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HDo tech billionaires talk like no one is listening? Usually the only people they know are the National Security Agency and the waiters at Manresa, Silicon Valley’s only three-star Michelin restaurant. But now, courtesy of the Chancery Court in the state of Delaware, we mortals have had the opportunity to catch up on recent conversations between Elon Musk (of Tesla, SpaceX and PayPal fame) and some of his friends.
why? Well, the court is the stage for the legal battle between Twitter and Musk. Recall that in April, Tesla’s boss offered to buy Twitter for $54.20 a share, valuing the company at $43.4bn, which seemed generous at the time. Soon after, shares in Twitter and Tesla (the main source of Musk’s wealth) tanked, leading to a nasty bout of buyer’s remorse and a search for a way out of the deal. Twitter was not happy about this and sued in a court in Delaware, which is the main boxing ring for the competition, as more than two-thirds of the Fortune 500 companies register. Then both sides mustered high-priced lawyers (Musk’s legion, I see Messrs. Wachtel, Lipton, Rosen & Katz has about 300 lawyers, none of them cheap) and the battle began.
Most of the documents related to the case are shrouded in three coats of major legal jargon, but one set has been pleasantly clear: text messages exchanged between Musk and his friends that were supposed to be revealed in “discovery” proceedings. Hearing. In Exhibits H and J, the attorneys presented the 151 pages of correspondence as 35 pages, averaging 21 entries per page. That’s roughly 735 instances of pure, unadulterated billionaire speech.
I’m ashamed to say that life is too short to read Field’s text messages and his never-ending Twitter stream, so I’ve given up on diving into the Delaware trove. But popular blogger, podcaster and NYU professor Scott Galloway wanted to, as he puts it, “give a glimpse of the power of technology” and it’s made of stronger stuff. And his conclusion by analyzing private conversations between “some of the richest and most influential people in the world”? Just that “gut” was the correct metaphor.
To say he wasn’t impressed would be an understatement. “The logic, the prose, and the whole dialogue are amazingly…amazing. The richest man in the world and his associates are as unsophisticated, stupid and petty as the rest of us. Maybe more. When we play checkers, we thought billionaires were playing 3D chess. You are playing the same game but on a more expensive board.
He also showed remarkable respect in his speeches. It’s all about who is richer. Since it is a mask, pro temThe richest man in the world is late – even rich people who can’t spend money The interest in the interest They live up to 200 of their wealth. And since we live in a world of mass media and mass media – billionaires seem to believe that if a person is very rich, he/she must be very smart. That too. They live in their own reality-distortion field.
“I have never noted a difference in ability or knowledge between the rich and the rich,” Galloway wrote. Yet it is this virus that infects the tech elite: pitting talent against opportunity. Going from millions to hundreds of millions or billions is a function of increasing intelligence and more time. Confirmation? Elon’s text archive. Anyone who inspires the electrification of the auto industry and lands two rockets on boats at once deserves the label ‘genius’. But his mega-billions flow from well-regulated capital markets, a web of enforceable contracts, the hard work of thousands of employees, and at least billions of dollars in government subsidies, including $465 million for the DOE at the time. [Department of Energy] The loan that allowed Tesla to produce the Model S. So is Mr. Musk a genius, or just a genius whose talents were placed in a unique time and place? Answer: Yes to both.
To prosper in a capitalist world, in other words, you need not only talent, but also luck and legal and social institutions that protect your investments. Shameless hypocrisy can also be useful. Recently, for example, Musk canceled a meeting on short notice to answer questions about the Twitter deal. His reasoning: One of Twitter’s lawyers was worried about catching Covid. This is the same person who refused to close the Fremont plant in May 2020 as the outbreak worsened due to a local shutdown order. This is full throttle billionaire thinking: Laws are for the little people, not us. That’s why they choose when we can’t hear them.
What I read
Reasons to be happy
A dose of rational optimism is the title of Zachary Carter’s review. Disagreement Brad DeLong’s Amazing New Book Magazine, Slouching to Utopia: A Twentieth-Century Economic History.
Listen and learn
Audiobooks: Every Minute Counts is a wonderful blog post by Carl Berglun that explains why audiobooks are different.
Farewell to a philosopher
Bruno Latour’s passing is a tribute to a great public intellectual from the University of Sciences Po in Paris.
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