For the Men Who Have Everything

On the unmoored oligarch class

It was a big week for my new novel, Glass Century, which is now available in all formats. In Air Mail, Glass Century was called a “feat” and some nice words were shared about my own career. And I had a great conversation with Bar Crawl Radio that you should listen to now. We talked Glass Century, Trump, and American politics. As always, if you’ve read and enjoyed, please leave a rating on Goodreads!

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In the latest season of Black Mirror, there’s an episode that won’t quite leave me. The best of them will do this; they’re sticky, disturbing you for weeks on end. “Bête Noire” follows a young woman named Maria who works in research and development at a chocolate-making company. She’s young, relatively successful, and pretty. One day, a former classmate named Verity is hired at the same company. This is strange because Maria is sure there are no job openings for Verity’s position. Later, she checks the company website and finds a job listing she is certain wasn’t there before. Subtly, as the days pass, Maria’s reality begins to shift. She seems to misremember the name of a popular fast food chain, though she insists she’s right and everyone else, including Google, is wrong. More inconsistencies pile up: her work suffers when she supposedly screws up a new chocolate concoction. Slowly, she feels herself cracking up until Verity confronts her in the empty office, reaches into the company fridge, and chugs a colleague’s carton of almond milk. When their colleagues return, Verity blames Maria for drinking the milk. Maria, of course, didn’t—except, well, she did. Security camera footage shows, somehow, Maria drinking the milk, not Verity, though Maria insists she never would because she has a nut allergy. Her boss has no idea what she’s talking about: no one has ever heard of nut allergies.

Eventually, Maria learns the truth. Verity, who was always a science whiz at school, has built a quantum computer that can manipulate reality at will. Her goal is to drive Maria insane and make her kill herself. All of it is revenge for a lie Maria spread when they were classmates, many years ago; Maria claimed that Verity was romantically involved with a beloved teacher. The teacher was fired and Verity’s life was never the same. Maria, now in tears, tells Verity it simply doesn’t matter anymore, now that she has the quantum computer and can alter reality however she’d like.

“You can use that. You can use that to do anything,” Maria tells her. “You can make it so none of that matters. You can be the—”

“Empress of the universe?”

“Yeah!”

“Make it so I’m empress of the universe?” Verity nods toward a painting on the wall, depicting herself as a god-like monarch on a celestial throne. “Worshipped by acolytes? Yeah, yeah, that was the first thing I did. Don’t get me wrong, it was amazing … for a while. I’ve done everything. I’ve been everything. But whatever I do, all that stuff is just, it’s just—it’s still there. Just aching away.”

Verity has literally, in other realities, made herself the most powerful being in creation and still she’s in pain; the childhood trauma will not cease. She isn’t satisfied. Only through killing Maria does she believe closure will come. But we know that isn’t really true: Verity already drove another classmate to suicide, one who participated in the rumormongering, and she is still the way she is.

The Black Mirror episode dovetails fittingly with an essay recently published by Katya Grishakova that seeks to explain why tech oligarchs like Elon Musk appear so restless and ultimately unhappy. Grishakova, a novelist who worked on Wall Street, delves into the psychology of the men who seemingly have everything: near-infinite wealth, no serious guardrails on their power, and the blind worship of thousands or even millions.

And what can one do after he’s been on top of the world? It’s a precarious, unstable mental place. There’s a disorienting emptiness mixed with residual dynamism that’s built up from the years of hustle and combat and that now lacks an outlet and direction. There is a creeping dread borne out of unexpected idleness. The restless mind longs for action, like a street fighter, flexing muscles and crackling knuckles, looking to beat up the next villain. But there’s no villain to beat up this time. You are alone with your thoughts and with nothing to do. The problem is unidentifiable. There’s no solution. This is a state that can create monstrosities.

They are running out of goals. Musk longs for Mars because the Earth can’t satisfy him any longer. Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg try on new outrageous personas because they can’t feel comfortable in the skin they always knew. Sam Altman speaks of OpenAI like it can guarantee eternal life for all who might sign up for a ChatGPT subscription. All of these men enjoy an unfathomable amount of freedom. Absent murdering a few bystanders in the middle of Fifth Avenue, they really can do whatever it is they want. The old emperors and feudal lords were accountable, in some form, to the polity, and even they were constrained by technology and geography. These oligarchs are nation-states unto themselves. Legal and institutional restraints mean little to them.

Yet they ache. None of them, publicly, appear especially content, and some like Musk are in constant online combat with their critics. Musk bought off an American president and it wasn’t enough; Bezos is trying now. What they can’t seem to accrue—not Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Altman, Peter Thiel, or Mark Andreessen—is broad popularity and respect. Once upon a time, the ultra-rich were quasi-beloved or at least widely tolerated. Consider how Musk was perceived in the 2010s, as a sort of Iron Man figure come to life, a renaissance entrepreneur who could single-handedly drag mankind into a wondrous tomorrow. Or recall what Zuckerberg once was: the architect of a groundbreaking social media platform that would join strangers in harmony and keep electing enlightened politicians like Barack Obama. Even Bezos’ Amazon, in the 2000s and early 2010s, had a far more benevolent sheen, few Americans paying attention to the destruction of small businesses or the exploitation of warehouse labor. Were this still 2013 or 2014, the arrival of artificial intelligence might have been greeted differently. Back then, we were in a techno-optimist moment, and Silicon Valley was the glory of the world. Americans were, on the whole, a bit more gullible. But the 2020s, with its neo-Romantic thrust, is not a decade for the unabashed celebration of tech. If free AI programs are being widely adopted—and subsidized to staggering degrees by conglomerates like Microsoft—they are not accepted with any particular glee. Few seem to be hopeful for AI’s future, and the polling bears this out. Most Americans appear to believe jobs will be lost, and they aren’t wrong. Sam Altman is no hero to them.

The tech oligarchs understand this well enough. As insulated as they are, they are uneasy because they have to keep straining for attention and approval. If they, outwardly, shun the left-leaning, college-educated cognoscenti, they’d still, like Donald Trump, prefer some kind of affirmation. Much of Trump’s career can be understood through the lens of a Queens boy trying to get Manhattan to take him seriously. Most troubling for the oligarchs is that it’s not just the Times editorial board turning from them—it might be Wall Street, too. The bond traders are second-guessing them. Trump found his “liberation day” tariffs were not, in fact, going to liberate the world. They were going, instead, to crash the economy until Trump beat a hasty retreat. The tariffs are one kind of failure; the various business pivots of the tech elite are another. AI, in the end, might be too big to fail, treated by the federal government like the development of nuclear weapons. But there is no real business model otherwise: AI costs many billions of dollars and there’s no way to recoup on these losses unless ChatGPT or Claude subscriptions start costing individuals thousands of dollars per month. If Amazon, in the early years, lost money, it always had a road to profitability that seems indefinitely foreclosed to AI. One can detect a subtle angst: AI must happen because Silicon Valley is otherwise out of ideas. There are few great leaps forward left. AI cannot stack up to the invention of the internet or the personal computer, or even the introduction of the iPhone. Zuckerberg is chasing AI too, now that the Metaverse is emptied out. All the billions in the world can’t buy a new idea. Nor, after a while, validation. Musk’s retreat from the White House is proof enough of that. Tesla is losing to Chinese electric vehicles and will probably keep losing. Mars, meanwhile, remains uninhabitable, and always will be. The space-age billionaires cannot even match the achievements of the federal government in the analog age: fifty-six years ago, we put men on the moon, and neither Musk nor Bezos appear especially capable of replicating that feat. Instead, Bezos shoots his fiancé and a few fading celebrities into the lower reaches of outer space and begs for accolades. All anyone will remember of that voyage is the round of mockery aimed at Katy Perry, who wishes, more than almost anyone on Earth, it was still the year 2010 and not 2025. The “girl boss” and “lean in” era is as dead as techno-optimism. The Facebook whistleblower’s book is outselling Sheryl Sandberg these days, and will be for a while longer.

The oligarchs will be rich until they’re dead and their descendants will be rich until the collapse of human civilization. What they can’t readily salve, in the here and now, is their angst, their cosmic loneliness. They struggle to infuse their lives with meaning. They thrash about like caged animals, doubt eating at them. How else, they wonder, to bend reality to your will? Verity learned that sitting on the throne of the universe wasn’t enough. Musk, Zuckerberg, and their ilk are haltingly coming to a similar realization. What, exactly, waits at the center of their lives? Perhaps God, or spirituality, is one answer, if they’re unlikely to earnestly embrace the teachings of a faith. As a writer, I think often of artistic ambition, and how art, by its unconquerable nature, can be a solution. An artist, when dedicated, is always striving. There are, forever, new mountains to conquer. Reality is so multifarious that, in a thousand lifetimes, it can never be fully apprehended, and one’s artistic appetites won’t be satiated. The artist can grow restless, weary, or dejected, but the artist can always fall back on meaning: the meaning of a work or the meaning that work gives a life. I wonder what sort of oligarchs these men would be if they could write, paint, draw, or think seriously about music. What if literature and philosophy were meaningful components of their lives? Would they behave the way they do? Perhaps. Art itself isn’t a panacea for existential dread and it can’t, on its own, guard against idiocy. What it can do, at least, is force a fresh engagement with reality. It can introduce new perspectives and new priorities. And from there, meaning might arrive.

The tech oligarchs are confronted with time. How to spend it, how to fill it. More houses, more yachts, and more rockets. More plastic surgery. For Musk, more children he barely knows. The question for the rest of us is how much destruction these men might cause. For the sake of the AI dream, how many jobs will be lost and how many human minds hollowed out? How many lies and fakeries will be spewed in the public domain so Altman and his friends can live out their Silicon Valley fantasy? For more than a century, technological revolutions promised progress along with radical disruption. The steam engine, the automobile, the telephone, and the airplane all erased worlds that came before but offered new and greater bounties; Americans, in the end, believed fully in this future, and the elites who would make it possible. Now we inch into a new age, with an oligarch class psychically and spiritually unmoored, their alienation palpable. They’re going to break much more around them before they ever make themselves whole.