“Even the Weather Felt Expensive”

Filmmaker Noah Hawley was invited to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Campfire retreat in 2018. Reflecting on the experience recently for The Atlantic, Hawley writes that today’s super-rich have stopped “pretending that the rules of human society apply” to them.

The Jeff Bezos of 2018 acted as if he still believed that people’s impression of him mattered, that his financial and social value could be affected by negative publicity. He still believed that his actions had consequences. He had not yet freed himself—the way Daniel Plainview freed himself—from the rules of men.

Eight years later, Bezos and two of the world’s other richest men—Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk—have clearly left the world of consequences behind. They float in a sensory-deprivation tank the size of the planet, in which their actions are only ever judged by themselves.

The closer I’ve gotten to the world of wealth, the more I understand that being truly rich doesn’t mean amassing enough money to afford superyachts, private jets, or a million acres of land. It means that everything becomes effectively free. Any asset can be acquired but nothing can ever be lost, because for soon-to-be trillionaires, no level of loss could significantly change their global standing or personal power. For them, the word failure has ceased to mean anything.

Daisy Grewal in 2012 for Scientific American: How Wealth Reduces Compassion.

Who is more likely to lie, cheat, and steal—the poor person or the rich one? It’s temping to think that the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to act fairly. After all, if you already have enough for yourself, it’s easier to think about what others may need. But research suggests the opposite is true: as people climb the social ladder, their compassionate feelings towards other people decline.

Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West by Justin Farrell sounds like an interesting read along these same lines.

• Daisy Grewal
• Jeff Bezos
• Noah Hawley
• wealth