This was written ten years ago. A billionaire warning other billionaires that they are fucking everything up, and soon enough there will be a price to pay. Interestingly, the billionaire prophet says one of the reasons he is a billionaire is because he has a fcility for seeing things coming. Not because he’s extra intelligent or boast some off scale technical brilliance. He’s just less risk averse and he sees things coming.
Pitchforks, mostly.
I have founded, co-founded and funded more than 30 companies across a range of industries—from itsy-bitsy ones like the night club I started in my 20s to giant ones like Amazon.com, for which I was the first nonfamily investor. Then I founded aQuantive, an Internet advertising company that was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6.4 billion. In cash. My friends and I own a bank. . . .
I’m not the smartest guy you’ve ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I’m not technical at all—I can’t write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future. Seeing where things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship. And what do I see in our future now?
I see pitchforks.
At the same time that people like you and me are thriving beyond the dreams of any plutocrats in history, the rest of the country—the 99.99 percent—is lagging far behind. The divide between the haves and have-nots is getting worse really, really fast. In 1980, the top 1 percent controlled about 8 percent of U.S. national income. The bottom 50 percent shared about 18 percent. Today the top 1 percent share about 20 percent; the bottom 50 percent, just 12 percent.
But the problem isn’t that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.
And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won’t last.
If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.
The response to the assassination of Brian Thompson says it all.
In some ways the re-election of Trump says it all too. Yes, there's a subset of idiots who think he's their guy and he actually gives a shit about them, and that's tragic. But there's also a subset who voted for him knowing he's a grifter con artist who cared nothing for them, but they voted for him because they knew he cared nothing for the rest of society either, and he would turn that society on its head in his quest to line his pockets and the pockets of his mates. And in doing so he would upend the status quo that condemns this subset to a life of either grinding poverty or grinding hustle to stay out of poverty, and anything, even becoming a feudal warlord in a Mad Max style hellscape as society and the climate collapses would be better than another 30, 40 years of the endless treadmill of trying to keep your head above water and survive (because nobody is thriving except for the billionaire arseholes). And at least in the Mad Max hellscape you might have an opportunity to get ahead that does not exist now.
We need to eat one rich oligarch, maybe two and this problem will be fixed.