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   Madeleine Morris (remittancegirl@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 17-Jan-2025 17:45:07 JST Madeleine Morris

   • Kevin Beaumont

   I think in order to get a firm coordinate on what people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are actually like, it is important to remember, as @GossiTheDog said, just how spectacularly they continue to shit in their own beds.

   https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/113840676503949388

   • GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Madeleine Morris (remittancegirl@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 17-Jan-2025 17:45:07 JST Madeleine Morris

     in reply to

     And, let us be honest, it is quintessentially human to, from time to time, shoot yourself in the foot. But these self-mutilations are spectacular by any measure. These men may have once been all about the money at one point in their lives, but now they have so much of it it has become an abstraction.

     What has happened to these men is that they have no measure of themselves. Nothing to model themselves on. And, as if proof were ever needed, they have shockingly uncreative imaginations.

   • Embed this notice
     zip (zip@wandering.shop)'s status on Friday, 17-Jan-2025 19:02:34 JST zip

     in reply to

     @Remittancegirl what gets me the most is that Musk could have kept the mythos of a tech genius going for a lot longer if he simply did not have a twitter account. He's single-handedly punctured his own reputation by failing to shut up

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     Madeleine Morris (remittancegirl@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 17-Jan-2025 19:02:36 JST Madeleine Morris

     in reply to

     I think one of the most ironic facets of this is that, unlike Buffet or Gates, these men are desperate to be loved by everyone. And yet, for all their wealth and power, they cannot make you love them.

     And in a way, that has always been the peasants' superpower. Even in the face of gods. We can refuse to love them. We can refuse to admire them. We can see them for the pathetic, underdeveloped infants that they are - every single one of them.

     Charlie Stross repeated this.
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     Madeleine Morris (remittancegirl@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 17-Jan-2025 19:02:37 JST Madeleine Morris

     in reply to

     I watch all these men swing manically from 'please love me' to 'fuck you, bitch' repeatedly.

     It's as if the only referent their woefully unimaginative minds have been able to come up with has turned out to be various incarnations of Caligula.

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     Madeleine Morris (remittancegirl@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 17-Jan-2025 19:02:38 JST Madeleine Morris

     in reply to

     It's sad not a single one of them took a humanities degree. And it's now, after their climb to the top of a financial mount olympus, that it really shows.

     Not a single one is capable of imagining himself coherently. I'm going to say something that will sound odd, but it requires a certain poetic talent, a certain writerly capacity, to forge a coherent heroic persona on the obscene level of power and wealth where these men dwell.

     They resort to the tired, threadbare robes of Roman emperors.

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     Madeleine Morris (remittancegirl@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 17-Jan-2025 19:02:39 JST Madeleine Morris

     in reply to

     One interesting aspect that unifies them is that not a single one of them can tolerate taking personal responsibility for their misjudgements or failures.

     So while they spend most of their time imagining themselves as 21st century techno gods, the costume can't fit because... the thing about being a god is that gods take responsibility. You cannot be a god without being responsible. If it's someone else's fault, then you're not the top god, are you?

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     Madeleine Morris (remittancegirl@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 17-Jan-2025 19:02:40 JST Madeleine Morris

     in reply to

     But Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos and Thiel have all failed to create coherent personas for themselves. None of them are imaginative enough to weave an ideal they can actually fit into. Often because the costumes they attempted to wear were so outrageously far from any concrete reality, they appear to us as monstrous clowns.

     In essence, they are all constantly shitting in their own pants because they cannot create a pair of pants that fit.

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     Madeleine Morris (remittancegirl@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 17-Jan-2025 19:02:41 JST Madeleine Morris

     in reply to

     Everyone needs an ego ideal. A kind of persona we want others to see us as. Warren Buffet, at one point the richest man in the world, styled himself as this folksy financial genius. It was a persona that he managed to pull on and wear quite well. It was a coat that he could fit into. And it had a marginally socially redemptive aspect. Like Gates, who imagined himself the nerdy magnate, who would save the world for various global diseases.