A Billion Bucks Doesn't Make You a Savant

As Ramaswamy & Musk show us, being a master of financial alchemy and making rockets do not you a genius make.

c/o Maksim Shamin

A common jocular refrain among my fellow construction workers back in the day was, “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” These days, I invert this: “Just because you’re so rich doesn’t make you smart.”

Unfortunately, many Americans equate money with smarts. They have a love affair with billionaires, hanging on every word they say, expecting pearls of wisdom to drop like manna from heaven. And this is compounded by the proliferation of members of that most exclusive of clubs. The number of U.S. billionaires grew more than nine fold between 1990 and 2020 — from 66 to 614. From 2010 to 2021, more U.S. billionaires achieved their wealth from finance than any other industry. The financial sector had 104 billionaires in 2010 — eleven years later that number had grown to 170. The technology industry produced the greatest growth in billionaires over the decade, almost tripling from 42 to 124. By 2021, U.S. billionaires possessed almost twice as much combined wealth as the bottom half of Americans, i.e., some 165 million people.

The wisest billionaires are those who know they aren’t necessarily the smartest person in the room. Warren Buffett is one of these. “Of the billionaires I have known, money just brings out the basic traits in them. If they were jerks before they had money, they are simply jerks with a billion dollars.” His fellow billionaire and business partner, Charlie Munger, reflected the same down-home Nebraska wisdom, “I try to get rid of people who always confidently answer questions about which they don’t have any real knowledge.”

Bill Gates is one of these. Frankly, I tune out whenever some broadcast network interviews him about international development, public health or U.S. schools. A college drop-out and computer nerd, he hit the jackpot founding Microsoft. But because he’s America’s sixth richest person, people treat him as an American Socrates.

I dealt with one of these mega-rich know-it-alls when I worked on Afghanistan at the State Department in the 1980s. Armand Hammer was an American industrialist, a son of Russian immigrants who made most of his wealth in oil. In today’s dollars, he would be a mere half-billionaire. Nonetheless, he was long a darling of the Beltway power set. In his quixotic quest for a Nobel Prize, Hammer drew on his connections with Soviet leaders to insert himself into sensitive negotiations between Washington and Moscow to bring an end to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. We in the diplomatic trenches regarded the aged diplomatic neophyte as both meddlesome and suspect. He merely added fog and confusion. Years after his death, the FBI determined that Hammer had been a KGB agent of influence for seven decades.

America’s richest man, Elon Musk, has taken it upon himself to conduct his own foreign policy, often at odds with Washington. The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow recently shed some light on it:

“Even though Musk is not technically a diplomat or statesman, I felt it was important to treat him as such, given the influence he had on this issue,” [Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Colin] Kahl told me. SpaceX, Musk’s space-exploration company, had for months been providing Internet access across Ukraine, allowing the country’s forces to plan attacks and to defend themselves. But, in recent days, the forces had found their connectivity severed as they entered territory contested by Russia. More alarmingly, SpaceX had recently given the Pentagon an ultimatum: if it didn’t assume the cost of providing service in Ukraine, which the company calculated at some four hundred million dollars annually, it would cut off access. “We started to get a little panicked,” the senior defense official, one of four who described the standoff to me, recalled. Musk “could turn it off at any given moment. And that would have real operational impact for the Ukrainians.”

On the phone with Musk from Paris, Kahl was deferential. According to unclassified talking points for the call, he thanked Musk for his efforts in Ukraine, acknowledged the steep costs he’d incurred, and pleaded for even a few weeks to devise a contract. “If you cut this off, it doesn’t end the war,” Kahl recalled telling Musk.

Musk wasn’t immediately convinced. “My inference was that he was getting nervous that Starlink’s involvement was increasingly seen in Russia as enabling the Ukrainian war effort, and was looking for a way to placate Russian concerns,” Kahl told me. To the dismay of Pentagon officials, Musk volunteered that he had spoken with Putin personally. Another individual told me that Musk had made the same assertion in the weeks before he tweeted his pro-Russia peace plan, and had said that his consultations with the Kremlin were regular.

Musk’s “peace plan” stipulates that Russia should be allowed to keep Crimea, which it had seized by force in 2014. Moreover, Ukraine should adopt neutrality and abandon its bid to join NATO. The pièce de résistance of Musk’s plan calls for UN-organized referendums in the four Ukrainian eastern regions Russia has claimed to have already annexed. A senior Ukrainian diplomat decried Musk’s proposal as “moral idiocy, repetition of Kremlin propaganda, a betrayal of Ukrainian courage and sacrifice.” A Kremlin spokesman, on the other hand, praised it as “very positive.”

To give credit where credit is due, the eccentric Musk is indeed a brilliant investor and visionary, notably with Tesla and SpaceX. But he’s also the dumbbell who overpaid by some $30 billion to purchase Twitter and has since worked assiduously to turn the once venerable “global town square” into a financial and cultural dumpster fire, a devil’s playground for Nazis, racists and MAGA-morons. Advertisers have fled in droves. As more evidence of his brilliance, he has saddled two of his eleven known children by three women with the names “Techno Mechanicus” and “X Æ A-Xii” (no, this is not a typo).

In our Gilded Age 2.0, latter-day robber barons exert undue sway over affairs that are traditionally the prerogatives of government and other public institutions. The New York Times’s Lauren Jackson puts it aptly:

Today’s billionaires are increasingly viewing corporate control as a vehicle for acting in the public interest. Through the pervasive power of platform companies, decisions about democracy, misinformation and free speech are being decided by the whims of a select few with no oversight, unprecedented access to capital and, at times, more influence than entire nations.

One scrappy young billionaire is aspiring to bring his crackpot ideas on the world straight to the White House. Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy earned his first billion in the voodoo economic sphere of hedge funds. This, of course, qualifies him to become leader of the Free World. A sampling of Ramaswamy’s policy genius:

During the GOP presidential debates, he vowed to accept Russian control of the occupied territories and to bar Ukraine from joining NATO “in exchange for Russia exiting its military alliance with China.” He furthermore would remove sanctions as a way to bring Russia back into the global market and thereby “elevate Russia as a strategic check on China’s designs in East Asia.”

Who writes Ramaswamy’s policy positions? Saturday Night Live?

Nikki Haley shot back at Ramaswamy that he had “no foreign policy and it shows” and “Every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber.”

Other latter-day robber barons with outsized influence over public life include the Koch and Mercer families. In a scathing essay in the Los Angeles Times, the late Scott Timberg wrote about the latter:

Then there’s Robert Mercer, one of the invisible rich people who has more influence on world affairs than just about everyone you know put together. Mercer, who helped fund Brexit and Donald Trump’s presidential race, and, for years, Breitbart News, is also the father of Rebekah Mercer. A toxic rich girl par excellence, Rebekah is known to Politico as “the most powerful woman in GOP politics” and to others as the first lady of the alt-right. (She recently sowed a rift on the right by cutting off Steve Bannon’s paychecks following his tussle with President Trump.)

Even in this charmless crowd, Robert Mercer’s obnoxiousness stands out. The Citizens United decision has unleashed people like Mercer — secretive gazillionaires whose expenditures are often untraceable despite the way they remake our shared reality. “In my view, Trump wouldn’t be President if not for Bob,” an old colleague of Mercer’s told The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer.

The thing about our Gilded Age’s mega-rich is that generally they indeed are brilliant in certain narrow realms but incompetent or even emotionally stunted in others. Yet too many people, razzle-dazzled by their enormous wealth, defer to them, treating them as oracles of the universe rather than the outsized weirdos they are.

Back in the day, when I laid rail track on the county line using the same axe-and-sledge hammer technology that the young Abraham Lincoln did, after the “suits” made an inspection visit, the guys would crack, “You think their shit don’t stink the same as ours?”

Exactly.