Even if rich people were no more likely to believe stupid shit than you or me, it'd still be a problem. After all, I believe my share of stupid shit (and if you think that none of the shit you believe in is stupid, then I'm afraid we've just identified at least one kind of stupid shit you believe in).
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The problem isn't whether rich people believe stupid shit; it's the fact that when a rich person believes something stupid, that belief can turn into torment for dozens, thousands, or millions of people.
Here's a historical example that I think about a *lot*. In 1928, Henry Ford got worried about the rubber supply chain.
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All the world's rubber came from plantations in countries that he had limited leverage over and he was worried that these countries could kneecap his operation by cutting off the supply. So Ford decided he would start cultivating rubber in the Brazilian jungles, judging that Brazil's politicians were biddable, bribeable or bludgeonable and thus not a risk.
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Ford took over a large area of old-growth jungle in Brazil and decreed that a town be built there. But not just any town: Ford decreed that the town of Fordlandia would be a replica of Dearborn, the company town he controlled in Michigan. Now, leaving aside the colonialism and other ethical considerations, there are plenty of *practical* reasons not to replicate Dearborn, MI on the banks of the Rio Tapajós.
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For one thing, Brazil is in the southern hemisphere, and Dearborn is in the northern hemisphere. The prefab houses that Ford ordered for Fordlandia had windows optimized for southern exposure, which is the normal way of designing a dwelling in the northern hemisphere. In the southern hemisphere, you try and put your windows on the *other side* of the building.
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Ford's architects told him this, and proposed having the factory flip the houses' orientation. But Ford was adamant: he'd had a vision for a replica of his beloved Dearborn plunked down smack in the middle of the Amazon jungle, and by God, that was what he would get:
Fordlandia was a catastrophe for *so many* reasons, and the windows are just a little footnote, but it's a detail that really stuck with me because it's just *so stupid*.
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Ford was a vicious antisemite, a bigot, a union-buster and an all-round piece of shit, but also, he believed that his opinions trumped the axial tilt of the planet Earth.
In other words, Henry Ford wasn't merely evil - he was also periodically as thick as pigshit. Ford's cherished stupidities didn't just affect him, they also meant that a whole city full of people in the Amazon had windows facing the wrong direction.
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Like I said, I sometimes believe stupid things, but those stupid things aren't *consequential* the way that rich people's cherished stupidities are.
This would be bad enough if rich people were no more prone to stupid beliefs than the rest of us, but it's actually worse than that. When I believe something stupid, it tends to get *me* in trouble, which means that (at least some of the time), I get to learn from my mistakes.
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But if you're a rich person, you can surround yourself with people who will tell you that you are right even when you are *so wrong*, with the result that you get progressively *more* wrong, until you literally kill yourself:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/alternative-medicine-extend-abbreviate-steve-jobs-life/
A rich person *could* surround themselves with people who tell them that they're being stupid, but in practice, this almost never happens.
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After all, the prime advantage to accumulating as much money as possible is freedom from having to listen to other people. The richer you are, the fewer people there are who can thwart your will. Get rich enough and you can be found guilty of 34 felonies and *still* become President of the United States of America.
But wait, it gets even worse! Hurting other people is often a great way to get even more rich.
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So the richer you get, the more insulated you are from consequences for hurting other people, and the more you hurt other people, the richer you get.
What a world! The people whose wrong beliefs have the widest blast-radius and inflict the most collateral damage *also* have the fewest sources of external discipline that help them improve their beliefs, and often, that collateral damage is a feature, not a bug.
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Billionaires are a danger to themselves and (especially) to the rest of us. They are wronger than the median person, and the consequences of their wrongness are exponentially worse than the consequences of the median person's mistake.
This has been on my mind lately because of a very local phenomenon.
I live around the corner from Burbank airport, a great little regional airport on the edge of Hollywood.
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It was never brought up to code, so the gates are *really* close together, which means the planes park really close together, and there's no room for jetways, so they park right up against the terminal. The ground crews wheel staircase/ramps to both the front and back of the plane. That means that you can walk the entire length of the terminal in about five minutes, and boarding and debarking takes less than half the time of any other airport.
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Sure, if one of those planes ever catches fire, every other plane is gonna go boom, and everyone in the terminal is toast, but my sofa-to-gate time is like *15 minutes*.
Best of all, Burbank is a Southwest hub. When we moved here a decade ago, this was *great*. Southwest, after all, has free bag-check, open seating, a great app, friendly crews, and a generous policy for canceling or changing reservations.
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If you fly in the US, you know what's coming next. In 2024, a hedge fund called Elliott Investment Management acquired an 11% stake in SWA, forced a boardroom coup that saw it replace five of the company's six directors, and then instituted a top to bottom change in airline policies. The company eliminated *literally everything* that Southwest fliers loved about the airline, from the free bags to the open seating:
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The airline went from being the *least* enshittified airline in America to the *most*. Southwest is now worse than Spirit airlines - no, really. Southwest doesn't just merely charge for seat selection, but if you refuse to pay for seat selection, *they preferentially place you in a middle seat even on a half-empty flight*, as a way of pressuring you to pay the sky-high junk fee for seat selection:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SouthwestAirlines/comments/1rd2g0k/ngl_thought_yall_were_joking/
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Obviously, passengers who are given middle seats (and the passengers around them, who paid for window or aisle seats) don't like this, so they try to change seats. So SWA now makes its flight attendants order passengers not to switch seats, and they've resorted to making up nonsense about "weight balancing":
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Even without junk fees, SWA's fares are now higher than their rivals. I'm flying to San Francisco tomorrow to host EFF executive director Cindy Cohn's book launch at City Lights:
https://citylights.com/events/cindy-cohn-launch-party-for-privacys-defender/
Normally, I would have just booked a SWA flight from Burbank to SFO or Oakland (which gets less fog and is more reliable). But the SWA fare - even without junk fees - was higher than a United ticket out of the same airport, even including a checked bag, seat selection, etc.
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Southwest is *genuinely* worse than Spirit now: not only does it have worse policies (forcing occupancy of middle seats!), and more frustrated, angrier flight crew (flight attendants are palpably sick of arguing with passengers), but SWA is now more expensive than United!
All of this is the fault of *one billionaire*: Elliott Investment Management CEO Paul Singer, one of America's most guillotineable plutes.
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This one guy *personally* enshittified Southwest Airlines, along with many other businesses in America and abroad. Because of this *one guy*, millions of people are made miserable *every single day*. Singer flogged off his shares and made a tidy profit. He's long gone. But SWA will never recover, and every day until its collapse, millions of passengers and flight attendants will have a shitty day because of this *one guy*:
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Even if Paul Singer were no more prone to ethical missteps than you or me, the fact that he is morbidly wealthy means that his ethical blind spots leave behind a trail of wreckage that rivals a *comet*. And of course, being as rich as Paul Singer inflicts a lasting neurological injury that makes you incapable of understanding how wrong you are, which means that Paul Singer is *doubly* dangerous.
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Billionaires aren't just a danger when they're trying to make money, either. One of the arguments in favor of billionaires is that sometimes, the "good" billionaires take up charitable causes. But even here, billionaires can cause sweeping harm. Take Bill Gates, whose charitable projects include waging war on the public education system, seeking to replace public schools with charter schools.
Gates has no background in education, but he spent millions on this project.
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He is one of the main reasons that poor communities around the country have been pressured to shutter their public schools and replace them with weakly regulated, extractive charters:
https://apnews.com/article/92dc914dd97c487a9b9aa4b006909a8c
This was a catastrophe. A single billionaire dilettante's cherished stupidity wrecked the educational chances of a generation of kids:
https://dissidentvoice.org/2026/03/free-market-charter-schools-wreak-havoc-in-michigan/
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Gates was a prep-school kid, so it's weird for him to have forceful views about a public education system he never experienced. In reality, it's not so much that Gates has forceful views about *schools* - rather, he has forceful views about *teachers' unions*, which he wishes to see abolished. Gates is one of America's most vicious union-busters:
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(CAMBRIDGE, UK) – Two members of the Teamsters Union, which represents U.S. refuse collectors at Republic Services, America’s second-largest rubbish disposal corporation, protested Microsoft founder Bill Gates at the Cambridge Union Society yesterday. They were joined by supporters from Unite the Union, which represents refuse collectors in Cambridge and across Great Britain.
Gates's ideology permeates *all* of his charitable work. We all know about Gates's work on public health, but less well known is the role that Gates has played in blocking poor countries from exercising their rights under the WTO to override drug patents in times of emergency. In the 2000s, the Gates Foundation blocked South Africa from procuring the anti-retroviral AIDS drugs it was entitled to under the WTO's TRIPS agreement.
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The Gates Foundation blocked the Access to Medicines WIPO treaty, which would have vastly expanded the Global South's ability to manufacture life-saving drugs. And during the acute phase of the covid pandemic, Gates *personally* intervened to kill the WHO Covid-19 Technology Access Pool and to get Oxford to renege on its promise to make an open-source vaccine:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#gates-foundation
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It's not that Gates is insincere in his desire to improve public health outcomes - it's that his desire to improve public health conflicts with his extreme ideology of maximum intellectual property regimes. Gates simply opposes open science and compulsory licenses on scientific patents, even when that kills millions of people (as it did in South Africa). Gates's morbid wealth magnifies his cherished stupidities into weapons of mass destruction.
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Gates is back in the news these days because of his membership in the Epstein class. Epstein is the poster child for the ways that wealth is a force-multiplier for bad ideas. We can't separate Epstein's sexual predation from his wealth. Epstein spun elaborate junk-science theories to justify raping children, becoming mired in that most rich-guy coded of quagmires, eugenics:
https://www.statnews.com/2026/02/24/epstein-cell-line-george-church-harvard-personal-genome-project/
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Epstein openly discussed his plans to seed the planet with his DNA, reportedly telling one scientist that he planned to fill his ranch with young trafficked girls and to keep 20 of them pregnant with his children at all times:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/31/business/jeffrey-epstein-eugenics.html
We still don't know where Epstein's wealth came from, but we know that he was a central node in a network of *vast* riches, much of which he directed to his weird scientific projects.
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Cory Doctorow
