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 businesses.
‘I’ve pulled myself up by the bootstraps so many damn times that I’ve ripped them off.’ — Community organizer Amy Jo Hutchinson explained to the Senate in vivid, emotional detail that poverty is not because of laziness and why the current poverty guidelines are ‘ridiculously out of touch’
Elon Musk’s only real act of genius was casting himself into a fictional archetype (the Tom Swift / John Galt / Tony Stark-style billionaire inventor) that so many people want to believe in so badly that they will overlook the mounting evidence that he’s actually just an unstable idiot with enough money to hire better engineers than himself.
Let’s not also forget that the small number of lifeboats was so the rich passengers had more room to stroll around on the decks.
The Titanic is such a shockingly apt metaphor.
I learned this song in school:
“They built the ship, Titanic / to sail the ocean’s blue / and they said it was a ship / that the water’d never come thru / it was on its maiden trip / when an iceburg hit the ship / it was sad when the great ship went down.
Verse: It was sad / oh it was sad / it was sad when the great ship went down / to the bottom of the… / husbands and wives, little kiddies lost their lives / it was sad when the great ship went down.
Well the ship set sail from England / and not very far from shore /the rich refused to associate with the poor / so they put them down below / where they’d be the first to go / it was sad when the great ship went down…”
