February 5, 2025

I don't want Taylor Swift's life

Every job I have provides its own challenges and its own lessons. The job I held last year for a now-dissolved startup was, in retrospect, the best job I could have held at the moment. During that work, I met a billionaire, I was managed by a child of privilege, and I had plenty of time to contemplate what wealth does to the mind.

The most startling thing about billionaires, all told, is their complete lack of imagination.

The billionaire investor for my now-dead company was trying to build a city. Billionaires are trying to buy up California to build their own city. Billionaire technocrats who wish to bring back slavery (or, at least, feudalism) at any cost want Greenland to… build a city. Elon Musk is destroying the United States right now because he wants our city on the hill to be his city on the hill. We get it, guys. You all read Atlas Shrugged.

All these wannabe kings lack imagination on a grand scale.

To wit: Wonder, Marc Lore’s startup which, during my tenure at my last company, he went to journalist-murdering Saudi Arabia on a quest to fund. (Again, the imagination is so weak they cannot anticipate they may, too, fall to the sword they seek to kiss.)

Wonder was Lore’s baby. The concept is this: you can use the Wonder app to order multiple dishes from multiple fine-dining restaurants and have them delivered to you in thirty minutes or less. In New York City.

Lore’s imagination cannot stretch far enough to conjure up the image of a New York apartment. Lore is a billionaire seeking to sell his billionaire lifestyle to you, a non-billionaire. But, the problem is, we don’t want it.

If I’m paying for fine dining, I want the experience of dining out. I don’t want to eat a $30 spaghetti carbonara off my knees on my couch in my 500-square-foot apartment.

All billionaire propositions are like this lately. Billionaires hate being around other people or—in the case of celebrity-billionaires like Swift—cannot be around other people for practical reasons. (Swift’s mere presence can induce a heart attack in the average white woman.) Billionaires do not need to think much in their daily life, having hired dozens of people to remember birthdays and deal with wider humanity. They do not like humanity, generally. They think you want this life for yourself.

So they try to sell it to you. They want to sell us AI to text our friends or interrupt a genuine family moment to pretend you remembered your husband’s birthday. They want to pitch us on virtual reality instead of actually hanging out with friends. They assume we always want to stay home, in our bubbles. We only want to connect with others virtually or not at all.

They have no imagination. Our ability to imagine new worlds and stand together in real life will help save us from the nightmarish reality they wish to create for us.