You can afford to be odd when you’re richer than NZ
In the 1989 film Batman, billionaire Bruce Wayne hosts a lavish fundraiser for Gotham’s elite at his family manor. Among the guests are journalists Vicki Vale (the caped crusader’s soon-to-be love interest) and Alexander Knox (working-class reporter). The two find themselves alone in a large eccentric room filled with suits of armour from around the world, discussing the weird lives the wealthy lead.
‘‘The rich,’’ opines Knox, ‘‘you know why they’re so odd? Because they can afford to be.’’
In 1989 Elon Musk arrived in Canada from South Africa to start university. He had money, but by no means ‘‘justify odd behaviour’’ money. This week he bought Twitter.
No-one seems to be sure why he bought Twitter. He claims it is to preserve ‘‘free speech’’, an interesting take from someone whose Tesla company is currently being sued by California’s Department of Fair Employment and
Housing for racism against its Black employees.
He also claims to want to make Twitter ‘‘politically neutral’’, which many are reading as ‘‘less censorship of hate speech’’ and, again, is an interesting position for someone whose company is being sued for racism.
It is also an interesting position for someone heavily criticised during the past two years for spreading Covid misinformation.
The whole financial endeavour brings to mind the 2005 film Batman Begins, where Bruce Wayne is asked to leave a hotel for breaking the rules and promptly declares he is buying the hotel and changing said rules.
The latest big-splash billionaire to dominate headlines, Musk is somewhat of a Richard Branson 2.0, with a bit of Steve Jobs thrown in.
He even has his own hardcore fan base who will reverently refer to him as a ‘‘Creator’’.
However, ‘‘Creator’’ is a very unspecific job title which could be equally applied to building a rocket or using a toilet. In both cases, the ‘‘creator’’ will generally receive praise or concern, depending on their age. Each can claim to be doing society a service.
New Zealand has very few individual billionaires, though surely a decent number per capita. The most recent is Sir Peter Jackson, and he’s mainly in the news when either promoting a film, or continuing his slow conversion of Wellington into a giant movie studio/ archive. The rest tend to keep quiet by billionaire standards. A superyacht purchase here, a small tiff with David Lange over underpaying for the
Government Printing Office there.
Does Musk come across as a good person? Should that matter? Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the world’s secondrichest man, has a company infamous for poor working conditions. He’s made
US$20 billion during Covid, because workers’ rights come second to quality streaming content.
While much of the planet was in lockdown, Bezos and Musk farcically competed to see who could get their personal rocket to space quicker. It was a spectacle remarkable for both its societal tone-deafness and its ability to make yacht races look like cashed-up go-karts. Take note America’s Cup enthusiasts; the rich folks are now into rockets. Your time is up. The ridiculous actions of the world’s uber-rich elites is nothing new. Rupert Murdoch has been unashamedly cackling at society for decades with few repercussions for his dopamine-mining cascade of lowest-denominator current events coverage.
Gina Rinehart, Australia’s richest person, owns 9.2 million hectares of land, roughly 1% of the continent. It is a somewhat larger area than the entire Auckland region. She famously lamented that African miners would work for just A$2 a day, and last year her net worth was A$31b.
Rinehart and Murdoch are merely Pentiums in a MacBook world, because Elon Musk is worth US$252b. That converts to about NZ$389b. New Zealand’s GDP was $350b at the last quarter. When your personal economy is greater than a small first-world nation, your sense of self-importance may become slightly warped.
Billionaires with warped egos aren’t necessarily villains. The Batman, the fourth cinematic iteration of the vigilante with unlimited credit, is the biggest blockbuster this year. A running theme is that laws need not apply to the rich, and it is purely down to personal discretion whether they act as crime-fighters or criminals.
No-one should be surprised when the ridiculously wealthy attempt to make fiction into reality, but rather hope they don’t cause unintended mass destruction doing so.
Perhaps the question about Elon Musk simply is: ‘‘Why would someone worth $252b care about public opinion?’’ After all, if he lost or spent $251b of his fortune, he would still be a billionaire.