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Even if rich people were no more likely to believe stupid shit than you or me, it'd still be a problem. After all, I believe my share of stupid shit (and if you think that none of the shit you believe in is stupid, then I'm afraid we've just identified at least one kind of stupid shit you believe in).
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Pluralistic: Billionaires are a danger to themselves and (especially) us (09 Mar 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Pluralistic: Billionaires are a danger to themselves and (especially) us (09 Mar 2026)Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow)
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Cory Doctorow
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The problem isn't whether rich people believe stupid shit; it's the fact that when a rich person believes something stupid, that belief can turn into torment for dozens, thousands, or millions of people.
Here's a historical example that I think about a *lot*. In 1928, Henry Ford got worried about the rubber supply chain.
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Cory Doctorow
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All the world's rubber came from plantations in countries that he had limited leverage over and he was worried that these countries could kneecap his operation by cutting off the supply. So Ford decided he would start cultivating rubber in the Brazilian jungles, judging that Brazil's politicians were biddable, bribeable or bludgeonable and thus not a risk.
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Cory Doctorow
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Ford took over a large area of old-growth jungle in Brazil and decreed that a town be built there. But not just any town: Ford decreed that the town of Fordlandia would be a replica of Dearborn, the company town he controlled in Michigan. Now, leaving aside the colonialism and other ethical considerations, there are plenty of *practical* reasons not to replicate Dearborn, MI on the banks of the Rio Tapajós.
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Cory Doctorow
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For one thing, Brazil is in the southern hemisphere, and Dearborn is in the northern hemisphere. The prefab houses that Ford ordered for Fordlandia had windows optimized for southern exposure, which is the normal way of designing a dwelling in the northern hemisphere. In the southern hemisphere, you try and put your windows on the *other side* of the building.
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Cory Doctorow
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Ford's architects told him this, and proposed having the factory flip the houses' orientation. But Ford was adamant: he'd had a vision for a replica of his beloved Dearborn plunked down smack in the middle of the Amazon jungle, and by God, that was what he would get:
memex.craphound.com/2010/06/02…
Fordlandia was a catastrophe for *so many* reasons, and the windows are just a little footnote, but it's a detail that really stuck with me because it's just *so stupid*.
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Fordlandia: novelistic history of Henry Ford’s doomed midwestern town in the Amazon jungle – Cory Doctorow's MEMEX
Cory Doctorow (Cory Doctorow's MEMEX)Cory Doctorow
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Ford was a vicious antisemite, a bigot, a union-buster and an all-round piece of shit, but also, he believed that his opinions trumped the axial tilt of the planet Earth.
In other words, Henry Ford wasn't merely evil - he was also periodically as thick as pigshit. Ford's cherished stupidities didn't just affect him, they also meant that a whole city full of people in the Amazon had windows facing the wrong direction.
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Cory Doctorow
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Like I said, I sometimes believe stupid things, but those stupid things aren't *consequential* the way that rich people's cherished stupidities are.
This would be bad enough if rich people were no more prone to stupid beliefs than the rest of us, but it's actually worse than that. When I believe something stupid, it tends to get *me* in trouble, which means that (at least some of the time), I get to learn from my mistakes.
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Cory Doctorow
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But if you're a rich person, you can surround yourself with people who will tell you that you are right even when you are *so wrong*, with the result that you get progressively *more* wrong, until you literally kill yourself:
scientificamerican.com/article…
A rich person *could* surround themselves with people who tell them that they're being stupid, but in practice, this almost never happens.
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Did Alternative Medicine Extend or Abbreviate Steve Jobs's Life?
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Cory Doctorow
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After all, the prime advantage to accumulating as much money as possible is freedom from having to listen to other people. The richer you are, the fewer people there are who can thwart your will. Get rich enough and you can be found guilty of 34 felonies and *still* become President of the United States of America.
But wait, it gets even worse! Hurting other people is often a great way to get even more rich.
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Cory Doctorow
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So the richer you get, the more insulated you are from consequences for hurting other people, and the more you hurt other people, the richer you get.
What a world! The people whose wrong beliefs have the widest blast-radius and inflict the most collateral damage *also* have the fewest sources of external discipline that help them improve their beliefs, and often, that collateral damage is a feature, not a bug.
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Cory Doctorow
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Billionaires are a danger to themselves and (especially) to the rest of us. They are wronger than the median person, and the consequences of their wrongness are exponentially worse than the consequences of the median person's mistake.
This has been on my mind lately because of a very local phenomenon.
I live around the corner from Burbank airport, a great little regional airport on the edge of Hollywood.
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Cory Doctorow
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It was never brought up to code, so the gates are *really* close together, which means the planes park really close together, and there's no room for jetways, so they park right up against the terminal. The ground crews wheel staircase/ramps to both the front and back of the plane. That means that you can walk the entire length of the terminal in about five minutes, and boarding and debarking takes less than half the time of any other airport.
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Cory Doctorow
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Sure, if one of those planes ever catches fire, every other plane is gonna go boom, and everyone in the terminal is toast, but my sofa-to-gate time is like *15 minutes*.
Best of all, Burbank is a Southwest hub. When we moved here a decade ago, this was *great*. Southwest, after all, has free bag-check, open seating, a great app, friendly crews, and a generous policy for canceling or changing reservations.
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Cory Doctorow
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If you fly in the US, you know what's coming next. In 2024, a hedge fund called Elliott Investment Management acquired an 11% stake in SWA, forced a boardroom coup that saw it replace five of the company's six directors, and then instituted a top to bottom change in airline policies. The company eliminated *literally everything* that Southwest fliers loved about the airline, from the free bags to the open seating:
reddit.com/r/SouthwestAirlines…
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Cory Doctorow
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The airline went from being the *least* enshittified airline in America to the *most*. Southwest is now worse than Spirit airlines - no, really. Southwest doesn't just merely charge for seat selection, but if you refuse to pay for seat selection, *they preferentially place you in a middle seat even on a half-empty flight*, as a way of pressuring you to pay the sky-high junk fee for seat selection:
reddit.com/r/SouthwestAirlines…
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Cory Doctorow
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Obviously, passengers who are given middle seats (and the passengers around them, who paid for window or aisle seats) don't like this, so they try to change seats. So SWA now makes its flight attendants order passengers not to switch seats, and they've resorted to making up nonsense about "weight balancing":
reddit.com/r/SouthwestAirlines…
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Even without junk fees, SWA's fares are now higher than their rivals. I'm flying to San Francisco tomorrow to host EFF executive director Cindy Cohn's book launch at City Lights:
citylights.com/events/cindy-co…
Normally, I would have just booked a SWA flight from Burbank to SFO or Oakland (which gets less fog and is more reliable). But the SWA fare - even without junk fees - was higher than a United ticket out of the same airport, even including a checked bag, seat selection, etc.
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You are being redirected...
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Cory Doctorow
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Southwest is *genuinely* worse than Spirit now: not only does it have worse policies (forcing occupancy of middle seats!), and more frustrated, angrier flight crew (flight attendants are palpably sick of arguing with passengers), but SWA is now more expensive than United!
All of this is the fault of *one billionaire*: Elliott Investment Management CEO Paul Singer, one of America's most guillotineable plutes.
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Cory Doctorow
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This one guy *personally* enshittified Southwest Airlines, along with many other businesses in America and abroad. Because of this *one guy*, millions of people are made miserable *every single day*. Singer flogged off his shares and made a tidy profit. He's long gone. But SWA will never recover, and every day until its collapse, millions of passengers and flight attendants will have a shitty day because of this *one guy*:
wfaa.com/article/money/busines…
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Activist investor Elliott Investment Management sells off shares, lowers ownership stake in Southwest Airlines
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Cory Doctorow
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Even if Paul Singer were no more prone to ethical missteps than you or me, the fact that he is morbidly wealthy means that his ethical blind spots leave behind a trail of wreckage that rivals a *comet*. And of course, being as rich as Paul Singer inflicts a lasting neurological injury that makes you incapable of understanding how wrong you are, which means that Paul Singer is *doubly* dangerous.
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Cory Doctorow
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Billionaires aren't just a danger when they're trying to make money, either. One of the arguments in favor of billionaires is that sometimes, the "good" billionaires take up charitable causes. But even here, billionaires can cause sweeping harm. Take Bill Gates, whose charitable projects include waging war on the public education system, seeking to replace public schools with charter schools.
Gates has no background in education, but he spent millions on this project.
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Cory Doctorow
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He is one of the main reasons that poor communities around the country have been pressured to shutter their public schools and replace them with weakly regulated, extractive charters:
apnews.com/article/92dc914dd97…
This was a catastrophe. A single billionaire dilettante's cherished stupidity wrecked the educational chances of a generation of kids:
dissidentvoice.org/2026/03/fre…
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“Free Market” Charter Schools Wreak Havoc in Michigan - Dissident Voice
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Cory Doctorow
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Gates was a prep-school kid, so it's weird for him to have forceful views about a public education system he never experienced. In reality, it's not so much that Gates has forceful views about *schools* - rather, he has forceful views about *teachers' unions*, which he wishes to see abolished. Gates is one of America's most vicious union-busters:
teamster.org/2019/10/teamsters…
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Teamsters Union and Allies Protest Bill Gates and Cambridge Union Society
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Cory Doctorow
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Gates's ideology permeates *all* of his charitable work. We all know about Gates's work on public health, but less well known is the role that Gates has played in blocking poor countries from exercising their rights under the WTO to override drug patents in times of emergency. In the 2000s, the Gates Foundation blocked South Africa from procuring the anti-retroviral AIDS drugs it was entitled to under the WTO's TRIPS agreement.
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Cory Doctorow
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The Gates Foundation blocked the Access to Medicines WIPO treaty, which would have vastly expanded the Global South's ability to manufacture life-saving drugs. And during the acute phase of the covid pandemic, Gates *personally* intervened to kill the WHO Covid-19 Technology Access Pool and to get Oxford to renege on its promise to make an open-source vaccine:
pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/pub…
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Pluralistic: 13 Apr 2021 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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It's not that Gates is insincere in his desire to improve public health outcomes - it's that his desire to improve public health conflicts with his extreme ideology of maximum intellectual property regimes. Gates simply opposes open science and compulsory licenses on scientific patents, even when that kills millions of people (as it did in South Africa). Gates's morbid wealth magnifies his cherished stupidities into weapons of mass destruction.
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Cory Doctorow
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Gates is back in the news these days because of his membership in the Epstein class. Epstein is the poster child for the ways that wealth is a force-multiplier for bad ideas. We can't separate Epstein's sexual predation from his wealth. Epstein spun elaborate junk-science theories to justify raping children, becoming mired in that most rich-guy coded of quagmires, eugenics:
statnews.com/2026/02/24/epstei…
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Jeffrey Epstein’s tissue samples ignited a furor in the Harvard lab of George Church
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Cory Doctorow
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Epstein openly discussed his plans to seed the planet with his DNA, reportedly telling one scientist that he planned to fill his ranch with young trafficked girls and to keep 20 of them pregnant with his children at all times:
nytimes.com/2019/07/31/busines…
We still don't know where Epstein's wealth came from, but we know that he was a central node in a network of *vast* riches, much of which he directed to his weird scientific projects.
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Cory Doctorow
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The network also protected him from consequences for his prolific child-rape project, which had more than 1,000 survivors.
In embracing eugenics junk science, Epstein was ahead of the curve. Today, eugenics is all the rage, reviving an idea that went out of fashion shortly after the Fordlandia era. After all, Henry Ford didn't just build a city where his word was law - he also bought up media companies to promote his ideas of racial superiority:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dear…
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The Dearborn Independent - Wikipedia
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Cory Doctorow
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Despite being too cringe to make it onto Epstein island, Elon Musk is the standard bearer for the dangers of billionaireism:
people.com/emails-reveal-that-…
Like Henry Ford, he craves company towns where his word is law:
texasmonthly.com/news-politics…
Like Ford, he buys up media companies and then uses them to push his batshit ideas about racial superiority:
motherjones.com/politics/2025/…
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Eugenics isn't dead—it's thriving in tech
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Cory Doctorow
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Like Paul Singer, he is a master enshittifier who never met a junk fee he didn't fall in love with:
edition.cnn.com/2022/11/01/tec…
And like Epstein, he wants to seed the human race with his babies, and has built a secret compound in the desert he plans to fill with women he has impregnated:
realtor.com/news/celebrity-rea…
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musk-twitter-verification-price
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Cory Doctorow
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Billionaires and their lickspittles will tell you that all of this is wrong: the market selects "capital allocators" by executing a vast, distributed computer program whose logic gates are every producer and consumer in The Economy (TM), and whose data are trillions of otherwise uncomputable buy and sell decisions.
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Cory Doctorow
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This is a tautology: the argument goes that only good people are made rich, and therefore all the rich people are good. If rich people had as many cherished stupidities as I claim, The Economy (TM) would relieve them of their wealth, and thus their power to allocate capital, and thus their potential to hurt people by being wrong, which means that they must be right.
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Cory Doctorow
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This is the stupidest (and most destructive) of all of billionaireism's cherished stupidities: that we live in a meritocracy, which means that whatever the richest people want must be right. It's a modern update to the doctrine of divine providence, which held that we can discern god's favor through wealth. The more god loves you, the richer he makes you.
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Cory Doctorow
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This *can't* be true, because *every single economic cataclysm in the history of the world was the fault of rich people*. Rich people gave us the 19th century's bank panics. They gave us the South Seas bubble. They gave us the Great Depression, and the S&L Crisis, and the Great Financial Crisis. They invented greedflation and created the cost of living crisis. Today they are teeing up an AI crash that will make 2008 look like the best day of your life:
pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop…
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Pluralistic: The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI (05 Dec 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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The old left aphorism has it that "every billionaire is a policy failure." That's true, but it's incomplete. Every billionaire is a machine for producing policy failures at scale.
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Image:
Aude (modified)
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil…
CC BY 4.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/b…
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File:80th floor of 3 World Trade Center - OHNY.jpg - Wikimedia Commons
commons.wikimedia.orgPeter 💙 Stevens
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •huntingdon
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huntingdon
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My favorite anecdote about comeuppance for airline execs is that on New Year's Eve 1999, at the witching hour for the Y2K scare, the Chinese govt made the top execs of its state airlines be on one of their aircraft and in the air from 11.00 pm to 1.00 am. It was an incentive to make sure they had sorted out any Y2K bugs.
If only something similar could be sorted out for scores of top American airline execs. Their policies might not be so rapacious.
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arrakeen_urbanite
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Damon L. Wakes
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Mad Engineering
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The Penguin of Evil
in reply to Mad Engineering • • •Colm Donoghue
in reply to Mad Engineering • • •The Roman empire ended when the Ottomans conquered it in the 15th century, long after their plumbers did the initial work.....
Mad Engineering
in reply to Colm Donoghue • • •Chris
in reply to Colm Donoghue • • •Clayfoot
in reply to Mad Engineering • • •penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/E…
Lead Poisoning and Rome
penelope.uchicago.eduhot tran*sexual menace
in reply to Mad Engineering • • •@madengineering actually it is probably not the lead plumbing as limescale buildup limits the lead concentration in the water.
The bigger problem in terms of exposure were pewter plates and pots, especially in combination with fruits or acidic drinks.
David S. Reed
in reply to Mad Engineering • • •Mad Engineering
in reply to David S. Reed • • •@DavidReed They didn't die, they just developed a real bad case of crazy decision, which made it a really big problem for everyone who wasn't rich also.
Your boss has commanded you to cover the parking lot on gasoline to keep the dragons away.
Ride Theory
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I often remember Disney CEO Michael Eisner thinking EuroDisney's color should be purple, and Disney would own that purple the way Coke owned red.
Trouble was, in Europe purple is often associated with funerals and death.
Less harmful than other examples, but pure stupidity.
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ferricoxide
in reply to Enema Cowboy • • •Todd Knarr
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Unknown parent • • •Sensitive content
Neil
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thriftwicker
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow reshared this.
𝙎𝙥𝙖𝙘𝙚 𝙧𝙚𝙗𝙚𝙡
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Craig Duncan
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •The length of this thread really exposes the inadequacy of this medium for essays.
This has been on my mind lately due to the length of this thread.
Also, those with great wealth are sometimes stupid and their wealth can shield them from criticism and amplify the negative consequences of that.
plan-A (ﾟ̀_̀ﾟ́)
in reply to Cory Doctorow • — (8 - Bit) •I usually just tell the people welcome tho the new world disorder.
Since WEF announced a new world order pre Cov 19 > that other world.
I saw and believe in a human led society cycle of war and prosperity and advancement but here and now it goes the other sense on the road.
David Knuffke
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Wulfy—Speaker to the machines
in reply to David Knuffke • • •@Dknuffke
Hoarding
Susanna the Artist 🌻
in reply to David Knuffke • • •Zhi Zhu 🕸️
in reply to Susanna the Artist 🌻 • • •@superflippy @Dknuffke
Yep, I've always thought of the uber-rich as hoarders.
kali
in reply to David Knuffke • • •kali
in reply to kali • • •