantly reduced, within 3 generations because the later generations get surrounded by the same yes men and have no idea what it takes to maintain let alone make a fortune. There's really no hope for any form of introspection, accountability or growth.
I'm old enough to remember the Netscape saga. I remember feeling kind of sorry for Marc Andressen who got kinda screwed by the whole netscape deal. By "screwed" I mean he ended up with ~$50M (IIRC) on a deal worth billions. I also remember how the other tech titans of the era were at least ostensibly anti-establishment rebels. "Tech hippies" in a way.
I really wonder what those people would think of the likes of Andressen, Musk, Bezos, Ballmer, Gates, Thiel, etc. All those are objectively awful people who kowtow to the American administration and have essentially just become military contractors who uphold awful ideas like "transhumanism" (which is just eugenics).
But is he wrong? Our company culture rewards psychopaths and sociopaths because they have no conscience. In a way, there's no accountability without a conscience. So it might be a successful strategy in business but it is objectively making the world a worse place. And that ultimately ends with heads on spikes.
"Look around at all these things I have - how could I be wrong when I have so much?"
And that's how you get the Andreessen's and Musk's of the world stating these nonsensical things as truth. In their minds, financial success is the ultimate yardstick. The fact that they have so much wealth is a testament that their way of thinking is always right.
You don't need to look very hard to see this is what they really believe. Elon has done extremely silly things like claiming he was the best Path of Exile player in the world because he paid several people grind his account to a high-level. Having enough money to pay someone to play the game for you, is the same as being good at the game, in his mind.
It's very obvious to gamers when someone hasn't played, it actually doesn't matter whether you have high level gear.
There's things you can't buy with money, and respect is one of them. He fundamentally doesn't understand how status works. He could, for free, just put out a video where he says "look at me, I'm a busy CEO, but I play this game even though I'm bad at it".
People would think positively about that.
In a loopy recursive way, it is. Cost gates what we can do and become. Paying back your costs to extend your runway is the working principle behind biology, economy and technology. I am not saying rich people are always right, just that cost is not so irrelevant to everything else. I personally think cost satisfaction explains multiple levels, from biology up.
Related to introspection - it certainly has a cost for doing it, and a cost for not doing it. Going happy go lucky is not necessarily optimal, experience was expensive to gain, not using it at all is a big loss. Being paralyzed by rumination is also not optimal, we have to act in time, we can't delay and if we do, it comes out differently.
If you look at the entire entirety of understood history of biology:
The most ruthless always wins
That is to say if I go into a village and kill all the adults and teenagers and steal all the kids who are scared to be killed by me, then I will win in the probably two successive generations that I’ve been able to successfully brainwashing into thinking I’m some kind of God.
That is until somebody kills me and then takes over the structure. For example there are no dictatorships that last past the third generation
That is literally and unambiguously how all life operates
There are intermediary cooperation periods. But if you look at the aggregate time periods including how galaxies form it’s all straight up brute force consumption
No one would think that was a reasonable position.
No one would argue, "Well, food DOES have draw backs. What if you eat too much of it!"
We all inherently understand that you have to eat food, and while being careful not to eat too much.
We would understand that if anyone said, "Look at all these successful people who also didn't eat food!" that they were talking absolute shite.
No one would treat the statement "I don't eat food" as anything other than deeply fucking weird.
Better to just not think about it.
One of many, many, many stupid things he's said.
It turns out that when you actually allow yourself to feel those things, it gives your nervous system the ability to metabolize and process them.
The smaller version of same phenomena I see in enterprises where musings of non/barely technical leadership of a tech org is not only considered as go-to strategy but also why previous plans and implementations which were so obviously crappy not totally replaced yet.
The people that feel the need to be loud and in the public eye aren't necessarily playing 4d chess. It's really just an ego thing for them.
The wealthy who keep a low-profile are the smarter one's.
Many in these positions get there by being really good/smart/lucky at something once and then having a war chest of capital to deploy for life.
It doesn't mean they are a polymath genius with unique worthwhile insights into all facets of the human experience. In fact, it may almost be the opposite. The hyper focus and hustle required to attain what they do often requires withdrawing from the wider world, not being particularly well read, and living in a socioeconomic/political/work bubble.
While there are exceptions with people who were lucky and were at the right spot at the right time, there is a different distribution of character traits compared to society at large.
edit: I don't mean just to shoot you down here--I think there's a counterargument to be made here. It might start with "those folks really are the same as us, responding and acting as we ourselves would when dropped into that environment and surroundings". That would hinge on observing the actions and behaviors of someone who, having lived a life as a billionaire, has lost or forsworn that level of fortune and whose lives we might now judge as in the range of "normal". I think that'll be hard to find; the wealthy making public pledges to give away 99% of their wealth are still ludicrously wealthy, and to my knowledge all make that commitment to do so around when they die--not before.
1. In 1926, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that the rich “are different from you and me,” and Ernest Hemingway supposedly retorted, “Yes, they have more money.”
2. Kurt Vonnegut's obituary for Joseph Heller...
True story, Word of Honor: Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer now dead, and I were at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island. I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel ‘Catch-22’ has earned in its entire history?” And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.” And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?” And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.” Not bad! Rest in peace!”
Or, as Cyndi Lauper sang it, 'Money Changes Everything'
I'm of the latter persuasion, that wealth influences one's personality in important ways.
The ultra wealthy are very different from anyone else. First of all, their games is about power, everyone else's is survival and making the rent. Second they have armies of ass kissers. Third, they have no job and can even own politicians. And of course their wealth isolates them from repercursions anyone else would face, and puts their experience way out of phase with the regular people.
And we should also account for the sociopathic drive that made them rich in the first place (sociopaths are overrepresented in higher status positions).
Because rich people have both the power and motivation to define it in a manner in which they still win. Wealth can be education. Wealth can be contacts. Wealth can be properties. Wealth can be businesses. Wealth can be in other countries.
If a poor person had the same view, would anything different happen? I suppose nobody would pay attention.
People having nutty views is a fact of life. Its not related to wealth. It happens among all classes.
He's free to choose what to believe. He's not "insulated from his negative world view". If you're correct and introspection is to his benefit and he chooses to forgo it, it's his loss.
So I don't know what you're upset about.
I think his broader point is that people are too introspective in modern times and its paralyzing. For instance, I remember reading a blog that argues that argues PTSD doesn't exist historically. People saw terrible things, buried their children and suffered unimaginable pain but there were no concept of PTSD. He argues that its not because it was taboo (virtually every other topic that was taboo was extensively documented), so perhaps there was less introspection.
https://acoup.blog/2020/04/24/fireside-friday-april-24-2020/
Musk slanders a cave diver trying to rescue trapped children as a paedo? No problem! The courts said it's fine. It's just a joke bro, you should be laughing.
Andreeson frontruns pump and dump shitcoins on retail investors via coinbase et al? Don't worry about it! Conning and scamming is fine now. The dog either eats or gets eaten.
We are far too kind to people being visibily obnoxious people because they are rich.
He is wrong about almost everything, and especially about introspection.
But he got lucky and wrote a good-enough-for-the-time browser at just the right time.
Now, he mistakes his luck and his F_U_Money for skill and intelligence. And why wouldn't he? He can simply walk away from any situation that makes it seem he is wrong.
And the broader problem in society is nearly the entire populace has been conditioned to ignore the factors of luck and mistake monetary success with hard work and wisdom, when in fact those people are often no more than massively amplified fools.
The massive follies of most these current robber barons makes the case for taxing them out of existence. Once someone has enough money that they and their family cannot spend it in multiple lifetimes of excessive luxury, the only reason to have more is power. We should ramp up tax rates so those people cannot accumulate that power.
Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. A society that fails to manage that fact of human nature dooms itself.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/05/19/trump-solo
Then and now, having a platform isn't the same as having an effective and popular platform for force indoctrination...
Technology truly can be used by the dispossessed in order to reclaim power from the billionaire psychopath class
But it requires those of us who know how to wield technology to stop looking to rich people to fund us, and start organizing from the ground up in order to take them down
Step one is that all of us blue collar technologists need to get organized
I’ve tried it and failed, but maybe now is the time
If you need to work to collect a wage to pay your expenses, you are still labor, sorry if that hurts peoples feelings, but it shouldn't.
What category would you place the following 99% of human people:
You you will lose your ability to eat and have housing if you do not show up to a place (even if it’s at your rented apartment) and spend hours doing on what someone else wants you to do
For the majority of working people in the world they never had any type of retirement like this and for anybody who did it was a very temporary period in western society.
So while it might’ve been true in the past that the body was the first thing to break, now it’s just “can you maintain your own financial status in the future given your previous work history.”
Everybody at this point understands that there is no possible job you could as an 18-year-old in 2026 that you will be able to retire from and live comfortably in your twilight years from 65-80 with the earnings and “investments” made in the preceding 50 years of work.
Beyond that if I look around at least the “western” world there are very few of those jobs left that totally destroy your body - military, mining, construction etc… still have a lot of that (My body is ruined from 17 years of military) but it’s a shrinking group
For example most of agriculture is being done mechanically compared to 100 years ago, similarly for manufacturing lines humans are a minority in a manufacturing line at this point
I remember back in the 1990s it would take a work party of three families to cut and bail hay in Texas. I was on one of those crews for at least a couple years as a kid. Literally nobody does that anymore it’s all mechanical bailers and silege wrapping machines
So that Apple and Google can discriminate against us as a bloc, instead of individually?
As a programmer I struggle to see how organization would achieve anything. We hold no cards, it's the platform holders who won.
Labor is entitled to all it creates.
Google and Microsoft employees already tolerate terrible software and immoral contract deals. It's not like you can count on them growing a conscience over working for an evil company.
but hey maybe I’m totally wrong
and the number of synchophants and boot lickers who work in tech is going up
there was a before the nlrb and there were unions then. would you expect union organizers for a tech workers union to be assassinated? would you expect members of a tech workers union to be gunned down en masse? if no, then the political landscape has been so much worse than now, and unions have managed to form.
If you believe you are incapable of actually doing anything then you are correct, and you should just go ahead and submit yourself to whatever power structure you think will benefit you the most
This leads me to believe that the power structures can't be fixed. There is no amount of protesting that can coerce private capital to take humanity's best interests to heart, that's the tragedy of the commons. There is no guerilla warfare you can wage on a totalitarian platform like iOS or Windows; you simply lose in the end, because you are malware and the OEM is always right.
Movements like GNU/FOSS win because they don't even acknowledge the existence of corporate technology. They don't "fight" against anyone or make multi-billion dollar nemeses because it is a waste of volunteer hours that could go towards building something wonderful.
i advise against being so sure of your ideas. maybe you think platform holders have all the cards--test it. if they fight efforts to unionize, that tells a different story.
> if they fight efforts to unionize, that tells a different story.
You are describing an industry that has outsourced intelligent labor to India and Pakistan for more than 25 years. The efforts to unionize would be like trying to save America's auto industry in 2004.
However, theories of political and social power argue the exact opposite: the power of any ruling class or corporation is actually quite fragile because it depends entirely on the cooperation, obedience, and skills of its subordinates. If highly skilled individuals like blue-collar technologists and programmers collectively withdraw our human resources, skills, and knowledge, we can severely disrupt or paralyze the systems that enrich the platform holders.
0. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire
Like 10 years ago, I felt like Andreesen and Elon were thought leaders. Now they sound like idiots.
Did I or did they change?
Did I grow up and they changed to a younger audience and what I used to enjoy was just a different kind of stupid?
Being rich != being famous. There are tons of extremely wealthy people out there that keep a very low profile. Sure they might be well known within their circle but ask the average person and they have no clue who that person is. I would say this is the case for like 90-95% of billionaires.
Musk, Andreessen, Zuck and others were all in this camp 10 years ago but they all decided that simply being rich wasn't enough, they wanted to be famous. These folks have all the resources and connections to become famous so they can get on all the podcasts, write op-eds, and are guaranteed to get the best reach on social media and thus the most eyeballs on their content and the most attention paid to them.
But when you go from making a few media appearances a year to constantly making media appearances in one way or another is that you need more "content" so to speak. Just like a comedian needs more content if they are going to do a 1hr special versus a 10min set at a comedy club.
The problem for all these guys is they have a few genuinely insightful ideas mixed in with a ton of cooky and out of touch ideas. Before they could safely stick to the genuinely insightful ideas but as they've made more and more appearances, they have to reach for some of those other ideas. They don't realize that their cooky ideas sound very different than their few insightful ideas. They think all their ideas are insightful based on the feedback they have been getting for the past decade or so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class:_A_Guide_Through_the_Ame...
Their thinking didn’t change.
Sort of an oppositional defiant thing, filtered through immense wealth and power
Wealth is not the only way this can happen, you see it with notoriety and power who have gotten used to " being right" (Dawkins comes to mind), and now this experience is being "democratised" by LLMs.
"I've known you for all of 10 seconds and enjoyed not a single one of them" followed by blocking is good, actually. That doesn't make you any more correct or wrong, of course.
Also: Back in the days™ statements where edited by marketing people and others before publication. Now people blast out stuff on their own via "social media"
I’d say both.
They ran out of novel things to say which is expected of anyone because there’s only so many non trivial things one could say. But then unlike normal people they didn’t stop talking because being rich they are bored and they want to be in the limelight all the time. So they end up talking nonsense.
You also changed, you are now wiser and have developed BS detector.
Why do they always feel like they need to pull stuff out of their butts to make themselves sound like they know what is going on? In some ways I think it's related to the stock market "just meet the next quarterly goal" kind of thinking. Who cares if you don't come up with something pithy to say for a few years. Have big impacts over time instead of tons of little ups and downs all the time.
Massive, unconstrained egos? They think they're hot shit, because they surround themselves with yes men.
I'm reminded of this:
> Beneath the grand narrative Musk tells, when he takes things over, what does he actually have the people under him do? What is the theory of action?
> He has people around him who are just enablers. All these Silicon Valley people do. All his minions. And they are minions — they’re all lesser than he is in some fashion, and they all look up to him. They’re typically younger. They laugh at his jokes. Sometimes when he apologizes for a joke, which is not very often, he’ll say that the people around him thought it was funny.
> When he was being interviewed at Code Conference once, he had a couple of them there. He told a really bad joke, and they all went like: Ha-ha-ha-ha. And I was like: That’s not funny — I’m sorry, did I miss the joke? And they looked at me like I had three heads. (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...)
But the simple fact is, nobody's a genius in all areas. We all have our areas of expertise, but none of us can be trusted to speak wisely about all things all the time.
At the same time, as others have said, your BS detector has matured.
This doesn't just apply to the wealthy, but more lowly people too: see "Engineer's disease."
People like Musk and Adreessen are getting hit by a double-whammy: they're software engineers (the stupidest and most arrogant class of engineers) AND they're massively wealthy.
Given the massive string of lies he spun about "full self driving" over the last decade or more, I don't think so.
I tend to have a negative view of celebrities who did cameos for the Simpsons far past its peak lol
You grew up.
There are definitely some idiots with more money than sense, but reality tended to correct that fast. Now, it seems, they get rescued ( vide not that old case of Summers running to safe VC bank ).
I don't think this is new though, Henry Ford was famously into anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and even owned a newspaper to spread hateful nonsense (history might not repeat itself but it apparently does rhyme). I'm sure if there was more recordings of robber barons of the past you would see the same dumb nonsense you see now.
It’s amazing how often becoming rich makes one into a libertarian :)
This creates an echo chamber where you don’t get reality checks, and when you do they’re easy to brush off as some form of “sour grapes,” after all if the person telling you that you’re wrong was so great they’d have your level of wealth.
I think it takes a really extraordinary person to avoid this. As far as I can tell, most of the modern Silicon Valley titans are not extraordinary in this respect.
Before social media started running society off the rails people like this would generally hold back their controversial opinions to avoid alienating a chunk of the public.
Now they realize they can say whatever they want and the 40% of people that glaze them for it are worth more to their ego than the downside of alienating everyone else.
Media consolidation has really helped weird billionaires move the Overton window, so that their weird/bad takes become "acceptable", and then they start admitting them publicly.
This won't have the effect they hope for. It'll just expose them as the frauds they are.
Also, power corrupts. That's a tale as old as time, I have found no evidence that somehow tech-bros are immune to it.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/512029.Richistan
People are just finally able to see how dumb they are
I’ve seen this in action and in person multiple times and it’s absolutely fucking horrifying watching how ignorant, useless and totally out of touch with reality the Rich are , yet still can crush people via the police state whenever they want
Chris Hedges did a good video on this recently: https://youtu.be/EJ-OSJ7J64w
The moment the ultra wealthy slip up - that they reveal that they're a normal shitty person with a severe case of affluenza - the illusion shatters. And social media has made it both very easy and addictive for rich people to indulge in their worst vices. So now instead of fundamentally soulless people engaging in virtue signalling to pretend to be human, you have fundamentally soulless people engaging in vice signalling, because suddenly these p-zombies been given access to a machine that finds them fellow p-zombies to validate themselves with.
Furthermore, once you see this happen a few times, your mental default changes. Now you assume every wealthy person is an asshole until proven otherwise. Even if Elon Musk might be saying something poignant about space travel or AI safety, you've seen enough Cybertrucks and "X Æ A-12"s and "autistic" Nazi salutes to know that he's a moron. You, personally, were ignoring the latter to focus on the former, because you were probably smarter than him. But he's shoved the latter in your face to the point where it's undeniable.
> Did I grow up and they changed to a younger audience and what I used to enjoy was just a different kind of stupid?
No, you're thinking of MAD Magazine. Notably, it's still possible for an emotionally mature adult to still enjoy that kind of humor. But emotionally mature adults tend to not enjoy manchildren.
[0] 10 years ago was 2016, which is probably not as far back as you were thinking.
This is especially true if you believe your mistakes are due to an internal flaw, because then you can't even learn from them. If you believe you are too damaged to be a good leader, then you will never lead.
I confess that I'm pretty good at letting go of my own mistakes. I can somehow learn from them without blaming myself for making them. That means I'm able to make a lot of mistakes without taking emotional damage. And that lets me try new things without fear.
Does that mean I'm less introspective than the average person? I don't think so, but I don't know.
Shoe Button Complex as coined by Buffet and Munger. I see this all the time from even mildly successful people. Suddenly the Early Bitcoin Adopter is now a Macro Economist and a Relationship Guru.
But in hindsight it was always more likely to be green than red, and you could handily beat the market average if you had any kind of tech tilt at all, which many of these people naturally did. This applies to private equity too. I think a lot of mediocre tech VCs ended up with green books because the tide was just rising so fast; if you invested in any Stanford/Berkeley/MIT person who walked through your doors, it was impossible to end up in the red.
Fawning over wealthy people has been happening for far, far longer than America has been around. This problem is by no means new at all.
My parents told me story about their trip to the US. They went on a boat tour in Miami and when the boat passed the homes of some rich people, the tour guide proudly announced the price of each building. The US tourists on the bus applauded! My parents were shocked.
Meditation was around way before Freud in eastern cultures. For once. Other cultures around the world had similar things about introspection. Just because his greedy ass doesn't want to face his own demons, he frames it as we don't need it
Maybe the current AI landscape is a symptom of that mentality - that everyone should just pour as much money and resources into it, never look back, never measure, just keep pushing forward. If you start asking questions, you're in doubt. If you're in doubt, you're a roadblock for progression.
- Teddy Roosevelt
but were they, as a whole, ever wise?
Redefining competence and intelligence as "ability to make money" has done untold damage to American society.
A small group of colonies managed to win a war against what was considered at one point the globe's strongest empire. Throughout the history-narrative of America there is a prevailing sense that the underdog can always overcome their circumstances and win the day. That most Americans (myself included) have a semi-deluded sense they "can achieve anything they put their minds to" is a direct manifestation of that narrative-history. It's also why there is so much rampant anti-intellectualism here; think about it, if you can do and are capable of anything - why would you *ever* listen to an expert's opinion? It's also why libertarian-ism is so popular; why would you want the rest of society dragging you down when you yourself are capable of so much more?
I want to be clear as well, there *are* benefits to the can-do attitude, but at this point the cons outweigh the pros, and we are seeing that play out in American society. I'd also like to acknowledge that the current situation is the result of many different factors; but that this one is largely overlooked due to the assumption that it's positives outweigh it's negatives.
It appears to come with a lot of corruption and anti-intellectualism. Like you say there are also benefits to this. I think the break through of mRNA vaccines was an early indicator. I just hope we can steer this attitude back to a more optimistic world-view instead of the blatant self serving one that is currently prevailing.
It's easy to have a zero-introspection mindset if the consequences of having zero introspection are absorbed by the many zeroes on Andreessen's bank account.
I do agree that too much introspection can be negative and that it's hard or even impossible to understand your decisions and motives until some time has passed.
Perhaps Mark is one of those people, and simply lacks the capability to effectively introspect, and he's trying to turn that into a flex.
Those who act would do well to think a bit more, and those who think a lot need help taking action.
I recently launched an app that can help in either case (Wiseday on the app store.)
It lets you print a daily page that can both be used to introspect, as well as an execution aid to help you actually take consistent action towards your goals.
In order to go from reading the news to going outside and doing yardwork, you need to have a thought along the lines of "this doesn't feel good - I should do something else". That is introspection.
This isn't introspection.
Without introspection you'd just dive into the pit.
Edit: the comment above said 'zero of everything', but it was edited.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_thyself
In the podcast, he basically lays out that the A16Z thesis is that there is not enough technology, information, and intelligence in the world, so they are going out and investing in companies/ideas that can make an impact in these areas. That requires learning from the past, but not dwelling on it. Seems like a very sensible and positive approach to me.
I was recently reading a post about how the Claude Code leak and Boris Cherny had the following to say..
"Mistakes happen. As a team, the important thing is to recognize it’s never an individuals’s fault — it’s the process, the culture, or the infra.
In this case, there was a manual deploy step that should have been better automated. Our team has made a few improvements to the automation for next time, a couple more on the way."
When complex systems fail often there is more than one thing that went wrong. Uncovering what those things are is important, so that you can address them and prevent them from happening again. Once fixed, it is on to the next task and no need to dwell on the past.
The comments only reinforce that impression: most are some variation of “rich guy, therefore idiot.” This is more pile-on than discussion.
EDIT: From checking in with Claude about his talk.
> So the thing he was arguing against was specifically what he sees as a modern therapeutic culture — the expectation that people should examine their motives, feel guilty about their actions, and look backward. He wasn't framing it as a philosophical position so much as a practical one about founder effectiveness.
https://claude.ai/share/9c5611f7-fd0e-4f76-bd39-e1129c035a4f
Actually, what about web browsers was he right about?
I have a theory that a large fraction of the population is not conscious. They go about their lives, they still work and think and have emotions in some form, but they don't actually experience. In other words, they're P-zombies. (Note: I do NOT support any actual action based on this idea. This certainly doesn't suggest that it would be morally acceptable to do anything to that group that wouldn't be acceptable to do to the rest.)
This is by analogy to mental imagery. For a long time, there was a debate over whether people actually saw mental imagery in some real sense, or whether it was just a way of describing more symbolic thought. These days the general consensus seems to be that it varies, where someone might see extremely lifelike images, or more vague images, or none at all.
Since it's all about internal experience, people had a hard time understanding that their experience wasn't necessarily the same as everyone else's. The same might be true of consciousness.
This started out as mostly a joke or a thought experiment, but more and more I'm thinking it might actually be true. Statements like Andreessen's really push me in that direction. It's such a baffling statement... unless Andreessen is a P-zombie, then it makes perfect sense. And if he is, he probably thinks this whole consciousness idea is just a weird analogy for perception, and thinks we're a bunch of weirdos for acting like his statement isn't something obvious.
I'm broadly sympathetic to the point in this article but it's trying to slip in literature and philosophy with honest first hand reports of introspection is underhanded. There's no reason to expect them to be any less guilty of motivated reasoning than Marc Andreesen
I have watched these people expend literally years getting into hypothetical arguments with strawmen they believe are active participants in their community when, at best, they are occasional lurkers, and will erect entire superstructures of theory and belief that make utterly no sense to those outside of their rationalist cult.
Lesswrong and motteizen type users fall squarely into this category, who also tend to cleave towards the pro-AI side of the spectrum now that, as with the rest of their lives, they are able to delegate the production of logorrhea at scale to the machine.
These people are mentally unwell, and reading their proclamations is not too dissimilar to browsing a deep web trans community discussing esoteric gender theory, or even merely the slashdot comment section in 2016 - just with an extra ten paragraphs of fluff and vapidity as if they had been fed on a steady diet of the New Yorker; none of which has any correlation whatsoever to material sensate reality. No wonder there is such reverence for the hyperreality of LLM literary hallucination in these circles...
Sent from my iPhone
Nonetheless you need to understand the dark and less visited corners of the mental landscape whence these ideas and his (putative) target audiences were borne (Bay Area rationalism), and the strategic nature of this communication which is more intended to send a message to certain sects rather than reveal anything genuine about himself or others.
At these echelons communication takes on a different character. You must understand if you speak at this level.
What's the endgame here?
>But he has since been wrong about a great many things.
Basically summarizes any billionaire. Society still seems to drink the kool-aid of billionaires. People think a guy has a billion dollars because he’s a genius. In all cases it was some small amount of intelligence with a whole lot of luck.
My hope is in the decades to come we wake up to the fact these guys are lucky wealth-hoarders and they get too much time on every podcast you can think of.
It almost feels to me like acting as though a famous person being gasp wrong about something is implicitly suggesting that this is somehow surprising?
We should be surprised and write essays when the smartest people we know say something silly. Just because somebody's bank account has some zeroes in it doesn't mean it should be worthy of our focus.
The rich dude saying the stupid thing was platformed. This is defense.
It's not like they don't have a right to an opinion, but it's usually outsized, aggrandized nonsense.
Rare Book + Ego + a few thoughts on a long walk = Insufferable Twitter Nonsense
Billionaires are modern day monarchs, divorced from the experience of hoi polloi. I don’t say this (in this present moment) out of simple complaint or sloganeering, though both are easily applied. The argument I’m making is that gaining and/or living with sufficiently ludicrous wealth—orders of magnitude beyond what most of us plebs would retire on—leads _inextricably_ to living a life that is so utterly different that people lose completely the understanding of what the majority of the population actually does with their days. It almost doesn’t matter if the person who gains this level of wealth was “good” or “bad” or whatever qualifier you want to apply.
This isn’t a new or a fresh take. It’s a tale as old as…well, I’m comparing to monarchy. But it bears restating, because the folks that are empowered to make sweeping changes to the systems that we all live under cannot actually relate to what most of those changes feel like. This is less of an individual moral failing than a structural one—though when the structure is being driven by the selfsame individuals, I guess there’s plenty of blame to go around.
It isn’t so surprising that someone raised with generational wealth would have such blinders—and in fact I find that fairly forgivable on the individual basis, though damning of the system that allows that to happen while there’s still people unhoused and unfed.
Perhaps more surprising (and maybe serving as a warning to the rest of us) is that it’s visibly possible to have and to then lose that perspective and ability to relate. This is most visible with folks whose public work precedes their extreme wealth. Jerry Seinfeld still writes comedy—but it doesn’t hit like his earlier works, since there isn’t a shared reality. Our own Paul Graham’s earlier essays have aged, but a fair number of them still ring true; his more recent works barely make a blip here, and with reason.
Marc Andreessen might be right for himself. Or he might be dead wrong. But his advice and writings are effectively useless to the rest of us either way. There’s no shared “there” there.
You see, High School never ended. Things can still get lame in the “real world”. The “geeks” need to shut up and go back to the geek table and be more humble. The whole lot of us have demonstrated limited ability on how to be decent.
To quote Rick James:
”They should have never given you developers money. Fuck your Ping Pong table, fuck. Your. Ping. Pong. Table!”
So now they spout their mouth off and the media hangs on their every word and debates it.
Write better sentences, please!
And it's not like you could convinced his followers that this take is wrong, anyone gullible enough to take such an insane take at face value is very unlikely to read your rebuttal.
Only at least since the ancient Greeks has introspection been relevant (and even the Renaissance was well established 400 years ago in the 1600s):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_unexamined_life_is_not_wor...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_thyself
So congratulations, you are a fool
> But he has since been wrong about a great many things.
This is true for almost all of the tech bros / influencers / CEOs. Being right once and getting rich does not make them smarter or better than anyone. Unfortunately our society doesn‘t view it that way - hence here we are, stuck with the Elons and Thiels of the world. And it‘s hurting us yet they’re on a pedestal
Going back four hundred years, it would have never occurred to anyone that humans shouldn’t be slaves or that the environment will be irrecoverably destroyed if everyone pillages it for their own business needs.
Philosophers considered that even before Christ.
https://www.cnbc.com/2011/06/03/the-ancient-and-noble-greek-...
"A fragment of Solon’s poetry describes a situation in which many of the poor “have arrived in foreign lands/sold into slavery, bound in shameful fetters.”"
"In 594 BC, Solon was appointed archon of Athens. His solution to his city’s strife was to cancel both public and private debts and end debt slavery."
> or that the environment will be irrecoverably destroyed if everyone pillages it for their own business needs
https://theconversation.com/the-waters-become-corrupt-the-ai...
Pliny the Elder: "We taint the rivers and the elements of nature, and the air itself, which is the main support of life, we turn into a medium for the destruction of life."
(The same is true for introspection. It's certainly not a modern invention. Andreessen asserts it's an 1800s/1900s invention, but Shakespeare's fucking famous for "to be or not to be, that is the question"!)
Thats catagorically wrong on both levels.
Common land was regulated and had a ton of bylaws to make sure that people didn't take the piss. There was lots of work done to improve the soil, (leaving fallow, crop rotation, fertilising, etc etc)
As for anti-slavery, there was a whole multi century effort to fight against surfdom.
The Quakers and other more radical religious types condemned it as unchristian,
The secular types also raged against it, thomas paine is most well known now, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Spence was also a key proponent.
1. Prosperity theology [1]. This idea took hold in early Protestantism. Even if you're not religious, it's had an undeniable impact on the West (including the so-called "Protestant work ethic"). The idea is that you are essentially blsssed by God if you are rich. This was a huge departure from Catholic dogma. If Jesus was real and came back in Texas today he'd get hung at a Communist terrorist;
2. The myth of meritocracy. This is a core tenet of capitalism that the wealthy are that way because they deserve to be; and
#. In the US in particular, hyper-individualism. Specifically, the destruction of any kinf of collectivism. This shields people from the impacts of their actions and any kind of accountability.
People who find success tend to get high on their own supply and they have no one around them to correct their behavior. Instead they have a cadre of slavishly sycophantic yes men.
There's a common refrain that it takes three generations to go from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves. The vast majority of fortunes are lost, or at least significantly reduced, within 3 generations because the later generations get surrounded by the same yes men and have no idea what it takes to maintain let alone make a fortune. There's really no hope for any form of introspection, accountability or growth.
I'm old enough to remember the Netscape saga. I remember feeling kind of sorry for Marc Andressen who got kinda screwed by the whole netscape deal. By "screwed" I mean he ended up with ~$50M (IIRC) on a deal worth billions. I also remember how the other tech titans of the era were at least ostensibly anti-establishment rebels. "Tech hippies" in a way.
I really wonder what those people would think of the likes of Andressen, Musk, Bezos, Ballmer, Gates, Thiel, etc. All those are objectively awful people who kowtow to the American administration and have essentially just become military contractors who uphold awful ideas like "transhumanism" (which is just eugenics).
But is he wrong? Our company culture rewards psychopaths and sociopaths because they have no conscience. In a way, there's no accountability without a conscience. So it might be a successful strategy in business but it is objectively making the world a worse place. And that ultimately ends with heads on spikes.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology
you are absolutely right, whilst having $0b in your accounts