Being a billionaire doesn’t mean you’re not totally nuts

The ‘The Richest Person on the Planet Hat’ is passed around from time to time. When I wrote my ‘open letter to all billionaires, everywhere‘ post in September 2020, Jeff Bezos had the hat. Forbes World’s Billionaires List 2023 now shows Bezos as #3, with Elon Musk at #2, and some geezer I’ve never heard of (I don’t know if that’s a good thing, or a bad thing), Bernard Arnault, holding the hat.

The thing is, at least from where I sit, far too many people seem to believe that ‘being a billionaire’ is synonymous with ‘being incredibly brilliant’. That’s not the way I see it. Smart, well, yes (in some ways). Hard-working, certainly. The factor few take into account is blind luck: some will succeed, others won’t.

Not long ago, Elon Musk was reported as saying the following:

If people don’t have more children, civilization is going to crumble. Mark my words.

Elon Musk (as reported by CNBC, 07Dec2021)

Really.

I reacted to this on Twitter, and was attacked by a dimwit who clearly believed the myth that ‘billionaires must be smart’. Interspersed with suggestions that I was ‘dense’, he wittered on about how the Earth’s ‘carrying capacity’ has been increased, and suggested that I ‘google productivity’. Another moron adjured me to, “Look at statistics – birth decline is real. World need young people.”

I have indeed looked at the statistics. Here’s one example, where you can see in real time that the numbers of the members of the species homo fatuus brutus are going decidedly up, minute by minute. Not down.

Yes, human fertility is declining. But it is in no way crashing. The net increase of births over deaths at present is approximately 1.3% per year. That equates to a doubling time of ~53 years (if you doubt that, you need to watch Professor Albert Bartlett’s lecture ‘Arithmetic, population and energy‘). Or, to put it another way, there are now ~8 billion people on our planet. In less than one human lifetime, if things continue as they are (which, given the climate crisis, is impossible) there would be twice as many people on the planet, ie 16 billion. The United Nations estimates that our numbers will peak at 11 billion (and, barring mass starvation and/or genocide on a horrific scale, I cannot understand how they arrive at that figure).

And, yes, of course the world needs young people. However, there are in fact a great many right now, and far too many are suffering, badly – but far away, and, to far too many, they simply don’t count, as they’re not ‘our own’, and so the eye that turns to them is blind. That we’re not collectively doing far more about their plight than we are sickens me to the core.

Pink Floyd – On The Turning Away [HQ] (Live 1988)

Back to Elon Musk and his bizarre assertion, which all too many are willing to believe simply because “he’s a billionaire, and therefore ‘a really smart guy’.” His statement is not wrong, per se: if nobody were to have any more children, then humanity would disappear, duh. To my mind, he’s just rationalising his own selfish behaviour. He already has nine – at least? – children of his own: if he were really so concerned about the fate of civilization, it would, surely, be better all round were he to adopt starving orphans instead (he can’t claim he can’t afford to do that). But, no, instead he wants to procreate; over and above the prehistoric urge to spread one’s own seed, no doubt he believes that his genes are far superior.

If you are on the fence about Musk’s credentials as some kind of genius, then I urge you to read the article ‘Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule‘. It’s pretty long, but I found it compelling: my take-away from it is that, while we should all be concerned about AI in the long term, there’s a much more serious danger in the near term, and its initials are EM.

One of the ‘genius’ things that Elon Musk has done of late is to rebrand Twitter as ‘X’. The first I knew about that was when my pinned tab featuring a blue bird icon vanished (‘twould have been nice if the Chief Twit had let his userbase know in a more friendly way). Meanwhile, the BBC and others still refer to it as ‘Twitter’; go figure. I have to ask myself what kind of idiot thinks it’s a good idea to rebrand anything with, of all things, an icon that commonly means ‘close’ / ‘shut’ / ‘end’ / ‘finish’ / ‘terminate’. Or, indeed, ‘deactivate’.

Well, I’m about to deactivate my Twitter – sorry, ‘X’ – account. The ‘X Help Center‘ assures me that, ‘After your 30-day deactivation window, your Twitter account is permanently deleted.’ I did try, briefly, to determine whether ‘deleting the account’ is synonymous with ‘deleting all of the personal data held about me by that arm of Big Tech Controlled By Mr Musk The Genius’, but I failed miserably on that front (I’m clearly no genius as I’m not a billionaire), and since I wouldn’t believe any of its assurances anyway if it were to give any, I didn’t bother wasting my time further on it.