Comment by rich_sasha
9 days ago
Has the quality of the ultra ultra rich decayed over time? It's hard to say, and of course common perception of the past is very skewed.
There were always monstrous leaders, and overall, cruelty and suffering in much of the developed world has decreased over time. But I can't think, through my biased filter, of historical ultra rich people who were less scheming for power and more for, well, evil.
I'm not picking specifically at Karp, or indeed calling him evil - I don't like Palantir but don't know enough about them to have an opinion. But I think most people wouldn't struggle to name a few very evil, very rich contemporary people.
It's easy to think of some ultra rich people from the past doing grand philanthropy - Carnegie, JP Morgan, Rockefeller. Recent era? All I can think of is Soros and Bill Gates (whatever the Epstein files say, and I admit I didn't look at the details, he is a bona fide philanthropist) and they're both getting old.
Yep. Because their worth is tied to taking credit for other people's effort, except financialization, scalability, power law distribution, policy failures, and self-amplifying corruption make the inequality absurdly worse rewarding the wrong people while stealing healthcare, comfort, and dignity from many more.
Certainly we are exposed more to the thoughts of billionaires (and they are exposed more to ours). This makes it way easier to observe them being monsters.
But I think there is something to be said for the rising power of the labor movement in the past. I'd wager that Rockefeller was more concerned about being murdered by workers than Zuckerberg. That could manifest both as violent crackdowns against labor but also as a need to appear benevolent to the masses.