> There's Zuck, whose underlings let him win at board-games like Settlers of Catan because he's a manbaby who can't lose (and who accuses Wynn-Williams of cheating when she fails to throw a game of Ticket to Ride while they're flying in his private jet).
Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy? Does anyone who fails to bend over backwards for them just end up getting exiled? Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game? Being good at any kind of game is mostly a function of how much time and energy you've invested into it. If you claim to be an extremely hardcore worker who has any kind of family life there just aren't any leftover hours in the day for you to grind a top position in a game. And anyway, if you're playing games for fun and to bond with people, you probably shouldn't be playing tryhard optimal strategies every game, and should instead explore and experiment with more creative strategies. This is a lesson that took me a while to learn.
John Major, who was prime minister of the UK in the 90s, has talked a bit about how isolated a position like that makes you, and how unprepared he was for it. Few of the normal pressures of life apply you in a position like that: you can't get fired (not really), you don't have to accept consequences (not really), and perhaps most importantly: you don't have anyone tell you "you idiot, that's fucking mental". No one that you can just dismiss anyway.
I can't find the interview right now, it was a while ago, but I thought it was pretty interesting. Major was a man in his 50s when he became PM. Zuck was in his early 20s. You have to wonder what that does to a person. People like Zuck are more or less like child actors that made it big: everyone bends over backwards to deepthroat them and they've got a view of the world that's just delusional. I'd feel sorry if it wasn't for the highly negative and caustic effects.
You've won the lottery, but you don't want to acknowledge that you won the lottery. You want to feel they you deserve your position through hard work and talent. You're living in a society where people are credulous, to some degree they believe that hard work and talent are related to success.
So what will happen? Everyone you hire ends up patting you on the back, telling you what a great guy you are.
> to some degree they believe that hard work and talent are related to success
Does anyone actually believe that hard work and talent are either zero or negatively correlated to success? I don't think the correlation is 1.0, but I firmly believe that it's positive for both.
108 Billion humans have ever lived on planet earth. 8 billion-ish currently.
Most of them live lives that in no way reflected on their hard work and talent, but rather their circumstances, starting with where and when they were born but encompassing a million different contingencies outside the control of their hard work or talent.
So do you think you have talent and hard work greater than 99% of those many billions? If you're posting on HN you've probably got "success" in that extreme even if you've never applied yourself or excelled in anything of any note.
Pick any of those 8 billion. Have them work half as hard. Have them have half as much talent. Do their outcomes remain the same , get better, or get worse?
You’re arguing that there are other factors that also influence outcomes (and that those other factors are stronger forces).
I agree with that point, but that’s not a refutation to the notion that the coefficients on talent and hard work are positive, nor a convincing argument that success is unrelated to those two factors.
Can anyone benefit from working 10% harder or smarter? Undoubtedly. But success isn’t linear. It’s clear from the zeitgeist that the ultra-rich and powerful—past or present—aren’t working a million percent harder or smarter; their positions are more accurately explained by structural advantages. The first million might be 95% hard work and talent. The next million, probably a bit less so.
> It’s clear from the zeitgeist that the ultra-rich and powerful—past or present—aren’t working a million percent harder or smarter; their positions are more accurately explained by structural advantages.
Millions of people had an equal or better starting condition than Mark Zuckerberg so we aren't really lacking privileged people, but vanishingly few of those do become ultra wealthy.
Point is that wealth is a pretty minor part here compared to luck and skill, as otherwise people born wealthy would dominate the startup world. Instead its people born to upper-middle class families that dominates it.
> otherwise people born wealthy would dominate the startup world. Instead its people born to upper-middle class families that dominates it.
Those are just two different points on the "wealthy" scale. If you zoom out on a global level, they are not very far apart.
The kind of upper-middle class family that produces startup founders tends to be from the rich countries.
It makes perfect sense that it's the pretty wealthy and not the super-wealthy. There's more of the UMC, and they only need a certain amount of social/economic capital to roll the dice.
I broadly agree with your point, but you’re overlooking a critical dimension: once someone successfully identifies and exploits a niche (through a combination of skill and luck), the subsequent growth >can< often become largely independent of further skill or luck. At that stage, wealth through some basic intelligence compounds itself, regulatory capture can then occur, monopolistic behaviors can emerge—none of which are necessarily admirable traits in a society. But we're talking about different parts of an elephant and I don't think we disagree, but stepping back what we may disagree about is my opinion that ultra wealth (I'm not talking about millionaires or low level billionaires) but the wealth of Musk/Bezos/Zuck is a bug of the system, not a feature.
Humorous analogy: Imagine you’re playing a video game where, through a mix of skill and luck, you stumble upon an incredibly overpowered weapon. With even minimal competence, this weapon lets you easily acquire even more powerful gear, initiating a self-reinforcing loop that rapidly propels you to dominance. Soon enough, your advantage reshapes the entire game—limiting access to similar weapons for other players. The game stops being fun, or as some might put it, it becomes fundamentally unfair.
I imagine first you’d have to define success in a way others might agree with. And talent, for that matter—most notable talents can’t be easily exploited by capital.
But, I do know for sure that being wealthy is correlated to neither skill nor hard work, but savvy leverage of the skill and hard work of others. That shit has to end. You should make proportional to the work you put in. Shareholders and investors are even worse.
But whatever. I do not expect the world to improve at this point. We’re just stuck in a shitty place (as humanity) and asked to be grateful for the insight of the rich.
Circumstances and luck are hugely important, but you have agency even if you don't have full control.
Any of us could get hit by a meteor or drop dead at any minute, but working harder towards goals in aggregate moves us towards those goals, so I don't understand how this logic works?
What they want to believe is that their wealth is in proportion to their hard work and talent. But even ignoring luck, in a "tournament market", rewards are a strongly nonlinear function of inputs. Being no 2 in a market which is a natural monopoly has limited rewards.
I don't personally know any people who believe that hard work and talent have zero positive correlation with success. However I know many people who believe that parents' socioeconomic status, genetics, luck, birthplace, and lack of scruples are all much more significant factors.
I choose to actively reject that mindset because doing so motivates me to focus on elements within my control, but if I'm being honest I think they are probably correct, at least from a statistical perspective.
My take: "winning the lottery" in a Facebook sense requires a floor of talent and work at the early stages, but the odds of winning don't correlate with how much talent and work exists, nor are continued talent and work required once a critical mass of success has occurred. External factors - being in the right place at the right time, having some cushion of familial wealth, etc - dominate once you're over the floor.
Neither talent nor hard work have anything to do with helping humanity.
The reality is that our measurements of success don’t correlate with “goodness”, they correlate with getting stuff done. And you can do lots of evil stuff pretty easily.
The reason so many rich people seem evil is because they are. You don’t become rich via charity. You become rich by exploiting others and siphoning their success to yourself.
It’s just plainly evident in every sector of our economy. You don’t have to pay for the bad shit you do. Look at tobacco. Tobacco is a zero-value or negative-value industry. The sheer existence of tobacco actively makes the world a worse place.
But guess what? They don’t pay for your COPD medicine. They don’t pay for your congestive heart failure. But they will happily take your money for a carton.
All bad costs are externalizer, and all profit is kept. The end result is obvious. The more good you do, the stupider you are. The more evil you do, the more money you make.
Are you sitting in a room while typing this? At the margin to reduce the odds of heart attacks, you should be at a walking desk outdoors, or ideally not arguing on the internet at all. Someone trying to "help humanity" should decide the threshold of acceptable self harm for you, just like you feel free to decide it for smokers; then after determining how you should live, they can declare that the alternatives make the world a worse place.
If I was asked about the best correlate for being evil, honestly trying to make the world a better place by determining how specifically others should live would be on top of the list by a huge margin.
> If I was asked about the best correlate for being evil, honestly trying to make the world a better place by determining how specifically others should live would be on top of the list by a huge margin.
Really? Telling people, "hey, don't give other's poison, that's bad"... is worse than giving other's poison? You actually believe that?
To give some context, I used to smoke. For a long time!
Nobody wants to smoke. The only people that want you to smoke are the people literally extracting value out of your rotting corpse.
Look, if you actually think those people are better, then whatever. Clearly this isn't something I can dispute or even try to argue against so who cares. Just... find some medication or something, I don't know. This pathetic, self-destructive method of thinking can't be right.
>Does anyone actually believe that hard work and talent are either zero or negatively correlated to success?
On average or for a particular person? Maybe on average there’s an effect (r=.4), so there will be many people for whom that correlation is in their individual case actually negative. Some struggle with this notion, and assume success must signal talent or hard work in individual cases. How one defines success matters a lot too. If one is comparing zuck to some random CEO, say collison, can you say zuck is more hardworking or talented? He is more successful on paper, but I doubt he is significantly more hardworking or talented.
But negative, but success is correlated to success so much that at some point work and talent are irrelevant. Let's say Zuck has an idea to make something. He has enough people around him discussing ideas that he can basically pick one he likes and it's already pre-filtered. Then he can give it to basically anytime he chooses, with arbitrary skills threshold and resource allocation. Then he's got a whole support network to make it work. And if it falls? A loss of a few millions means nothing to him and he can try again.
Every step of that is inaccessible to someone hardworking and talented. So let's say you got lucky once or was born with wealth available to you - you can skip the whole talent and work thing.
A lot of people seem to think of success as the sum of a bunch of independent variables: positioning + insight + hard work + talent + luck - scruples ... Then, they argue about the relative magnitude of each term.
It's obviously more complex than this, but I think it's more useful to think of it as a product. You don't need a high value in any of them to succeed, but a tiny value in even one means you need an astronomical value somewhere else.
I think you can certainly make some of your own luck via hard work, but there is a difference between actually making on your own, and starting on 3rd base.
At school I used to play marbles. I had no skill whatsoever so I did "set ups" where I put a marble down and other kids threw theirs from a standard distance to hit it. If they missed the marble was mine. More valued marbles got more chances.
I got "marble rich" because I knew who the good players were and when one came a long I put my foot over my marble. Once you knew the trick it was impossible not to win on average and be a few marbles better off every day. Even a slight positive over a few weeks turns into a lot.
At a certain point I stopped finding this desirable and felt a bit guilty about it - the marbles were of no use to me really and it was enough to know that I had the trick of succeeding.
I wonder if this is roughly how people get wealthy in real life other than that they don't think "enough".
I suspect talent and hard work are pretty well correlated with becoming wealthy (say >$10m), but I think you then need a big injection of luck to take you from wealthy to ultra wealthy.
How many are born into it? If I think about the people that I personally know who are worth 8-figures or more they were each born into wealth. I wouldn't ever say that they also don't work hard and have talent, because they truly do, but it doesn't apply to their wealth.
Talent and hard work at what is what's missing from these discussions, I think.
I literally don't even know what kind of work I should do if I wanted to make a billion dollars. I think it's mostly delegating, and convincing people to give me ownership of things that throw off money that I get, or to invest in things for which I have such ownership so my ownership becomes more valuable. But in concrete terms, I don't even know what to do to make that happen, like, step 1 of that process, I have no idea. Just being talented at programming and working hard at it (more talented than I am, and working harder than I do, even) doesn't seem to be a great way to get there. You have to focus on and have talent for activities that cause capital to end up owned by you, and I have zero idea where to even start with that kind of thing.
Meanwhile, I was socialized as a kid into a smear of multiple Fussellian "Prole" categories, plus his "Middle", so I have to hype myself up and still feel bad just to hire a plumber and not hover around them because I feel like I ought to be helping (and definitely feel like I've failed on some level any time I choose to do that instead of doing the work myself), and the notion of owning a business but not working at, or just being a kind of hype-man for it mostly for my personal benefit, weirds me the fuck out, it feels fragile and strange. Why would people let me do that and make so much money from it? It's so weird; I get that's how things work, but the idea of doing it feels scary and kinda gross, and I don't mean because of risk of failure.
I think I'd need a huge mindset shift and a totally different skillset to get actually-rich. I'd need to be a different person entirely. Meanwhile there's a long list of things I am or could become talented at, and could work hard at, and that produce real value, that might make me a living but will never get me past seven or maaaaybe with a ton of right-place-right-time luck ten digits of lifetime earnings, let alone net worth.
I think it was a Steve Jobs quote, paraphrase "it's 5% the idea, 95% implementation".
Lots of very intelligent and talented people out there. But when you have the good fortune of coming up with a great idea (Facebook in the mid 00's) you have to use your talent to relentlessly implement it.
This is what separates the plebs from the ultra wealthy. Intelligence + talent + idea + implementation = success
I think it was a Tutankhamun quote, paraphrase "it's 5% the idea and the implementation, 95% having been born into a family who are very wealthy and who also happen to do a good job instilling the innate belief in you that dominating in business is everything".
There's a shockingly large number of people out there with buckets of "intelligence + talent + ideas" who never get the opportunity to move to the "implementation" phase of anything as they're too busy surviving, and the world is all the poorer for it.
As if that cruel ignominy weren't enough on its own, we are also blessed with the spectacle of ignoramuses piling up and blaming the "plebs" for a situation they've no control over. What a double whammy.
I'd argue that every billionaire has a talent for persuading capable people to join them on a journey.
Having that skill alone isn't enough because you also need to pick the right journey at the right time, but not having that skill definitely means you won't be a billionaire.
This makes me think of early employees in a startup that goes through an IPO or acquisition. Skill and talent get you through the door but heaps and heaps of luck lead to that event. Having personally won a (minor) startup lottery I got to see the luck factor first hand.
Meh. If you get lucky once and make a chunk of money or were born into money, people will associate that success with skill rather than luck, and follow you hoping that luck repeats. You don't need the skill if you can point at a big house and a nice car.
"if hard work was all you needed to get rich, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire".
The clothes I'm wearing right now were probably made by a sweatshop laborer working 12 hours a day under awful conditions, getting paid something like 1% of what I make in my tranquil 7 hour workday sitting comfortably at a computer.
I therefore think that just hard work has an almost zero correlation to success by itself.
If you add in "addressing a valuable market", then yes, hard work helps, in that more effort spent addressing that market will likely yield higher rewards. But working hard on something people don't want will not yield success, in my view.
"The horse was the best worker in the kolkhoz, but never became its chairman". Heck, there is an entirely too depressing to read (but probably mostly correct) theory about how the office politics work [0] and I imagine it roughly translates to the other fields as well. Putting lots of efforts into some random thing most likely won't make you rich and/or powerful. It's putting the effort into becoming rich and powerful that gets you there — but that takes a rather particular personality and skill set.
Enormous numbers of humans work hard and are talented at the things they do. Hard work and talent gets you a middle-class existence, at least if you were born in the right country and with the right resources to go to university, etc.
In the case of Zuck, he basically did play a lottery ticket, and a perfect confluence of being in the right place at precisely the right time yielded some success. A million other programmers, working just as hard and just as talented, were trying to make their web app hit at that time and failed.
That's how life is. It is a lottery ticket that Zuck is super rich. And it's a strawman to act as if pointing this out means that hard work and talent don't matter.
And FWIW, the overwhelming predicate of significant business success is sociopathy. I am kind of a broken record on this, but I think Meta's entire business is basically the oxycontin of the online world, and that everyone involved should feel absolute shame about the negative value they bring to the world. Non-sociopaths would have felt shame and changed course when they realized they were getting rich on the mentally ill, conspiracies, misinformation, etc.
> The overwhelming predicate of significant business success is sociopathy
Bingo. Now good luck getting such message into heads of star-stuck young folks who dream of faang and similar jobs thinking there is some respect to get there in 2025, when its all about money.
I work in banking, much better job than startup/faangs could offer here in Europe, at least people aren't so naive when joining. Had a discussion with my boss recently and we figured we have around 40% of management visibly falling under various sociopathic definitions. Not requirement per se but certainly helps thrive up there.
> dream of faang and similar jobs thinking there is some respect to get there in 2025
Something that has bothered me in recent times is how much more concerned people are with where they work as opposed to what they work on. I honestly believe people would design software to kill puppies and kittens so long as they could tell people they work at a Big N company.
Not to mention, I think a vast majority of the products and services that come out of these Big N companies have increasingly started to reflect this mentality each passing year and have so for the past decade or more.
Yes, it's totally sensible that someone would setup an experiment to prove a conjecture in a comment thread that will be forgotten in a couple hours. Totally reasonable ask.
Skill and effort obviously has a part in explaining success.
That aside, I can’t be the only person tired of people bringing envy politics to this forum, trying to shoehorn wealth into every single discussion involving someone who is wealthy, as if that’s the only, or even a valid, way to look at everything they do.
In order to get into Zuckerberg’s position in the first place, you need to have a highly competitive personality type. And competitive people want to win at EVERYTHING, all the time. It’s a constant compulsion. Even if they might intellectually understand the distinction between “just a game” and “actual serious time”, they don’t “feel” that distinction in their bones. They have no off switch.
I think there are some similar remarks on Bill Gates in another good memoir by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen [1]. Even on his school days, Gates was so sure he will not have a competition on Math, since he was the best at math at his school. When he went to Harvard, (which I somehow remember as Princeton(!) as pointed out by a commenter) and saw people better than him, he changed to applied math from Pure math. (Remarks are Paul's)
> I was decent in math and Bill was brilliant, but I spoke from experience at Wazzu. One day I watched a professor cover the black board with a maze of partial differential equations, and they might as well have been hieroglyphics from the Second Dynasty. It was one of those moments when you realize, I just can’t see it. I felta little sad, but I accepted my limitations. I was OK with being a generalist.
> For Bill it was different. When I saw him again over Christmas break, he seemed subdued. I asked him about his first semester and he said glumly, “I have a math professor who got his PhD at sixteen.” The course was purely theoretical, and the homework load ranged up to thirty hours a week. Bill put everything into it and got a B. When it came to higher mathematics, he might have been one in a hundred thousand students or better. But there were people who were one in a million or one in ten million, and some of them wound up at Harvard. Bill would never be the smartest guy in that room, and I think that hurt his motivation. He eventually switched his major to applied math.
Even Paul admits, he was torn between going into Engineering or Music. But, when he saw his classmate giving virtuoso performance, he thought "I am never going to as great as this." So, he chose engineering.
Huh. I remember being miles ahead of my peers in computer science in high school. When getting to college and finding people most definitely better than I was, I was incredibly excited to finally find such people, not scared away.
in my experience, people who grow up as the biggest fish in a small pond (whether concerning just fields they care about, or in general) are always 99% of the time, one of these two when they end up a middling fish in the big pond: like you, happy to find peers and inspiring exemplars to collaborate with and learn from, or those who hate that they are not the best anymore.
the former group probably leads the healthiest & happiest life fulfillment while pursuing their interests — i'm heavily biased though because i too fall into this category and am proud of this trait.
the latter group consists of people who either spin their wheels real hard and more often than not burn out in their pursuit of being the best, or pivot hard into something else they think they can be the best at (often repeatedly every time they encounter stronger competition) like gates & co, or in rare cases succeed in being the best even in the more competitive environment.
this last .001% are probably people whose egos get so boosted from the positive reinforcement that they become "overcompetitive" and domineering like zuck or elon, and let their egos control their power and resources to suppress competition rather than compete "fairly" ever again.
i think there's a subset of people from both main groups that may move from one into the other based on life experiences, luck, influence of people close to them, maturity, therapy, or simply wanting something different from life after a certain point. i don't have a good model for whether this is most people, or a tiny percentage.
I think the more common outcome you're not seeing, for the "other" group, is that they just go back to smaller ponds where they excelled in the first place, and often make strong contributions there.
Once it's been observed that there are bigger fish, you can't really go back to the naive sense of boundless potentiality, but you can go back to feeling like a strong and competent leader among people who benefit from and respect what you have.
Your comment focuses on the irrepressibly ambitious few who linger in the upper echelons of jet-setting academia and commerce and politics, trying to find a niche while constantly nagged by threats to their ego (sometimes succeeding, sometimes not), but there's many more Harvard/etc alum who just went back to Omaha or Baltimore or Denver or Burlington and made more or less big things happen there. That road is not so unhealthy or unhappy for them.
this is a very good point, and a blind spot in my comment because IME people who left the small pond in the first place were dissatisfied and unfulfilled there.
it is absolutely possible that after experiencing the bigger pond, people can develop purpose in their "original" pond based on values like community and relationships, or even simply dislike the vibes in bigger ponds and want to undo as much as they can. this is a super valuable thing to society and humanity for the most part, as perhaps more change can happen this way than big things happening in big places.
personally i struggle with this, because whenever i re-enter a smaller ecosystem (including/such as the one i grew up around) i feel like everyone has a distorted view of the bigger pond and self-limit themselves, which is a contagious energy i can't stand.
Excuse me for generalizing the point. That's not fair to do just based on these anecdotes. But, I can also understand their perspective.
Paul continued to be a guitar player all his life and hosted jamming sessions in his home. I started with piano very late in my life and not very regular, but I am just happy to join the fun party.
Congratulations on learning piano. I think everyone who is capable of learning an instrument should consider it.
Rachmaninoff once said, "Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music." So, no matter when one starts, there would never be enough time to truly master the craft.
I believe it is better for one to start late and enjoy it than start early and burnout.
That’s not a common reaction with humans. When people are the best, there’s a huge serotonin rush. Like literally this is measurable in humans.
Serotonin regulates dominance hierarchies and is associated with happiness. It’s so biological in nature that the same effect can be witnessed in lobsters. People or lobsters high in dominance have more serotonin and are generally happier.
Your story is not only anomalous. But it’s anomalous to the point where it’s unrealistic too. I can’t comment on this but if you did not feel the associated come down of serotonin I’m more inclined to say you’re not being honest with yourself more then you’re a biological anomaly. There’s likely enough variation in genetics to produce people like you so I’m not ruling it out.
I don’t think they said anything about their serotonin. They just described their reaction to the situation. If we were able to ask lobsters about their self-experience we might learn something about them too.
A less unflattering interpretation might be that once they saw the level of skill required to contribute to a field, they switched to a field that they could more meaningfully contribute to.
I think the reality though is you don't need to be in the top 99.999% to contribute to a field, you just need a unique take/voice. Trying to be the best at anything is a bad strategy in a connected world
Yeah, but these are also about people who are not even starting off at a field. These are teenagers. It really stood out that they can think where they can make most impact in the world at such an young age.
What are you talking about? Our society harasses every teenager to think again and again and give definite answers to exactly that kind of question. It's completely normal and exactly like every other young person.
> Even Paul admits, he was torn between going into Engineering or Music. But, when he saw his classmate giving virtuoso performance, he thought "I am never going to as great as this." So, he chose engineering.
Coincidentally, I had a very similar experience, and made a similar decision to switch to software engineering. However, the irony is that I am also just a bad, if not worse, at software engineering. Oh well, not a day goes by that I regret my decision.
> I was decent in math and Bill was brilliant, but I spoke from experience at Wazzu. One day I watched a professor cover the black board with a maze of partial differential equations, and they might as well have been hieroglyphics from the Second Dynasty. It was one of those moments when you realize, I just can’t see it. I felta little sad, but I accepted my limitations. I was OK with being a generalist.
> For Bill it was different. When I saw him again over Christmas break, he seemed subdued. I asked him about his first semester and he said glumly, “I have a math professor who got his PhD at sixteen.” The course was purely theoretical, and the homework load ranged up to thirty hours a week. Bill put everything into it and got a B. When it came to higher mathematics, he might have been one in a hundred thousand students or better. But there were people who were one in a million or one in ten million, and some of them wound up at Harvard. Bill would never be the smartest guy in that room, and I think that hurt his motivation. He eventually switched his major to applied math.
When I was 18 years old and a new classical guitar student, I was very fortunate to hear the Maestro in concert. I even got to meet him briefly afterward because my music professor had some connection to him.
I was blown away at the time by what was possible and that, even though he was very old at the time and had to be led out onstage by the arm, needed help getting seated, and had the guitar placed in his lap, what he could still play was so far advanced of anyone in my class who were all in attendance.
The temptation (and I have felt this many times since then after hearing various guitarists) could have been "I should just quit now because I'll never be that good." But I'm glad I didn't succumb to that and decided that "I'd rather not sound like anyone else" and still feeling pleasure and accomplishment from playing on my own terms.
My classical guitar instructor was well acquainted with Segovia, and he himself, was a student of Julian Bream. However, my instructor was without a doubt one of the most angry people I think I have ever interacted with. He was somewhat better known for his arrangements and less so as a performer.
> "I should just quit now because I'll never be that good."
I never had to think about this because my instructor would often tell me this. XD
And to understand that there are people who are much better, to internalize it and change the major also requires some intelligence. I wish I had that insight instead of banging my head against the walls, barely passing while others sailed through and continued to Phd with half my effort.
> In order to get into Zuckerberg’s position in the first place, you need to have a highly competitive personality type. And competitive people want to win at EVERYTHING, all the time.
Many competitive people want to win, but they want to win the real game, not a rigged version.
> Many competitive people want to win, but they want to win the real game, not a rigged version.
There are far, far fewer of these people than you think. Lance Armstrong was the best, and he cheated to win anyway. Barry Bonds was the best, and he cheated to win anyway. Tom Brady was the best, and he cheated to win anyway.
The thing Tom Brady is accused of (deflating footballs) is scientifically proven to be a result of the ideal gas law. The NFL admitted they had no idea that was a thing when they levied the accusations at him.
Even if you believe the NFL and it was "more probable than not" that he was "generally aware" of a scheme to deflate the balls, let's not pretend that accusation is even in the same universe as what Bonds and Armstrong did
>Many competitive people want to win, but they want to win the real game, not a rigged version.
Apply the phrase to the staff member he lost to, and the situation makes sense. The staff member wants to win the real game (of remaining a high-salary Facebook employee), and will throw an otherwise inconsequential game of Catan to maintain that position's security.
The do anything to win mentality often includes bending the rules where they can. Someone listed some top people in their various sports below but I'd include Lebron too. Dude is the best basketball player the world has ever seen at least when considering longevity but he still flops often to get what he wants even though he doesn't need to to win. He's just going to get every edge.
The game of capitalism is to win by any means necessary. Rigging the game and evading the law is part of game itself. All winners play the game this way.
It's not competition that they like. It's winning.
Competitive athletes expect to lose. They don't want to lose, but there's only one winner (or three podium spots) in any given contest. They turn "not wanting to lose" into their motivation for getting better, still knowing that they are fairly likely to lose. The competition is the point, and when they lose, they are still a little happy if they did better than they did last time.
The people who want to win regardless of the competition, regardless of the rules: we call those people bullies.
>A couple years back, I got a job offer from an investment bank to help them win zero sum games against people who didn't necessarily deserve to lose. I had tried very hard to get that offer
I can recall being this way as a small child. So had I not been disciplined as a child so that I would not be a sore loser, did this blunt something that would have led to my being more "successful"?
I think that while the trait itself is fairly common the ability to bully and pressure everyone around you to give in to this level of petty and demeaning deference is quite rare. You only see it in powerful people because they're the only ones who can actually make people do this.
I have an aunt like this and she's super annoying and largely ostracized and in constant conflict with people around her, but if she had $175 billion she could probably surround herself with people who would indulge her.
Money is a potent and addictive hallucinogenic neurotoxin. We have a culture where everything is run by addicts, with predictably disastrous consequences.
The two sour losers I know just refuse to play any game at all. Cooperative games or team games they think are kinda fine though of they are "forced to". They just can't handle being targeted as individuals.
I'm like that and really I have lots of free time because of not playing any competitive games
Downside is I obviously don't use that free time to do anything I'm not already skilled at, like art or music or writing or exercise (except for rock climbing which I manage to not be competitive at)
A few years back (2015ish?) I read a big magazine profile of Michael Jordan in his post-basketball life and I was really surprised by how unhappy he seemed - extraordinarily competitive at everything, even casual games of golf, running up huge gambling debts, etc.
This is a guy who was the most dominant athlete of his generation, arguably the greatest the ever play the game, and yet he can't turn it off, he can't relax and rest on his laurels. The same personality quirks that drove him to win at basketball mean he can't tolerate losing in any arena.
Arguably, to be great at modern sports, you have to be good at multiple unrelated thing (On field strategy, Physical Conditioning, Actually the sport itself, playing politics, doing all of that while listening to coach), either you have that kind of drive to be the best at all of them or you'll just be a good athlete
I'm pretty sure this is the correct and intuitive reason.
In a competition to be 'ever above everything else',
tragically it selects for the most pathologically ruthless behaviour pattern,
be it Musk or Putin.
If there were a contestant even more unscrupulous than you,
he'd take your place.
So, as long as we allow/tolerate obscene wealth, we invariably get this.
And if we try to avoid it the wrong way, we get Stalin.
What a ridiculous video that's reading way too much into a silly 5 second clip.
Bill Gates may be competitive, but this specific event, and the whole idea that it somehow represents a shift, is completely unrelated to the current topic. People have different private and public personas, and even present different personas to different people. This is completely normal, and often the only way to cope with being a celebrity, especially for introverted personality types.
It's only 5 seconds edited down to match your attention span. Exceed it, I suppose, because the fact that personas exist is not the pertinent part, it's the glimpse past BillG's persona to see the compulsive competitive behavior: inventing a chair game, "cheating" at it, and instead of brushing it off as silly fun (which everyone would have accepted) getting increasingly flustered until he walked out of an interview.
Speaking of which, if you watch the (nearly) full interview[1] instead of that 5 second clip, you'll realize that the chair jumping bit had nothing to do with the reason he walked out of that interview. I couldn't find the full version, but you can see that towards the end he gets annoyed at the constant prodding to get him to admit some wrongdoing. The entire segment is made to portray him as some out-of-touch rich guy and tyrant that abuses his employees and competitors. Just poor television all around, more interested in promoting sensationalism for engagement purposes, than showing an honest image of the person. The chair jumping bit is proof of this, given that it's the only thing the public remembers.
Extrapolating that bit to make some grand assumption about his personality is beyond ridiculous.
I think it's easy to believe a narrative like this about someone generally disliked, but the reality about basically everyone is that we have good moments and bad moments. People that are famous are constantly being watched and evaluated.
Given the inevitability of those bad moments being observed and reported, I don't think it's a good foundation for evaluating someone's character. In this case, it's mostly useful for confirming an already negative point of view.
from the article you linked, it seems that Zuck told everyone else to gang up on the next hardest player so he could win.
That they went along with it is... kind of in line with what Wynn-Williams said.
Would they still have all teamed up on Zuck's opponent if Zuck hadn't been their boss?
I know a number of wealthy folks, many of them, actually really decent people. They deserve their wealth, and I have no issues with it. They tend to have somewhat different value systems than I do, but we get along, anyway.
I have learned that one word they pretty much never hear, is "No."
Even the very best of them, gets used to having every whacked-out fever dream their Id squeezes out, treated like God's Word.
People who aren't very good at self-analysis and self-control, can have real problems with it.
We are watching a bunch of very public examples of exactly this, right now.
How wealthy are the wealthy folks you know ? a quant or faang principal engineer making 1.5-2 million/year is wealthy and worked hard to get there (although, luck is still a big part of it) yet they're much closer in wealth than a fast food employee than they are to the super rich. Someone who has accumulated 50 millions of assets is wealthy, yet they'll never afford a super yacht or the lifestyle that billionaires can afford.
the principle engineer may have a lot of money but also still has a job with a boss and thus probably still hears (or know they can potentially hear) "no".
In the 1800s in Spain, king Ferdinand VII, was famously keen on playing billiards while being a really bad player. His opponents were known to, not only play badly, but play so that he would get easy positions to shoot.
"Así se las ponían a Fernando VII" is even nowadays a popular -though not that widely used today- expression to tell someone the task in front of them is an easy one nobody can fail.
Being ultra wealthy/famous/powerful would have a lot of negative psychological pressures that would likely effect all of us in that situation. Personal growth is difficult. Acknowledging negative parts of ourselves is difficult. Many times, we are forced to confront something negative about ourselves because of how it effects our lives and our relationships.
I think we have all had that friend at some point that was a poor sport. They were poor losers, gloating winners, and just unpleasant to play games with. Usually that person stops getting invited to game night, or you have a “come to Jesus” talk with them about their behavior. The social pressure of losing friends is a powerful motivator.
But what if that person has an unlimited supply of people that would validate, flatter, and reinforce their bad behavior? When you are thinking about who to hang out with from your unlimited rolodex, you will likely subconsciously lean towards people that make you feel validated, understood, respected, etc. Slowly, by degrees, over years, you could find yourself surrounded by sycophants, where you more and more validated and catered to, and are less and less used to hearing constructive criticism of your behavior.
It reminds me of how highly processed “junk” foods can short circuit a lot of our physiological mechanisms around overeating. Basically unlimited availability of junk food is part of why obesity is has shot up. Being ultra wealthy/famous/powerful is the highly processed food of the psyche. It doesn’t mean every rich person become psychologically unhealthy but it makes the rates of it shoot up.
> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
Yes. As a kid, I read a legend that one of the Charlemagne's knights got so annoyed for losing a game of chess that he killed his opponent with the chessboard.
I agree that such an event would demonstrate insecurity. I would also argue that past elites were not “that insecure”, because they put their lives at risk by waging wars. Of course, later elites figured out ways to address the downsides.
There's a frame question in this, and the history of duelling. Is your image, or self-image, in matters of honor or social status more important than your life? Is it secure or insecure to risk your life simply because of an insult? To what extent does "security" in this context boil down to the capacity for violence, rather than anything else?
But duels were instituted primarily to curb vendettas, deadly street brawls, and retaliatory assassinations that aristocrats regularly engaged in. At least with a duel, the violence was limited to one death and a settlement to the honor of all involved. It was in improvement to the situation they were facing at the time.
But the idea of honor itself was a necessity for most of history, when there was no central government to enforce contracts, punish violence, etc. Your reputation was one of the only protections you had. Whether your family was known to exact revenge to those that wronged you or as weak pushovers would affect someone’s decision to kill one of you, steal your things, or make a deal with you and keep everything for themselves.
You had to show that anything someone could gain at your expense would be outweighed by your commitment to take more back in revenge.
It's hard to speak broadly about this I think but since we already are. Military aristocrats like knights were at the least risk among combatants in an armed conflict, being better armed, armored, and more likely to be mounted compared to the levied militias or even professional soldiers, later in the early modern era.
And social norms at the time were to take them hostage and ransom them back to their family or allied higher lord if possible, so their chances of surviving a lost battle were much higher than that of the men they were leading. So even in this context they are already figuring out "ways to address the downsides."
Vs the like, the normal people who would also be called on to die in battle, but then the rest of the time would be living under the capricious and frequently violent rule of these certainly-no-more-than-average-emotionally-secure men with more or less unchecked power over their daily lives.
What we have now developed from what they had then and a lot of the dynamics are quite similar. The violence is more abstract but that's exactly what the current crop of tech billionaires is trying to change.
I think you'll see this kind of thing in many professions. Some doctors, who are highly specialized and highly trained in their field, act like they should automatically be great at skills they barely have experience with, and then get frustrated when they don't immediately excel or when people with less impressive credentials end up being better at something.
My family member who taught flying to hobbyist pilots always said physicians were the most dangerous students because of their "know-it-all" attitude.
>> Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy? Does anyone who fails to bend over backwards for them just end up getting exiled? Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
There is a long history of wealthy elites wanting to always win, even at games, and who want to be the center of attention.
Kaiser Wilhelm II had many of the same characteristics seen in today's ultrawealthy elites. When he commanded forces in German military exercises his side was always the side that won because it was his side.
"Wilhelm II's reign marked a departure from the more restrained leadership of his predecessors, as he sought to assert direct influence over the German Empire's governance and military affairs. This shift toward a more "personalist" system, where loyalty to the Kaiser outweighed true statesmanship, weakened the effectiveness of German leadership and contributed to its eventual strategic missteps."
>This shift toward a more "personalist" system, where loyalty to the Kaiser outweighed true statesmanship, weakened the effectiveness of German leadership and contributed to its eventual strategic missteps."
I'm not convinced there has ever been a positive or constructive outcome from cults of personality.
> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
This is very Roman Emperor behavior. Or Chinese Emperor, for that matter. It has pretty much always been the case that power and privilege lets you get away with bad behavior while simultaneously holding your subordinates to onerous standards and/or inflicting punishment on a whim.
Building a court who will steer you away from bad ideas rather than surrounding yourself with yes-men requires active effort, and enough humility to be aware of that risk.
The other constant historical trope is of course the abuse of power for sexual purposes.
I had a conversation with one of these types. He honestly told me, "I really feel I am superior to most people". He was very frank with me. (And, in the things he did, he was actually much better than most people - he did have great talent but also spend almost all of his time on that.)
So my pet peeve theory is when they feel they are not superior and other people are better than them in activities that involve logical thinking for example, they feel extremely uncomfortable as their perception of themselves gets weaker, hence these strange behaviors.
When someone builds their whole identity around being "the smartest person in the room," any situation that challenges that (even something as trivial as losing a game) can feel like a threat to their entire self-image. It's not just ego, it's almost existential.
Success has a part of skill, and a part of luck. It hurts to be reminded about skill issues.
Board games aren't as simple as time invested. I could spend my whole life studying chess, and some 13yo prodigy will handily beat me blindfolded, while juggling three other boards.
Board games cannot be conquered with wealth or a successful business. Or, rather, they can, but only by pressuring your underlings into letting you win; giving you the feeling you crave.
Naw, the rare super talented 13yo child that excells at such games will have also spend an incredible amount of time learning everything there is about it - leaving very little time to pursuit outside of that discipline to improve themselves.
There is a grain of truth to what you're saying, obviously - as Magnus has proven when he started to enter chess tournaments... Outplaying people with decades more experience. But you're also ignoring that he spend pretty much every waking moment of his thinking life playing chess.
This is the more interesting answer to me because it's a reminder that everyone is playing a different game.
I used to play games to win, but now I play games to maximize the collective enjoyment of playing the game. This shift began with my spouse (who is a very sore loser) but continued with my children. I still let them lose sometimes because I want them to know how to enjoy a losing game, but I (selfishly) want them to enjoy games as much as I do, so that's my focus, and I will play to lose (as non-obviously as possible) frequently.
When I play games against good players now, I notice that I've lost a lot of skill in the kind of strategic ruthlessness required to win. I found this surprising, because playing in a way where you're trying to "fix" the outcomes for other players and modulate the mood of the game based on outcomes still requires a great deal of strategic insight and clever play. I guess the additional attention to the social and emotional dynamics must naturally reduce focus. It's kind of a shame, because you can't maximize enjoyment with a skilled player without being skilled, but I suppose the trade off is that there will always be more unskilled players who can benefit from enjoyment maximizing play than skilled players who will suffer from subpar opponents. Naturally, skilled players are already getting a lot out of the game, or else they wouldn't be playing enough to become skilled.
The need to dominate can be a favorable trait for success. It can also be all consuming that you can't easily turn off. Like...ok Zuck, you won the f'ing lottery. You could spend the rest of your life on an island or helping orphans, but you still work at Facebook - why? Because he's wrapped up in it. It's a miracle Bill Gates managed to step down.
It can also be unsettling to know that, just as easily as you killed off competitors, competitors could unseat you.
So yea, you might sleep a bit easier at night if you can just win at the things you can control, like that darn Settlers of Catan game.
Also someone who reflexively accuses the other of cheating while playing a game likely has a hard time admitting they failed at something. Not an admirable trait in a leader.
> And anyway, if you're playing games for fun and to bond with people, you probably shouldn't be playing tryhard optimal strategies every game, and should instead explore and experiment with more creative strategies.
Agreed. I have played some truly awful strategies in games (Azul: Queen’s Garden comes to mind) where it was clear within a round or two that it was doomed to fail; my wife / gaming partner expressed dismay that I was doggedly continuing, but to me, I had to see it through without introducing other variables so that I could definitively know (modulo luck of tile draw) that the strategy sucked. I thoroughly enjoyed losing.
EDIT: if anyone is curious, the strategy was to maximize high-point (5/6) tokens above everything else, eschewing end-round bonuses, brief tactical shifts, etc. Turns out it’s really hard to collect enough sets of them to count at game end, and you’re giving up compounding points along the way.
Really rich people aren't any different from the rest of us. You quickly realize that what sets them apart is privilege. You see behaviors in the wealthy that if they were poor they'd be locked up for. "They just let you do it if you're rich" comes to mind.
There is also a feedback effect. Most people are part of groups which aren't strongly selected for moral character, but the rich and powerful become surrounded by people who are after money and power, unless they deliberately manage to avoid that. So some of their bad behaviour is because the availability heuristic tells them that that's how most people behave, and fills them with cynicism and contempt
Right? I had a sort of respect for the Zuck, same partner for a long time, seems nice to his children, does charity… And then he gets one of those mega yachts and he can’t stand loosing at board games. So disappointing.
Surprise surprise, probably the image you had of Zuckerberg was not an intimate look into his personal life but instead a carefully crafted image created by an professional agency whose life and blood is creating neat images of famous people.
Somehow, actual real life details are starting to come out (he does seem more "daring" as of late, might be why), destroying the picture painted by the professionals for all this time.
Celebrity worship really needs to end, including the worship of the celebrity programmer. We're all humans, with a bunch of flaws, and it's easy to forget when what you're consuming is a fake impression of someone.
There is definitely a point where we need to stop assuming that people who are good at building tech companies are, by default, good at _anything_ else.
Imagine being so spineless, so utterly desperate for power, that you’re willing to contort your public persona just to appease a man who made lying a brand. Zuckerberg didn’t just sell out—he gift-wrapped his integrity and hand-delivered it to Cheetolini.
I know these types of people, a lot of them, but I am not one of them. I was a student at Harvard, I've dated the daughter of a film studio owner, the daughter of the then-owner of Gucci, I've worked at an Academy Award winning VFX studio, I know celebrities and CEOs, and I married an Academy Award winner. I know these people.
There is a mechanism in high wealth investment circles that seeks very ambitious and simultaneously low self knowledge individuals to invest heavily. They tend to be driven and charismatic in that drive, while being very ignorant of their negative impact on others. Many high net worth individuals see themselves in such youth, and invest in them, their ideas and their drive. They create psychopaths, and celebrate their mistakes as fuel for control of them later. This mechanism I am describing is very powerful, dominating.
The problem is also the justification stories they excrete to justify the wealth the capital machine pours on them. The whole gods choosen, superior, natural strong willed aristocratic uebermensch bottled into one cyst of sycophants. Totally unable to connect with "easily distracted by the trivial" normies, barely able to talk to the monomaniacs they once where themselves. Not a good show.
It looks at loads of dictators from history - Stalin, Hitler, Saddam Hussein.
What they all have in common is a love for loyalty and subservience. And they demand loyalty and subservience be constantly proven. Often in very weird and trivial ways.
Eg. Saddam Hussein liked to have a BBQ where he would cook (but not eat) and make the food inedible spicy. Then he would force his top people to eat it while he laughed at them.
They of course had to keep up the pretence that the food was delicious and pay him lots of compliments.
No one deserves that much more than others. No one believes they don't deserve what they have. People work backwards to justify why they need so much more power, control, and wealth than others. Worse for Zuck b/c his special shares.
The ambition/success feedback loop never stops, which is why the folks on top seem somehow less secure and content than the rest of us. Most of us figure out we probably won't be the #1 anything pretty early in our journey and stop fixating on comparison and focus on maximizing ourselves.
Most people have to make peace with not being №1, and in doing so, they actually get a shot at real contentment. But when you're at the top, the game never ends. There's always another metric to dominate, another threat to neutralize, another narrative to control.
> Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy?
Who says it's limited to the ultra wealthy? My network has a lot of people who have net worths of under $5-6 million USD and a lot of them are highly insecure.
I've witnessed several of them going out of their way to tear down people who are fitter or more attractive than them as well.
Look at the manbaby actions through that lens and you might get some insight.
Hmm. So highly insecure people have to "win" (however it's defined at the moment) in order to bury their insecurities for the moment, but ultra wealthy individuals 1) have more power, so they can make it so that they win more often, and 2) are noticed more (or at least by a wider circle), so when they do it, a lot more people pay attention.
>so when they do it, a lot more people pay attention.
It makes sense, media glamorizes these people and amplifies their actions, and some of the insecure folks crave attention. Look at that one guy who somehow works harder than all of us but is able to tweet all day every day...
It’s more so related to power. Once you’ve acquired enough power, it consumes most people. They don’t like having their power challenged or put in a weakened state. Many of these people are acquiring power via some form or their “genius”. Technical wunderkind, military strategy genius, etc. So that drives their ego. But, they probably know they’re not actually a genius and plenty of people could have done what they did but they got lucky. So they end up getting defensive and insecure when anything challenges their power, risks to expose their genius as a fraud, etc. They’re operating on a mental house of cards and are volatile due to it. For regular people, they seem to be triggered by small things like losing a card game but it’s probably just that, a trigger that unleashed a wave of pent up insecurity.
f you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
Zuck 'earning' another billion probably means nothing to him. I doubt he can even keep count. All of that sense of self-worth that people derive from their career or wealth is lost in the noise of Meta's stock price for him. But winning a board game is tangible. It's right there in front of him, as a direct result of his own actions. He can feel that.
If you couple that with him being surrounded by people who know that losing to him makes him feel good, and that Zuck is more generous when he's happy, you can see why people lose on purpose.
Probably have been told their whole lives that they are so smart, clever, and special, that they will (and rightly should) always win. So any loss immediately looks to them like foul play by their opponent(s). Even if it's just a casual game. Anyone telling them otherwise doesn't last long in their orbit. As they gain power, they naturally grow a bubble of sycophants who reinforce their "I always win" beliefs.
There's also no shortage of people willing to tell Zuck and Musk (from a relatively safe distance, like in public here at HN) that they're insecure manbabies born into wealth who don't deserve a fraction of the power they've managed to claw themselves. I suspect that we, and the desire to show us wrong (or at the least spite us) are also part of the equation for why the current crop of billionaires are as they are.
From an Eastern philosophy point of view, low ego with high confidence, is a skill that can be trained. It is also a skill someone can get worst at. That being said, I don't think that Zuck and Musk would have become low ego people without internet criticism, since they are on the completely wrong path.
Here on HN, we're not telling Zuck and Musk anything. We're telling each other things about Zuck and Musk. Zuck and Musk aren't dropping by to find out what we think of them, ever.
Figuratively speaking, we're telling them, since we're saying it loudly in public. You bet they know people are saying it. They might even peek in - we know some of their friends (arguably friends) who do, and Musk is among other things famous for being a bit of a social media addict.
Rich people's bubbles are thick, and their "outside-the-bubble" communication tends to be write-only. I highly doubt Zucc or Musk spends any time at all on places like HN or Reddit, and their comms on their respective social media platforms tend to be broadcast sending/writing and not reading comments or feedback. They rely on the sycophants in their orbit to give them the summarized, sanitized, positive feedback, and downplay/hide the negative.
We know Musk spends time on X. We also know he reads as well as writes, because he often replies to random things.
But even for a slightly wiser billionaire who does what you suggest - they wouldn't do that unless they knew they would get public hate, and were bothered by it. You don't have a thick bubble unless you understand that you need it.
You mean "us jealous poor people who are mad that he is bright and successful".
I've known a few people in the hundreds and millions of dollars in wealth category and that seemed to be their go to response when anyone had to say anything negative about their behaviors.
In the US at least, never underestimate the amount of calvinism and prosperity gospel that has creeped into every facet of our lives.
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
It’s possible that exact personality trait is what drove them to such success in the first place. Perhaps like an obsession with winning.
These guys are sort of like a type of inherited wealth. They created companies at a time where you could go public and have no accountability to a board with power.
When you take a genius and drown them in good fortune… you sometimes get a sense of personal infallibility.
> Being a billionaire must be insane. You can buy new teeth, new skin. All your chairs cost 20,000 dollars and weigh 2,000 pounds. Your life is just a series of your own preferences. In terms of cognitive impairment it's probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day
It raises the question: where is the crack in this structural system, and how can we pry it open? Perhaps the vulnerability lies in the desire of the ultra-rich and powerful for societal respect—whether born of love or fear hardly matters. How should society respond? Mercilessly mock them.
We all have personal quirks which would appear silly if publicly known. But most of us are not billionares, so these quirks do not come to light, or do not seem that strange in ordinary people. "Not wanting to lose at board games" is actually quite a mild personal quirk compared to some of the things I know about myself or about my close friends. I know a guy who spends 20 minutes picking out tomatoes.
> If you're wildly successful at something … why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
> And anyway, if you're playing games for fun and to bond with people…
I think it's easy to unknowingly surround yourself with yes-men and become insulated from failure. Losing then seems like an exception to the rule, a bug.
There's lots of talk in the entertainment world, from the long-term famous, about how money and fame tend to be fundamentally warping. Bill Murray said to Pete Davidson that, once it happens, nearly everyone is an asshole for about two years. People fawn all over you; they do things for you. They give you things for free. You can get things normal people can't get. If you're making a few million a year, you have economic power beyond nearly everyone you've ever known. At a certain level, travel is a whim, not a slog through TSA and airport lines. And you lose the ability to deal with pushback of any kind.
The smart ones -- the ones with some capacity for self-awareness -- course-correct. The others don't.
But in Hollywood, one assumes, the bubble is far less perfect than the one around someone like Zuck, whose power over Facebook is absolute and inviolate, and who has money and power beyond almost every other person on the planet. So there's only a very small chance of any course-correction, and thus he stays an asshole, and that assholery extends to insisting that he win at trivial board games.
It's weird how moments can go from "we were playing a game when.." to "The New York Times is covering a game we played 15 years ago". What I've heard from people who were in the game was that he wanted to go to bed so he was trying to negotiate a quick end to the game. There was a time at a con where I did something similar (i.e. we had to finish, we couldn't just leave the game setup and play later.)
Everything is viewed through a mirror darkly.
"HE FORCED OTHERS TO KNEEL BEFORE HIM, EVEN IN BOARD GAMES!1!" vs. "He wanted to go to bed so made a dickhead comment that would let him both win and sleep." Think back to your 20s, which feels more likely.
At the Versailles court of the Louies there were constant parties and games, gambling and otherwise. It wasn't to bond or for fun, it was to keep the aristocracy too busy to threaten the dictatorship, as well as letting the king exert an immediate influence over them through a borderline insanity.
Infamously the first or second Versailles Louis, I forgot which, got very aggressive around the topic of toilet excretions, basically forcing aristocrats to try and handle being drunk and desperately needing both to piss and stay in his vicinity. The ceremony around the parties and the court in general over time got more and more intricate and maddening, causing the aristocracy to spend more and more resources on getting clothes and drinks and showing up at the right time and doing the right thing and being on top of the fashion of the day.
It would be weird if a late modern corporate dictator didn't apply similar tactics, since they are known to work and didn't come to an end until the guillotines rolled into town. Things like sleepovers in the office, ceremonial games, constant 'after work', oddball demands regarding clothing and behaviour, intimate surveillance and gossiping, and so on.
>Things like sleepovers in the office, ceremonial games, constant 'after work', oddball demands regarding clothing and behaviour, intimate surveillance and gossiping, and so on.
That sounds more like a cult than a company.
I don't understand why anyone would put up with that, if they had any other alternative. And most people do have alternatives.
With the number of people that have been swept up in cults over history the entire idea that "people can just easily leave" doesn't seem to pan out well.
Finding those companies is hard, especially when there's an obvious winner. Hell, I'd have joined facebook (not in hindsight, though) in the early 2000s because the specific challenges they were facing would have been novel. That being said, I'd likely feel terrible for what FB became had I did.
I visited the FB campus ~2015 on the invitation of some former colleagues that worked there. It felt very culty at the time and I left with the vague feeling that I always got when I left the house of my spoiled and over-privileged friend that I had in grade school. How they were working with the scale of data that they had to deal with was very cool, though.
Corporations are commonly run as cults, at least to some extent. It could be demands of loyalty ('we're a family'), personality cult, dress code, 'teambuilding exercises' and so on.
The alternatives usually involve a threat of more uncertainty or misery.
Louis XIV had a notably insecure childhood, with portions of the nobility were in open rebellion. When he came of age, he set about to make damn sure that they were under his thumb.
But the parallel seems lacking to me: Musk and Zuckerman can't jail recalcitrant managers.
Sure, every tyrant has a story that superficially allows some shift of blame.
They could, though. It's just that they likely would have to do something more involved than depriving them of their contracts, which is often enough to get rid of the problem and unlike an aristocracy where bloodlines and births set limits there are now institutions that produce replacements 'at scale'.
I think power sometimes leads to this kind of insecurity, but a bigger factor is that people with narcissistic personalities often succeed because ordinary people are unaccustomed to dealing with them. Narcissists often come off as unusually competent, confident, and intimidating. This leads normies to want to follow them and give them what they want.
Narcissists are always extremely insecure, usually because someone crushed their ego during childhood. (There also exist people with intact egos who are simply arrogant; I'm not talking about them. The arrogant are easy to distinguish from narcissists after you study them a bit.)
My point is that Zuck was probably very insecure before the creation of FB, and he became rich partially because he was an insecure narcissist.
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
All the other comments are about Zuckerberg being an out-of-touch egomaniac, but I think this is a reflection of people.
We want our leaders to be infaliable and we use the stupidest metrics to judge people. Remember how Ed miliband eating a sandwich became a scandal? For every one person that would see losing as not a big deal, there's like ten people that will think "this guy can't win a game of settlers of Catan, and he's running the company???".
I am reminded of that joe rogan clip where he's just in awe of Elon Musk because of his Diablo rankings or something. People feed into the mythology.
It's all stupid and insane, but I don't see how anyone can look at the current state of politics or the stock market and not say that the world is full of crazy things that just run on vibes.
> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
The modern phenomenon, relative to history in general, is that upsetting an elite doesn't get you immediately killed or sold into slavery. But yes, they have always been like this. Behind every great fortune is a crime, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
i see it in local politics a lot too, people don't dare to contradict the leaders, who in turn end up believing they are right on everything, it's a sad thing really
It’s part of the pathology. So much so it’s violating otherwise core tenets of their culture and customs:
Look, today meritocracy and brutal honesty are absolutes, they’re considered critical, exactly to overcome biases that stand in your way. The Zuck types are 100% believers in this (heck they accelerated it), yet they still need positive affirmations like winning board games.
Most people (especially smart and opportunistic ones) fold because they know winning a private board game means nothing.
He should have eaten his own dog food and played the games inside the Metaverse where he could have had the environment ensure his desired outcome. But maybe the Metaverse itself is now a painful reminder of failure.
> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
I don't think _all_ the superrich _are_ this insecure. Like, the obvious examples of this sort of behaviour are Trump (golf, in particular), Musk (video game nonsense), Zuck (this). But all three of those are very obviously fucked-up, socially maladjusted people in _other_ ways, too. Potentially the issue is more that being very rich allowed them to _get away_ with this behaviour; poor weirdos have more incentive to suppress it because people will only accept it from rich weirdos.
Though the phenomenon of "adult manbaby gets upset when not allowed to win game (especially by his partner)" is _absolutely_ out there, even for non-absurdly-rich people; see any subreddit about relationships for examples.
That phenomenon is certainly not exclusive to men. All it takes is someone insecure enough to feel that losing a game threatens their sense of worth as a person.
Nah, definitely not exclusive to men, but you do see it more from men. I think possibly at least partially because it _is_ seen as somewhat more socially acceptable from men than from women; the boy who never grew up is viewed more favourably than the girl who ditto.
> All it takes is someone insecure enough to feel that losing a game threatens their sense of worth as a person
You also need them to think that they'll get away with this behaviour, whether it be just being very rich, or because there is some societal tolerance of Homer Simpson-esque emotionally immature men, or for some other reason.
That's interesting becasue at least with Zuckerberg, he entered a local bjj tournament under a fake name.
And tbh if you eventually do find yourself against him your going to want the opportunity to say you submitted him. No one's letting him win at a tournament
It's an old problem. Medieval kings had this problem. One way around it was the fool/jester, who could (within limits) say the things that nobody else was free to say.
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
I think that successful people tend to be people who pay a lot of attention to "winning" in as many situations as possible. If you accept losing as a part of life and move on, you're not going to be successful, because you don't spend time thinking how you could've won. Of course this looks funny in situations where one cannot win, but it's really helpful when it comes to fixing your mistakes, allowing you to be successful.
> but it's really helpful when it comes to fixing your mistakes, allowing you to be successful.
It would be helpful if they'd take a loss as a learning opportunity. But as stated in the original quote they threw a tantrum and accused the opponent of cheating, taking away no lesson to improve the next time around.
Given this, I don't want to imagine how much Elon Musk is suffering right now for the bullying he gets and for Tesla, which have higher stakes than a tabletop game.
He doesn't care about Tesla anymore. His president will kill EV subsidies and give them to coal. He never cared about the mission of Tesla, and anyone working at Tesla who still believes in it is a sucker.
IIRC, he borrowed against them for a lot of stuff, including the Twitter acquisition. It's probably why he's freaking out a bit and returning to it. It's also not the first time he's had liquidity problems. Tesla literally did come weeks away from bankruptcy on a few occasions in the 2010s as he often put the cart before the horse. The infamous "refundable deposit" for the car back then that ended up being almost twice as much as promised was essentially an unsecured loan. People were almost out all their money.
Bethany McLean (a journalist that was among the first to start questioning Enron's numbers and wrote the book "the smartest men in the room" on it that also became a documentary) has been following Elon Musk for well over a decade.
She once said "Whenever Elon is lashing out is when he's under enormous stress". Also, he has a large cult of true believers who believe a man who's taken credit for others work as his own all his life. Watch this documentary called "the cult of the dead stock" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5Bd6YxifCo ; it's like that x100.
> Tesla literally did come weeks away from bankruptcy on a few occasions in the 2010s as he often put the cart before the horse.
Yet another thing Tesla should have faced sanctions on - you'd never have known this by listening to any earnings call or looking at any financial filings from Tesla at that time (and at one point I think the number was <10 days).
I really do wonder if outright financial fraud was occurring. There was a period of time where they were going through CFOs like water over Niagara Falls (whom I assume were refusing to sign off on the books?).
That's not how it works. You can't sell without someone buying from you, and if you're selling everything then buyers will know your stock is worthless and will not exactly be rushing to take you up on the offer, except at whatever severely depressed prices will generate a profit margin from liquidating your assets.
He's much better off propping up the stock with a bit more grifting for as long as that will last and living off loans taken with stocks as the collateral.
One cannot simply sell all of their stock if they own that much.
I don’t think Elon cares about Tesla as a vision anymore, but does he care about being “the richest man in the world” or at least one of them. Absolutely, and TSLA is the reason that’s true.
First of all, there has been a significant selloff by Tesla top executives, including over $10 billion by Musk in the past 3 years [1,2,3]. The main reason he can’t sell of more is that he is still fighting in court to get his insane $56 billion executive bonus, which would be primarily in Tesla stock [4]. I say insane because it is over 500 times larger than any bonus given by any other company ever and is equivalent to giving every other Tesla employee an almost half a million-dollar bonus. I think we will see a lot more sell offs once the outcome of that legal battle is done, whether it comes out positive or negative for Musk.
More broadly, I think Tesla’s general valuation is a house of cards that his been hyper inflated by years of Musk lying to investors about future sales, future products, and future features. He promised a million driverless taxi’s that would make $30,000 profit each year would be coming “next year” in 2019 [5], that full self driving was coming in an update “next month” in 2020 [6] and wildly incorrect capabilities of basically every product ever released.
[1] “four top officers at the company have offloaded over $100 million in shares since early February [2025]… Elon Musk's brother, Kimbal Musk, who also sits on the board, unloaded 75,000 shares worth approximately $27 million last month” https://abcnews.go.com/Business/tesla-board-members-executiv...
[2] “Musk sold a total of 41.5 million shares of Tesla stock between November 4 and December 12 [2024]… The sales came not long after a October 19, 2022 earning call in which he told investors ‘I can’t emphasize enough, we have excellent demand for Q4.’… But when Tesla reported fourth-quarter sales, they were far weaker than forecast, and that sent stocks down 12%, the worst day of trading for the stock in more than two years.” https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/04/business/musk-tesla-stock-sal...
[3] “Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Thursday he does not plan to sell any more shares of Tesla for at least the next two years, after the billionaire and nascent Twitter owner offloaded nearly $3.6 billion worth of stock this week [2022] as Tesla's share price tumbled.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2022/12/22/musk...
Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
It's always been this way, more or less.
If you look back at the ultra-wealthy in any age, you'll find just these sorts of people. It's in 20th-century literature. It's in classic literature. It's in the Bible. It's probably in ancient Greek literature, but I'm not well-versed there.
At least in the early part of the last century, there was some hope. A number of ultra-wealthy people decided that instead of building a faster steam engine or racing to pump more oil, they'd engage in benefiting society as an alternative penis-measuring contest.
They were happy to pour the equivalent of today's billions into projects like paying artists to spend 30 years documenting the fading culture of the American Indian, or funding scientific expeditions to improve our understanding of ancient history.
Today's billionaires are, instead, trying to one-up each other on getting 12-year-old girls addicted to their apps.
you're getting the order of events backwards. it's not "Become a billionaire, then become a baby who insists they be allowed to win board games". The order is, first you're an entitled, manipulative jackass with absolutely no bottom for unethical behavior and zero tolerance for "losing", then become a billionaire by being so brazenly shitty in all areas of life and getting people to go along with you. Caveat, you have to be a white guy for this to work and it works much better if you already inherited millions from your dad.
As an exercise, apply this rule to all the other billionaires you know.
I tend to agree with you, but I also tend to believe that indeed, having a billion dollars (read: having no constraints) will tend to bring out the worst in anyone.
Another way to say this is, most people who earn obscene wealth who would be offended by the obscenity of it would work hard to give most of it away. Those who are not offended by the obscenity of it will be happy to keep it, so there's a selection bias to it.
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
Deep running narcissism, bordering on sociopathy or psychopathy.
Anyone with a conscience would worry about having the work of your lifetime being used in genocide. Zuck isn't like that. He doesn't care. What he cares is winning at board games.
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
Billionaires are highly psychologically disordered individuals. This is an expression of unrestrained narcissism in a "man" who has fully neglected to grow character as an individual, because his obscene wealth allows him to get through life with the emotional maturity of a teenager. Same with Musk, same with Trump, same with most other billionaires. Bill Gates is another great example.
People hate to admit it, but apparently having a billion dollars either makes one a narcissist, or it takes being a narcissist to make a billion dollars. Either way, just from the data we have in front of us, there's a very strong correlation there.
I’m only part of the way through the book, so have nothing to spoil here. But it’s entertaining. And shocking. The author will relate a scene that’s so absurd that you think “ah, this can’t be true, this is made up for dramatic effect, nobody would act like that” and then you Google it and you realize the absurd thing is totally true and was fully documented at the time. All the author is adding is a perspective from the inside.
I understand why Facebook people might have wanted the book to go away. That their attempt to do so comically backfired and resulted in entirely the opposite effect, well, that’s also pretty much what you’d expect from this crew after reading the book.
It's kind of amazing that people still hit this, really. Like, if you're Facebook's lawyers, how are you not telling them "don't talk about this; anything you say or do will only promote it further"? The lawyers must _know_.
Lawyers get paid to “do something”. To wealthy people, a lawyer saying “let’s actually not do anything” seems like a “what am I paying you for then” moment.
From the lawyer's point of view I guess you're making a risk judgement, presumably they thought the chance of getting a successful court order outweighed the potential increase in press of they happened to fail.
I'm not so sure. I think there is some selection bias happening, so it's easy to say "Streisand effect!" When it makes the headlines but that ignores the times it doesn't make the headlines.
> completely uninterested in the author’s “job pitch”
It's central to the arc of the narrative though. She begins with the idealistic possibilities for Facebook; and now, in a real-life epilogue, is concluding by pulling back the curtain on how horrible these people are. And by extension this company.
The book is a good read and she also testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee[0], repeating many of the claims from the book under oath. One of the striking things is that it's clear that Mark and several others from Facebook perjured themselves in prior hearings. I expect there will be no consequence for this.
I believe it will take at least a couple of generations after a new political ideology is cemented in the USA to change anything.
Market fundamentalism has been the game since the 80s with Reagan, it was building up to it but Reagan was the watershed moment when it really gripped. You see it everywhere now, here on HN especially, any deviation from the dogma of market fundamentalism is met with the usual retort about "innovation", "growth", and all the buzzwords implemented to make it seem to be the only alternative we have. Any discussion about regulation, breaking down behemoths wielding massive power, betterment of wealth distribution, workers' rights, etc. will attract that mass who are true believers of the dogma.
To undo this will require a whole political ideology from the ground up in the USA where the two parties are just two sides of the same coin, I really cannot see how this can realistically change without a series of major crises, bad enough that people will rise and understand who exactly is fucking them... It's sad to realise there's much more pain to happen before it might spark real change, we are kinda bound to live in the aftermath of the erosion of society brought by "shareholder value"-hegemony.
During the Great Depression the Americans did pull together and demanded from President Roosevelt a social reform. That was called the New Deal Coalition.
This time though the fight will be much harder because even the democrats are so strongly indoctrinated in the "free market" idolatry that they are much closer to the republicans than any true social democratic movement (such as labor unions) that would actually be needed in order to help the American working (and soon ex-middle) class.
I think you and the person you're replying to agree.
We won't get a New Deal Coalition Part 2 without our own Dust Bowl (climate-change/industrial-agronomy-induced disasters, and the massive disruption to peoples way of lives that accompanied it) and Great Depression to conclusively demonstrate that industrialized, financialized oligarchy "doesn't work".
The two-party system was just as much captured by "free market" idolatry pre-FDR as they are today. There was nearly three decades of socialistic organizing in response to crisis in the 1890s-1920s before we finally had those principles manifest in one of the two major political parties in the executive branch, with FDR in 1932.
We're barely into the nascency of our own century's progressive era. If history's any guide, it'll probably take decades and it will get much, much worse before it gets better. :/
I re-read Grapes of Wrath recently, and it was an uncanny feeling: like I was reading something that was both near-future Sci-Fi and a memory-holed but relatively-recent history.
These crises are occurring right now so I don’t think it will take multiple generations. The rise of neo-fascism, the climate crisis, and the escalating warmongering toward China - a nuclear power - should be seen as symptoms of a system breaking down because it prioritizes profit over people. Intensification of capitalism’s worst tendencies is the capitalist’s last stand. It’s either going to end in mass destruction or people throwing off their chains.
This is very much what professor Richard Wolff is saying.
What you're witnessing down is the systemic failure and breakdown of a system (capitalism) that is completely out of control and ultimately starts to attack the very institutions that enable it in its greedy search for "growth" (i.e. producing more wealth for the already wealthy).
I haven't listened to the talk but read Mobiot's book when it came out last year :)
On the same vein, I'd recommend "Capitalist Realism" by Mark Fisher, Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine", and even the original "A Neo-Liberal's Manifesto" by Charles Peters to understand how the term is slippery and diverged a lot from the original manifesto.
And I'm not an anti-market, full-blown communism person. The feeling I have is that all the aftermath from the dogmatic implementation of an unsound ideology has brought much of our contemporary malaise, the allowance of finance to take over the real economy, the productive economy, has just eroded any semblance of a good market-driven society. I'm against that, the supremacy of finance over all other economical activity, it's a cancer that festers on every single big corporation.
>And I'm not an anti-market, full-blown communism person
Also, it is interesting that you feel the need to say you aren't a communist before criticising the current system. I guess that is a sign of just how entrenched it is.
I see it more as a sign of how few mainstream alternatives have been proposed. I've been guilty of generally assuming a communist bent when I see a negatively zealous response to the "free market" ideology. I don't act on the assumption, but from my experience, it tends to be the most common result.
Our political system seems hell-bent on only ever having two solutions to a problem, though.
We seem to be stuck at a local maxima[1]. The current system works great for the 0.001% who have all the money and the power, so it isn't in their interest to change it. But there definitely seems to have been a failure of the imagination amongst the 99.999%. Too distracted by social media and our phones perhaps?
[1] There is a lot to dislike about the current system, but there have been far worse ones (feudalism, communism etc).
> Too distracted by social media and our phones perhaps?
I think this is a significant contributing factor. It's becoming increasingly difficult to have any semblance of a meaningful conversation with those around me. I don't really know how to describe it other than an apparent "dumbing down" of the average person. I despise elitists, and I hate to even act in a way that might come off as elitist, but I simply have no other explanation for what I am seeing. People just want to talk about the latest trend on TikTok and have no interest in applying anything close to intellectual thought to what's happening around them.
Weirdly, right at the moment the US economy is tanking because of severe departures from market fundamentalism. By the people who most claim to be pro capitalism.
There's no departure from market fundamentalism, the belief in shareholder value being supreme is still very much the current Zeitgeist.
As much as the USA's administration is jerking around with trade, the fundamental principle of what governs any corporation is still market fundamentalism: returning value to shareholders, nothing else.
Shareholders are pretty grumpy right now. They've lost a ton of money.
I'm sure that some economist will asset that this will produce more shareholder value in the long run. But the stock market suggests that shareholders do not currently believe that.
Capitalism is incompatible with free markets. Capitalism means all the wealth goes to those with the most capital, while free markets means the wealth flows freely in all directions.
> Capitalism means all the wealth goes to those with the most capital, while free markets means the wealth flows freely in all directions
I don't understand this distinction, why wouldn't capital accumulate under free markets? The freer the market the more capital accumulates.
In a freer market that today you would have to pay a massive toll every time you went to the grocery store, because the road owner has monopoly on that route, that would lead to much more wealth accumulation.
In economics perfect markets mean that your company that raises spherical cows has no moat against others doing the same. If you do something to gain profits to become rich someone else joins the market to compete those profits down to zero. This reduces inefficiency and makes everyone rich.
Deregulation is sold as getting closer to this, in reality it means the money collects wherever the market breaks down, monopolies, network effects, externalities, concentrated special interests, middlemen, oligarchies, gangsters, landlords etc.
When all of the capital ends up in a small number of hands, the market ceases.
Each capitalist tries to corner the market, but if they succeed, the resulting monopoly isn't a free market. In theory a competitor arises, but it takes only an instant to shut it down and restore the monopoly.
>I don't understand this distinction, why wouldn't capital accumulate under free markets?
It would, which is why businesses support deregulation - not because they believe in vigorous competition for the sake of consumers, but because they want as little friction and consequence standing between themselves and oligarchy as possible.
A market in which the wealth "flows freely in all directions" is socialist, not capitalist. "Fair" markets are regulated, and by definition not free.
To me that is the biggest win in public discourse from capitalists: conflating markets with capitalism, as if free markets could only exist under unbounded capitalism. Which, as you say, is incompatible. Capitalism does not want free markets, nor foster free markets, the best end result for a capitalist is the abolition of a market under the control of a monopoly.
Markets are fundamental, and a natural result of human socioeconomic order. Capitalism not at all.
I mean, I guess the obvious question is if one person lied under oath (her) or several (all the people that her testimony implies perjured).
The book sounds pretty outlandish. That's not to say that Zuck and co aren't just a whole gang of melodramatically evil and stupid people, but it a priori it seems just as probable to me that she's the one that is? I don't know much about her. Is she a reliable witness?
This review is as naive as Wynn-Williams portrays herself in her memoir (which I enjoyed!)
In the book, Wynn-Williams described herself as a wide-eyed, almost helpless person, which doesn't align with her pre-Facebook career as a lawyer in the a diplomatic corps. And when at FB, she was in the rooms where it happened, and had a job enabling some of it. She could've quit, but did not.
She was one of the titular careless people at the time, and excuses it now by pointing at others who were even more careless. It's not atonement, it's whitewashing.
This may be a little naive from my side, but I'm wondering - is every big tech company the same as Meta and it's leadership? Or is there something special, a perfect storm of circumstances that we only hear so much about so many instances of outright - can't even find the right word here - evil, stupidity, brashness?
If we assume that every big (let's say FAANG) company is the same, why we hear about Meta time and time again?
Bias disclaimer: I've worked at multiple FAANGs and Meta isn't one of them, but as with anyone in the industry I've had friends at all of them.
Meta feels very different - both at the top, with Zuckerberg's immunity from the board, full control, and personality "quirks" on public display - but also at the lower levels. Every company has a stable of people who will do what they're told to collect a paycheck but Meta had a much higher ratio of people - including people I know, respect, and consider very smart in other aspects - who bought in to the vision that what the company was doing was good for the world even in a post-2016 world when all of the consequences of social media and Meta's specific actions were fully evident.
My Amazon friends won't defend the bad things Amazon does, my Alphabet friends love to gripe, my Microsoft friends....you get the idea. But my friends at Meta would repeatedly try to defend bad things in a way the others don't.
It doesn't have anything to do with this though. It has to do with having so much power and money in a "meritocracy" and the mental gymnastics needed to maintain those two opposing propositions.
Meta's core product is a machine to sell ads, just like YouTube, TikTok, Netflix (now), etc. It's not that unique. And these stories are all over the valley for even much less powerful individuals
Zuckerberg is unusually powerful in the company, due to how it's structured (note that few companies of this sort of size are run by their founders...), and he's unusually unhinged.
I was the TL on a Facebook app feature driven by us, the engineers, that was 100% in the category of "good for humanity and it solves a problem for billions of people". I had to fight internal org leads to launch it, because there was almost no benefit for FB.
Jane leaked the feature and put this entire 'evil Facebook' shade on it, with no real proof, just wildly false speculation based on what she thought the feature is. That's when I realized how easy it is to present anything Meta works on through the lens of "stealing people's data" and "ads bad". Oculus headsets? VR ads. Smart glasses? AR ads. Spyware. Facebook app feature? Must have some privacy issue.
I'm not saying it's not deserved, with all the scandals, just that at some point it was getting a bit ridiculous with all the "Facebook bad" articles, at least one of which I knew first-hand was complete nonsense. It did seem like news outlets were grasping at straws to write yet another article to put Facebook in a bad light.
It's low-hanging fear-mongering fruit that gets the clicks and it's hard to disprove (not that PR/Legal would let us refute anything in the first place) because the trust is broken.
You did something good while working for the devil, people were right to be suspect. You gain no redemption points from pointing out the people describing facebook as evil misunderstand the precise bounds of facebook's evil.
Also, you didn't address parent's question about the uniqueness (or lackthereof) of Meta. Feeling targeted because people on the outside don't have the visibility to properly understand the nature of the evil is shared with at least 3/4 of the remaining FAANG letters.
Tell us the feature so we can evaluate your claim. Absolute certainty, bitter criticism, and expectation of unearned trust do not build confidence in your ability to judge what is good for humanity.
I worked at a FAANG company that was not Meta. I'm not going to defend everything they did, but the culture was set up in such a way that people at all levels of the organization considered how their decisions would impact customers, and they had some sense of obligation to question harmful decisions.
Afterwards, I went to a startup, and the company leadership was shockingly callous about doing things that would harm customers. Some lower-level people spoke up about it, but nobody in a leadership position seemed to want to hear it.
"When he gets to the mic, he spontaneously promises that Facebook will provide internet access to refugees all over the world. Various teams at Facebook then race around, trying to figure out whether this is something the company is actually doing, and once they realize Zuck was just bullshitting, set about trying to figure out how to do it.
They get some way down this path when Kaplan intervenes to insist that giving away free internet to refugees is a bad idea, and that instead, they should sell internet access to refugees. Facebookers dutifully throw themselves into this absurd project, which dies when Kaplan fires off an email stating that he's just realized that refugees don't have any money. The project dies."
It's nice to know that despite playing fast and loose with the facts, the film The Social Network does capture something fundamentally true about Zuckerberg's psychology. The pathological need to dominate can be disguised when you're the underdog, but the more power you accrue the more it becomes the sole motivation. To paraphrase Robert Caro, "power does not corrupt, it reveals."
She didn't respond, which is fair enough, it's probably not big enough to be interesting to her. But then I got auto-added to her PR mailing list. I didn't ask or consent to be on the PR mailing list (all the page says as of now is "To contact Sarah, please complete the form below"). Seems I was just added because I used the "contact" form.
Auto-adding someone who contacts you to a PR mailing list is a dark pattern. Seems she learned something at Facebook. I found it ironic.
Doctorow touches on this, but I really think the biggest problem with society today is simply that too many people in power simply don't experience consequences
I think that's true for our society in general at the moment. Everyone can behave like an asshole and it's completely OK for a society if they say "I had a tough childhood and haven't received a professional help".
Zuckerberg and co. always seem so basic. Settlers of Catan and Ticket To Ride? I can't imagine more flavorless, generic games.
Wait, those are the games that I play...
I remember listening to Zuckerberg speak at length about the various epochs of Facebook including the fast pivot to global, it's overall a fascinating and compelling story that the book surely capitalizes on well.
I'm not a big fan of Catan. Players can get locked out of the game with no way to meaningfully play.
Ticket to Ride is decent though. Simple, straight-forward rules. Enough strategy and randomness to make playing interesting. No one can gum up the game by being intransigent.
I'm responding to TheAceOfHearts, I can't seem to reply directly to the original comment.
The question was "if you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?"
You kind of answered the question yourself. He cares so much because he is successful in something else and has extended that need for success into other areas of his life. It seems this is common among successful people, they try to be successful in everything else in their lives, perhaps not realizing they might have got lucky in one area and are convinced they can apply that to all other areas of their lives.
This is something I try to be acutely aware of in myself. Not that I have any level of wealth worth mentioning.
I started working at a company where they just give me stuff. I can go to work in clothes my employer gave me, eat my meals there, use the phone they pay the plan for, etc.
It does affect you. I first noticed it when I went to buy some triviality. Something small I needed for something or the other. Something that would have been just given to me at work. The line to checkout was long and while waiting, I just thought "Why can't I just fucking go? It's not even $10. What does it matter?"
So now I try and be mindful of what I receive and to be sure to acknowledge it at least mentally.
Then you realize that Facebook has been extraordinarily active banning Palestinian posts and accounts over the last year. So the "casual indifference" is at the very least selectively applied.
Maybe I'm jaded, but this is how I understand all US technology companies to be run. In fact, I'd be surprised if all of those things weren't true for most of the enormous "tech bro" companies coming from SV.
I would put Meta, the Elon Musk companies, Uber, and some others in a separate category from Amazon, Apple, and Google. To be sure, Amazon, Apple, and Google have done some very immoral things, but there does seem to be something in the culture of those companies that understands that they wield enormous power and that sees value in acting responsibly - even if it's just because they think being cartoonishly evil isn't in their long-term interest. I do think there's been a change in ethos from the Jobs/Bezos/Page/Brin generation of leadership to the Musk/Zuckerberg generation.
>Zuck learns Mandarin. He studies Xi's book, conspicuously displays a copy of it on his desk. Eventually, he manages to sit next to Xi at a dinner where he begs Xi to name his next child. Xi turns him down.
I do wonder what the point of amassing all that money and power is, if it means you end up grovelling to a despot like Xi (or a would-be despot like Trump).
Just riding that hedonic treadmill, probably. Once you have bought all the properties you want, airplanes, helicopters and yachts, I imagine your hedonic set-point adjusts to that level and you begin to cast about for what's missing. (What's missing of course, is what all these people can't seem to find, which is an unwavering set of human-centred values.)
Once you have several mansions, a helicopter and a super yacht, the only possible reason to want more is for status. And you have to be some sort of sociopath to use that much of the world's resources just have a yacht 5m longer than the other guy.
Compliments to the author of this piece, Cory Doctorow, who I believe coined the useful term "enshittification". He has consistently championed consumer rights (presumably at a significant risk of having powerful people come after him) and lots of other worthwhile causes. And his writing is excellent.
I read the book. It’s something that comes up & happens multiple times, and the potential meetings being described are with various global heads of state.
This requires all of the "source" to be available. For PyTorch and a bunch of other projects, this is trivial as all the source is straight up on GitHub. But for proprietary things like Llama, it's really hard to fork something when you don't even have access to what they used to build it (software-wise, not even thinking about the hardware yet).
How could you fork something like Llama when Meta don't even speak clearly about what data they used, literally none of the training code is available, and you have to agree to terms and conditions before you're "allowed" to do anything with it?
> you have to agree to terms and conditions before you're "allowed" to do anything with it
I don’t have experience with this so I’m taking it at face value; if this is true, it’s so strange that I have an idea of this being an “open” model. As in, not that they PR’ed to make people believe it but that people who were required to accept those terms seem to believe it (as users seem to repeat it). Seems a little bit of critical thinking should dispel that notion. Are there any, more reasonably open models? Is LLaMa just called open because it’s the most accessible?
> Are there any, more reasonably open models? Is LLaMa just called open because it’s the most accessible?
Indeed there are! They aren't exactly SOTA, but they're 100% open source and you could build them yourself from scratch, granted you had the compute, knowledge and time for it. OLMo 2 from Ai2 is probably the most notable one.
I think Llama is called "open source" because that's what Meta, Zuckerberg and the Llama website says it is, and people take it at face value. Then people see "Oh but it's free, who cares about the license?" not understand how we got here in the first place...
Lets say Meta goes under tomorrow (won't happen, but bear with me) and stops making new Llama releases.
Would the community be able to take over the project and train new models, assuming they have access to the same hardware? Obviously, the community doesn't have access to similar hardware, but even if it did, would the community be able to continue releasing Llama models?
And if the answer to that is no, why is that and how could Llama be considered open source if no one could pick up the torch afterwards (even theoretically), even if they had access to hardware for training?
There are many things to be said about open-source projects and, more broadly, the capabilities of the open-source community.
The most capable parts are for-profit organizations that release open-source software for their business imperative, public benefit companies that write open-source software for ideological reasons but still operate as businesses, and a tiny number of public benefit organizations with unstable cash flow. Most other efforts are unorganized and plagued by bickering.
Llama itself is challenging to take over. The weights are public, but the training data and process is not. It could be evolved, but not fully iterated by anyone else. For a full iteration, the training process and inputs would need to be replicated, with improvements there.
But could another open-source model, as capable as Llama, be produced? Yes. Just like Meta, other companies, such as Google and Microsoft, have the incentive to create a moat around their AI business by offering a free model to the public, one that's just barely under their commercial model's capabilities. That way, no competitor can organically emerge. After all, who would pay for their product if it's inferior to the open-source one? It's a classic barrier to entry in the market - a thing highly sought after by monopolistic companies.
Public benefit companies leading in privacy could develop a model to run offline for privacy purposes, to avoid mass consumer data harvesting. A new open-source ideological project without a stable business could also, in theory, pop up in the same pattern as the Linux project. But these are like unicorns - "one in a million years (maybe)."
So, to answer your question, yes, Llama weights could be evolved; no, an entirely new version cannot be made outside of Meta. Yes, someone else could create such a wholly new open-source model from scratch, and different open-source groups have different incentives. The most likely incentive is monopolistic, to my mind.
I think you've kind of answered a different question. Yes, more LLM models could be created. But specifically Llama? Since it's an open source model, the assumption is that we could (given access to the same compute of course) train one from scratch ourselves, just like we can build our own binaries of open source software.
But this obviously isn't true for Llama, hence the uncertainty if Llama even is open source in the first place. If we cannot create something ourselves (again, given access to compute), how could it possibly be considered open source by anyone?
I understand I was supposed to say “no” and question the open-source label. We’ve heard many arguments that if something can’t be reproduced from scratch, it’s not true open-source.
To me, they sound a bit like “no true Scotsman”. Llama is open source, compared to commercial models with closed weights. Even if it could be more open source.
That’s why I looked at it in a broader sense — what could happen in an open-source world to improve or replace Llama. Much could happen, thanks to Llama’s open nature, actually.
> Llama is open source, compared to commercial models with closed weights
Yeah, just like a turd is a piece of gourmet food if there is no other good food around.
Sorry, but that's a really bad argument, "open source" is not a relative metric you use to compare different things, it's a label that is applied to something depend on what license that thing has. No matter what licenses others use, the license you use is still the license use.
Especially when there are actually open source models out there, so it isn't possible. Maybe Meta feels like it's impossible because of X, Y and Z, but that doesn't make it true just because they don't feel like they could earn enough money on it, or whatever their reasoning is.
> Yeah, just like a turd is a piece of gourmet food if there is no other good food around.
I didn't mean it's on a continuum, as you assumed. Apologies for phrasing it unclearly. I meant that the weights are public. They are open; there is no debate to be had about it. Generally and broadly, that is already considered open-source.
And we all understand what "open-source" means in the context of Llama - it doesn't mean one of the idealized notions of open source, it means open weights.
> Generally and broadly, that is already considered open-source.
No, just because something is public doesn't mean it's open source, those are two very different things. If I upload code on my website without any license, that code is not now suddenly open source just because it's public. Just like Llama isn't suddenly "open source" because Meta's marketing department says so, their own legal department still call Llama proprietary, don't you wonder why that is?
> And we all understand what "open-source" means in the context of Llama - it doesn't mean one of the idealized notions of open source, it means open weights.
You, and some others (including Meta) are using a definition Meta came up with themselves, probably in order to try to skirt EU AI regulations as it's different for "open source" models vs others. I'm not sure why you as an individual would fall for it though, unless I'm missing something you have nothing to gain by spreading PR from Meta, do you?
The existing definition of open source (before Meta's bastardization) is not a "idealized" definition, is the one we built an enormous ecosystem on top of, who taught a whole generation of programmers how to program and connected people together, without putting profits first.
I think the fact that all (good) LLM datasets are full with licensed/pirated material means we'll never really see a decent open source model under the strict definition. Open weight + open source code is really the best we're going to get, so I'm fine with it coopting the term open source even if it doesn't fully apply.
> we'll never really see a decent open source model under the strict definition
But there are already a bunch of models like that, were everything (architecture, training data, training scripts, etc) is open, public and transparent. Since you weren't aware those existed since before, but you now know that, are you willing to change your perspective on it?
> so I'm fine with it coopting the term open source even if it doesn't fully apply
It really sucks that the community seems OK with this. I probably wouldn't have been a developer without FOSS, and I don't understand how it can seem OK to rob other people of this opportunity to learn from FOSS projects.
Not all of the community is OK with this, lots of folks are strongly against OSI's bullshit OSAID for example. Really it should have been more like the Debian Deep Learning Team's Machine Learning Policy, just like last time when the OSI used the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) to create the Open Source Definition (OSD).
Its unlikely all the training data for Llama is publicly available, let alone under an open source license. If Llama actually had an open source license (IIRC it doesn't), that would still make it a Toxic Candy model under the Debian Deep Learning Team's Machine Learning policy. That means no-one could replicate it exactly, even if they had the boatloads of cash it would take to buy enough hardware and electricity to do the training. Eventually the community could maybe find or create enough data, but that would be a new different model.
AI models aren't really iterative in the way that other software is. Llama 4 is a completely different product from Llama 3, with different parameter counts and even different modalities. The only reason it gets to be called Llama 4 is that the company that made it is the same and it's convenient to not have to come up with new names all the time, not because there's any sort of continuity with Llama 2.
Fine tunes are the correct analogy to iterative software development—they take the existing code (weights) and improve upon it and modify it—and fine tunes can be produced with what Meta has released.
The bigger problem with Meta's claim that it's open source is that they've attached a bunch of strings to the license that prevent you from using it in a bunch of different ways. It's not open source because it's not open, not because weights aren't source.
> No. You need a research lab, compute time and talent to train LLMs.
Right, but even if you had those, could you actually train a Llama model from scratch? You'd still have a lot of work in front of you, compared to a "regular" open source project where you have everything available already, download the source and hit "compile" and you have it done.
While her boss continues to sexually harass her? Doesn’t sound like a mistake to me. There’s more to life than money, as the author makes quite clear throughout the book, IMO.
Did she say that she renegotiated her compensation? Because early in the book she wrote that unlike basically everyone else she's working with, she poorly negotiated her comp and that she's working for a regular and unimpressive salary while her coworkers are flashing luxury brands that she can't afford.
I've stopped reading after the Myanmar episode so I don't know if she's ever renegotiated her package.
Trying to get Xi to name his child is both completely tone deaf to the point of being offensive, and incredibly debilitating for his child's self-esteem as just a bargaining chip.
It’s a good memoir and like the author of this review. I too only picked it up because of Mark/Meta’s attempt to suppress the promotion of it. Listened to a couple of chapters on an audiobook service before picking up physical copy and was hooked.
This book probably could have been written about any major company. Our corporate system's built-in moral imperative that profits must be optimized above absolutely everything else virtually guarantees that these kind of people end up at the top of each and every one of them.
It's very odd that we consider corporations to have personhood in the U.S., if you were to actually describe most of these top, predatory companies like Nestlé, Meta, etc. and their action as something "a person" did we would all immediately say that person should be jailed, is evil and that allowing them to interact with the general population is too risky. That person once in jail would assuredly never pass a parole board.
Companies should either be treated as people or as companies, what we have is a ongoing classification error that makes all natural persons lives worse as our rights are subordinate to unnatural persons. It's insane how we build our own cages.
That being said, the environment is bad but not all individual companies are the same and saying so is not only false but creates an environment of acceptance and equivocation. "Pay ratio" is often a good indicator of where on the evil spectrum a company is... If only every company could have the moral standards of a HEB or Costco the world would be better than it is.
Anyone else notice how losing at simple board games seems scarier to billionaires than losing millions in business? Makes you wonder if it's because they can't control the outcome with money or power...
I don’t find the anecdotes very interesting—people with great power are or turn out to be assholes; sure, what else is new?—but this little gem stood out to me. Not that I’m surprised, just that it’s the first I heard of it:
> According to Wynn-Williams, Facebook actually built an extensive censorship and surveillance system for the Chinese state – spies, cops and military – to use against Chinese Facebook users, and FB users globally. They promise to set up caches of global FB content in China that the Chinese state can use to monitor all Facebook activity, everywhere, with the implication that they'll be able to spy on private communications, and censor content for non-Chinese users.
I think the comparison is not meant to be between degrees of horribleness between the two events, but between degrees of complicity and denial on the part of Facebook management.
Complicity in what, exactly? Democracy? Personally I'm less concerned about Facebook staying neutral in 2016 and more concerned about their election sabotage in 2020:
The comparison is that there are two events that Facebook couldn't mentally or emotionally acknowledge their involvement in even though they were clearly involved and had influenced, not that there is moral equivalence between the two events.
Reading an audiobook is reading. As a partially blind person, it is the only way I can read comfortably. I'm not sure how a different word would help. If one was reviewing the audiobook, specifically, they might call it out in order to comment on the narration quality, etc. But if you listened to the book, you've read it.
I don’t agree. Your eyes sending signals to your brain is different than your ears. It is a different way to digest information. People tend to remember 20% of what they hear and only 10% of what they read. While the hearing is greater it doesn’t include the same process of acquiring information. “Listening is reading” is a false generalization just because you were able to gather the same information doesn’t mean you “read” the book. I don’t consider a person in a wheel chair a “walker” but I would go for a “stroll” (roaming) with them.
This is exactly the type of people the cultural purge in big tech came to flush out. Trying to change a multi billion dollar company from the inside is delusional, self serving, narcissistic and ineffective. Who the hell do you think you are in the great machine of 100,000+ employees companies, of billions invested in them.
The change is going to be political, regulatory. These companies always can't change until regulation is there, and then they miraculously adapt. If you took big tech money for 7 years you were not part of the solution.
The lengths some people will go to self explain why they were not egotistical is amazing! This is not an expose, everything is well known, this is a books worth of convincing herself she is a good person after all.
I don't understand your "delusional, self serving, narcissistic and ineffective" / "egotistical" point. All of this would apply to people trying to change things from the outside too.
Who the hell do you think you are in the great machine of hundreds of millions of US citizens, or billions of people globally, to think you can effect political and regulatory change?
And yet, this is how things change, by people working to change them, from either the inside or the outside. Maybe your point is right that anyone trying to be a change agent is self serving and egotistical. But don't fool yourself that there is some big difference here between internal and external activists.
You are equating "Hard" with impossible. Its impossible to turn a for profit company against itself from the inside, its hard to push for regulatory change.
One system is built to create shareholder value, the other is to create social value. Its like a vegan working in a pig farm for 7 years to change the industry from the inside, at some point you need to ask yourself, is she just whitewashing her time there.
This just isn't true that one thing is hard and the other is impossible. Both things are nearly impossible to a similar degree.
What system is "built ... to create social value"? You mean government?
My friend, I'm sorry, but no. Government is built to wield power. Bending that power toward social value is just as hard as bending a business toward ethical behavior.
I don't think this is about convincing anyone that she's a good person. She's forthright about her instincts and values and the institutions she worked at that fostered her understanding of the world.
She documents in detail critical moments where Facebook executives made decisions that exemplified their incompetence and damaged their potential impact.
That the "cultural purge" in big tech is flushing out people with these instincts is precisely why the industry is flailing and groveling at the feet of power, for they have no internal compass save for growth for growth's sake.
Everyone can see that now laid bare on these pages, and these companies that rely on their user's willingness to exchange details about their personal lives for cheap dopamine hits may find that generosity well run dry.
Speculating about her motives isn't fruitful, because her motives don't matter particularly. It has many upvotes because the information in the book is newsworthy and relevant for a place like HN.
Because it's an interesting and positive review of a popular book about the industry covered by this forum. It would be really weird if an article like this didn't get upvoted here...
I assumed the word choice was a reference to this line from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald:
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Given the way the novel is written, this is intentional understatement.
After the part where she was giving a birth to her child, while still writing emails and doing work stuff, I take everything she said with a grain of salt. As a father, the way she prioritised work to family through out many years of her work at FB, I find it very repelling and disgusting.
I believe that Zuck&team are slimy greedy spoiled brats, but I could also say few things about her. Which make me wonder what is actual truth, book is very biased.
I look forward to reading the book, but I’m not anti-Zuck.
Individuals can change the world. Groups with ideology can change the world.
This is why many of us are here at HN- for the discussion of ideas and for idealism.
Few want to be supreme jerks that ruin things on a massive scale.
Zuck, if you’re reading this- thanks for being part of the thing that allowed me to continue communication with my friends when they weren’t nearby, and thanks for continuing to provide that for my children.
Are things fucked up? Were lives ruined? Sure. We all fuck shit up and ruin lives, some of us more than others. Then we own up to that as much as we can and use what we have left to try to continue doing what we did before to try to make the world a better place.
Who hasn’t ruined a life or two for excessive monetary gain? Surely every person on earth right?
Thanks Zuck for ruining lives, selling out the public to advertising and performing psychological experiments on your users, so this guy could send text across the wire. Something not possible before Facebook apparently.
Part A sure, but I can say with some certainty that most people do not ruin lives. It's just hard to have that much influence over other people. If you want to be particularly pessimistic, you might be able to argue that many people ruin their children's lives -- But even that's a stretch.
This is a disappointing take on the state of affairs. The book is trying to say the execs couldn't care less about the harm their platform was causing. This is not about "screwing up" inadvertently. This is about prioritising money over everything else.
Yes, individuals have the power to change the world. Some of them in positive ways and some in horrific ways. By all accounts, Zuck and the top execs at FB firmly belong in the latter category.
The great man theory [1] has been thoroughly debunked at this point. I you feel grateful for old Facebook, do thank the thousand nameless engineers that actually built it, not the single man that took all the credit (and money).
Very few people actively try to be supreme jerks and ruin things, that's very abnormal behaviour for a human being.
It's much more common that your inner narrative keeps finding justifications for why what you are doing is important, and the damage you are causing is either justified or not perceived as so damaging.
The issue is the system we live under doesn't really incentivise moral and ethical behaviour, the rewards to be reaped are much larger if you act immorally, people like Zuck are able to tell themselves what they are doing is ok for "making the world a better place". But there's no reward for making the world a better place, the reward is for you showing revenue growth, user growth, and Zuck chased that even though there was an inflection point where the "good" was outweighed by the "bad".
> Zuck, if you’re reading this- thanks for being part of the thing that allowed me to continue communication with my friends when they weren’t nearby, and thanks for continuing to provide that for my children.
All of that could still have existed without all the appendages included to extract more money from the machine. Without creating feeds of content measured by "engagement" to the point it became detrimental to the users themselves, all the good Meta has done could have existed if morals and ethics trumped profit-seeking. And for that I do not thank Zuckerberg, at all, even though I do understand he is also a product of the system, in the end he (and Meta) abused one of the most powerful feelings of humans (connection among each other) to extract as much money as they could without regards to the dangerous side-effects that many pointed out were happening when Facebook was growing, there was no care about anyone, you and I were swindled.
It's unfortunate, I hope you can see that, for all the good provided over years on fostering connections, it was just spoiled in the end by his greed, and carelessness.
We can do better than that, no need to thank Zuckerberg for fucking us over.
What a disgustingly ass-kissing take. To pull the Godwin: Hitler built the autobahn, should I thank him for allowing me the thrill of going 200km/h (I need a better car...), sure 17++ million of lives(1) were ruined, but whatever!
And yes your beloved communication medium helped the Burmese commit genocide...
You talk as if you'd have had no other means of communication had Facebook not existed. Your delusion would have been funny had you not also implied you intend to subject your children to the same poison too.
> There's Zuck, whose underlings let him win at board-games like Settlers of Catan because he's a manbaby who can't lose (and who accuses Wynn-Williams of cheating when she fails to throw a game of Ticket to Ride while they're flying in his private jet).
Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy? Does anyone who fails to bend over backwards for them just end up getting exiled? Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game? Being good at any kind of game is mostly a function of how much time and energy you've invested into it. If you claim to be an extremely hardcore worker who has any kind of family life there just aren't any leftover hours in the day for you to grind a top position in a game. And anyway, if you're playing games for fun and to bond with people, you probably shouldn't be playing tryhard optimal strategies every game, and should instead explore and experiment with more creative strategies. This is a lesson that took me a while to learn.
John Major, who was prime minister of the UK in the 90s, has talked a bit about how isolated a position like that makes you, and how unprepared he was for it. Few of the normal pressures of life apply you in a position like that: you can't get fired (not really), you don't have to accept consequences (not really), and perhaps most importantly: you don't have anyone tell you "you idiot, that's fucking mental". No one that you can just dismiss anyway.
I can't find the interview right now, it was a while ago, but I thought it was pretty interesting. Major was a man in his 50s when he became PM. Zuck was in his early 20s. You have to wonder what that does to a person. People like Zuck are more or less like child actors that made it big: everyone bends over backwards to deepthroat them and they've got a view of the world that's just delusional. I'd feel sorry if it wasn't for the highly negative and caustic effects.
You've won the lottery, but you don't want to acknowledge that you won the lottery. You want to feel they you deserve your position through hard work and talent. You're living in a society where people are credulous, to some degree they believe that hard work and talent are related to success.
So what will happen? Everyone you hire ends up patting you on the back, telling you what a great guy you are.
> to some degree they believe that hard work and talent are related to success
Does anyone actually believe that hard work and talent are either zero or negatively correlated to success? I don't think the correlation is 1.0, but I firmly believe that it's positive for both.
I do.
108 Billion humans have ever lived on planet earth. 8 billion-ish currently.
Most of them live lives that in no way reflected on their hard work and talent, but rather their circumstances, starting with where and when they were born but encompassing a million different contingencies outside the control of their hard work or talent.
So do you think you have talent and hard work greater than 99% of those many billions? If you're posting on HN you've probably got "success" in that extreme even if you've never applied yourself or excelled in anything of any note.
Pick any of those 8 billion. Have them work half as hard. Have them have half as much talent. Do their outcomes remain the same , get better, or get worse?
You’re arguing that there are other factors that also influence outcomes (and that those other factors are stronger forces).
I agree with that point, but that’s not a refutation to the notion that the coefficients on talent and hard work are positive, nor a convincing argument that success is unrelated to those two factors.
Can anyone benefit from working 10% harder or smarter? Undoubtedly. But success isn’t linear. It’s clear from the zeitgeist that the ultra-rich and powerful—past or present—aren’t working a million percent harder or smarter; their positions are more accurately explained by structural advantages. The first million might be 95% hard work and talent. The next million, probably a bit less so.
> It’s clear from the zeitgeist that the ultra-rich and powerful—past or present—aren’t working a million percent harder or smarter; their positions are more accurately explained by structural advantages.
Millions of people had an equal or better starting condition than Mark Zuckerberg so we aren't really lacking privileged people, but vanishingly few of those do become ultra wealthy.
I'm not going to get into the role of luck, but more curious -- how many ultra-rich individuals do you think can exist on the planet earth?
Point is that wealth is a pretty minor part here compared to luck and skill, as otherwise people born wealthy would dominate the startup world. Instead its people born to upper-middle class families that dominates it.
> otherwise people born wealthy would dominate the startup world. Instead its people born to upper-middle class families that dominates it.
Those are just two different points on the "wealthy" scale. If you zoom out on a global level, they are not very far apart.
The kind of upper-middle class family that produces startup founders tends to be from the rich countries.
It makes perfect sense that it's the pretty wealthy and not the super-wealthy. There's more of the UMC, and they only need a certain amount of social/economic capital to roll the dice.
I broadly agree with your point, but you’re overlooking a critical dimension: once someone successfully identifies and exploits a niche (through a combination of skill and luck), the subsequent growth >can< often become largely independent of further skill or luck. At that stage, wealth through some basic intelligence compounds itself, regulatory capture can then occur, monopolistic behaviors can emerge—none of which are necessarily admirable traits in a society. But we're talking about different parts of an elephant and I don't think we disagree, but stepping back what we may disagree about is my opinion that ultra wealth (I'm not talking about millionaires or low level billionaires) but the wealth of Musk/Bezos/Zuck is a bug of the system, not a feature.
Humorous analogy: Imagine you’re playing a video game where, through a mix of skill and luck, you stumble upon an incredibly overpowered weapon. With even minimal competence, this weapon lets you easily acquire even more powerful gear, initiating a self-reinforcing loop that rapidly propels you to dominance. Soon enough, your advantage reshapes the entire game—limiting access to similar weapons for other players. The game stops being fun, or as some might put it, it becomes fundamentally unfair.
I imagine first you’d have to define success in a way others might agree with. And talent, for that matter—most notable talents can’t be easily exploited by capital.
But, I do know for sure that being wealthy is correlated to neither skill nor hard work, but savvy leverage of the skill and hard work of others. That shit has to end. You should make proportional to the work you put in. Shareholders and investors are even worse.
But whatever. I do not expect the world to improve at this point. We’re just stuck in a shitty place (as humanity) and asked to be grateful for the insight of the rich.
[dead]
Circumstances and luck are hugely important, but you have agency even if you don't have full control.
Any of us could get hit by a meteor or drop dead at any minute, but working harder towards goals in aggregate moves us towards those goals, so I don't understand how this logic works?
That's assuming that free will actually exists, which is an open question at this point.
What they want to believe is that their wealth is in proportion to their hard work and talent. But even ignoring luck, in a "tournament market", rewards are a strongly nonlinear function of inputs. Being no 2 in a market which is a natural monopoly has limited rewards.
You can believe it's positive, but not buy the idea that someone is millions of times more hard working or talented than ordinary people.
The guy who has made billions needs the stronger form of this karma-like idea.
I don't personally know any people who believe that hard work and talent have zero positive correlation with success. However I know many people who believe that parents' socioeconomic status, genetics, luck, birthplace, and lack of scruples are all much more significant factors.
I choose to actively reject that mindset because doing so motivates me to focus on elements within my control, but if I'm being honest I think they are probably correct, at least from a statistical perspective.
My take: "winning the lottery" in a Facebook sense requires a floor of talent and work at the early stages, but the odds of winning don't correlate with how much talent and work exists, nor are continued talent and work required once a critical mass of success has occurred. External factors - being in the right place at the right time, having some cushion of familial wealth, etc - dominate once you're over the floor.
Neither talent nor hard work have anything to do with helping humanity.
The reality is that our measurements of success don’t correlate with “goodness”, they correlate with getting stuff done. And you can do lots of evil stuff pretty easily.
The reason so many rich people seem evil is because they are. You don’t become rich via charity. You become rich by exploiting others and siphoning their success to yourself.
It’s just plainly evident in every sector of our economy. You don’t have to pay for the bad shit you do. Look at tobacco. Tobacco is a zero-value or negative-value industry. The sheer existence of tobacco actively makes the world a worse place.
But guess what? They don’t pay for your COPD medicine. They don’t pay for your congestive heart failure. But they will happily take your money for a carton.
All bad costs are externalizer, and all profit is kept. The end result is obvious. The more good you do, the stupider you are. The more evil you do, the more money you make.
Are you sitting in a room while typing this? At the margin to reduce the odds of heart attacks, you should be at a walking desk outdoors, or ideally not arguing on the internet at all. Someone trying to "help humanity" should decide the threshold of acceptable self harm for you, just like you feel free to decide it for smokers; then after determining how you should live, they can declare that the alternatives make the world a worse place.
If I was asked about the best correlate for being evil, honestly trying to make the world a better place by determining how specifically others should live would be on top of the list by a huge margin.
> If I was asked about the best correlate for being evil, honestly trying to make the world a better place by determining how specifically others should live would be on top of the list by a huge margin.
Really? Telling people, "hey, don't give other's poison, that's bad"... is worse than giving other's poison? You actually believe that?
To give some context, I used to smoke. For a long time!
Nobody wants to smoke. The only people that want you to smoke are the people literally extracting value out of your rotting corpse.
Look, if you actually think those people are better, then whatever. Clearly this isn't something I can dispute or even try to argue against so who cares. Just... find some medication or something, I don't know. This pathetic, self-destructive method of thinking can't be right.
>Does anyone actually believe that hard work and talent are either zero or negatively correlated to success?
On average or for a particular person? Maybe on average there’s an effect (r=.4), so there will be many people for whom that correlation is in their individual case actually negative. Some struggle with this notion, and assume success must signal talent or hard work in individual cases. How one defines success matters a lot too. If one is comparing zuck to some random CEO, say collison, can you say zuck is more hardworking or talented? He is more successful on paper, but I doubt he is significantly more hardworking or talented.
Do you actually believe that Mark Zuckerberg worked harder and is more talented than (rounded to the nearest person) every other person on the planet?
But negative, but success is correlated to success so much that at some point work and talent are irrelevant. Let's say Zuck has an idea to make something. He has enough people around him discussing ideas that he can basically pick one he likes and it's already pre-filtered. Then he can give it to basically anytime he chooses, with arbitrary skills threshold and resource allocation. Then he's got a whole support network to make it work. And if it falls? A loss of a few millions means nothing to him and he can try again.
Every step of that is inaccessible to someone hardworking and talented. So let's say you got lucky once or was born with wealth available to you - you can skip the whole talent and work thing.
A lot of people seem to think of success as the sum of a bunch of independent variables: positioning + insight + hard work + talent + luck - scruples ... Then, they argue about the relative magnitude of each term.
It's obviously more complex than this, but I think it's more useful to think of it as a product. You don't need a high value in any of them to succeed, but a tiny value in even one means you need an astronomical value somewhere else.
I think you can certainly make some of your own luck via hard work, but there is a difference between actually making on your own, and starting on 3rd base.
At school I used to play marbles. I had no skill whatsoever so I did "set ups" where I put a marble down and other kids threw theirs from a standard distance to hit it. If they missed the marble was mine. More valued marbles got more chances.
I got "marble rich" because I knew who the good players were and when one came a long I put my foot over my marble. Once you knew the trick it was impossible not to win on average and be a few marbles better off every day. Even a slight positive over a few weeks turns into a lot.
At a certain point I stopped finding this desirable and felt a bit guilty about it - the marbles were of no use to me really and it was enough to know that I had the trick of succeeding.
I wonder if this is roughly how people get wealthy in real life other than that they don't think "enough".
I suspect talent and hard work are pretty well correlated with becoming wealthy (say >$10m), but I think you then need a big injection of luck to take you from wealthy to ultra wealthy.
> I suspect talent and hard work are pretty well correlated with becoming wealthy (say >$10m)
Statistically, no.
Nah bro all the poors are just lazy bro /s
How many are born into it? If I think about the people that I personally know who are worth 8-figures or more they were each born into wealth. I wouldn't ever say that they also don't work hard and have talent, because they truly do, but it doesn't apply to their wealth.
Talent and hard work at what is what's missing from these discussions, I think.
I literally don't even know what kind of work I should do if I wanted to make a billion dollars. I think it's mostly delegating, and convincing people to give me ownership of things that throw off money that I get, or to invest in things for which I have such ownership so my ownership becomes more valuable. But in concrete terms, I don't even know what to do to make that happen, like, step 1 of that process, I have no idea. Just being talented at programming and working hard at it (more talented than I am, and working harder than I do, even) doesn't seem to be a great way to get there. You have to focus on and have talent for activities that cause capital to end up owned by you, and I have zero idea where to even start with that kind of thing.
Meanwhile, I was socialized as a kid into a smear of multiple Fussellian "Prole" categories, plus his "Middle", so I have to hype myself up and still feel bad just to hire a plumber and not hover around them because I feel like I ought to be helping (and definitely feel like I've failed on some level any time I choose to do that instead of doing the work myself), and the notion of owning a business but not working at, or just being a kind of hype-man for it mostly for my personal benefit, weirds me the fuck out, it feels fragile and strange. Why would people let me do that and make so much money from it? It's so weird; I get that's how things work, but the idea of doing it feels scary and kinda gross, and I don't mean because of risk of failure.
I think I'd need a huge mindset shift and a totally different skillset to get actually-rich. I'd need to be a different person entirely. Meanwhile there's a long list of things I am or could become talented at, and could work hard at, and that produce real value, that might make me a living but will never get me past seven or maaaaybe with a ton of right-place-right-time luck ten digits of lifetime earnings, let alone net worth.
I think it was a Steve Jobs quote, paraphrase "it's 5% the idea, 95% implementation".
Lots of very intelligent and talented people out there. But when you have the good fortune of coming up with a great idea (Facebook in the mid 00's) you have to use your talent to relentlessly implement it.
This is what separates the plebs from the ultra wealthy. Intelligence + talent + idea + implementation = success
> Facebook in the mid 00's
Timing plays a huge role in this too.
I think it was a Tutankhamun quote, paraphrase "it's 5% the idea and the implementation, 95% having been born into a family who are very wealthy and who also happen to do a good job instilling the innate belief in you that dominating in business is everything".
There's a shockingly large number of people out there with buckets of "intelligence + talent + ideas" who never get the opportunity to move to the "implementation" phase of anything as they're too busy surviving, and the world is all the poorer for it.
As if that cruel ignominy weren't enough on its own, we are also blessed with the spectacle of ignoramuses piling up and blaming the "plebs" for a situation they've no control over. What a double whammy.
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I have no idea. What I do know is that there's no degree of hard work or talent that will make me a billionaire.
I'd argue that every billionaire has a talent for persuading capable people to join them on a journey.
Having that skill alone isn't enough because you also need to pick the right journey at the right time, but not having that skill definitely means you won't be a billionaire.
This makes me think of early employees in a startup that goes through an IPO or acquisition. Skill and talent get you through the door but heaps and heaps of luck lead to that event. Having personally won a (minor) startup lottery I got to see the luck factor first hand.
Meh. If you get lucky once and make a chunk of money or were born into money, people will associate that success with skill rather than luck, and follow you hoping that luck repeats. You don't need the skill if you can point at a big house and a nice car.
"if hard work was all you needed to get rich, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire".
The clothes I'm wearing right now were probably made by a sweatshop laborer working 12 hours a day under awful conditions, getting paid something like 1% of what I make in my tranquil 7 hour workday sitting comfortably at a computer.
I therefore think that just hard work has an almost zero correlation to success by itself.
If you add in "addressing a valuable market", then yes, hard work helps, in that more effort spent addressing that market will likely yield higher rewards. But working hard on something people don't want will not yield success, in my view.
"The horse was the best worker in the kolkhoz, but never became its chairman". Heck, there is an entirely too depressing to read (but probably mostly correct) theory about how the office politics work [0] and I imagine it roughly translates to the other fields as well. Putting lots of efforts into some random thing most likely won't make you rich and/or powerful. It's putting the effort into becoming rich and powerful that gets you there — but that takes a rather particular personality and skill set.
[0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
I agree with you that there is positive correlation.
I also believe those two things are correlated with genetics (and of course environment/upbringing)
Enormous numbers of humans work hard and are talented at the things they do. Hard work and talent gets you a middle-class existence, at least if you were born in the right country and with the right resources to go to university, etc.
In the case of Zuck, he basically did play a lottery ticket, and a perfect confluence of being in the right place at precisely the right time yielded some success. A million other programmers, working just as hard and just as talented, were trying to make their web app hit at that time and failed.
That's how life is. It is a lottery ticket that Zuck is super rich. And it's a strawman to act as if pointing this out means that hard work and talent don't matter.
And FWIW, the overwhelming predicate of significant business success is sociopathy. I am kind of a broken record on this, but I think Meta's entire business is basically the oxycontin of the online world, and that everyone involved should feel absolute shame about the negative value they bring to the world. Non-sociopaths would have felt shame and changed course when they realized they were getting rich on the mentally ill, conspiracies, misinformation, etc.
> The overwhelming predicate of significant business success is sociopathy
Bingo. Now good luck getting such message into heads of star-stuck young folks who dream of faang and similar jobs thinking there is some respect to get there in 2025, when its all about money.
I work in banking, much better job than startup/faangs could offer here in Europe, at least people aren't so naive when joining. Had a discussion with my boss recently and we figured we have around 40% of management visibly falling under various sociopathic definitions. Not requirement per se but certainly helps thrive up there.
> dream of faang and similar jobs thinking there is some respect to get there in 2025
Something that has bothered me in recent times is how much more concerned people are with where they work as opposed to what they work on. I honestly believe people would design software to kill puppies and kittens so long as they could tell people they work at a Big N company.
Not to mention, I think a vast majority of the products and services that come out of these Big N companies have increasingly started to reflect this mentality each passing year and have so for the past decade or more.
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> Does anyone actually believe
> I firmly believe that it's positive for both.
Alright, setup an experiment and prove it. Should be easy.
Speculation is free. Can't ever be wrong in the land of uncertainty.
Yes, it's totally sensible that someone would setup an experiment to prove a conjecture in a comment thread that will be forgotten in a couple hours. Totally reasonable ask.
Skill and effort obviously has a part in explaining success.
That aside, I can’t be the only person tired of people bringing envy politics to this forum, trying to shoehorn wealth into every single discussion involving someone who is wealthy, as if that’s the only, or even a valid, way to look at everything they do.
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I wish I could upvote you twice.
In order to get into Zuckerberg’s position in the first place, you need to have a highly competitive personality type. And competitive people want to win at EVERYTHING, all the time. It’s a constant compulsion. Even if they might intellectually understand the distinction between “just a game” and “actual serious time”, they don’t “feel” that distinction in their bones. They have no off switch.
I think there are some similar remarks on Bill Gates in another good memoir by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen [1]. Even on his school days, Gates was so sure he will not have a competition on Math, since he was the best at math at his school. When he went to Harvard, (which I somehow remember as Princeton(!) as pointed out by a commenter) and saw people better than him, he changed to applied math from Pure math. (Remarks are Paul's)
> I was decent in math and Bill was brilliant, but I spoke from experience at Wazzu. One day I watched a professor cover the black board with a maze of partial differential equations, and they might as well have been hieroglyphics from the Second Dynasty. It was one of those moments when you realize, I just can’t see it. I felta little sad, but I accepted my limitations. I was OK with being a generalist.
> For Bill it was different. When I saw him again over Christmas break, he seemed subdued. I asked him about his first semester and he said glumly, “I have a math professor who got his PhD at sixteen.” The course was purely theoretical, and the homework load ranged up to thirty hours a week. Bill put everything into it and got a B. When it came to higher mathematics, he might have been one in a hundred thousand students or better. But there were people who were one in a million or one in ten million, and some of them wound up at Harvard. Bill would never be the smartest guy in that room, and I think that hurt his motivation. He eventually switched his major to applied math.
Even Paul admits, he was torn between going into Engineering or Music. But, when he saw his classmate giving virtuoso performance, he thought "I am never going to as great as this." So, he chose engineering.
Maybe it is a common trait in ambitious people.
Edits: Removed some misremembered information.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Man-Memoir-Cofounder-Microsoft/d...
Huh. I remember being miles ahead of my peers in computer science in high school. When getting to college and finding people most definitely better than I was, I was incredibly excited to finally find such people, not scared away.
in my experience, people who grow up as the biggest fish in a small pond (whether concerning just fields they care about, or in general) are always 99% of the time, one of these two when they end up a middling fish in the big pond: like you, happy to find peers and inspiring exemplars to collaborate with and learn from, or those who hate that they are not the best anymore.
the former group probably leads the healthiest & happiest life fulfillment while pursuing their interests — i'm heavily biased though because i too fall into this category and am proud of this trait.
the latter group consists of people who either spin their wheels real hard and more often than not burn out in their pursuit of being the best, or pivot hard into something else they think they can be the best at (often repeatedly every time they encounter stronger competition) like gates & co, or in rare cases succeed in being the best even in the more competitive environment.
this last .001% are probably people whose egos get so boosted from the positive reinforcement that they become "overcompetitive" and domineering like zuck or elon, and let their egos control their power and resources to suppress competition rather than compete "fairly" ever again.
i think there's a subset of people from both main groups that may move from one into the other based on life experiences, luck, influence of people close to them, maturity, therapy, or simply wanting something different from life after a certain point. i don't have a good model for whether this is most people, or a tiny percentage.
I think the more common outcome you're not seeing, for the "other" group, is that they just go back to smaller ponds where they excelled in the first place, and often make strong contributions there.
Once it's been observed that there are bigger fish, you can't really go back to the naive sense of boundless potentiality, but you can go back to feeling like a strong and competent leader among people who benefit from and respect what you have.
Your comment focuses on the irrepressibly ambitious few who linger in the upper echelons of jet-setting academia and commerce and politics, trying to find a niche while constantly nagged by threats to their ego (sometimes succeeding, sometimes not), but there's many more Harvard/etc alum who just went back to Omaha or Baltimore or Denver or Burlington and made more or less big things happen there. That road is not so unhealthy or unhappy for them.
this is a very good point, and a blind spot in my comment because IME people who left the small pond in the first place were dissatisfied and unfulfilled there.
it is absolutely possible that after experiencing the bigger pond, people can develop purpose in their "original" pond based on values like community and relationships, or even simply dislike the vibes in bigger ponds and want to undo as much as they can. this is a super valuable thing to society and humanity for the most part, as perhaps more change can happen this way than big things happening in big places.
personally i struggle with this, because whenever i re-enter a smaller ecosystem (including/such as the one i grew up around) i feel like everyone has a distorted view of the bigger pond and self-limit themselves, which is a contagious energy i can't stand.
well put
Excuse me for generalizing the point. That's not fair to do just based on these anecdotes. But, I can also understand their perspective.
Paul continued to be a guitar player all his life and hosted jamming sessions in his home. I started with piano very late in my life and not very regular, but I am just happy to join the fun party.
Congratulations on learning piano. I think everyone who is capable of learning an instrument should consider it.
Rachmaninoff once said, "Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music." So, no matter when one starts, there would never be enough time to truly master the craft.
I believe it is better for one to start late and enjoy it than start early and burnout.
That’s not a common reaction with humans. When people are the best, there’s a huge serotonin rush. Like literally this is measurable in humans.
Serotonin regulates dominance hierarchies and is associated with happiness. It’s so biological in nature that the same effect can be witnessed in lobsters. People or lobsters high in dominance have more serotonin and are generally happier.
Your story is not only anomalous. But it’s anomalous to the point where it’s unrealistic too. I can’t comment on this but if you did not feel the associated come down of serotonin I’m more inclined to say you’re not being honest with yourself more then you’re a biological anomaly. There’s likely enough variation in genetics to produce people like you so I’m not ruling it out.
I don’t think they said anything about their serotonin. They just described their reaction to the situation. If we were able to ask lobsters about their self-experience we might learn something about them too.
You sound like Jordan Peterson.
A less unflattering interpretation might be that once they saw the level of skill required to contribute to a field, they switched to a field that they could more meaningfully contribute to.
I think the reality though is you don't need to be in the top 99.999% to contribute to a field, you just need a unique take/voice. Trying to be the best at anything is a bad strategy in a connected world
Yeah, but these are also about people who are not even starting off at a field. These are teenagers. It really stood out that they can think where they can make most impact in the world at such an young age.
Agreed, it's very impressive. The distribution of capability in the human race is incredible.
What are you talking about? Our society harasses every teenager to think again and again and give definite answers to exactly that kind of question. It's completely normal and exactly like every other young person.
> Even Paul admits, he was torn between going into Engineering or Music. But, when he saw his classmate giving virtuoso performance, he thought "I am never going to as great as this." So, he chose engineering.
Coincidentally, I had a very similar experience, and made a similar decision to switch to software engineering. However, the irony is that I am also just a bad, if not worse, at software engineering. Oh well, not a day goes by that I regret my decision.
I’m pretty sure Gates went to Harvard, not Princeton.
You are right. I should have looked it up.
> I was decent in math and Bill was brilliant, but I spoke from experience at Wazzu. One day I watched a professor cover the black board with a maze of partial differential equations, and they might as well have been hieroglyphics from the Second Dynasty. It was one of those moments when you realize, I just can’t see it. I felta little sad, but I accepted my limitations. I was OK with being a generalist.
> For Bill it was different. When I saw him again over Christmas break, he seemed subdued. I asked him about his first semester and he said glumly, “I have a math professor who got his PhD at sixteen.” The course was purely theoretical, and the homework load ranged up to thirty hours a week. Bill put everything into it and got a B. When it came to higher mathematics, he might have been one in a hundred thousand students or better. But there were people who were one in a million or one in ten million, and some of them wound up at Harvard. Bill would never be the smartest guy in that room, and I think that hurt his motivation. He eventually switched his major to applied math.
"Oh well, I'm not going to be Andres Segovia, so I guess I will never pick up a guitar."
I think that attitude comes from people who are deeply unhappy. They need therapy.
When I was 18 years old and a new classical guitar student, I was very fortunate to hear the Maestro in concert. I even got to meet him briefly afterward because my music professor had some connection to him.
I was blown away at the time by what was possible and that, even though he was very old at the time and had to be led out onstage by the arm, needed help getting seated, and had the guitar placed in his lap, what he could still play was so far advanced of anyone in my class who were all in attendance.
The temptation (and I have felt this many times since then after hearing various guitarists) could have been "I should just quit now because I'll never be that good." But I'm glad I didn't succumb to that and decided that "I'd rather not sound like anyone else" and still feeling pleasure and accomplishment from playing on my own terms.
I wonder if our professors knew each other?
My classical guitar instructor was well acquainted with Segovia, and he himself, was a student of Julian Bream. However, my instructor was without a doubt one of the most angry people I think I have ever interacted with. He was somewhat better known for his arrangements and less so as a performer.
> "I should just quit now because I'll never be that good."
I never had to think about this because my instructor would often tell me this. XD
Mastery comes with age, no way around that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pi7WcHqBNU - Here are some bits of wisdom from Japanese master chefs, both young and old.
And to understand that there are people who are much better, to internalize it and change the major also requires some intelligence. I wish I had that insight instead of banging my head against the walls, barely passing while others sailed through and continued to Phd with half my effort.
There’s a very very similar story about Jeff bezos and physics.
https://youtu.be/eFnV6EM-wzY?si=Nc_EqhXEFJVuQWS6
I’m not making this up. Seems like a shared personality trait among these people.
> In order to get into Zuckerberg’s position in the first place, you need to have a highly competitive personality type. And competitive people want to win at EVERYTHING, all the time.
Many competitive people want to win, but they want to win the real game, not a rigged version.
> Many competitive people want to win, but they want to win the real game, not a rigged version.
There are far, far fewer of these people than you think. Lance Armstrong was the best, and he cheated to win anyway. Barry Bonds was the best, and he cheated to win anyway. Tom Brady was the best, and he cheated to win anyway.
The thing Tom Brady is accused of (deflating footballs) is scientifically proven to be a result of the ideal gas law. The NFL admitted they had no idea that was a thing when they levied the accusations at him.
Even if you believe the NFL and it was "more probable than not" that he was "generally aware" of a scheme to deflate the balls, let's not pretend that accusation is even in the same universe as what Bonds and Armstrong did
>Many competitive people want to win, but they want to win the real game, not a rigged version.
Apply the phrase to the staff member he lost to, and the situation makes sense. The staff member wants to win the real game (of remaining a high-salary Facebook employee), and will throw an otherwise inconsequential game of Catan to maintain that position's security.
The do anything to win mentality often includes bending the rules where they can. Someone listed some top people in their various sports below but I'd include Lebron too. Dude is the best basketball player the world has ever seen at least when considering longevity but he still flops often to get what he wants even though he doesn't need to to win. He's just going to get every edge.
Some people view rigging the game as a part of a larger game.
Yes, that is a convenient escape hatch for justifying amoral behavior.
In my personal experience the will to win and the willingness to cheat in general correlates.
There is no real game in the fog of business development. You invent your own and see if it works.
"If you're not cheating, you're not trying."
To be fair, some games effectively to force you to move outside normal set of rules eventually ( ie. Monopoly, when bank money supply dries out ).
Diplomacy encourages cheating, but only if you don't get caught.
The game of capitalism is to win by any means necessary. Rigging the game and evading the law is part of game itself. All winners play the game this way.
What does any of this have to do with capitalism?
Have you ever seen a succession struggle in eg any old monarchy?
It's not competition that they like. It's winning.
Competitive athletes expect to lose. They don't want to lose, but there's only one winner (or three podium spots) in any given contest. They turn "not wanting to lose" into their motivation for getting better, still knowing that they are fairly likely to lose. The competition is the point, and when they lose, they are still a little happy if they did better than they did last time.
The people who want to win regardless of the competition, regardless of the rules: we call those people bullies.
Reminds me of this post[0] from a few weeks ago:
>A couple years back, I got a job offer from an investment bank to help them win zero sum games against people who didn't necessarily deserve to lose. I had tried very hard to get that offer
https://www.hgreer.com/PlayingInTheCreek/
I can recall being this way as a small child. So had I not been disciplined as a child so that I would not be a sore loser, did this blunt something that would have led to my being more "successful"?
I suppose I assumed “choosing your battles” had to be a skill they were also good at. Only 24 hours in a day.
I think that while the trait itself is fairly common the ability to bully and pressure everyone around you to give in to this level of petty and demeaning deference is quite rare. You only see it in powerful people because they're the only ones who can actually make people do this.
I have an aunt like this and she's super annoying and largely ostracized and in constant conflict with people around her, but if she had $175 billion she could probably surround herself with people who would indulge her.
Money is a potent and addictive hallucinogenic neurotoxin. We have a culture where everything is run by addicts, with predictably disastrous consequences.
s/money/power
Money is a means to an end.
The two sour losers I know just refuse to play any game at all. Cooperative games or team games they think are kinda fine though of they are "forced to". They just can't handle being targeted as individuals.
Maybe Zuckerberg has a lack of self reflection?
I'm like that and really I have lots of free time because of not playing any competitive games
Downside is I obviously don't use that free time to do anything I'm not already skilled at, like art or music or writing or exercise (except for rock climbing which I manage to not be competitive at)
Ye. My problem is the opposite. I am a way too good loser. It has its drawbacks too but they are less emotionally obvious maybe.
A few years back (2015ish?) I read a big magazine profile of Michael Jordan in his post-basketball life and I was really surprised by how unhappy he seemed - extraordinarily competitive at everything, even casual games of golf, running up huge gambling debts, etc.
This is a guy who was the most dominant athlete of his generation, arguably the greatest the ever play the game, and yet he can't turn it off, he can't relax and rest on his laurels. The same personality quirks that drove him to win at basketball mean he can't tolerate losing in any arena.
Arguably, to be great at modern sports, you have to be good at multiple unrelated thing (On field strategy, Physical Conditioning, Actually the sport itself, playing politics, doing all of that while listening to coach), either you have that kind of drive to be the best at all of them or you'll just be a good athlete
I'm pretty sure this is the correct and intuitive reason. In a competition to be 'ever above everything else', tragically it selects for the most pathologically ruthless behaviour pattern, be it Musk or Putin. If there were a contestant even more unscrupulous than you, he'd take your place. So, as long as we allow/tolerate obscene wealth, we invariably get this. And if we try to avoid it the wrong way, we get Stalin.
The Bill Gates Chair Jump is another great example of this.
https://youtu.be/YUGk30Wy8vU?t=175
What a ridiculous video that's reading way too much into a silly 5 second clip.
Bill Gates may be competitive, but this specific event, and the whole idea that it somehow represents a shift, is completely unrelated to the current topic. People have different private and public personas, and even present different personas to different people. This is completely normal, and often the only way to cope with being a celebrity, especially for introverted personality types.
It's only 5 seconds edited down to match your attention span. Exceed it, I suppose, because the fact that personas exist is not the pertinent part, it's the glimpse past BillG's persona to see the compulsive competitive behavior: inventing a chair game, "cheating" at it, and instead of brushing it off as silly fun (which everyone would have accepted) getting increasingly flustered until he walked out of an interview.
Way to assume what my attention span is.
Speaking of which, if you watch the (nearly) full interview[1] instead of that 5 second clip, you'll realize that the chair jumping bit had nothing to do with the reason he walked out of that interview. I couldn't find the full version, but you can see that towards the end he gets annoyed at the constant prodding to get him to admit some wrongdoing. The entire segment is made to portray him as some out-of-touch rich guy and tyrant that abuses his employees and competitors. Just poor television all around, more interested in promoting sensationalism for engagement purposes, than showing an honest image of the person. The chair jumping bit is proof of this, given that it's the only thing the public remembers.
Extrapolating that bit to make some grand assumption about his personality is beyond ridiculous.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgwHIwEwGLQ
I was interested in this anecdote about the board games, but it seems like there's at least some dispute about how true or inflated this story is:
https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-board-game-c...
I think it's easy to believe a narrative like this about someone generally disliked, but the reality about basically everyone is that we have good moments and bad moments. People that are famous are constantly being watched and evaluated.
Given the inevitability of those bad moments being observed and reported, I don't think it's a good foundation for evaluating someone's character. In this case, it's mostly useful for confirming an already negative point of view.
Sure, one single anecdote doesn't say much.
But at this point it would be hard to say that Zuck is not a toxic individual. Not everyone is toxic.
from the article you linked, it seems that Zuck told everyone else to gang up on the next hardest player so he could win.
That they went along with it is... kind of in line with what Wynn-Williams said. Would they still have all teamed up on Zuck's opponent if Zuck hadn't been their boss?
I know a number of wealthy folks, many of them, actually really decent people. They deserve their wealth, and I have no issues with it. They tend to have somewhat different value systems than I do, but we get along, anyway.
I have learned that one word they pretty much never hear, is "No."
Even the very best of them, gets used to having every whacked-out fever dream their Id squeezes out, treated like God's Word.
People who aren't very good at self-analysis and self-control, can have real problems with it.
We are watching a bunch of very public examples of exactly this, right now.
How wealthy are the wealthy folks you know ? a quant or faang principal engineer making 1.5-2 million/year is wealthy and worked hard to get there (although, luck is still a big part of it) yet they're much closer in wealth than a fast food employee than they are to the super rich. Someone who has accumulated 50 millions of assets is wealthy, yet they'll never afford a super yacht or the lifestyle that billionaires can afford.
the principle engineer may have a lot of money but also still has a job with a boss and thus probably still hears (or know they can potentially hear) "no".
Multi-millionaires (not billionaires), but they are business owners and finance folks.
They own a mansion and a yacht (Bugs Bunny reference).
But you are correct. Different orbit from the ultra-wealthy. They still hang out with plebes like me.
However, if this happens to these folks, then you can bet that it also happens to the next valence level.
In the 1800s in Spain, king Ferdinand VII, was famously keen on playing billiards while being a really bad player. His opponents were known to, not only play badly, but play so that he would get easy positions to shoot.
"Así se las ponían a Fernando VII" is even nowadays a popular -though not that widely used today- expression to tell someone the task in front of them is an easy one nobody can fail.
Being ultra wealthy/famous/powerful would have a lot of negative psychological pressures that would likely effect all of us in that situation. Personal growth is difficult. Acknowledging negative parts of ourselves is difficult. Many times, we are forced to confront something negative about ourselves because of how it effects our lives and our relationships.
I think we have all had that friend at some point that was a poor sport. They were poor losers, gloating winners, and just unpleasant to play games with. Usually that person stops getting invited to game night, or you have a “come to Jesus” talk with them about their behavior. The social pressure of losing friends is a powerful motivator.
But what if that person has an unlimited supply of people that would validate, flatter, and reinforce their bad behavior? When you are thinking about who to hang out with from your unlimited rolodex, you will likely subconsciously lean towards people that make you feel validated, understood, respected, etc. Slowly, by degrees, over years, you could find yourself surrounded by sycophants, where you more and more validated and catered to, and are less and less used to hearing constructive criticism of your behavior.
It reminds me of how highly processed “junk” foods can short circuit a lot of our physiological mechanisms around overeating. Basically unlimited availability of junk food is part of why obesity is has shot up. Being ultra wealthy/famous/powerful is the highly processed food of the psyche. It doesn’t mean every rich person become psychologically unhealthy but it makes the rates of it shoot up.
> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
Yes. As a kid, I read a legend that one of the Charlemagne's knights got so annoyed for losing a game of chess that he killed his opponent with the chessboard.
> this insecure
I agree that such an event would demonstrate insecurity. I would also argue that past elites were not “that insecure”, because they put their lives at risk by waging wars. Of course, later elites figured out ways to address the downsides.
There's a frame question in this, and the history of duelling. Is your image, or self-image, in matters of honor or social status more important than your life? Is it secure or insecure to risk your life simply because of an insult? To what extent does "security" in this context boil down to the capacity for violence, rather than anything else?
But duels were instituted primarily to curb vendettas, deadly street brawls, and retaliatory assassinations that aristocrats regularly engaged in. At least with a duel, the violence was limited to one death and a settlement to the honor of all involved. It was in improvement to the situation they were facing at the time.
But the idea of honor itself was a necessity for most of history, when there was no central government to enforce contracts, punish violence, etc. Your reputation was one of the only protections you had. Whether your family was known to exact revenge to those that wronged you or as weak pushovers would affect someone’s decision to kill one of you, steal your things, or make a deal with you and keep everything for themselves.
You had to show that anything someone could gain at your expense would be outweighed by your commitment to take more back in revenge.
It's hard to speak broadly about this I think but since we already are. Military aristocrats like knights were at the least risk among combatants in an armed conflict, being better armed, armored, and more likely to be mounted compared to the levied militias or even professional soldiers, later in the early modern era.
And social norms at the time were to take them hostage and ransom them back to their family or allied higher lord if possible, so their chances of surviving a lost battle were much higher than that of the men they were leading. So even in this context they are already figuring out "ways to address the downsides."
Vs the like, the normal people who would also be called on to die in battle, but then the rest of the time would be living under the capricious and frequently violent rule of these certainly-no-more-than-average-emotionally-secure men with more or less unchecked power over their daily lives.
What we have now developed from what they had then and a lot of the dynamics are quite similar. The violence is more abstract but that's exactly what the current crop of tech billionaires is trying to change.
I think you'll see this kind of thing in many professions. Some doctors, who are highly specialized and highly trained in their field, act like they should automatically be great at skills they barely have experience with, and then get frustrated when they don't immediately excel or when people with less impressive credentials end up being better at something.
My family member who taught flying to hobbyist pilots always said physicians were the most dangerous students because of their "know-it-all" attitude.
>> Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy? Does anyone who fails to bend over backwards for them just end up getting exiled? Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
There is a long history of wealthy elites wanting to always win, even at games, and who want to be the center of attention.
Kaiser Wilhelm II had many of the same characteristics seen in today's ultrawealthy elites. When he commanded forces in German military exercises his side was always the side that won because it was his side.
"Wilhelm II's reign marked a departure from the more restrained leadership of his predecessors, as he sought to assert direct influence over the German Empire's governance and military affairs. This shift toward a more "personalist" system, where loyalty to the Kaiser outweighed true statesmanship, weakened the effectiveness of German leadership and contributed to its eventual strategic missteps."
Source: https://www.deadcarl.com/p/the-kaiser-and-his-men-civil-mili...
Lots of historical echos in the state of the world today.
>This shift toward a more "personalist" system, where loyalty to the Kaiser outweighed true statesmanship, weakened the effectiveness of German leadership and contributed to its eventual strategic missteps."
I'm not convinced there has ever been a positive or constructive outcome from cults of personality.
> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
This is very Roman Emperor behavior. Or Chinese Emperor, for that matter. It has pretty much always been the case that power and privilege lets you get away with bad behavior while simultaneously holding your subordinates to onerous standards and/or inflicting punishment on a whim.
Building a court who will steer you away from bad ideas rather than surrounding yourself with yes-men requires active effort, and enough humility to be aware of that risk.
The other constant historical trope is of course the abuse of power for sexual purposes.
I had a conversation with one of these types. He honestly told me, "I really feel I am superior to most people". He was very frank with me. (And, in the things he did, he was actually much better than most people - he did have great talent but also spend almost all of his time on that.)
So my pet peeve theory is when they feel they are not superior and other people are better than them in activities that involve logical thinking for example, they feel extremely uncomfortable as their perception of themselves gets weaker, hence these strange behaviors.
When someone builds their whole identity around being "the smartest person in the room," any situation that challenges that (even something as trivial as losing a game) can feel like a threat to their entire self-image. It's not just ego, it's almost existential.
Success has a part of skill, and a part of luck. It hurts to be reminded about skill issues.
Board games aren't as simple as time invested. I could spend my whole life studying chess, and some 13yo prodigy will handily beat me blindfolded, while juggling three other boards.
Board games cannot be conquered with wealth or a successful business. Or, rather, they can, but only by pressuring your underlings into letting you win; giving you the feeling you crave.
Naw, the rare super talented 13yo child that excells at such games will have also spend an incredible amount of time learning everything there is about it - leaving very little time to pursuit outside of that discipline to improve themselves.
There is a grain of truth to what you're saying, obviously - as Magnus has proven when he started to enter chess tournaments... Outplaying people with decades more experience. But you're also ignoring that he spend pretty much every waking moment of his thinking life playing chess.
But if you knew people were letting you win, wouldn't that ruin the feeling forever?
It seems like there must be another component, but maybe it is just that simple.
If they let me win, that is since I have power over them.
This is the more interesting answer to me because it's a reminder that everyone is playing a different game.
I used to play games to win, but now I play games to maximize the collective enjoyment of playing the game. This shift began with my spouse (who is a very sore loser) but continued with my children. I still let them lose sometimes because I want them to know how to enjoy a losing game, but I (selfishly) want them to enjoy games as much as I do, so that's my focus, and I will play to lose (as non-obviously as possible) frequently.
When I play games against good players now, I notice that I've lost a lot of skill in the kind of strategic ruthlessness required to win. I found this surprising, because playing in a way where you're trying to "fix" the outcomes for other players and modulate the mood of the game based on outcomes still requires a great deal of strategic insight and clever play. I guess the additional attention to the social and emotional dynamics must naturally reduce focus. It's kind of a shame, because you can't maximize enjoyment with a skilled player without being skilled, but I suppose the trade off is that there will always be more unskilled players who can benefit from enjoyment maximizing play than skilled players who will suffer from subpar opponents. Naturally, skilled players are already getting a lot out of the game, or else they wouldn't be playing enough to become skilled.
The need to dominate can be a favorable trait for success. It can also be all consuming that you can't easily turn off. Like...ok Zuck, you won the f'ing lottery. You could spend the rest of your life on an island or helping orphans, but you still work at Facebook - why? Because he's wrapped up in it. It's a miracle Bill Gates managed to step down.
It can also be unsettling to know that, just as easily as you killed off competitors, competitors could unseat you.
So yea, you might sleep a bit easier at night if you can just win at the things you can control, like that darn Settlers of Catan game.
Also someone who reflexively accuses the other of cheating while playing a game likely has a hard time admitting they failed at something. Not an admirable trait in a leader.
> And anyway, if you're playing games for fun and to bond with people, you probably shouldn't be playing tryhard optimal strategies every game, and should instead explore and experiment with more creative strategies.
Agreed. I have played some truly awful strategies in games (Azul: Queen’s Garden comes to mind) where it was clear within a round or two that it was doomed to fail; my wife / gaming partner expressed dismay that I was doggedly continuing, but to me, I had to see it through without introducing other variables so that I could definitively know (modulo luck of tile draw) that the strategy sucked. I thoroughly enjoyed losing.
EDIT: if anyone is curious, the strategy was to maximize high-point (5/6) tokens above everything else, eschewing end-round bonuses, brief tactical shifts, etc. Turns out it’s really hard to collect enough sets of them to count at game end, and you’re giving up compounding points along the way.
I think it is part nature, part nurture.
To get where they are, they need to be quite smart, competitive, and ruthless.
As soon as they succeed, they become magnets to yes-men and people trying to ride their coat-tails.
So you end up in a position where the majority will ask "how high?" when you tell them to jump, and who will never question you.
Do that for a couple of decades, and something has to change - psychologically. You become condition to it.
>I think it is part nature, part nurture.
Really rich people aren't any different from the rest of us. You quickly realize that what sets them apart is privilege. You see behaviors in the wealthy that if they were poor they'd be locked up for. "They just let you do it if you're rich" comes to mind.
There is also a feedback effect. Most people are part of groups which aren't strongly selected for moral character, but the rich and powerful become surrounded by people who are after money and power, unless they deliberately manage to avoid that. So some of their bad behaviour is because the availability heuristic tells them that that's how most people behave, and fills them with cynicism and contempt
Right? I had a sort of respect for the Zuck, same partner for a long time, seems nice to his children, does charity… And then he gets one of those mega yachts and he can’t stand loosing at board games. So disappointing.
Surprise surprise, probably the image you had of Zuckerberg was not an intimate look into his personal life but instead a carefully crafted image created by an professional agency whose life and blood is creating neat images of famous people.
Somehow, actual real life details are starting to come out (he does seem more "daring" as of late, might be why), destroying the picture painted by the professionals for all this time.
Celebrity worship really needs to end, including the worship of the celebrity programmer. We're all humans, with a bunch of flaws, and it's easy to forget when what you're consuming is a fake impression of someone.
There is definitely a point where we need to stop assuming that people who are good at building tech companies are, by default, good at _anything_ else.
They might be, sure. But we shouldn't assume it.
> crafted image created by an professional agency whose life and blood is creating neat images of famous people
Melon should fire his!
Probably did.
I'd think the ruining society for profit part would be a red flag.
Imagine being so spineless, so utterly desperate for power, that you’re willing to contort your public persona just to appease a man who made lying a brand. Zuckerberg didn’t just sell out—he gift-wrapped his integrity and hand-delivered it to Cheetolini.
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I know these types of people, a lot of them, but I am not one of them. I was a student at Harvard, I've dated the daughter of a film studio owner, the daughter of the then-owner of Gucci, I've worked at an Academy Award winning VFX studio, I know celebrities and CEOs, and I married an Academy Award winner. I know these people.
There is a mechanism in high wealth investment circles that seeks very ambitious and simultaneously low self knowledge individuals to invest heavily. They tend to be driven and charismatic in that drive, while being very ignorant of their negative impact on others. Many high net worth individuals see themselves in such youth, and invest in them, their ideas and their drive. They create psychopaths, and celebrate their mistakes as fuel for control of them later. This mechanism I am describing is very powerful, dominating.
The problem is also the justification stories they excrete to justify the wealth the capital machine pours on them. The whole gods choosen, superior, natural strong willed aristocratic uebermensch bottled into one cyst of sycophants. Totally unable to connect with "easily distracted by the trivial" normies, barely able to talk to the monomaniacs they once where themselves. Not a good show.
At my work, we play much much better board games than Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride. I feel for Zuck and his colleagues.
There’s a podcast I love called Real Dictators.
It looks at loads of dictators from history - Stalin, Hitler, Saddam Hussein.
What they all have in common is a love for loyalty and subservience. And they demand loyalty and subservience be constantly proven. Often in very weird and trivial ways.
Eg. Saddam Hussein liked to have a BBQ where he would cook (but not eat) and make the food inedible spicy. Then he would force his top people to eat it while he laughed at them.
They of course had to keep up the pretence that the food was delicious and pay him lots of compliments.
No one deserves that much more than others. No one believes they don't deserve what they have. People work backwards to justify why they need so much more power, control, and wealth than others. Worse for Zuck b/c his special shares.
The ambition/success feedback loop never stops, which is why the folks on top seem somehow less secure and content than the rest of us. Most of us figure out we probably won't be the #1 anything pretty early in our journey and stop fixating on comparison and focus on maximizing ourselves.
Most people have to make peace with not being №1, and in doing so, they actually get a shot at real contentment. But when you're at the top, the game never ends. There's always another metric to dominate, another threat to neutralize, another narrative to control.
> Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy?
Who says it's limited to the ultra wealthy? My network has a lot of people who have net worths of under $5-6 million USD and a lot of them are highly insecure.
I've witnessed several of them going out of their way to tear down people who are fitter or more attractive than them as well.
Look at the manbaby actions through that lens and you might get some insight.
Hmm. So highly insecure people have to "win" (however it's defined at the moment) in order to bury their insecurities for the moment, but ultra wealthy individuals 1) have more power, so they can make it so that they win more often, and 2) are noticed more (or at least by a wider circle), so when they do it, a lot more people pay attention.
>so when they do it, a lot more people pay attention.
It makes sense, media glamorizes these people and amplifies their actions, and some of the insecure folks crave attention. Look at that one guy who somehow works harder than all of us but is able to tweet all day every day...
It’s more so related to power. Once you’ve acquired enough power, it consumes most people. They don’t like having their power challenged or put in a weakened state. Many of these people are acquiring power via some form or their “genius”. Technical wunderkind, military strategy genius, etc. So that drives their ego. But, they probably know they’re not actually a genius and plenty of people could have done what they did but they got lucky. So they end up getting defensive and insecure when anything challenges their power, risks to expose their genius as a fraud, etc. They’re operating on a mental house of cards and are volatile due to it. For regular people, they seem to be triggered by small things like losing a card game but it’s probably just that, a trigger that unleashed a wave of pent up insecurity.
f you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
Zuck 'earning' another billion probably means nothing to him. I doubt he can even keep count. All of that sense of self-worth that people derive from their career or wealth is lost in the noise of Meta's stock price for him. But winning a board game is tangible. It's right there in front of him, as a direct result of his own actions. He can feel that.
If you couple that with him being surrounded by people who know that losing to him makes him feel good, and that Zuck is more generous when he's happy, you can see why people lose on purpose.
Probably have been told their whole lives that they are so smart, clever, and special, that they will (and rightly should) always win. So any loss immediately looks to them like foul play by their opponent(s). Even if it's just a casual game. Anyone telling them otherwise doesn't last long in their orbit. As they gain power, they naturally grow a bubble of sycophants who reinforce their "I always win" beliefs.
There's also no shortage of people willing to tell Zuck and Musk (from a relatively safe distance, like in public here at HN) that they're insecure manbabies born into wealth who don't deserve a fraction of the power they've managed to claw themselves. I suspect that we, and the desire to show us wrong (or at the least spite us) are also part of the equation for why the current crop of billionaires are as they are.
Not that this means we're wrong, exactly.
From an Eastern philosophy point of view, low ego with high confidence, is a skill that can be trained. It is also a skill someone can get worst at. That being said, I don't think that Zuck and Musk would have become low ego people without internet criticism, since they are on the completely wrong path.
For £1M/year after tax, I'd tell Zuck anything he wants to hear from 9 to 5, excluding weekends, bank holidays and 28 days of annual leave.
We all have a price really.
You could make more than that without compromising yourself. Aim higher.
I'd have to put in effort. I've already got other things taking up my spare brain cell.
Here on HN, we're not telling Zuck and Musk anything. We're telling each other things about Zuck and Musk. Zuck and Musk aren't dropping by to find out what we think of them, ever.
Figuratively speaking, we're telling them, since we're saying it loudly in public. You bet they know people are saying it. They might even peek in - we know some of their friends (arguably friends) who do, and Musk is among other things famous for being a bit of a social media addict.
Rich people's bubbles are thick, and their "outside-the-bubble" communication tends to be write-only. I highly doubt Zucc or Musk spends any time at all on places like HN or Reddit, and their comms on their respective social media platforms tend to be broadcast sending/writing and not reading comments or feedback. They rely on the sycophants in their orbit to give them the summarized, sanitized, positive feedback, and downplay/hide the negative.
We know Musk spends time on X. We also know he reads as well as writes, because he often replies to random things.
But even for a slightly wiser billionaire who does what you suggest - they wouldn't do that unless they knew they would get public hate, and were bothered by it. You don't have a thick bubble unless you understand that you need it.
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You mean "us jealous poor people who are mad that he is bright and successful".
I've known a few people in the hundreds and millions of dollars in wealth category and that seemed to be their go to response when anyone had to say anything negative about their behaviors.
In the US at least, never underestimate the amount of calvinism and prosperity gospel that has creeped into every facet of our lives.
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
It’s possible that exact personality trait is what drove them to such success in the first place. Perhaps like an obsession with winning.
I think it's less a new phenomenon and more a timeless one - we've just digitized the palace
These guys are sort of like a type of inherited wealth. They created companies at a time where you could go public and have no accountability to a board with power.
When you take a genius and drown them in good fortune… you sometimes get a sense of personal infallibility.
One of my favorite tweets:
> Being a billionaire must be insane. You can buy new teeth, new skin. All your chairs cost 20,000 dollars and weigh 2,000 pounds. Your life is just a series of your own preferences. In terms of cognitive impairment it's probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day
https://x.com/Merman_Melville/status/1088527693757349888
It raises the question: where is the crack in this structural system, and how can we pry it open? Perhaps the vulnerability lies in the desire of the ultra-rich and powerful for societal respect—whether born of love or fear hardly matters. How should society respond? Mercilessly mock them.
We all have personal quirks which would appear silly if publicly known. But most of us are not billionares, so these quirks do not come to light, or do not seem that strange in ordinary people. "Not wanting to lose at board games" is actually quite a mild personal quirk compared to some of the things I know about myself or about my close friends. I know a guy who spends 20 minutes picking out tomatoes.
There is a huge difference between not wanting to lose and getting angry when someone doesn't let you win.
> If you're wildly successful at something … why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
> And anyway, if you're playing games for fun and to bond with people…
I see you answered your own question.
I think it's easy to unknowingly surround yourself with yes-men and become insulated from failure. Losing then seems like an exception to the rule, a bug.
The game thing is just the tip of the iceberg.
There's lots of talk in the entertainment world, from the long-term famous, about how money and fame tend to be fundamentally warping. Bill Murray said to Pete Davidson that, once it happens, nearly everyone is an asshole for about two years. People fawn all over you; they do things for you. They give you things for free. You can get things normal people can't get. If you're making a few million a year, you have economic power beyond nearly everyone you've ever known. At a certain level, travel is a whim, not a slog through TSA and airport lines. And you lose the ability to deal with pushback of any kind.
The smart ones -- the ones with some capacity for self-awareness -- course-correct. The others don't.
But in Hollywood, one assumes, the bubble is far less perfect than the one around someone like Zuck, whose power over Facebook is absolute and inviolate, and who has money and power beyond almost every other person on the planet. So there's only a very small chance of any course-correction, and thus he stays an asshole, and that assholery extends to insisting that he win at trivial board games.
It's weird how moments can go from "we were playing a game when.." to "The New York Times is covering a game we played 15 years ago". What I've heard from people who were in the game was that he wanted to go to bed so he was trying to negotiate a quick end to the game. There was a time at a con where I did something similar (i.e. we had to finish, we couldn't just leave the game setup and play later.)
Everything is viewed through a mirror darkly.
"HE FORCED OTHERS TO KNEEL BEFORE HIM, EVEN IN BOARD GAMES!1!" vs. "He wanted to go to bed so made a dickhead comment that would let him both win and sleep." Think back to your 20s, which feels more likely.
At the Versailles court of the Louies there were constant parties and games, gambling and otherwise. It wasn't to bond or for fun, it was to keep the aristocracy too busy to threaten the dictatorship, as well as letting the king exert an immediate influence over them through a borderline insanity.
Infamously the first or second Versailles Louis, I forgot which, got very aggressive around the topic of toilet excretions, basically forcing aristocrats to try and handle being drunk and desperately needing both to piss and stay in his vicinity. The ceremony around the parties and the court in general over time got more and more intricate and maddening, causing the aristocracy to spend more and more resources on getting clothes and drinks and showing up at the right time and doing the right thing and being on top of the fashion of the day.
It would be weird if a late modern corporate dictator didn't apply similar tactics, since they are known to work and didn't come to an end until the guillotines rolled into town. Things like sleepovers in the office, ceremonial games, constant 'after work', oddball demands regarding clothing and behaviour, intimate surveillance and gossiping, and so on.
>Things like sleepovers in the office, ceremonial games, constant 'after work', oddball demands regarding clothing and behaviour, intimate surveillance and gossiping, and so on.
That sounds more like a cult than a company.
I don't understand why anyone would put up with that, if they had any other alternative. And most people do have alternatives.
With the number of people that have been swept up in cults over history the entire idea that "people can just easily leave" doesn't seem to pan out well.
> I don't understand why anyone would put up with that
To paraphrase McBain's answer to "how do you sleep at night?"
"On top of a pile of money with many beautiful ladies".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO0JaecRWy0
People with the skills to earn lots of money can generally also get well paid jobs at companies not run by sociopaths.
Finding those companies is hard, especially when there's an obvious winner. Hell, I'd have joined facebook (not in hindsight, though) in the early 2000s because the specific challenges they were facing would have been novel. That being said, I'd likely feel terrible for what FB became had I did.
I visited the FB campus ~2015 on the invitation of some former colleagues that worked there. It felt very culty at the time and I left with the vague feeling that I always got when I left the house of my spoiled and over-privileged friend that I had in grade school. How they were working with the scale of data that they had to deal with was very cool, though.
Corporations are commonly run as cults, at least to some extent. It could be demands of loyalty ('we're a family'), personality cult, dress code, 'teambuilding exercises' and so on.
The alternatives usually involve a threat of more uncertainty or misery.
Louis XIV had a notably insecure childhood, with portions of the nobility were in open rebellion. When he came of age, he set about to make damn sure that they were under his thumb.
But the parallel seems lacking to me: Musk and Zuckerman can't jail recalcitrant managers.
Sure, every tyrant has a story that superficially allows some shift of blame.
They could, though. It's just that they likely would have to do something more involved than depriving them of their contracts, which is often enough to get rid of the problem and unlike an aristocracy where bloodlines and births set limits there are now institutions that produce replacements 'at scale'.
I think power sometimes leads to this kind of insecurity, but a bigger factor is that people with narcissistic personalities often succeed because ordinary people are unaccustomed to dealing with them. Narcissists often come off as unusually competent, confident, and intimidating. This leads normies to want to follow them and give them what they want.
Narcissists are always extremely insecure, usually because someone crushed their ego during childhood. (There also exist people with intact egos who are simply arrogant; I'm not talking about them. The arrogant are easy to distinguish from narcissists after you study them a bit.)
My point is that Zuck was probably very insecure before the creation of FB, and he became rich partially because he was an insecure narcissist.
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
All the other comments are about Zuckerberg being an out-of-touch egomaniac, but I think this is a reflection of people.
We want our leaders to be infaliable and we use the stupidest metrics to judge people. Remember how Ed miliband eating a sandwich became a scandal? For every one person that would see losing as not a big deal, there's like ten people that will think "this guy can't win a game of settlers of Catan, and he's running the company???".
I am reminded of that joe rogan clip where he's just in awe of Elon Musk because of his Diablo rankings or something. People feed into the mythology.
It's all stupid and insane, but I don't see how anyone can look at the current state of politics or the stock market and not say that the world is full of crazy things that just run on vibes.
> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
The modern phenomenon, relative to history in general, is that upsetting an elite doesn't get you immediately killed or sold into slavery. But yes, they have always been like this. Behind every great fortune is a crime, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
i see it in local politics a lot too, people don't dare to contradict the leaders, who in turn end up believing they are right on everything, it's a sad thing really
It’s part of the pathology. So much so it’s violating otherwise core tenets of their culture and customs:
Look, today meritocracy and brutal honesty are absolutes, they’re considered critical, exactly to overcome biases that stand in your way. The Zuck types are 100% believers in this (heck they accelerated it), yet they still need positive affirmations like winning board games.
Most people (especially smart and opportunistic ones) fold because they know winning a private board game means nothing.
He should have eaten his own dog food and played the games inside the Metaverse where he could have had the environment ensure his desired outcome. But maybe the Metaverse itself is now a painful reminder of failure.
> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
I don't think _all_ the superrich _are_ this insecure. Like, the obvious examples of this sort of behaviour are Trump (golf, in particular), Musk (video game nonsense), Zuck (this). But all three of those are very obviously fucked-up, socially maladjusted people in _other_ ways, too. Potentially the issue is more that being very rich allowed them to _get away_ with this behaviour; poor weirdos have more incentive to suppress it because people will only accept it from rich weirdos.
Though the phenomenon of "adult manbaby gets upset when not allowed to win game (especially by his partner)" is _absolutely_ out there, even for non-absurdly-rich people; see any subreddit about relationships for examples.
That phenomenon is certainly not exclusive to men. All it takes is someone insecure enough to feel that losing a game threatens their sense of worth as a person.
Nah, definitely not exclusive to men, but you do see it more from men. I think possibly at least partially because it _is_ seen as somewhat more socially acceptable from men than from women; the boy who never grew up is viewed more favourably than the girl who ditto.
> All it takes is someone insecure enough to feel that losing a game threatens their sense of worth as a person
You also need them to think that they'll get away with this behaviour, whether it be just being very rich, or because there is some societal tolerance of Homer Simpson-esque emotionally immature men, or for some other reason.
> Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy
It makes a better story in a tell-all memoir?
That's interesting becasue at least with Zuckerberg, he entered a local bjj tournament under a fake name.
And tbh if you eventually do find yourself against him your going to want the opportunity to say you submitted him. No one's letting him win at a tournament
It’s a personality trait that leads him to success.
Yes Zuckerberg won the lottery. But at the same time his business acumen and ruthless personality put him in a position to win the lottery.
It's an old problem. Medieval kings had this problem. One way around it was the fool/jester, who could (within limits) say the things that nobody else was free to say.
People who have built empires who then surround themselves with Yes Men is probably the strongest indicator they’re about to lose it all
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
I think that successful people tend to be people who pay a lot of attention to "winning" in as many situations as possible. If you accept losing as a part of life and move on, you're not going to be successful, because you don't spend time thinking how you could've won. Of course this looks funny in situations where one cannot win, but it's really helpful when it comes to fixing your mistakes, allowing you to be successful.
> but it's really helpful when it comes to fixing your mistakes, allowing you to be successful.
It would be helpful if they'd take a loss as a learning opportunity. But as stated in the original quote they threw a tantrum and accused the opponent of cheating, taking away no lesson to improve the next time around.
Given this, I don't want to imagine how much Elon Musk is suffering right now for the bullying he gets and for Tesla, which have higher stakes than a tabletop game.
And I don't feel bad for it
He doesn't care about Tesla anymore. His president will kill EV subsidies and give them to coal. He never cared about the mission of Tesla, and anyone working at Tesla who still believes in it is a sucker.
So, why is he not selling all his Tesla stocks, then?
IIRC, he borrowed against them for a lot of stuff, including the Twitter acquisition. It's probably why he's freaking out a bit and returning to it. It's also not the first time he's had liquidity problems. Tesla literally did come weeks away from bankruptcy on a few occasions in the 2010s as he often put the cart before the horse. The infamous "refundable deposit" for the car back then that ended up being almost twice as much as promised was essentially an unsecured loan. People were almost out all their money.
Bethany McLean (a journalist that was among the first to start questioning Enron's numbers and wrote the book "the smartest men in the room" on it that also became a documentary) has been following Elon Musk for well over a decade.
She once said "Whenever Elon is lashing out is when he's under enormous stress". Also, he has a large cult of true believers who believe a man who's taken credit for others work as his own all his life. Watch this documentary called "the cult of the dead stock" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5Bd6YxifCo ; it's like that x100.
> Tesla literally did come weeks away from bankruptcy on a few occasions in the 2010s as he often put the cart before the horse.
Yet another thing Tesla should have faced sanctions on - you'd never have known this by listening to any earnings call or looking at any financial filings from Tesla at that time (and at one point I think the number was <10 days).
I really do wonder if outright financial fraud was occurring. There was a period of time where they were going through CFOs like water over Niagara Falls (whom I assume were refusing to sign off on the books?).
Because as soon as he starts selling them, they'll devaluate immensely
That's not how it works. You can't sell without someone buying from you, and if you're selling everything then buyers will know your stock is worthless and will not exactly be rushing to take you up on the offer, except at whatever severely depressed prices will generate a profit margin from liquidating your assets.
He's much better off propping up the stock with a bit more grifting for as long as that will last and living off loans taken with stocks as the collateral.
I think they don't have to pay the same amount of taxes if they use the stock as collateral for getting loans
Chances are there are some considerations which I don't know about
One cannot simply sell all of their stock if they own that much.
I don’t think Elon cares about Tesla as a vision anymore, but does he care about being “the richest man in the world” or at least one of them. Absolutely, and TSLA is the reason that’s true.
Because he can afford not to, for now.
First of all, there has been a significant selloff by Tesla top executives, including over $10 billion by Musk in the past 3 years [1,2,3]. The main reason he can’t sell of more is that he is still fighting in court to get his insane $56 billion executive bonus, which would be primarily in Tesla stock [4]. I say insane because it is over 500 times larger than any bonus given by any other company ever and is equivalent to giving every other Tesla employee an almost half a million-dollar bonus. I think we will see a lot more sell offs once the outcome of that legal battle is done, whether it comes out positive or negative for Musk.
More broadly, I think Tesla’s general valuation is a house of cards that his been hyper inflated by years of Musk lying to investors about future sales, future products, and future features. He promised a million driverless taxi’s that would make $30,000 profit each year would be coming “next year” in 2019 [5], that full self driving was coming in an update “next month” in 2020 [6] and wildly incorrect capabilities of basically every product ever released.
[1] “four top officers at the company have offloaded over $100 million in shares since early February [2025]… Elon Musk's brother, Kimbal Musk, who also sits on the board, unloaded 75,000 shares worth approximately $27 million last month” https://abcnews.go.com/Business/tesla-board-members-executiv...
[2] “Musk sold a total of 41.5 million shares of Tesla stock between November 4 and December 12 [2024]… The sales came not long after a October 19, 2022 earning call in which he told investors ‘I can’t emphasize enough, we have excellent demand for Q4.’… But when Tesla reported fourth-quarter sales, they were far weaker than forecast, and that sent stocks down 12%, the worst day of trading for the stock in more than two years.” https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/04/business/musk-tesla-stock-sal...
[3] “Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Thursday he does not plan to sell any more shares of Tesla for at least the next two years, after the billionaire and nascent Twitter owner offloaded nearly $3.6 billion worth of stock this week [2022] as Tesla's share price tumbled.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2022/12/22/musk...
[4] https://www.investopedia.com/elon-musks-multi-billion-dollar...
[5] https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/22/tech/tesla-robotaxis/index.ht...
[6] https://www.whichcar.com.au/news/tesla-level-five-absurd-say...
used to be such accusations were grounds to seek satisfaction in a duel.. might be time to revive that practice
Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
It's always been this way, more or less.
If you look back at the ultra-wealthy in any age, you'll find just these sorts of people. It's in 20th-century literature. It's in classic literature. It's in the Bible. It's probably in ancient Greek literature, but I'm not well-versed there.
At least in the early part of the last century, there was some hope. A number of ultra-wealthy people decided that instead of building a faster steam engine or racing to pump more oil, they'd engage in benefiting society as an alternative penis-measuring contest.
They were happy to pour the equivalent of today's billions into projects like paying artists to spend 30 years documenting the fading culture of the American Indian, or funding scientific expeditions to improve our understanding of ancient history.
Today's billionaires are, instead, trying to one-up each other on getting 12-year-old girls addicted to their apps.
Yay, progress.
you're getting the order of events backwards. it's not "Become a billionaire, then become a baby who insists they be allowed to win board games". The order is, first you're an entitled, manipulative jackass with absolutely no bottom for unethical behavior and zero tolerance for "losing", then become a billionaire by being so brazenly shitty in all areas of life and getting people to go along with you. Caveat, you have to be a white guy for this to work and it works much better if you already inherited millions from your dad.
As an exercise, apply this rule to all the other billionaires you know.
I tend to agree with you, but I also tend to believe that indeed, having a billion dollars (read: having no constraints) will tend to bring out the worst in anyone.
Another way to say this is, most people who earn obscene wealth who would be offended by the obscenity of it would work hard to give most of it away. Those who are not offended by the obscenity of it will be happy to keep it, so there's a selection bias to it.
Many many many years ago I used to like playing Scrabble (knockoff) on Yahoo Games.
I quit playing completely when my opponent accused me of cheating because I made a high point move and was winning.
First person shooters were like this back before I stopped playing them online.
Get decent and dominate a few rounds? Here's a kick ban, must be cheating. Couldn't be because they keep bunching up.
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
Deep running narcissism, bordering on sociopathy or psychopathy.
Because they are psychopaths and sociopaths.
Anyone with a conscience would worry about having the work of your lifetime being used in genocide. Zuck isn't like that. He doesn't care. What he cares is winning at board games.
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
Billionaires are highly psychologically disordered individuals. This is an expression of unrestrained narcissism in a "man" who has fully neglected to grow character as an individual, because his obscene wealth allows him to get through life with the emotional maturity of a teenager. Same with Musk, same with Trump, same with most other billionaires. Bill Gates is another great example.
People hate to admit it, but apparently having a billion dollars either makes one a narcissist, or it takes being a narcissist to make a billion dollars. Either way, just from the data we have in front of us, there's a very strong correlation there.
I’m only part of the way through the book, so have nothing to spoil here. But it’s entertaining. And shocking. The author will relate a scene that’s so absurd that you think “ah, this can’t be true, this is made up for dramatic effect, nobody would act like that” and then you Google it and you realize the absurd thing is totally true and was fully documented at the time. All the author is adding is a perspective from the inside.
I understand why Facebook people might have wanted the book to go away. That their attempt to do so comically backfired and resulted in entirely the opposite effect, well, that’s also pretty much what you’d expect from this crew after reading the book.
It's called the Streisand Effect. :)
It's kind of amazing that people still hit this, really. Like, if you're Facebook's lawyers, how are you not telling them "don't talk about this; anything you say or do will only promote it further"? The lawyers must _know_.
Competing incentives.
Lawyers get paid to “do something”. To wealthy people, a lawyer saying “let’s actually not do anything” seems like a “what am I paying you for then” moment.
After reading the article, it seems plausible that they were advised against this and, well... didn’t care.
(Perhaps it’s more accurate to say they did not think it would manifest but that’s not a fun play on words.)
From the lawyer's point of view I guess you're making a risk judgement, presumably they thought the chance of getting a successful court order outweighed the potential increase in press of they happened to fail.
Even if they got a court order (they did get partial bars on publicity AIUI) it would _still make the problem for Facebook worse_, tho.
I'm not so sure. I think there is some selection bias happening, so it's easy to say "Streisand effect!" When it makes the headlines but that ignores the times it doesn't make the headlines.
It's right there in the URL, along with #ZDGAF
For a company that supposedly runs on data and strategy, they're shockingly bad at anticipating how people will react when they try to bury criticism
What is the thing? (you can rot13 it for spoilers)
It's hardly just one single thing. The book is full of absurd scenes all the way through.
Please tell me exactly when it gets interesting, Im listening to it and completely uninterested in the author’s “job pitch”
> completely uninterested in the author’s “job pitch”
It's central to the arc of the narrative though. She begins with the idealistic possibilities for Facebook; and now, in a real-life epilogue, is concluding by pulling back the curtain on how horrible these people are. And by extension this company.
The book has great stories. You could skip the job pitch part and jump straight to once she joins Facebook, that's fine too.
The book is a good read and she also testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee[0], repeating many of the claims from the book under oath. One of the striking things is that it's clear that Mark and several others from Facebook perjured themselves in prior hearings. I expect there will be no consequence for this.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3DAnORfgB8
As long as we have this concentration of wealth in this country we are going to have this selective enforcement of laws based on class lines.
"The big thieves hang the little ones." Czech Proverb
It's actually Roman: Magni minores saepe fures puniunt
Citizens United has enshrined this in law by allowing wholesale purchase of politicians via the current campaign finance system.
I believe it will take at least a couple of generations after a new political ideology is cemented in the USA to change anything.
Market fundamentalism has been the game since the 80s with Reagan, it was building up to it but Reagan was the watershed moment when it really gripped. You see it everywhere now, here on HN especially, any deviation from the dogma of market fundamentalism is met with the usual retort about "innovation", "growth", and all the buzzwords implemented to make it seem to be the only alternative we have. Any discussion about regulation, breaking down behemoths wielding massive power, betterment of wealth distribution, workers' rights, etc. will attract that mass who are true believers of the dogma.
To undo this will require a whole political ideology from the ground up in the USA where the two parties are just two sides of the same coin, I really cannot see how this can realistically change without a series of major crises, bad enough that people will rise and understand who exactly is fucking them... It's sad to realise there's much more pain to happen before it might spark real change, we are kinda bound to live in the aftermath of the erosion of society brought by "shareholder value"-hegemony.
Not necessarily..
During the Great Depression the Americans did pull together and demanded from President Roosevelt a social reform. That was called the New Deal Coalition.
This time though the fight will be much harder because even the democrats are so strongly indoctrinated in the "free market" idolatry that they are much closer to the republicans than any true social democratic movement (such as labor unions) that would actually be needed in order to help the American working (and soon ex-middle) class.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal_coalition
I think you and the person you're replying to agree.
We won't get a New Deal Coalition Part 2 without our own Dust Bowl (climate-change/industrial-agronomy-induced disasters, and the massive disruption to peoples way of lives that accompanied it) and Great Depression to conclusively demonstrate that industrialized, financialized oligarchy "doesn't work".
The two-party system was just as much captured by "free market" idolatry pre-FDR as they are today. There was nearly three decades of socialistic organizing in response to crisis in the 1890s-1920s before we finally had those principles manifest in one of the two major political parties in the executive branch, with FDR in 1932.
We're barely into the nascency of our own century's progressive era. If history's any guide, it'll probably take decades and it will get much, much worse before it gets better. :/
I re-read Grapes of Wrath recently, and it was an uncanny feeling: like I was reading something that was both near-future Sci-Fi and a memory-holed but relatively-recent history.
These crises are occurring right now so I don’t think it will take multiple generations. The rise of neo-fascism, the climate crisis, and the escalating warmongering toward China - a nuclear power - should be seen as symptoms of a system breaking down because it prioritizes profit over people. Intensification of capitalism’s worst tendencies is the capitalist’s last stand. It’s either going to end in mass destruction or people throwing off their chains.
This is very much what professor Richard Wolff is saying.
What you're witnessing down is the systemic failure and breakdown of a system (capitalism) that is completely out of control and ultimately starts to attack the very institutions that enable it in its greedy search for "growth" (i.e. producing more wealth for the already wealthy).
The system will eventually collapse.
Recommended video, an interview with Prof Wolff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeWiKOEkfj8
You might find this recent talk on neo-liberalism, by journalist and activist George Monbiot, interesting:
https://shows.acast.com/rhlstp/episodes/rhlstp-book-club-134...
I haven't listened to the talk but read Mobiot's book when it came out last year :)
On the same vein, I'd recommend "Capitalist Realism" by Mark Fisher, Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine", and even the original "A Neo-Liberal's Manifesto" by Charles Peters to understand how the term is slippery and diverged a lot from the original manifesto.
And I'm not an anti-market, full-blown communism person. The feeling I have is that all the aftermath from the dogmatic implementation of an unsound ideology has brought much of our contemporary malaise, the allowance of finance to take over the real economy, the productive economy, has just eroded any semblance of a good market-driven society. I'm against that, the supremacy of finance over all other economical activity, it's a cancer that festers on every single big corporation.
Amen to that. Thanks for the reading recommendations. However my book backlog is a bit out of control. ;0)
>And I'm not an anti-market, full-blown communism person
Also, it is interesting that you feel the need to say you aren't a communist before criticising the current system. I guess that is a sign of just how entrenched it is.
I see it more as a sign of how few mainstream alternatives have been proposed. I've been guilty of generally assuming a communist bent when I see a negatively zealous response to the "free market" ideology. I don't act on the assumption, but from my experience, it tends to be the most common result.
Our political system seems hell-bent on only ever having two solutions to a problem, though.
We seem to be stuck at a local maxima[1]. The current system works great for the 0.001% who have all the money and the power, so it isn't in their interest to change it. But there definitely seems to have been a failure of the imagination amongst the 99.999%. Too distracted by social media and our phones perhaps?
[1] There is a lot to dislike about the current system, but there have been far worse ones (feudalism, communism etc).
> Too distracted by social media and our phones perhaps?
I think this is a significant contributing factor. It's becoming increasingly difficult to have any semblance of a meaningful conversation with those around me. I don't really know how to describe it other than an apparent "dumbing down" of the average person. I despise elitists, and I hate to even act in a way that might come off as elitist, but I simply have no other explanation for what I am seeing. People just want to talk about the latest trend on TikTok and have no interest in applying anything close to intellectual thought to what's happening around them.
2000 years ago it was 'bread and circuses'. ;0)
Weirdly, right at the moment the US economy is tanking because of severe departures from market fundamentalism. By the people who most claim to be pro capitalism.
There's no departure from market fundamentalism, the belief in shareholder value being supreme is still very much the current Zeitgeist.
As much as the USA's administration is jerking around with trade, the fundamental principle of what governs any corporation is still market fundamentalism: returning value to shareholders, nothing else.
Shareholders are pretty grumpy right now. They've lost a ton of money.
I'm sure that some economist will asset that this will produce more shareholder value in the long run. But the stock market suggests that shareholders do not currently believe that.
We might have just exited from the era where shareholders mattered.
Capitalism is incompatible with free markets. Capitalism means all the wealth goes to those with the most capital, while free markets means the wealth flows freely in all directions.
> Capitalism means all the wealth goes to those with the most capital, while free markets means the wealth flows freely in all directions
I don't understand this distinction, why wouldn't capital accumulate under free markets? The freer the market the more capital accumulates.
In a freer market that today you would have to pay a massive toll every time you went to the grocery store, because the road owner has monopoly on that route, that would lead to much more wealth accumulation.
In economics perfect markets mean that your company that raises spherical cows has no moat against others doing the same. If you do something to gain profits to become rich someone else joins the market to compete those profits down to zero. This reduces inefficiency and makes everyone rich.
Deregulation is sold as getting closer to this, in reality it means the money collects wherever the market breaks down, monopolies, network effects, externalities, concentrated special interests, middlemen, oligarchies, gangsters, landlords etc.
When all of the capital ends up in a small number of hands, the market ceases.
Each capitalist tries to corner the market, but if they succeed, the resulting monopoly isn't a free market. In theory a competitor arises, but it takes only an instant to shut it down and restore the monopoly.
>I don't understand this distinction, why wouldn't capital accumulate under free markets?
It would, which is why businesses support deregulation - not because they believe in vigorous competition for the sake of consumers, but because they want as little friction and consequence standing between themselves and oligarchy as possible.
A market in which the wealth "flows freely in all directions" is socialist, not capitalist. "Fair" markets are regulated, and by definition not free.
To me that is the biggest win in public discourse from capitalists: conflating markets with capitalism, as if free markets could only exist under unbounded capitalism. Which, as you say, is incompatible. Capitalism does not want free markets, nor foster free markets, the best end result for a capitalist is the abolition of a market under the control of a monopoly.
Markets are fundamental, and a natural result of human socioeconomic order. Capitalism not at all.
I mean, I guess the obvious question is if one person lied under oath (her) or several (all the people that her testimony implies perjured).
The book sounds pretty outlandish. That's not to say that Zuck and co aren't just a whole gang of melodramatically evil and stupid people, but it a priori it seems just as probable to me that she's the one that is? I don't know much about her. Is she a reliable witness?
This review is as naive as Wynn-Williams portrays herself in her memoir (which I enjoyed!)
In the book, Wynn-Williams described herself as a wide-eyed, almost helpless person, which doesn't align with her pre-Facebook career as a lawyer in the a diplomatic corps. And when at FB, she was in the rooms where it happened, and had a job enabling some of it. She could've quit, but did not.
She was one of the titular careless people at the time, and excuses it now by pointing at others who were even more careless. It's not atonement, it's whitewashing.
This may be a little naive from my side, but I'm wondering - is every big tech company the same as Meta and it's leadership? Or is there something special, a perfect storm of circumstances that we only hear so much about so many instances of outright - can't even find the right word here - evil, stupidity, brashness?
If we assume that every big (let's say FAANG) company is the same, why we hear about Meta time and time again?
Bias disclaimer: I've worked at multiple FAANGs and Meta isn't one of them, but as with anyone in the industry I've had friends at all of them.
Meta feels very different - both at the top, with Zuckerberg's immunity from the board, full control, and personality "quirks" on public display - but also at the lower levels. Every company has a stable of people who will do what they're told to collect a paycheck but Meta had a much higher ratio of people - including people I know, respect, and consider very smart in other aspects - who bought in to the vision that what the company was doing was good for the world even in a post-2016 world when all of the consequences of social media and Meta's specific actions were fully evident.
My Amazon friends won't defend the bad things Amazon does, my Alphabet friends love to gripe, my Microsoft friends....you get the idea. But my friends at Meta would repeatedly try to defend bad things in a way the others don't.
The Koolaid is stronger at Facebook, because it has to be.
It does feel slightly cathartic to reject someone's resumè for having any time at Facebook on it.
I think Facebook's core product is inherently evil in a way that other FAANG's core products may not be.
It doesn't have anything to do with this though. It has to do with having so much power and money in a "meritocracy" and the mental gymnastics needed to maintain those two opposing propositions.
Meta's core product is a machine to sell ads, just like YouTube, TikTok, Netflix (now), etc. It's not that unique. And these stories are all over the valley for even much less powerful individuals
Zuckerberg is unusually powerful in the company, due to how it's structured (note that few companies of this sort of size are run by their founders...), and he's unusually unhinged.
'absolute power corrupts absolutely'
Have you heard the stories about Uber?
I haven't. What stories?
Because Zuckerberg is a worse human being than the senior people in the other FAANG companies.
I was the TL on a Facebook app feature driven by us, the engineers, that was 100% in the category of "good for humanity and it solves a problem for billions of people". I had to fight internal org leads to launch it, because there was almost no benefit for FB.
Jane leaked the feature and put this entire 'evil Facebook' shade on it, with no real proof, just wildly false speculation based on what she thought the feature is. That's when I realized how easy it is to present anything Meta works on through the lens of "stealing people's data" and "ads bad". Oculus headsets? VR ads. Smart glasses? AR ads. Spyware. Facebook app feature? Must have some privacy issue.
I'm not saying it's not deserved, with all the scandals, just that at some point it was getting a bit ridiculous with all the "Facebook bad" articles, at least one of which I knew first-hand was complete nonsense. It did seem like news outlets were grasping at straws to write yet another article to put Facebook in a bad light.
It's low-hanging fear-mongering fruit that gets the clicks and it's hard to disprove (not that PR/Legal would let us refute anything in the first place) because the trust is broken.
You did something good while working for the devil, people were right to be suspect. You gain no redemption points from pointing out the people describing facebook as evil misunderstand the precise bounds of facebook's evil.
Also, you didn't address parent's question about the uniqueness (or lackthereof) of Meta. Feeling targeted because people on the outside don't have the visibility to properly understand the nature of the evil is shared with at least 3/4 of the remaining FAANG letters.
Who was Jane?
Tell us the feature so we can evaluate your claim. Absolute certainty, bitter criticism, and expectation of unearned trust do not build confidence in your ability to judge what is good for humanity.
What was the app feature you worked on?
I worked at a FAANG company that was not Meta. I'm not going to defend everything they did, but the culture was set up in such a way that people at all levels of the organization considered how their decisions would impact customers, and they had some sense of obligation to question harmful decisions.
Afterwards, I went to a startup, and the company leadership was shockingly callous about doing things that would harm customers. Some lower-level people spoke up about it, but nobody in a leadership position seemed to want to hear it.
this cracked me up
"When he gets to the mic, he spontaneously promises that Facebook will provide internet access to refugees all over the world. Various teams at Facebook then race around, trying to figure out whether this is something the company is actually doing, and once they realize Zuck was just bullshitting, set about trying to figure out how to do it.
They get some way down this path when Kaplan intervenes to insist that giving away free internet to refugees is a bad idea, and that instead, they should sell internet access to refugees. Facebookers dutifully throw themselves into this absurd project, which dies when Kaplan fires off an email stating that he's just realized that refugees don't have any money. The project dies."
> ... but then Meta's lawyer tried to get the book suppressed and secured an injunction to prevent her from promoting it.
Sounds like the work of Barbra Streisand's PR firm LOL
It's nice to know that despite playing fast and loose with the facts, the film The Social Network does capture something fundamentally true about Zuckerberg's psychology. The pathological need to dominate can be disguised when you're the underdog, but the more power you accrue the more it becomes the sole motivation. To paraphrase Robert Caro, "power does not corrupt, it reveals."
[dead]
I used the form on the author of the book's website a few weeks ago to invite her on our books podcast:
https://sarahwynnwilliams.com
She didn't respond, which is fair enough, it's probably not big enough to be interesting to her. But then I got auto-added to her PR mailing list. I didn't ask or consent to be on the PR mailing list (all the page says as of now is "To contact Sarah, please complete the form below"). Seems I was just added because I used the "contact" form.
Auto-adding someone who contacts you to a PR mailing list is a dark pattern. Seems she learned something at Facebook. I found it ironic.
She certainly didn't code that contact form. Still an oversight from her, but...
Doctorow touches on this, but I really think the biggest problem with society today is simply that too many people in power simply don't experience consequences
I think that's true for our society in general at the moment. Everyone can behave like an asshole and it's completely OK for a society if they say "I had a tough childhood and haven't received a professional help".
Don't mess with a Kiwi I guess :)
That said FB sounds evil not careless.
Evil and careless can be one and the same. They (FB) could not care-less about the consequences of their actions on other peoples' lives.
"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference." - Elie Wiesel
The banality of evil.
Zuckerberg and co. always seem so basic. Settlers of Catan and Ticket To Ride? I can't imagine more flavorless, generic games.
Wait, those are the games that I play...
I remember listening to Zuckerberg speak at length about the various epochs of Facebook including the fast pivot to global, it's overall a fascinating and compelling story that the book surely capitalizes on well.
I'm not a big fan of Catan. Players can get locked out of the game with no way to meaningfully play.
Ticket to Ride is decent though. Simple, straight-forward rules. Enough strategy and randomness to make playing interesting. No one can gum up the game by being intransigent.
I'm responding to TheAceOfHearts, I can't seem to reply directly to the original comment.
The question was "if you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?"
You kind of answered the question yourself. He cares so much because he is successful in something else and has extended that need for success into other areas of his life. It seems this is common among successful people, they try to be successful in everything else in their lives, perhaps not realizing they might have got lucky in one area and are convinced they can apply that to all other areas of their lives.
I read the book. It’s a very interesting read. A few things stood out ( no spoilers )
- Casual indifference at exec level to atrocities happening because of FB/ Meta.
- Money/power does make you insensitive
- Tech bro view of the world permeates most decisions that Meta takes.
- Casual sexual harassment for women ( follows from the tech bro worldview I guess )
- US centric world view influencing how execs treat world leaders.
All in all worth a read or two!
> - Money/power does make you insensitive
This is something I try to be acutely aware of in myself. Not that I have any level of wealth worth mentioning.
I started working at a company where they just give me stuff. I can go to work in clothes my employer gave me, eat my meals there, use the phone they pay the plan for, etc.
It does affect you. I first noticed it when I went to buy some triviality. Something small I needed for something or the other. Something that would have been just given to me at work. The line to checkout was long and while waiting, I just thought "Why can't I just fucking go? It's not even $10. What does it matter?"
So now I try and be mindful of what I receive and to be sure to acknowledge it at least mentally.
The casual indifference part really got to me too.
Then you realize that Facebook has been extraordinarily active banning Palestinian posts and accounts over the last year. So the "casual indifference" is at the very least selectively applied.
> Kaplan fires off an email stating that he's just realized that refugees don't have any money
Maybe they just realized that Palestinians don't have any money.
Maybe I'm jaded, but this is how I understand all US technology companies to be run. In fact, I'd be surprised if all of those things weren't true for most of the enormous "tech bro" companies coming from SV.
There's a reason the Silicon Valley TV show's humor was so biting.
I would put Meta, the Elon Musk companies, Uber, and some others in a separate category from Amazon, Apple, and Google. To be sure, Amazon, Apple, and Google have done some very immoral things, but there does seem to be something in the culture of those companies that understands that they wield enormous power and that sees value in acting responsibly - even if it's just because they think being cartoonishly evil isn't in their long-term interest. I do think there's been a change in ethos from the Jobs/Bezos/Page/Brin generation of leadership to the Musk/Zuckerberg generation.
>Zuck learns Mandarin. He studies Xi's book, conspicuously displays a copy of it on his desk. Eventually, he manages to sit next to Xi at a dinner where he begs Xi to name his next child. Xi turns him down.
I do wonder what the point of amassing all that money and power is, if it means you end up grovelling to a despot like Xi (or a would-be despot like Trump).
Just riding that hedonic treadmill, probably. Once you have bought all the properties you want, airplanes, helicopters and yachts, I imagine your hedonic set-point adjusts to that level and you begin to cast about for what's missing. (What's missing of course, is what all these people can't seem to find, which is an unwavering set of human-centred values.)
Once you have several mansions, a helicopter and a super yacht, the only possible reason to want more is for status. And you have to be some sort of sociopath to use that much of the world's resources just have a yacht 5m longer than the other guy.
Zuck begs Xi to name his child? Why would Xi want Zuck to name his child? What a bag of hubris~~
The opposite - Zuck begged Xi to name Zuck's child as a form of flattery.
;) I know but it can be read both ways. Leaning into the ambiguity.
Why does our country continue to exalt people like this? Can we have some compassion up top for once?
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Compliments to the author of this piece, Cory Doctorow, who I believe coined the useful term "enshittification". He has consistently championed consumer rights (presumably at a significant risk of having powerful people come after him) and lots of other worthwhile causes. And his writing is excellent.
To be fair, Catan really brings out the worse in people, despite it being a friendly Euro game. It's worse than Monopoly in a lot of ways.
> "[Zuck] blows key meetings because he refuses to get out of bed before noon."
Is this meant to be taken literally or is it an expression for arrogance?
I read the book. It’s something that comes up & happens multiple times, and the potential meetings being described are with various global heads of state.
I suddenly now imagine Zuck no differently from some of my unemployed friends.
Can't see any reason not to take it at face value. It's not a common phrase or expression.
Whenever these kind of articles pop up, I always think how sad it is that PyTorch, Llama and many widely used opens source projects are tied to Meta.
They are open-source. Shouldn’t we be happy that at least something good comes of that sentient pile of cash?
So get a group of other sympathetic people and fork them.
This is virtually the only place where you have a chance to take power from them by your actions.
"The best way to complain is to create things," and yes that's a poster I got for free back when I worked at Facebook.
> fork them
This requires all of the "source" to be available. For PyTorch and a bunch of other projects, this is trivial as all the source is straight up on GitHub. But for proprietary things like Llama, it's really hard to fork something when you don't even have access to what they used to build it (software-wise, not even thinking about the hardware yet).
How could you fork something like Llama when Meta don't even speak clearly about what data they used, literally none of the training code is available, and you have to agree to terms and conditions before you're "allowed" to do anything with it?
> you have to agree to terms and conditions before you're "allowed" to do anything with it
I don’t have experience with this so I’m taking it at face value; if this is true, it’s so strange that I have an idea of this being an “open” model. As in, not that they PR’ed to make people believe it but that people who were required to accept those terms seem to believe it (as users seem to repeat it). Seems a little bit of critical thinking should dispel that notion. Are there any, more reasonably open models? Is LLaMa just called open because it’s the most accessible?
> Are there any, more reasonably open models? Is LLaMa just called open because it’s the most accessible?
Indeed there are! They aren't exactly SOTA, but they're 100% open source and you could build them yourself from scratch, granted you had the compute, knowledge and time for it. OLMo 2 from Ai2 is probably the most notable one.
I think Llama is called "open source" because that's what Meta, Zuckerberg and the Llama website says it is, and people take it at face value. Then people see "Oh but it's free, who cares about the license?" not understand how we got here in the first place...
Be thankful they are open source at all. See OpenAI for the alternative.
Lets say Meta goes under tomorrow (won't happen, but bear with me) and stops making new Llama releases.
Would the community be able to take over the project and train new models, assuming they have access to the same hardware? Obviously, the community doesn't have access to similar hardware, but even if it did, would the community be able to continue releasing Llama models?
And if the answer to that is no, why is that and how could Llama be considered open source if no one could pick up the torch afterwards (even theoretically), even if they had access to hardware for training?
There are many things to be said about open-source projects and, more broadly, the capabilities of the open-source community.
The most capable parts are for-profit organizations that release open-source software for their business imperative, public benefit companies that write open-source software for ideological reasons but still operate as businesses, and a tiny number of public benefit organizations with unstable cash flow. Most other efforts are unorganized and plagued by bickering.
Llama itself is challenging to take over. The weights are public, but the training data and process is not. It could be evolved, but not fully iterated by anyone else. For a full iteration, the training process and inputs would need to be replicated, with improvements there.
But could another open-source model, as capable as Llama, be produced? Yes. Just like Meta, other companies, such as Google and Microsoft, have the incentive to create a moat around their AI business by offering a free model to the public, one that's just barely under their commercial model's capabilities. That way, no competitor can organically emerge. After all, who would pay for their product if it's inferior to the open-source one? It's a classic barrier to entry in the market - a thing highly sought after by monopolistic companies.
Public benefit companies leading in privacy could develop a model to run offline for privacy purposes, to avoid mass consumer data harvesting. A new open-source ideological project without a stable business could also, in theory, pop up in the same pattern as the Linux project. But these are like unicorns - "one in a million years (maybe)."
So, to answer your question, yes, Llama weights could be evolved; no, an entirely new version cannot be made outside of Meta. Yes, someone else could create such a wholly new open-source model from scratch, and different open-source groups have different incentives. The most likely incentive is monopolistic, to my mind.
I think you've kind of answered a different question. Yes, more LLM models could be created. But specifically Llama? Since it's an open source model, the assumption is that we could (given access to the same compute of course) train one from scratch ourselves, just like we can build our own binaries of open source software.
But this obviously isn't true for Llama, hence the uncertainty if Llama even is open source in the first place. If we cannot create something ourselves (again, given access to compute), how could it possibly be considered open source by anyone?
I understand I was supposed to say “no” and question the open-source label. We’ve heard many arguments that if something can’t be reproduced from scratch, it’s not true open-source.
To me, they sound a bit like “no true Scotsman”. Llama is open source, compared to commercial models with closed weights. Even if it could be more open source.
That’s why I looked at it in a broader sense — what could happen in an open-source world to improve or replace Llama. Much could happen, thanks to Llama’s open nature, actually.
> Llama is open source, compared to commercial models with closed weights
Yeah, just like a turd is a piece of gourmet food if there is no other good food around.
Sorry, but that's a really bad argument, "open source" is not a relative metric you use to compare different things, it's a label that is applied to something depend on what license that thing has. No matter what licenses others use, the license you use is still the license use.
Especially when there are actually open source models out there, so it isn't possible. Maybe Meta feels like it's impossible because of X, Y and Z, but that doesn't make it true just because they don't feel like they could earn enough money on it, or whatever their reasoning is.
> Yeah, just like a turd is a piece of gourmet food if there is no other good food around.
I didn't mean it's on a continuum, as you assumed. Apologies for phrasing it unclearly. I meant that the weights are public. They are open; there is no debate to be had about it. Generally and broadly, that is already considered open-source.
And we all understand what "open-source" means in the context of Llama - it doesn't mean one of the idealized notions of open source, it means open weights.
> Generally and broadly, that is already considered open-source.
No, just because something is public doesn't mean it's open source, those are two very different things. If I upload code on my website without any license, that code is not now suddenly open source just because it's public. Just like Llama isn't suddenly "open source" because Meta's marketing department says so, their own legal department still call Llama proprietary, don't you wonder why that is?
> And we all understand what "open-source" means in the context of Llama - it doesn't mean one of the idealized notions of open source, it means open weights.
You, and some others (including Meta) are using a definition Meta came up with themselves, probably in order to try to skirt EU AI regulations as it's different for "open source" models vs others. I'm not sure why you as an individual would fall for it though, unless I'm missing something you have nothing to gain by spreading PR from Meta, do you?
The existing definition of open source (before Meta's bastardization) is not a "idealized" definition, is the one we built an enormous ecosystem on top of, who taught a whole generation of programmers how to program and connected people together, without putting profits first.
Llama 3 license: https://github.com/meta-llama/llama3/blob/main/LICENSE
Calm it with the ad hominem attacks. It's not the place for it.
I think the fact that all (good) LLM datasets are full with licensed/pirated material means we'll never really see a decent open source model under the strict definition. Open weight + open source code is really the best we're going to get, so I'm fine with it coopting the term open source even if it doesn't fully apply.
> we'll never really see a decent open source model under the strict definition
But there are already a bunch of models like that, were everything (architecture, training data, training scripts, etc) is open, public and transparent. Since you weren't aware those existed since before, but you now know that, are you willing to change your perspective on it?
> so I'm fine with it coopting the term open source even if it doesn't fully apply
It really sucks that the community seems OK with this. I probably wouldn't have been a developer without FOSS, and I don't understand how it can seem OK to rob other people of this opportunity to learn from FOSS projects.
Not all of the community is OK with this, lots of folks are strongly against OSI's bullshit OSAID for example. Really it should have been more like the Debian Deep Learning Team's Machine Learning Policy, just like last time when the OSI used the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) to create the Open Source Definition (OSD).
https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team/ml-policy
Its unlikely all the training data for Llama is publicly available, let alone under an open source license. If Llama actually had an open source license (IIRC it doesn't), that would still make it a Toxic Candy model under the Debian Deep Learning Team's Machine Learning policy. That means no-one could replicate it exactly, even if they had the boatloads of cash it would take to buy enough hardware and electricity to do the training. Eventually the community could maybe find or create enough data, but that would be a new different model.
https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team/ml-policy
AI models aren't really iterative in the way that other software is. Llama 4 is a completely different product from Llama 3, with different parameter counts and even different modalities. The only reason it gets to be called Llama 4 is that the company that made it is the same and it's convenient to not have to come up with new names all the time, not because there's any sort of continuity with Llama 2.
Fine tunes are the correct analogy to iterative software development—they take the existing code (weights) and improve upon it and modify it—and fine tunes can be produced with what Meta has released.
The bigger problem with Meta's claim that it's open source is that they've attached a bunch of strings to the license that prevent you from using it in a bunch of different ways. It's not open source because it's not open, not because weights aren't source.
No. You need a research lab, compute time and talent to train LLMs.
> No. You need a research lab, compute time and talent to train LLMs.
Right, but even if you had those, could you actually train a Llama model from scratch? You'd still have a lot of work in front of you, compared to a "regular" open source project where you have everything available already, download the source and hit "compile" and you have it done.
And truckloads of data.
Its a good book I read it, the only thing that she messed up though is not letting her exec level shares vest and be quiet until then imo :)
While her boss continues to sexually harass her? Doesn’t sound like a mistake to me. There’s more to life than money, as the author makes quite clear throughout the book, IMO.
just the opposite. She put her money where her mouth was and didn't trade her dignity for some cash
Yes correct in some absolute ethical context, but would have been easier to fight with a few hundred million budget to pay for legal fees
Did she say that she renegotiated her compensation? Because early in the book she wrote that unlike basically everyone else she's working with, she poorly negotiated her comp and that she's working for a regular and unimpressive salary while her coworkers are flashing luxury brands that she can't afford.
I've stopped reading after the Myanmar episode so I don't know if she's ever renegotiated her package.
Will definitely read the book after this readout.
Trying to get Xi to name his child is both completely tone deaf to the point of being offensive, and incredibly debilitating for his child's self-esteem as just a bargaining chip.
How abstract is this book? Are there many examples of things that are relevant at meta today, especially on the web and developer front?
Maybe depends on if by relevant you mean, "I'm working on airflow surface turbulence" vs "am I making a cruise missile?"
It’s a good memoir and like the author of this review. I too only picked it up because of Mark/Meta’s attempt to suppress the promotion of it. Listened to a couple of chapters on an audiobook service before picking up physical copy and was hooked.
This book probably could have been written about any major company. Our corporate system's built-in moral imperative that profits must be optimized above absolutely everything else virtually guarantees that these kind of people end up at the top of each and every one of them.
It's very odd that we consider corporations to have personhood in the U.S., if you were to actually describe most of these top, predatory companies like Nestlé, Meta, etc. and their action as something "a person" did we would all immediately say that person should be jailed, is evil and that allowing them to interact with the general population is too risky. That person once in jail would assuredly never pass a parole board.
Companies should either be treated as people or as companies, what we have is a ongoing classification error that makes all natural persons lives worse as our rights are subordinate to unnatural persons. It's insane how we build our own cages.
That being said, the environment is bad but not all individual companies are the same and saying so is not only false but creates an environment of acceptance and equivocation. "Pay ratio" is often a good indicator of where on the evil spectrum a company is... If only every company could have the moral standards of a HEB or Costco the world would be better than it is.
Anyone else notice how losing at simple board games seems scarier to billionaires than losing millions in business? Makes you wonder if it's because they can't control the outcome with money or power...
Are any of these accusations proven or is this just an opinion piece that the far left who hate the rich want to fawn over?
signed, "I have had more money than I will ever need for the last decade". Get fucked.
I don’t find the anecdotes very interesting—people with great power are or turn out to be assholes; sure, what else is new?—but this little gem stood out to me. Not that I’m surprised, just that it’s the first I heard of it:
> According to Wynn-Williams, Facebook actually built an extensive censorship and surveillance system for the Chinese state – spies, cops and military – to use against Chinese Facebook users, and FB users globally. They promise to set up caches of global FB content in China that the Chinese state can use to monitor all Facebook activity, everywhere, with the implication that they'll be able to spy on private communications, and censor content for non-Chinese users.
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I don't think so. It just underlines the title of the book "Careless People".
Facebook doesn't care about anything, takes no responsibility, "can't be touched", be it on their home turf or across the globe.
I think the comparison is not meant to be between degrees of horribleness between the two events, but between degrees of complicity and denial on the part of Facebook management.
Complicity in what, exactly? Democracy? Personally I'm less concerned about Facebook staying neutral in 2016 and more concerned about their election sabotage in 2020:
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/3616579-zuckerberg-tel...
Of course in the end things turned out for the best, but that's almost certainly not what Sheryl wanted, so I guess it's on theme for the book.
US nationals being subject to arbitrary detention by ICE, with the plan to deport them to irretrievable offshore prisons, is probably not the best.
I'm not following, which things turned out for the best?
> Complicity in what
The massacres in Myanmar and in the propagation of misinformation relating to the elections in the US in 2020, and probably 2024[1].
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46590890
The comparison is that there are two events that Facebook couldn't mentally or emotionally acknowledge their involvement in even though they were clearly involved and had influenced, not that there is moral equivalence between the two events.
It’s jarring when people refer to having read something and then it turns out they listened to the audiobook.
This is not a jab on this specific blogger but a general thing.
There should be a term for listening to an audiobook that’s not reading but does refer to a book on audio level, or just say you listened to the book.
Reading an audiobook is reading. As a partially blind person, it is the only way I can read comfortably. I'm not sure how a different word would help. If one was reviewing the audiobook, specifically, they might call it out in order to comment on the narration quality, etc. But if you listened to the book, you've read it.
I don’t agree. Your eyes sending signals to your brain is different than your ears. It is a different way to digest information. People tend to remember 20% of what they hear and only 10% of what they read. While the hearing is greater it doesn’t include the same process of acquiring information. “Listening is reading” is a false generalization just because you were able to gather the same information doesn’t mean you “read” the book. I don’t consider a person in a wheel chair a “walker” but I would go for a “stroll” (roaming) with them.
This is exactly the type of people the cultural purge in big tech came to flush out. Trying to change a multi billion dollar company from the inside is delusional, self serving, narcissistic and ineffective. Who the hell do you think you are in the great machine of 100,000+ employees companies, of billions invested in them.
The change is going to be political, regulatory. These companies always can't change until regulation is there, and then they miraculously adapt. If you took big tech money for 7 years you were not part of the solution.
The lengths some people will go to self explain why they were not egotistical is amazing! This is not an expose, everything is well known, this is a books worth of convincing herself she is a good person after all.
I don't understand your "delusional, self serving, narcissistic and ineffective" / "egotistical" point. All of this would apply to people trying to change things from the outside too.
Who the hell do you think you are in the great machine of hundreds of millions of US citizens, or billions of people globally, to think you can effect political and regulatory change?
And yet, this is how things change, by people working to change them, from either the inside or the outside. Maybe your point is right that anyone trying to be a change agent is self serving and egotistical. But don't fool yourself that there is some big difference here between internal and external activists.
You are equating "Hard" with impossible. Its impossible to turn a for profit company against itself from the inside, its hard to push for regulatory change. One system is built to create shareholder value, the other is to create social value. Its like a vegan working in a pig farm for 7 years to change the industry from the inside, at some point you need to ask yourself, is she just whitewashing her time there.
This just isn't true that one thing is hard and the other is impossible. Both things are nearly impossible to a similar degree.
What system is "built ... to create social value"? You mean government?
My friend, I'm sorry, but no. Government is built to wield power. Bending that power toward social value is just as hard as bending a business toward ethical behavior.
I don't think this is about convincing anyone that she's a good person. She's forthright about her instincts and values and the institutions she worked at that fostered her understanding of the world.
She documents in detail critical moments where Facebook executives made decisions that exemplified their incompetence and damaged their potential impact.
That the "cultural purge" in big tech is flushing out people with these instincts is precisely why the industry is flailing and groveling at the feet of power, for they have no internal compass save for growth for growth's sake.
Everyone can see that now laid bare on these pages, and these companies that rely on their user's willingness to exchange details about their personal lives for cheap dopamine hits may find that generosity well run dry.
Lina Khan just needed a couple more years.
That's what the author (the linked blog's author, not the book's) also believes and concludes his post with.
Disgruntled ex-employee disparaging their old colleagues and bosses is extremely common, I don't get why this is getting so many upvotes...
Speculating about her motives isn't fruitful, because her motives don't matter particularly. It has many upvotes because the information in the book is newsworthy and relevant for a place like HN.
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Because it's an interesting and positive review of a popular book about the industry covered by this forum. It would be really weird if an article like this didn't get upvoted here...
ex-employes can be disgruntled for good reasons
"Careless" is doing some seriously heavy duty lifting here.
I assumed the word choice was a reference to this line from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald:
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Given the way the novel is written, this is intentional understatement.
Yeah, that’s rather the point of the article. They are careless in many ways as the author points out.
I read the book.
After the part where she was giving a birth to her child, while still writing emails and doing work stuff, I take everything she said with a grain of salt. As a father, the way she prioritised work to family through out many years of her work at FB, I find it very repelling and disgusting.
I believe that Zuck&team are slimy greedy spoiled brats, but I could also say few things about her. Which make me wonder what is actual truth, book is very biased.
I look forward to reading the book, but I’m not anti-Zuck.
Individuals can change the world. Groups with ideology can change the world.
This is why many of us are here at HN- for the discussion of ideas and for idealism.
Few want to be supreme jerks that ruin things on a massive scale.
Zuck, if you’re reading this- thanks for being part of the thing that allowed me to continue communication with my friends when they weren’t nearby, and thanks for continuing to provide that for my children.
Are things fucked up? Were lives ruined? Sure. We all fuck shit up and ruin lives, some of us more than others. Then we own up to that as much as we can and use what we have left to try to continue doing what we did before to try to make the world a better place.
Who hasn’t ruined a life or two for excessive monetary gain? Surely every person on earth right?
Thanks Zuck for ruining lives, selling out the public to advertising and performing psychological experiments on your users, so this guy could send text across the wire. Something not possible before Facebook apparently.
> We all fuck shit up and ruin lives
Part A sure, but I can say with some certainty that most people do not ruin lives. It's just hard to have that much influence over other people. If you want to be particularly pessimistic, you might be able to argue that many people ruin their children's lives -- But even that's a stretch.
This is a disappointing take on the state of affairs. The book is trying to say the execs couldn't care less about the harm their platform was causing. This is not about "screwing up" inadvertently. This is about prioritising money over everything else.
Yes, individuals have the power to change the world. Some of them in positive ways and some in horrific ways. By all accounts, Zuck and the top execs at FB firmly belong in the latter category.
The great man theory [1] has been thoroughly debunked at this point. I you feel grateful for old Facebook, do thank the thousand nameless engineers that actually built it, not the single man that took all the credit (and money).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory
Where is it “thoroughly debunked” in that link?
Very few people actively try to be supreme jerks and ruin things, that's very abnormal behaviour for a human being.
It's much more common that your inner narrative keeps finding justifications for why what you are doing is important, and the damage you are causing is either justified or not perceived as so damaging.
The issue is the system we live under doesn't really incentivise moral and ethical behaviour, the rewards to be reaped are much larger if you act immorally, people like Zuck are able to tell themselves what they are doing is ok for "making the world a better place". But there's no reward for making the world a better place, the reward is for you showing revenue growth, user growth, and Zuck chased that even though there was an inflection point where the "good" was outweighed by the "bad".
> Zuck, if you’re reading this- thanks for being part of the thing that allowed me to continue communication with my friends when they weren’t nearby, and thanks for continuing to provide that for my children.
All of that could still have existed without all the appendages included to extract more money from the machine. Without creating feeds of content measured by "engagement" to the point it became detrimental to the users themselves, all the good Meta has done could have existed if morals and ethics trumped profit-seeking. And for that I do not thank Zuckerberg, at all, even though I do understand he is also a product of the system, in the end he (and Meta) abused one of the most powerful feelings of humans (connection among each other) to extract as much money as they could without regards to the dangerous side-effects that many pointed out were happening when Facebook was growing, there was no care about anyone, you and I were swindled.
It's unfortunate, I hope you can see that, for all the good provided over years on fostering connections, it was just spoiled in the end by his greed, and carelessness.
We can do better than that, no need to thank Zuckerberg for fucking us over.
What a disgustingly ass-kissing take. To pull the Godwin: Hitler built the autobahn, should I thank him for allowing me the thrill of going 200km/h (I need a better car...), sure 17++ million of lives(1) were ruined, but whatever!
And yes your beloved communication medium helped the Burmese commit genocide...
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victims_of_Nazi_Germany
You talk as if you'd have had no other means of communication had Facebook not existed. Your delusion would have been funny had you not also implied you intend to subject your children to the same poison too.
Please, for God's sake, don't.