This Week In Oligarchs: Zuck Rubs Giant Yacht In Faces Of Fired Employees, And Other Adventures
It was a busy week for America's innovators!
How are America’s oligarchs doing this week? Still weeping bitter tears that their vast wealth has not translated into universal love and respect from the people because said wealth is built on systems and products that contribute mightily to our nation’s grotesque levels of income inequality and in so many ways make life worse?
Bummer. Life’s a shitstorm. Buy a wetsuit.
Take billionaire weird Peter Thiel ... please! Oh wait, Argentina apparently already is. The New York Times reports that the venture capitalist and owner of creepy surveillance hydra Palantir is moving to Argentina. Which seems a little too on the nose for a eugenicist who was born in Germany. World War II has been over for 80 years, but who knew the rattenlinien were still operating?
As the Times notes, Thiel “has a history of collecting backup countries as he hedges his bets against the United States.” You know, the country whose openness and easily buyable politicians allowed him to build his $29 billion fortune? Yeah, that one. Now that people have noticed that allowing him and the other oligarchs to run wild might in fact have been detrimental to society in too many ways, he can’t get away from it fast enough:
His new roots in Argentina are partly motivated by his concerns about the direction of the United States, the people familiar with his thinking say, particularly California, where an initiative on November’s ballot could lead to a significant tax on billionaires.
This tax, should it come to pass, would be a one-time assessment of five percent of billionaire wealth. In Thiel’s case, that translates to about $1.5 billion. Clearly he can’t live a worthwhile life on a mere $27.5 billion. How will he fund his constant search for the Antichrist?
Or for that matter, how will he fund elaborate transhumanist experiments that fall flat on their face? Thiel had financially backed the Enhanced Games, an athletic contest in which competitors were allowed to take whatever steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs they wanted. Which gives us an excuse to post this almost-40-years-old (!) classic, which we always thought was a funny piece of satire. Peter Thiel apparently saw it as aspirational:
No word on any weightlifters pulling their arms off at the Enhanced Games, but would you believe that this experiment born, as a writer for Yahoo Finance put it, of “a mix of grievance and the belief that, with the right amount of tech, financing, and new-age, untested science, any human being can transcend any and all natural limitations,” resulted in total flops by athletes who had been juicing?
It’s true. During the games’ run that ended last week in Las Vegas, not one single doped athlete set a new world record (with the exception of a swimmer using a polyurethane bodysuit that world swimming organizations have long outlawed). In fact, quite a few of the dopers were beaten by athletes who competed without taking any performance enhancers. As one put it, maybe the dopers needed to train harder.
The Enhanced Games had been founded by an Australian tech bro who is big into the idea that people should be allowed to put whatever they want into their bodies without the interference of any government or “paternalistic sports federation.” Which, as with the guys pushing for AI to replace artists and writers, perverts the very spirit and idea of human achievement.
It’s as if these guys read Captain America’s origin story and didn’t realize it was fiction. We don’t expect Thiel to learn anything about humanity from any of this. These guys never do.
In other oligarch news, this is so obtuse and braindead that it can only have been done by Mark Zuckerberg. As you may have heard, Meta is going through a round of layoffs — 8,000 employees, give or take, as the company focuses more on AI and less on whatever the hell it does now besides fill up your Facebook feeds with useless slop. So it’s a perfect time for Zuck to pull this move:
Zuckerberg himself decided to celebrate the sweeping layoffs, by bringing his 390-foot superyacht out to Seattle — a city with 1,400 newly unemployed former Meta workers.
Yep, 1,400 Seattle-area employees get laid off, and literally the next day Zuck brings his $300 million mega-yacht to town for some reason. Why? He doesn’t live in Seattle. Reportedly, he doesn’t even use the yacht all that much. Maybe he thinks he can hire some of those newly laid off employees to scrape barnacles off the hull? Maybe he’s offering it as a shelter to any fired workers who can no longer afford their apartments?
The yacht, Launchpad, is reportedly equipped with two helipads, solar panels, a meditation room, gym, infinity pool, movie theater, and just for kicks, its own goddamned support yacht, named Wingman, that goes everywhere with it and yes, is in Seattle right now.
So if any Wonkette readers are also newly laid off Meta employees, feel free to stop by the marina and jeer your former boss’s giant yacht.
Finally, capping off the week for the nation’s oligarchs, Jeff Bezos’s space exploration company Blue Origin was performing a launchpad test fire of its New Glenn rocket at Cape Canaveral. Everything looked good for the first three seconds before the rocket noped out in spectacular fashion:
Bezos says that taxing him more won’t help anyone. But what if those taxes went to paying for social goods and services while leaving him less money to literally set on fire? We would take that trade.
This second Gilded Age sucks. On the other hand … nah, that’s all we’ve got.
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BREAKING
A federal judge has ordered the Kennedy Center to remove President Trump's name from the facade, website, letterhead, and official materials.
Congress named the Center by statute in 1964 - and the judge ruled only Congress can change it.
Puget Sound orcas, your moment has arrived.