Like any good lawyer or journalist, Martin Longman asks a question he already knows the answer to. The wealthy like Trump just fine, even as they pretend to distance themselves from his vulgar boorishness. But the end result for them is just the same as with Willard Romney or any other bog-standard Republicon: lower taxes (with the goal of none, at least for them); fewer regulations (ditto); the ability to repatriate overseas profits without (you may detect a pattern here) having to pay taxes on said profits.
Over the years, I've read and studied and listened to more than my share of wealthy, successful people -- not just their carefully scripted public statements and ghost-written manifestos, but the rare moments of candor, as well as their unvarnished backstories. There are some common themes with them, and you don't have to slog through Napoleon Hill's stuff to see those themes.
One of them is a sense of self-regard, the self-reinforcing tautology of I'm rich because I'm smart, and I'm smart because I'm rich, a sentiment entirely devoid of context, obviously. Smart about what? If you've become successful at something, it's a given that you probably know much more than most people about that particular area where you found success. But you may be completely ignorant about a host of other subjects.
The real key to knowledge is not setting out on some foolish quest to "learn" or "know" everything about every subject. It really boils down to being able to prioritize the knowledge that you can apply to your life and business, being aware of the areas of knowledge that you're not strong in, and knowing which resources (human or Google or Wikipedia or whatever) to refer to when you need to access those weaker areas.
This seems obvious, but consider it in context with the sort of wealthy saps who infest the gubmint routinely. What does Donald Trump know about any subject beyond the immediate grasp of his own stubby fingers? He has never shown any interest or knowledge about anything beyond where he can grease the palms of the local aldermen and get another shitbag hotel built.
But the self-reinforcing tautology leads him to think that because he slapped his name on a hotel in Istanbul, he knows everything he needs to know about Turkey's history and geopolitical importance to us and to Russia -- things which even a moron would recognize to be at cross purposes at best, but which Trump, seeing only through his prism of solipsism, understands only in terms of transactions and opportunities that benefit him and his useless progeny.
The other salient factors to success are consistency and ruthlessness, which you can see across the spectrum, from dipshit trust-fund assholes like Trump to Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. Or even that WeWork huckster that just cashed out while shitcanning 2,000 employees -- he had a non-existent product with a bullshit revenue model, but in true Silicon Valley fashion, the whole point of WeWork was simply to get either to the IPO or the buyout. And he got there, by being consistent to the fiction, and by being willing to screw over thousands of people who were working for his success and counting on him to deliver for all of them.
I don't know whether Adam Neumann is "intelligent" or not, in the conventional sense. I do know that, like Trump, his actions serve as a fine example of demonstrating the clear difference between intelligence and mere cunning. Remember "Pharma Bro" Martin Shkreli, who just got denied parole? Yeah, him too, another good example of that difference.
Probably the single largest factor in wealthy people demonstrating some sort of real intelligence is whether the wealth was inherited, built on, or earned outright. Warren Buffett is a good example of this -- while he is clearly not an idiot, his real genius seems to be having a guy like Charlie Munger, who knows how to measure profitable outcomes and capitalize on them, as his silent partner.
A good example of wealth that was "built on" is Koch Industries. Now, Fred Koch was a monstrous human being -- made his nut literally working for Stalin and Hitler, and founded the John Birch Society -- but he achieved some measure of actual success. His sons, who also are scumbags, took over the company and turned it into one of the largest privately-held corporations on the planet. But there was some combination of those three factors -- intelligence, consistency, ruthlessness -- that made the difference, and catapulted the company into the coveted position of being able to skull-fuck the American political system for the past forty years.
Of course, as has historically been the case, the next generation of Kochsuckers is, well, not so adept at the finer arts of bidness acumen. A morally just society would tax a useless doofus like Wyatt Koch at roughly ninety-nine percent, thereby forcing him to earn his keep in some discernible way. He seems to seriously think that "designing" fat-guy shirts adorned with little bags of money counts for something. I would have more respect for him if I had never heard his name, if he had simply bought a two-hundred-foot superyacht and stocked it with unlimited Ketel One and wagyu beef and Russian hookers, and never set foot on land again. That's pretty much what I would have done.
Anyway. So of course the moneybags set loves them some Trump. They just try to keep it on the downlow, because a lot of them still fund and attend rich-guy hobbies like the symphony, or they clink appletinis at the Hamptons houses in the summer. It's all this Great Gatsby shit about putting on a mask for appearances, and eventually forgetting how to take it off.
It would be nice to think that there will eventually be some sort of reckoning, but of course there won't be. In a modern society where all the wealthy people also own all the modes of communication and disinformation, there can't be. The only reason they caught up with Epstein is because he crossed the wrong people, and it was they who caught up with him, not some oppressed peon. In the meantime, the hoarders will simply dump money on whatever scumbag lets them hoard more, and maybe they'll throw a crumb here and there, disguised as philanthropy.
Over the years, I've read and studied and listened to more than my share of wealthy, successful people -- not just their carefully scripted public statements and ghost-written manifestos, but the rare moments of candor, as well as their unvarnished backstories. There are some common themes with them, and you don't have to slog through Napoleon Hill's stuff to see those themes.
One of them is a sense of self-regard, the self-reinforcing tautology of I'm rich because I'm smart, and I'm smart because I'm rich, a sentiment entirely devoid of context, obviously. Smart about what? If you've become successful at something, it's a given that you probably know much more than most people about that particular area where you found success. But you may be completely ignorant about a host of other subjects.
The real key to knowledge is not setting out on some foolish quest to "learn" or "know" everything about every subject. It really boils down to being able to prioritize the knowledge that you can apply to your life and business, being aware of the areas of knowledge that you're not strong in, and knowing which resources (human or Google or Wikipedia or whatever) to refer to when you need to access those weaker areas.
This seems obvious, but consider it in context with the sort of wealthy saps who infest the gubmint routinely. What does Donald Trump know about any subject beyond the immediate grasp of his own stubby fingers? He has never shown any interest or knowledge about anything beyond where he can grease the palms of the local aldermen and get another shitbag hotel built.
But the self-reinforcing tautology leads him to think that because he slapped his name on a hotel in Istanbul, he knows everything he needs to know about Turkey's history and geopolitical importance to us and to Russia -- things which even a moron would recognize to be at cross purposes at best, but which Trump, seeing only through his prism of solipsism, understands only in terms of transactions and opportunities that benefit him and his useless progeny.
The other salient factors to success are consistency and ruthlessness, which you can see across the spectrum, from dipshit trust-fund assholes like Trump to Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. Or even that WeWork huckster that just cashed out while shitcanning 2,000 employees -- he had a non-existent product with a bullshit revenue model, but in true Silicon Valley fashion, the whole point of WeWork was simply to get either to the IPO or the buyout. And he got there, by being consistent to the fiction, and by being willing to screw over thousands of people who were working for his success and counting on him to deliver for all of them.
I don't know whether Adam Neumann is "intelligent" or not, in the conventional sense. I do know that, like Trump, his actions serve as a fine example of demonstrating the clear difference between intelligence and mere cunning. Remember "Pharma Bro" Martin Shkreli, who just got denied parole? Yeah, him too, another good example of that difference.
Probably the single largest factor in wealthy people demonstrating some sort of real intelligence is whether the wealth was inherited, built on, or earned outright. Warren Buffett is a good example of this -- while he is clearly not an idiot, his real genius seems to be having a guy like Charlie Munger, who knows how to measure profitable outcomes and capitalize on them, as his silent partner.
A good example of wealth that was "built on" is Koch Industries. Now, Fred Koch was a monstrous human being -- made his nut literally working for Stalin and Hitler, and founded the John Birch Society -- but he achieved some measure of actual success. His sons, who also are scumbags, took over the company and turned it into one of the largest privately-held corporations on the planet. But there was some combination of those three factors -- intelligence, consistency, ruthlessness -- that made the difference, and catapulted the company into the coveted position of being able to skull-fuck the American political system for the past forty years.
Of course, as has historically been the case, the next generation of Kochsuckers is, well, not so adept at the finer arts of bidness acumen. A morally just society would tax a useless doofus like Wyatt Koch at roughly ninety-nine percent, thereby forcing him to earn his keep in some discernible way. He seems to seriously think that "designing" fat-guy shirts adorned with little bags of money counts for something. I would have more respect for him if I had never heard his name, if he had simply bought a two-hundred-foot superyacht and stocked it with unlimited Ketel One and wagyu beef and Russian hookers, and never set foot on land again. That's pretty much what I would have done.
Anyway. So of course the moneybags set loves them some Trump. They just try to keep it on the downlow, because a lot of them still fund and attend rich-guy hobbies like the symphony, or they clink appletinis at the Hamptons houses in the summer. It's all this Great Gatsby shit about putting on a mask for appearances, and eventually forgetting how to take it off.
It would be nice to think that there will eventually be some sort of reckoning, but of course there won't be. In a modern society where all the wealthy people also own all the modes of communication and disinformation, there can't be. The only reason they caught up with Epstein is because he crossed the wrong people, and it was they who caught up with him, not some oppressed peon. In the meantime, the hoarders will simply dump money on whatever scumbag lets them hoard more, and maybe they'll throw a crumb here and there, disguised as philanthropy.
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