The Rage of the FU White Guy (Part 2)

Elon, Rupert and Their Band of Little Big Men

Earlier this week, Teddy Schliefer of Puck News reported that Elon Musk hosted a dinner of enraged and whiny billionaires at the home of Putin-goon David Sacks. Their reason for gathering? They don’t like Joe Biden.

Aside from Musk, the guest list included:

• Rupert Murdoch of NewsCorp, $787 million lighter in the wallet after last year’s settlement with Dominion Voting Systems.

• Peter Thiel of PayPal, Facebook, and other related tendencies.

• Michael Milken, the “Junk Bond King.”

• Travis Kalanick, founder of Uber.

• Steve Mnuchin, wannabe Bond villian and former Trump Treasury Secretary.

Mnuchin and wife Louise Linton, circa 2017. Courtesy Andrew Herrer/Bloomberg

As Schliefer writes, "…all were there as members of a burgeoning anti-Biden brain trust, united by a shared sense of grievance.”

Before I continue, it’s important to remind ourselves of who we’re talking about:

The FU White Guy

Noun

1.     American male defined by his opposition to most mainstream culture, inability to handle generational change, believes the Covid vaccine is the civil rights struggle of his time. Likely, though not always, a college-educated, financially successful, suburban father. May be ‘involuntarily celibate’ (incel) but isn’t a requirement for definition.

2.     Major league asshole.

3.     Probably has Lithium as a preset on SiriusXM.

You can read Part I here.

To a man, they’ve made many millions or billions. They’ve reached the summit of America’s Mt. Everest: Wealth and fame beyond imagination. They have lackies, fans, and followers to hang on their every word and consume their content. Perfect strangers defend them vigorously (and viciously) on social media. Yet they still find themselves aggrieved.

Why?

Because on any given day, each of them may still come into contact with the real world, and this upsets them very much. When someone dares pierce what Steve Jobs’ associates called the “reality distortion field” they react, and react badly. How dare you? How dare I? How dare they!

They’ve long since shed their connection to humanity. Musk communicates mainly through Twitter, taking delight in ‘owning the libs,’ returning the likes of Nick Fuentes to the mainstream, and opening the floodgates of noxious bots and their content.

When groups like the Center for Countering Digital Hate pointed out that Elon was allowing mainstream companies’ ads to appear alongside hateful posts, they advertisers pulled their dollars and Musk called his lawyers. This ‘free speech absolutist’ would be damned if some pesky non-profit could take the bark off him.

Worse for Elon, his defamation case against CCDH was thrown out!!

CCDH is an incredible organization. Find out more here.

Schliefer goes on:

“Both in public and in private, Musk has expressed feeling deeply unnerved by America’s migrant crisis—a fear that has driven his rush into Republican politics—and the issue was a key topic of discussion at the dinner.”

The irony abounds of course.

1. Elon Musk, David Sacks, Peter Thiel, and Rupert Murdoch are immigrants. They were not born in the United States. Mnuchin’s family came to the US in 1916. Kalanick’s family immigrated to the US in the early 20th Century.

2. None of them live anywhere near the Texas border (Austin doesn’t count.)

3. They were having this intense conversation in Sacks’ ‘$23 million, 11,000-square-foot home in the Hollywood Hills.’

Migrants aside, what did President Joe Biden do to these tough guys to upset them so?

Unlike most of this ‘pull yourself up by the bootstraps’ crowd, Biden didn’t come from wealth, money or status. Joe from Scranton. Joe riding Amtrak all those years. Joe the decent. Joe the bent, but not broken. Biden actually cares about the good of the country when he wakes up in the morning.

These guys, not so much.

Musk and Co. know that we’ve reached the end state of the Chicago School of Economics and Ayn Rand Fan Boyism. Biden has called for their ilk, and their companies, to (the horror!) pay more in taxes and show responsibility for the actions they and their companies take.

The Justice Department’s case against Google is coming to a head. Lina Khan, Chair of the Federal Trade Commission (rock star alert) has sued Amazon. She just got rid of non-compete agreements for American workers. Rupert, Elon, and Co. want none of this pro-American nonsense.

Deeper, though, is their fundamental sense of ingratitude and lack of patriotism for a country that’s given them everything. Musk and Sacks couldn’t have found their success in South Africa. Nor Thiel in Germany.

What’s more, these uber-tech bros built their companies and billions on top of investments we, the American people, made in a little ole thing called the United States Government. Our tax dollars were the seed stock for their success. As Scott Galloway pointed out in our conversation last week, the US government invented the Internet, GPS, and too many other things to count; usually in the basement of the Pentagon, some other military application, or the labs of NIH.

Beyond creating the infrastructure on which they could build their fortunes, the Federal government is a massive customer of most of their technology. Musk’s SpaceX and Starlink are the recipients of billions in federal contracting. Joe Lonsdale, who Schlieffer mentions as urging Musk to get more politically active, co-founded Palantir, the all-knowing, all-seeing surveillance company the Feds use for a variety of ‘tactical insights.’

They’re not against government spending money. They’re just against the government spending money on something that doesn’t benefit them.

Yes, their innovations have been life changing. That they ignore, or actively fight against the idea that they’d be where they are without the contributions you and I made, and an incredible amount of luck, shows just how far from reality and patriotism these men have strayed.

How do they repay their success to the country that helped make it possible? By hoping to return the one man on Earth who actively wants to destroy America as we know it and complete its turn from frail democracy to full oligarchy (at best) to an authoritarian state (at worst.)

Perhaps, though, it’s not that striking. Most of these men, like Trump, came from privilege. It’s easy to look down on others, or assume your own superiority, when you’re starting near the top of the building. Like Trump, these men see life as a zero-sum game. If someone else wins, no matter what it is, they consider it a loss. There’s also the unsettling libertarian/fascist brew of “I do what I want, I’ll tell you what to do, and you can fuck* off if you don’t like it.”

Lastly, there’s a God complex that runs through this crew. If they weren’t around, the world would spin off its axis. Only they could do what’s necessary to save humanity from itself (as they build rockets to leave the planet or create islands where no one can govern their behavior.)

Ask Tim Cook how Apple is doing.

Let’s reset the table stakes. To preserve American democracy, and chart a new path into the 21st century, we must defeat Donald Trump, and badly. We know that the MAGAs, the white Evangelical church, the nationalists, the Russians, the Iranians, and the Chinese are all helping Trump’s return. Add Musk, Thiel, Murdoch, Sacks, et al, to the list. They care not a whit for the United States, or its people.

We so often over complicate things. This race comes down to power. Who has it, and who doesn’t. This band will do whatever they believe is necessary to maintain their power, increase their wealth, and zero-out their accountability. All at our expense.

I don’t need more reasons to get out of bed in the morning, but if it means taking these goons on too, sign me up.

News and Notes:

Please check out my full conversation with Scott Galloway about his new book, The Algebra of Wealth.

Link to the book is here.

If you haven’t read Eric Cortalessa’s deep dive on Trump 2.0 in Time Magazine, I implore you to read it.