Philanthropy is Theft, or, How Competitive Society is Optimized for the Success of Individuals who Exhibit Sociopathic Personality Traits

Elon Musk is the richest African-American. To hear him say it, however, he really doesn’t care all that much about money. He’s actually just tirelessly using his genius to save humanity from its dumb-ass self — and that’s why he needs so much money. He just wants to help out.

But because worldly possessions just weigh a person down, Musk will be selling his homes and belongings, as if to become a penniless, screen-less, wandering cyber mystic. Like a hyper-modern Tolstoy, when he disowned his literary output and embraced Christian Anarchism, Musk is devoting his wealth entirely to the true deliverance and redemption of humanity.

African-American Elon Musk gives his future two thumbs up.

And through this delicate, alchemical fusion of earth and heaven — part of the hidden meaning of the riddle of the sphinx — Musk will bring the light of reason to the stars.

Setting aside how obviously sociopathic and delusional this all sounds, there’s a certain contempt towards all the employees and customers that supply him with so much of his wealth: his boasts about giving away all his money were tweeted on May Day — the International Worker’s Day. As CEO of Tesla Motors, Musk makes 40,688 times what his average employee makes, which is the highest CEO-to-worker pay ratio ever recorded. Which is also, of course, vital to single-handedly saving humanity.

In addition to getting rich by saving humanity, Musk is ruining astronomy to bring wireless social media propaganda to the entire planet, terrorizing rural residents by starting brush fires and breaking windows and shutting down highways for test launches, forcing employees to go to work during a pandemic and in defiance of local ordinances, earning billions of dollars in corporate welfare in the form of government subsidies and tax credits, and planning to build a humanoid robot in a bid to potentially destroy more jobs than George W. Bush.

The US economy shed roughly as many manufacturing jobs during George W. Bush’s presidency as World War II created.

While many Americans assume their society operates along meritocratic lines — such that the “best and brightest” are entitled to as much wealth as they can accumulate — the greatest predictor of who will become wealthy is not genius or talent, but whether one’s parents are wealthy.

And so both Musk and his brother — both of whom grew up white in apartheid South Africa — have become rather wealthy. Although Musk likes to tell the story that he “left South Africa by myself when I was 17 with just a backpack & suitcase of books,” his father’s fabulous wealth played a pivotal role in Musk’s success.

African-American Elon Musk gives his future two thumbs up.

Musk opportunistically arrived in Silicon Valley to become an entrepreneur right in the middle of the dotcom bubble, when companies with big ideas but which only existed on paper were a dime a dozen. The speculative bubble led companies without products to grab up wads of cash through an IPO craze, while venture capitalists threw money around left and right. At this time, Musk’s wits alone had only helped him to accumulate $2000. So his father stepped in with $28,000 to get Musk and his brother off the ground.

Musk then started work on a web site with the dreadfully un-sexy name “Global Link Information Network.” A year later, to impress some venture capitalists, he dressed up his web server during an office tour to make it look like a supercomputer; in exchange for a $3 million investment, Musk ceded control of the website he designed to Rich Sorkin. Under Sorkin’s leadership, the company changed its name to Zip2 — something more in line with how early internet firms named themselves — and within three years, the firm was sold to computer maker Compaq. Compaq paid $305 million, of which Musk received $22 million, which enabled him to “flip” a couple more start-ups.

So here is the Elon Musk recipe for success: get born rich, go to the right place at the right time, work hard, employ trickery, and get lucky. Unquestionable genius.

Martin Buber wrote “The man to whom freedom is guaranteed does not feel oppressed by causality.” We can see the glibness in Musk’s demeanor as the product of a certain type of fate mistaken for merit. It is perhaps this quality of the American new rich — which believes so fervently in the equality of merit and money — that most cleanly separates it from the old rich like Bill Gates.

African-American Elon Musk gives his future two thumbs up.

Like Musk, Gates has a story he likes to tell about how he dropped out of college to start a company in his garage — and then his genius and hard work made him rich. Of course, it didn’t hurt that Gates was born into a family with the means to send him to Harvard — one of those top universities that seem perfectly willing to admit anybody whose parents can make a sizable donation.

And so it went with Gates: his mother, Mary Maxwell Gates, was on the Board of Regents at the University of Washington, knew the CEO of IBM, served on the boards of banks and telecommunications carriers. And so it was with Mrs. Gates: her father, James Willard Maxwell, was a banker born around 1900. And so it was with Mr. Maxwell: his father, also named James Willard Maxwell, was also a banker and former head of the San Francisco Federal Reserve, born at the outbreak of the American Civil War. Bill Gates, Sr. was eulogized in the Puget Sound Business Journal like so: “Gates, a lawyer and philanthropist, was known as an optimist in relentless pursuit of an equitable world.” That’s the whole thing, right there.

The difference in attitude between these two types of wealth — the status-seeking new wealth of the colonialist and the low-key old wealth of the aristocracy — can perhaps illuminate one of the more troubling, Orwellian consequences of societies that permit such accumulations of money and power: philanthropy. The aristocracy experiences something like the noblesse oblige, and uses the term “philanthropy” to describe their efforts to justify amassing huge fortunes while their countrymen struggle and millions starve everywhere.

African-American Elon Musk gives his future two thumbs up.

It was perhaps this noblesse oblige that compelled Mrs. Gates in her time at the University of Washington to pressure the University to divest itself of South African holdings as a protest against apartheid. It was perhaps this Old World sense of aristocratic duty which led Bill Gates, Jr. to associate with pedophile-embezzler-drug-dealer-spy Jeffrey Epstein in a relentless effort to “get more philanthropy” for suffering humanity. As if such absurd amounts of wealth weren’t inherently immoral, regardless of the means of acquisition.

The status-seeking new wealth of the colonialist mindset has another facet, observed by Brazilian educator Paolo Freire in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire wrote:

The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility. Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly.

The oppressed suffer from the duality which has established itself in their innermost being. They discover that without freedom they cannot exist authentically. Yet, although they desire authentic existence, they fear it. They are at one and the same time themselves and the oppressor whose consciousness they have internalized.

In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both.

For better or for worse, we must view Musk as a victim of apartheid — not in the same way as Black South Africans, to be sure, but in a more subtle, pernicious way. While he should neither be faulted nor lavishly rewarded for the accidents of his birth, he nevertheless grew up under apartheid, and he internalized the logic of the oppressor class to which he belonged. As a member of a colonial oppressor class, he is unaware of the autonomous psychic processes within himself that re-create the logic of his oppressor class on a colossal scale. He openly identifies with his greed to be first to colonize another world. And so he seeks to perpetuate this victimization elsewhere, as a morally-neutered victim himself.

African-American Elon Musk gives his future two thumbs up.

The argument that Musk needs his wealth to save the rest of us from ourselves resembles the historical arguments used by white slave owners in the US to justify treating people like common property. President John C. Calhoun is known to have remarked:

Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually… It came to us in a low, degraded, and savage condition, and in the course of a few generations it has grown up under the fostering care of our institutions

But to decide whether it is fit and proper to allow such massive agglomerations of wealth to exist — or to even start that public discussion in a meaningful way — must we wait for some crisis to occur after Musk, for example, sparks outrage by deciding to use his wealth to hire a small mercenary army, take over some African nation, seize its mineral wealth, and continue his vanity project unmolested, like some Charles Taylor on a perverse messianic philanthropic mission? Is this what we want for our cosmic legacy? Is a sane society compatible with individuals capable of such a thing on a whim? Is this why the aliens keep us in quarantine?

African-American Elon Musk gives his future two thumbs up.