We are obsessed with billionaires—the big, bold and brash. They are mavericks and titans of industry. They are entrepreneurs and geniuses, in their own minds, at the very least. Sometimes, they are scions of a previous generation of billionaires. Always, they are righteous. They believe they are reaping what they have sown. Bounty and abundance are their inalienable rights. They have business savvy, charm and wit. They are not lucky, no, they are just the best of the best. They have, you see, a very particular set of skills that have afforded them such staggering good fortune.
Every year, Forbes calculates their net worth and ranks them accordingly as if studying billionaires is a sport and a pastime. Billionaire or billionaire-adjacent faces grace the covers of magazines; the billionaires look at the camera with their iciest stare or most rakish smile. Year after year, the numbers that define their lives grow exponentially and the reach of their power stretches further. They have not just billions or tens of billions but in at least one case, hundreds of billions of dollars at their disposal.
They buy and sell companies. They love to call themselves founders. They create new industries while destroying others. They pride themselves, in fact, on breaking things. They have a motto—“move fast and break things,” first coined by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg who actually borrowed, to put it delicately, the idea for his social network. He has “earned” so much money that he made the men he took the idea from or tried to cut out of the business billionaires, too, after they sued him. Sometimes, you see, billionaires replicate. Or they marry and/or divorce and spawn baby billionaires. Proximity to wealth, under the right circumstances, begets wealth.
While billionaires are moving fast and breaking things, they create products no one asked for or needed. They complicate simple things. They overly simplify complex things. They reinvent all manner of wheels, making them much worse in the process. They ignore pesky obstacles like laws or copyright or safety and environmental standards because when things go wrong, they can just throw some money at the problem. All this, they call disruption. They disrupt public works and food delivery and dating and blood testing and office space and commerce and hospitality and anything else that catches their fancy. They willingly allow their companies to lose money by luring customers with ridiculously low prices and once they’ve achieved success, they raise prices to where they should have been all along. By then, their customers are hooked; the circle of disruption is complete. When that disruption becomes too unwieldy, billionaires shrug at their failures but remain billionaires while the people on whose backs those billions were made, are left with almost nothing.