Angela Collier points out a bizarre thing these billionaires do: these people — Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk — are all college dropouts who couldn’t even finish an undergraduate degree, but now they all claim that they could have been physicists. Apparently anyone can be a physicist. No, wait, that’s not it, physicists have a reputation for being supersmart so these intellectual losers are all pretending to have an interest in physics for the reputation theft — these guys are going to grift everything.
I guess I’m not very bright because I never even wanted to be a physicist and was much more impressed with biologists like François Jacob or Lewis Wolpert or Rachel Carson or Rita Levi-Montalcini. Also, I not only completed my undergraduate degree, I finished a Ph.D. Dumb! Dumb dumb dumb.
If you can make it through the first half hour, you might also be amused at her take on Ayn Rand. She read Atlas Shrugged and enjoyed it because it was so ridiculous that she thought it was a satire. I can see that, but I’m still not going to slog through anything written by Rand.
Add Sam Altman to the list of college dropouts.
I think it’s telling that these are all American billionaires.
Not all cultures have this US postwar fetishization of physics as the super-intelligent intellectual discipline for extra-clever double-egghead smart boys. Nor did the US during its last Gilded Age – back then your Rockerfellers and your Gettys and your Morgans Stanley preferred to appear cultured by buying classical art and funding classical archaeology instead. I’m glad it’s someone else’s discipline they’re dressing up as now.
“If you can make it through the first half hour…”
Dr. C does tend to repeat herself a lot. Even so, I much prefer her to Hassenbabble.
The world would be at least a slightly better place if Ayn Rand had received treatment for her PTSD.
I’m a dropout. Where’s my billions?
Stop whining to us, larpar, if you had any initiative you’d get out there and inherit your own! Are there no apartheid police-states? No diamond-mines?
Collier: “why do we listen to what he [Gates] says as if he does have some physics knowledge?”
Why do we listen to Collier when she spectacularly fucks up the simple physics of the space elevator right from the start, and never (AFAIK) issues a correction or retraction?
The fetishization of Science has had many iterations and countermeasures over the centuries. An entry point might be the debate between TH Huxley and Matthew Arnold on the focus of education. Huxley pushed for Science of course where Arnold was more of a classicist. Before that was the Battle of the Books as told by Jonathan Swift. If I recall Gould’s recounting in The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox Swift may have preferred the Ancients over the Moderns.
So in these techbros feigning the physicist or engineer pose they may lean toward the Moderns. In the Renaissance there was much patronage by rich folk like the Medici for the arts and there was a rediscovery of classic works found within the Islamic realm. They rehashed Aristotle and Plato and humanism became a buzzword for pagan recycling projects before Savonarola pushed back a bit and got himself killed. There was some science being done under Medici patronage too, but the much later Enlightenment gets the focus for elevating the objective world before the Romantic pushback against Satanic mills.
Anyway Rand was an odd one. She had her own classical focus as she deified Aristotle and I think also liked Aquinas a bit. She also co-opted Nietzsche’s binary distinction of Apollo versus Dionysus to take a swipe at the hippies living in the midst of the space program. I do think PTSD may explain part of her visceral reaction to the Soviets.
Guess who else didn’t finish their undergraduate degree: sportsball thrower Aaron Rogers.
Much as I loathe the Muskrat, he did actually finish his undergrad, in Physics and Economics. It took 7 years and an interuniversity transfer to do it though. Apparently he was accepted to a masters program but never started, so maybe its the exception that still fits the spirit of the rule. All of the above is according to wiki, so the proverbial grain of salt with someone who can afford to pay people to manage their wiki page. Again, I hate the guy, but we stand on facts here, not stereotypes.
Let us not forget Rand’s praise of William Hickman, an evil a-hole who raped, murdered, and dismembered a 12 year-old girl. Not kidding, Rand thought the guy was a Great Man:
https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2010/08/ayn-rands-superman-a-serial-killer-and-rapist
My parents were Rand fans and got her ‘Objectivist Newsletter.’ I was urged to read her drivel. It was drivel even to my 8th grade mind, obvious nonsense and psychopathy. That she still has fans today, as we await the final unraveling of our democratic republic, is not altogether coincidental.
@DaveH
It’s amazing how many qualifiers you have to add to fact-check misinformation about Musk on the left, isn’t it?
Like, there’s plenty of reasons to dislike the guy that are based in reality. You don’t even have to research it much, he puts it on blast 24/7 these days. You don’t need to make up stuff about his past, or about Tesla vehicles. But 95% of stuff I see on lefty social media about him is “Elon’s dad’s apartheid diamond mines paid to have Tesla cars blow up when you sneeze on them and he didn’t even build any Teslas with his bare hands what an asshat lol.”
I think people recognize he has too much power, due to having too much money, and feel they need to justify why he’s unworthy of having it. But that justification is unnecessary.
Nobody should be allowed to have as much money he has. He’s now capable of spending $50M on every congressional race and still have the same net worth he had at the beginning of 2024. He’s already threatening congressional GOP members with primaries if they don’t do his bidding, and they’re caving to his wishes. Nobody should have this level of power, especially if they’re unelected. Whether he’s a super genius who pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, or an incompetent nepo baby who has prat-falled his way to the top, he does not deserve to be this wealthy. Nobody does.
@AstroLad #3: I usually don’t make it past 10 minutes. Her videos are too unstructured, repetitive and long winded for my taste. Which is a bit sad as she seems both smart and funny.
Opinion piece, hasty generalisation. #notallbillionaires.
https://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/
“The 400 richest people in America are having a rollicking time in the roaring 2020s. In all, they are worth a record $5.4 trillion, up nearly $1 trillion from last year. A dozen have $100 billion-plus fortunes, also a record. And admission to this elite club is pricier than ever: A minimum net worth of $3.3 billion is required, up $400 million since 2023. Despite the high bar, 23 newcomers managed to break into the ranks, having grown their fortunes in everything from mundane plastic pipes to cutting-edge artificial intelligence.”
OOOH, these people — Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk are all so sciency!
But, factual documentation on them clearly says they are all abusive and more parasitic than benevolent.
@14 John Morales wrote: hasty generalisation. #notallbillionaires
I reply: I do a agree with John that we should be very careful and selective in who we label as abusive billionaires. However, the best example of a decent one, and the only that comes to mind immediately, is Taylor Swift.
Hey, PZ, how about adding the tRUMP/muskrat cheerleader idiot Rummyswummy to the list?
Also, this is another nail in the muskrat’s coffin for me:
https://crooksandliars.com/2024/10/elon-musk-yes-guy-was-illegal-immigrant-us
Elon Musk – Yes, That Guy – Was An Illegal Immigrant In U.S. Revoke Musk’s citizenship and deport him now!
By NewsHound Ellen — October 27, 2024
A Washington Post investigation has found solid evidence that Elon Musk did not have the legal right to work in the U.S. when he ditched graduate school and began a start-up company.
Some of The Post’s findings https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/10/26/elon-musk-immigration-status/ :
Musk arrived in Palo Alto in 1995 for a graduate degree program at Stanford University but never enrolled in courses, working instead on his start-up.
Leaving school left Musk without a legal basis to remain in the United States, according to legal experts.
shermanj @15: I’ll reserve judgement on Swift, depending on what she does with her remaining billion+ dollars. Obscene wealth is obscene, regardless of the billionaire’s good points.
These guys equate personal wealth with IQ points, and share certificates with post-graduate diplomas.
That’s how I enjoyed Ready Player One.
They might want to be physicists but they sure aren’t rocket scientists .. Oh wait, Musk. Bezos, Branson. Hmm…
Okay, they bought rocket scientists more than actually being them but still.
Er, Brain Surgeons anyone?
Or they may not, StevoR.
(You’re relying on a third-hand opinion, you know)
“Brain Surgeons anyone?”
So Collier buys into the Ayn Rand died in poverty on food stamps thing (at around 28:04). Did she really?
https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2011/1015/Six-things-you-probably-didn-t-know-about-Ayn-Rand/Capitalism-and-the-stock-market
$800,000 in 1982 sounds a tad above poverty to me.
I’m a bit skeptical on the food stamps claim then. From what I gather she received Social Security benefits, which I presume she paid into and Medicare. She had lung cancer so wasn’t exactly super healthy. Medicare was prudent then or her meager wealth could have been eaten away by medical expenses. The problem with receiving SS and Medicare in her case is whether that’s hypocritical. She had a rationale at least for Social Security, having paid into it, which may parallel an argument she had made about the rightness of receiving student aid. Medicare is maybe more of a stretch given her radical libertarian philosophy. See:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ayn-rand-social-security/
So the Ayn Rand dying in poverty on food stamps seems not substantiated. Food stamps and Social Security payments retirees receive are not the same thing. The hypocrisy of decrying moochers and parasites while then dipping into that same pool upon retirement is arguable.
As for Atlas Shrugged, best book review ever:
Imagine if more billionaires looked up to & respected Climate scientists and ecologists as much as they admired rocket scientists.
Also:
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/03/28/nyregion/article-024270-no-title.html
Kinda goes against the dying in poverty trope.
Found that link referenced here:
https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Ayn-Rand-die-poor
Ahem. One can own a dwelling yet have little liquidity or income.
“Rand had surgery for lung cancer in 1974 after decades of heavy smoking.[117] In 1976, she retired from her newsletter and, despite her lifelong objections to any government-run program, was enrolled in and subsequently claimed Social Security and Medicare with the aid of a social worker.[118][119] Her activities in the Objectivist movement declined, especially after her husband died on November 9, 1979.[120] One of her final projects was a never-completed television adaptation of Atlas Shrugged.[121]
On March 6, 1982, Rand died of heart failure at her home in New York City.[122] Her funeral included a 6-foot (1.8 m) floral arrangement in the shape of a dollar sign.[123] In her will, Rand named Peikoff as her heir.[124]”
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand#Later_years)
(https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/120-E-34th-St-APT-6G-New-York-NY-10016/2109372544_zpid/
“Off market | Zestimate®: $1,359,200 Rent Zestimate®: $6,410”)
StevoR:
[I mean, I could go on… copyright vs. royalties, etc; point being, she was not too proud to get the pittance, which is kind of indicative]
John Morales @26
So you’re evaluating Rand’s putative financial situation ca. 1982 based on a Zillow page giving us real estate figures from 2024? Ok I guess. Thanks.
Anyway I completely screwed my algorithm now but if anyone wants surreality watch Jordan Peterson get all into the weeds on his meandering view on Ayn Rand:
People in the comments are confused AF as to what was even going on with this video. It would have been better if JP had compared Rand to his guru Jung given both branched from the same Nietzschean root. Or maybe not because I doubt Peterson could pull that off without getting bogged down in kooky asides.
“So you’re evaluating Rand’s putative financial situation ca. 1982 based on a Zillow page giving us real estate figures from 2024? Ok I guess. Thanks.”
And other factors.
Again: [I mean, I could go on… copyright vs. royalties, etc; point being, she was not too proud to get the pittance, which is kind of indicative]
But yes, it’s hardly worthless today, and it was hardly worthless back then, either.
Part of the estate.
(A car? Furniture? Artwork? All part of the estate)
—
You know, I’m often accused of being callous and inhuman and whatnot, but to mock an old lady dying of cancer at home who descended to sucking on the government’s teat… well.
Not me.
You know Dan Fincke was here for some time, no?
—
FWIW: https://au.thegospelcoalition.org/article/jordan-peterson-and-his-useful-god/
JP is pro-religious doctrine; AR is entirely against it — despite your alleged roots.
(I’ve read that Rand liked her rooting, but)
John Morales @30
If you read what I quoted from Christian Science Monitor above:
Heller is one of her biographers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand_and_the_World_She_Made
If I interpret the above correctly she had liquid enough assets in savings though don’t know what her monthly or annual expenses were or how much had been coming in from royalties. Her speaking engagement income had probably dried up due to her health.
I don’t think I was mocking her at all, especially not on her cancer issues, but I do dispute her being cast as “an old lady dying of cancer at home who descended to sucking on the government’s teat”. It doesn’t appear to be much of a descent in her case. Rich people could still collect social security and apparently Medicare. She doesn’t appear to have been receiving food stamps nor was she impoverished if she had hundreds of thousands of savings in a bank in 1982.
And I’m not defending her philosophy or her receipt of benefits. I am taking issue with casting her as impoverished on food stamps if that’s factually incorrect. The video maker Collier may have been completely unfamiliar with Rand and bizarrely formed part or a good portion of her initial opinion of Atlas Shrugged based on that overly ironic characterization. Ayn Rand poor on food stamps writing about captains of industry going on a brain drain strike in some mythic hidey hole sounds more alluring than the more mundane rich enough Ayn Rand being convinced to collect retirement benefits that could be argued as resulting from theft from her by the gov’t.
John Morales @31
If you had wielded your word hatchet more carefully the Nietzschean rooting I referenced was the ideological genealogy of Ayn Rand vs Carl Jung. Try again with more care as to the actual details.
Well, she was most certainly not a billionaire.
(Most people just don’t get how much moolah that is)
Yeah, and the rooting to which I referred was the horizontal tango. :)
(Look it up)
Mind you, nothing wrong with kink: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nietzsche_paul-ree_lou-von-salome188.jpg
JM@30–
John, that is entirely missing the point. Rand isn’t mocked for taking government handouts. She is mocked for taking government handouts after a lifetime of demonising government handouts.
[you don’t get I’m having fun with you, O Halfdigit?
Chris, sure… but the point is she did take them; I betcha that’s because she had to swallow her pride and thus open herself to mockery.
Which was my very point… This depiction of her as rich and powerful is bullshit.
She had some influence, she was comfortable. Until her old age.
[me, I think adaptive pragmatism is more meritorious than blind ideology]
…but the point is she did take them; I betcha that’s because she had to swallow her pride and thus open herself to mockery.
Well, there might not have been as much mockery if she had said something like “Y’know, my recent experience kinda shows I was wrong about government aid and the people who get it. Sorry for being such a narrow-minded idiot…”
Relevant info from Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made:
See the Heller reference in my @32 for an idea of how much money this may have involved.
And also more about her and Greenspan and her problematic Social Security benefits:
So her rationale was her paying “into the fund”.
FFS. Such stupid irrelevant trivia! Yeah, “Eickhoff tried to disguise her dismay when Rand revealed that all her money was in a savings bank across the street from the apartment; the champion of capitalism had no time to research stocks and disapproved of government savings bonds, she told Eickhoff, who eventually persuaded her to invest her savings in money-market funds.” means she was rich, and she did not own other assets as part of her estate — like signed original copies or whatever.
Point being, this is an incidental thing.
Main post is about the alleged belief of billionaires, and as for the person putting forth this proposition, “you might also be amused at her take on Ayn Rand” is the relevance.
(Where JP comes in is left to the imagination; most certainly not a billionaire)
John Morales @39
You aren’t buying the destitute food stamp receiving Ayn Rand line are you?
What do you mean with “This depiction of her as rich and powerful is bullshit.”? She wasn’t poor if she had half to three quarter of a million in the bank in 1982. She wasn’t a magnate or tycoon either. Who is depicting her as that rich and powerful? My contrast is with the depiction Collier was working with in the video. I think you’re going with a bit of either she’s poor on benefits or she’s rich and powerful with no range of outcome in the middle. Isn’t that a fallacy of some sort?
What was the “Until her old age.” about?
I would judge the ascent of acolyte Alan Greenspan into a degree of power under President Ford as indicative of her indirect influence even then.
Hemidactylus, I give up.
(Willful idiocy can’t be Trumped)
John Morales @43
The video in the OP has a good portion devoted to analyzing Atlas Shrugged where Angela Collier was working under the assumption Ayn Rand died in poverty collecting on food stamps.
I thought Peterson tackling Rand ineffectually was a good comic relief digression. YMMV.
Another part of her video that struck me in a different way was around 12:00 onward where in contrast to the other billionaire wannabe physicists Musk and Gates, Jeff Bezos kinda hit a QM wall while studying physics at Princeton and has some intellectual humility at that point. That was cool I guess. Plus he demurs when compared to Einstein.
I cannot tell y’all how much I appreciate Hemidactylus coming in on these threads to protect me from
John Morales.
Really. I cannot.
@ Rob Grigjanis
Holy fuck! It’s like over a year and you’re STILL fuming about this uppity lass not responding to your comment on her YouTube video. X-D
@ 違う
You literally have not been mentioned beanhead. Have a nice day.
Hardly fuming, Silentbob. I laughed out loud when she questioned listening to people without physics knowledge. The sad part is that there are lots of people out there who think she explains physics well, even when she gets high school maths and first year undergrad physics howlingly wrong. They should know better.
I’ve pretty much jumped around in the video and neither physics nor bios of tech tycoons are my forte. I guess Jobs touted his interest in physics, but what had long ago stood out to me when I was reading up on Gates, Jobs, and Torvalds was Jobs interest in calligraphy. I guess he took a class in that which was formative for him:
He perhaps was not a world class calligrapher by any standard but did this class coupled with his tour of Xerox PARC facilities inspire his vision of what personal computing might be as he borrowed a bit from PARC? He also had a Woz to help him in those formative years. What appealed to people about Macs that they didn’t get from drab Microsoft PCs.Maybe it was aesthetics and not physics acumen that grounded Jobs’ success so there was a class he took…
He also sojourned with NeXT before returning to Apple. It is accidental that the Web was invented on a NeXT platform. If my memory from Adam Grant’s Think Again is right, Jobs wasn’t quite fond of the iPhone idea as it was being pitched to him at first, but his fortuitous pivot kinda buried the Blackberry.
Collier’s take on Wolfram as contrast to the others was amusing as he had the background in physics (Cal Tech PhD) and the obsessive attention to himself in case Walter Isaacson came knocking.
I’m not gonna go full Grigjanis jealous misogynist, but I wish the otherwise brilliant Dr Collier would stop saying, “Anne Rand” X-D
It’s Ayn. Rhymes with “mine”. (Ironically enough.)
df #48
C’est dommage. Je littéralement pensais que tu étais mort.
Bessez mon cul.
Funny how the people who fetishize science also ignore it when it’s inconvenient.
Silentbob: just remember the slogan, “Ein Reich, ein Volk, Ayn Rand!”
Someone tell me something good these people are doing with all that money.
Please.
Fishy, hopefully not being pedantic, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundation
You really could have chosen better example than that foundation, mate.
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#gates-foundation
In short: the reason poor countries don’t produce their own vaccines despite being capable to do so (leading to new epidemics due to not being too poor to import them) is because “Gates foundation” is strongly enforcing copyright and walls off research.
Righto, jo1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Medical_Research_Institute
re vaccines: https://www.gavi.org/search?s=Bill+%26+Melinda+Gates+Foundation
You have just shown that you disn’t read the article I linked to. If you had, you wouldn’t have posted that.
Look, if you truly think all those billions of dollars of donations (and there are a lot of recipients) have done zero good, fine. But the facts are out there, regardless of how much you like your 2021 opinion piece.
Another: https://www.unicef.org/chad/stories/horseman-and-his-vaccines
I have never read Ayn Rand, but I guess she was traumatised by her youth in revolutionary Russia.
I should mention she got inside USA by bluffing her way in, getting ( altruistic ) help from people in USA during a period people from eastern europe were not welcome.
Thus she started her American phase by breaking her own principles.
As for donations at least some of that money will have done some good, if unintentionally, by keeping some people employed. And donations to British idiot # 2 (Nigel Farage) will put stress on the rival Tory party. May the tories sink forever in a tar pit, anongside other ancient monsters.
@27. John Morales : Thanks. Will watch that later.
Billionaires like all human individuals are human individuals.
To be asssessed based on their indiviudal deeds, words and actions.
That noted, the mere act of having just that absurdly much money all to themselves is probly problematic.
Clearly billionaires being human individuals and acting individually exist on a spectrm and range from ones that n my view help Humanity and make the world better like say Soros and Gates versus ones that are very much making the world worse by their choice of actuions and who they support eg Musk, Theil,, Kochs..
@61. John, I’ve never writtwn that foundation didn’t do any good. I’ve written that their copyright enforcement did more harm than any good they ever did.
Gates made the crappy system what it is with this little bit of lobbying in the 90s.
https://newrepublic.com/article/162000/bill-gates-impeded-global-access-covid-vaccines
Quote:
If we’re going to judge bazillionaires, either individually or as a class, we need to weigh the good done by their charitable actions against the harm done by whatever business activities made them so rich in the first place. If, for example, a particular plutocrat’s enterprise(s) made a million people less able to get the food they need, then we shouldn’t necessarily be praising them for feeding a mere few thousand hungry people.
When Officer Barbrady of South Park provides a more succinct and accurate evaluation of Ayn Rand’s works than her Republican fanboys, the GOP is in trouble. When was that episode done? 2010?
Well, if it is true what some people say, that biology is applied chemistry and chemistry is applied physics, then that makes you a physicist, PZ.
rietpluim @70: Gardening is applied biology, so gardeners are physicists. Sure, why not?
I never wanted to be a chemist or biologist, but I wish I’d learned about gardening. Always loved the idea of growing my own vegetables, but never got round to it, and I’m too decrepit to start now.
@Rob Grigjanis #71 – Well, since physics is applied mathematics and mathematics is applied philosophy, it appears that everyone (including gardeners) is a philosopher in the end.
I wonder if the diagram of people who think Musk is a physicist and those who think Neil DeGrasse Tyson is not, is a circle