What is money?

It is always a means to an end. A Friday essay, totally poll-free.

So what is a Mark Zuckerberg? Mark is a machine that makes power. There are a lot of those machines running around out there, and not all of them are called Mark, but let’s pick on him for a minute because why not.

Let’s walk through the basic progression that a Mark might have gone through:

1. I bet I can build that.

2. I bet I can get people to use it.

3. I bet I can make money off it.

4. I bet I can just buy all my competition.

5. I bet everyone doesn’t know what I know.

6. I bet all these dummies will listen to me.

7. I bet I can force them to listen to me.

8. I bet I can force them to do what I want.

I’m going to call this the power progression.

The power progression ultimately results in a flywheel of money and power. The money buys the power, the power keeps the money coming in. You can never say “it’s not about money — it’s about power” or “it’s not about power — it’s about money” because they are the same thing.

Money is always instrumental

Nobody actually wants to sit on a pile of gold, like Smaug.

I worked on a brand strategy project for a regional consumer bank. We asked people to recall the first dollar they ever earned, the first bank account they ever opened, and the first major purchase they ever made with the money they’d earned. To a person those memories shared common codes:

The first dollar = independence

The first bank account = having your own security guard

The first purchase = freedom (it was almost always a car)

Of course there were other feelings, of responsibility and stewardship. Because they were all “firsts” there was no longer a sense of being under threat, or being punished. That would come later — when paychecks or alimony checks bounced, when fees ate away at your savings, when honest mistakes were punished with fines.

But when you earned your first few dollars babysitting or delivering newspapers or running a lemonade stand, and when you opened your first passbook savings account, and when you finally had enough money to buy your grandpa’s old car for $500, all of that felt like freedom, independence, and power.

Several years later we did some work with an insurance company who specializes in risk management for high net worth individuals. Almost everyone we interviewed was born into the middle class. They’d gone to a good school and then to work in finance (it was the early 2010s), and they were now wealthy. But the men in particular avoided the word “rich”.

They said they were “comfortable.”

I asked them what it would mean to be rich. They all had the same answer: a private jet they owned. That had an on-call crew who could take them anywhere, any time.

Some of them were so wealthy that they had extremely expensive houses on tropical islands that had been built to withstand “once in a century” storms. They told me that the only way the house would come down would be if the whole island were wiped out. They also told me that they had self-insured the house. They didn’t need to be part of a risk pool — they had enough money that they could invest the replacement cost of the house, and make a profit.

They were wealthy enough to live outside of any kind of social safety net. If the island washed away, they would simply abandon it. If it didn’t, they would rebuild the house and still be richer.

For a lot of rich people, that would be it — they would be satisfied to be left to their own devices. They tend to be people whose income is entirely built on securitization and financialization — they (in general) don’t make products. They invest in products. They pick winners and losers. They place bets on other people’s work and ideas and ability to operate.

But there is a different kind of rich person — the one who got rich by making bets on themselves.

“You never say ‘thank you’!”

I know everyone loves to quote the Don Draper line, “that’s what the money is for!” But that’s the kind of thing an ultra high net worth person who made their money off investing in others say.

Someone who made their billions off (they believe) their own work and ideas, they think like Peggy.

Mark thinks like Peggy. The All In guys think like Peggy.

At our house, when one of us does something challenging for the household we say, “Thank you and congratulations!” It’s kind of a joke. But for the tech billionaires, it’s not a joke.

They want to be thanked and congratulated.

The money is not enough. The money buys them our obligation to thank and congratulate them.

And if they can’t be thanked and congratulated authentically, spontaneously — eventually, some of them think… they will see the thanks and congratulations delivered by force.

Elon thought like Peggy. He’s doing something else now.

Too rich to jail.

In the financial crisis we all learned the phrase “too big to fail” — there were financial institutions who were too large, too interconnected to be allowed to fail as enterprises.

We bailed them out. Because we didn’t want ordinary people to get hurt even worse. Of course — ordinary people get hurt either way.

Now we have a class of people who are too rich to jail. They can afford to transgress — everything from a social norm to criminal statute. They can afford the lawyers who will defend them. They can afford to buy media outlets, and fund campaigns to get officials elected who will pardon them or stop investigations into them. They can afford to keep those officials in lawyers and money long enough to avoid their own investigations and punishments.

I think a lot of people think that defenestrations are coming — that Trump’s transactionalism and Elon’s recklessness will collide, that the bribes paid by media platform-owning billionaires will stop working and then… something something hashtag-resistance.

But I wonder who will defenestrate whom. I wonder how far anyone is really willing to go. I wonder what kinds of tools we have as a society that has accepted that corporations are legal persons with first amendment rights and limitless power to give money to political candidates and parties, that turns to private philanthropy rather than public funding to achieve its goals. What tools does it have to beat back the tide of these billionaires-turned-kleptocrats who want to govern their own city-states?¹

[I know it’s tempting to believe in some idea of “too ridiculous to succeed” but… Trump.]

There is now a very dangerous alignment between people who have no capacity to fail — is there even a financial calamity that could render Musk poor? — and a president who holds the bomb power, has been granted near immunity by a supposedly democratic system, and will take whatever else he needs to work his will.

This is the system we’re in. I’m not sure you can call that a democracy.

The question for anyone trying to challenge it is — can it be subverted, exploited, used to our democratic advantage without aligning ourselves with “the good billionaires”?

How can we stop the flywheel of the power progression?

If you have any theories or thinkers about this, I’d love to hear them.

And I’ll recommend this:

Oligarchs Understand Power. Do We?

1. Technotheocrats? There’s a song for it: