It’s time to talk about billionaire math

Let me tell you about the very rich. 

They own yachts that have yachts. They leave Earth just to feel something. They buy art they don’t like and tout books they don’t read and play God with things they don’t comprehend. Above all, they live by their own set of rules.

There is a crude but undeniable logic to the rise of the American Oligarchy. As I argued in a cover story for the magazine earlier this year, decades of deregulation, concentration, opportunism, and no small amount of generally-quite-legal corruption have allowed a small group of people (mostly in Silicon Valley) to control an ever-greater share of the economy and bend the political process toward their own ends. Money begets power begets money. It’s why, laid out on the page, the net worths of the world’s richest men currently look like they’re heading for outer orbit. Seriously, have you seen the charts?

But as I’ve delved deeper and deeper into this world over the last few years, the thing I keep coming back to is not how all of these structures favor the very rich, but how wealth and power, in large enough quantities, allow you to simply bypass the structures that constrain everyone else. Gravity doesn’t really exist in the same way when you’re an oligarch. If your products drove people insane, they would be taken off the shelves. If you did a Hitler salute, people would probably just call it that. If you were responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, you would be ostracized from polite society, and maybe even CNBC. If you invented the Metaverse, people would stop asking you to invent more things. And if you didn’t pay taxes, dear reader, you might eventually go to prison. 

It’s this alternative physics that gives the American oligarchy, at this particular moment, its uniquely off-putting funk—a sense that, beyond all the hockey-stick wealth charts, the centibillionaires of Silicon Valley can pursue whatever bored or perverted or maniacal project they want without fear of censure or even market correction. Time and money just don’t mean the same things they do to the rest of us. (Maybe that explains the clock.) Laws become more like suggestions. Deadlines aren’t real. Or at least: They don’t have to be.

Welcome to Billionaire Math, where we make sense of the things that don’t make sense about the world’s ruling class.