The Billionaire Vibe Shift

Polls show that distrust and skepticism of billionaires have been building in recent years; in a Vox/Data for Progress poll last year, 72 percent of likely voters surveyed said that it was unfair that billionaires had become richer during the pandemic.

It was against this backdrop that this year’s billionaire controversies unfurled, setting off a public reappraisal of the richest in society. It was the end of the “billionaire genius” myth, and the notion that wealthy elites should be taken at their word. 2022 marked the peak of what can best be described as a billionaire vibe shift.

Part of the public’s captivation with billionaires in 2022 is the schadenfreude of watching the powerful tumble. This year also drove home that the ultrarich aren’t privy to greater wisdom or savvier than the rest of us, said Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. Musk’s baffling, impetuous decisions and reversals at Twitter, for example, have yanked back the curtain on how Musk leads his companies. He “just revealed billionaires are not smarter than you,” Giridharadas told Vox. “They are people who happen to have a billion dollars or more.”

The revelation that billionaires are not an exceptional group of people except for the size of their net worth marks a schism from the idea that the wealthy are demigods. Silicon Valley’s many billionaires insist that technology will transform and save the world. The infamous robber barons, like Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller, often remade their image, after a career of exploiting their workers, as magnanimous philanthropists.

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2022/12/20/23509726/billionaire-vibe-shift-elon-sbf-2022