Paul Krugman helps explode the myth of genius entrepreneurs.
By Paul Krugman
...to paraphrase Lord Acton, enormous privilege corrupts enormously, in part because the very privileged are normally surrounded by people who would never dare tell them that they’re behaving badly.
That’s why\ I’m not shocked by the spectacle of Elon Musk’s reputational self-immolation. Fascinated, yes; who isn’t? But when an immensely rich man, accustomed not just to getting whatever he wants but also to being a much-admired icon, finds himself not just losing his aura but becoming a subject of widespread ridicule, of course he lashes out erratically, and in so doing makes his problems even worse.
The more interesting question is why we’re now ruled by such people. For we’re clearly living in the age of the petulant oligarch.
As The Times’s Kevin Roose recently pointed out, Musk still has many admirers in the technology world. They see him not as a whiny brat but as someone who understands how the world should be run — an ideology the writer John Ganz calls bossism, a belief that the big people shouldn’t have to answer to, or even face criticism from, the little people. And adherents of that ideology clearly have a lot of power, even if that power doesn’t yet extend to protecting the likes of Musk from getting booed in public.
Krugman talks about how the extreme concentration of wealth at the top exacerbated by “thin-skinned egomaniac plutocrats acting out their insecurities in public view.”
The archetype of the innovator who gets rich while changing the world isn’t new; it goes back at least as far as Thomas Edison. But the big fortunes made in information technology turned this narrative into a full-blown cult, with wannabe or seem-to-be Steve Jobs types everywhere you look.
Indeed, the cult of the genius entrepreneur has played a large role in the rolling debacle that is crypto. Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX wasn’t selling a real product nor, as far as anyone can tell, are those of his former competitors who haven’t yet gone bankrupt: After all this time, nobody has come up with significant real-world uses for cryptocurrency other than money-laundering.
In the end, Musk and Bankman-Fried may end up doing a public service, by tarnishing the legend of the genius entrepreneur, which has done a great deal of harm. For now, however, Musk’s Twitter antics are degrading what had become a useful resource, a place some of us went for information from people who actually knew what they were talking about.
NBC did a lot to embellish the myth of genius entrepreneurs in the case of Donald Trump by making him their genius entrepreneur who could do no wrong in the Apprentice. That was what established the myth that Trump was one of those extraordinary “big people” who shouldn’t be held to the same standard that is applied to us “little people”.