> There's Zuck, whose underlings let him win at board-games like Settlers of Catan because he's a manbaby who can't lose (and who accuses Wynn-Williams of cheating when she fails to throw a game of Ticket to Ride while they're flying in his private jet).
Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy? Does anyone who fails to bend over backwards for them just end up getting exiled? Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game? Being good at any kind of game is mostly a function of how much time and energy you've invested into it. If you claim to be an extremely hardcore worker who has any kind of family life there just aren't any leftover hours in the day for you to grind a top position in a game. And anyway, if you're playing games for fun and to bond with people, you probably shouldn't be playing tryhard optimal strategies every game, and should instead explore and experiment with more creative strategies. This is a lesson that took me a while to learn.
You've won the lottery, but you don't want to acknowledge that you won the lottery. You want to feel they you deserve your position through hard work and talent. You're living in a society where people are credulous, to some degree they believe that hard work and talent are related to success.
So what will happen? Everyone you hire ends up patting you on the back, telling you what a great guy you are.
> to some degree they believe that hard work and talent are related to success
Does anyone actually believe that hard work and talent are either zero or negatively correlated to success? I don't think the correlation is 1.0, but I firmly believe that it's positive for both.
> You've won the lottery, but you don't want to acknowledge that you won the lottery.
Yes, but where does this drive come from?
I haven't the faintest idea, however we can extrapolate from some facts.
One fact is that they have a lot of money. Duh... But also money is the key metric to measure success, so a lot of other people flock around those who have money so that it rubs a bit off of them, that Midas touch.
Suddenly these ultrawealthy are surrounded by an endless wave of gold diggers. The immediate thing that follows is flatter, and then echo chamber.
Now imagine that goes for years and years. Slowly this metaphorical richy's whole world views -- and also how he view himself, his identity and his relationship with the things around him -- gets tied absolutely to that notion that he is right.
For this imaginary person, losing a game isn't just am innocent loss anymore. It's a direct question of his own identity.
I think this explains a lot, but I'm not psychologist so it's just a wild guess.
In addition, I think you have to be sort of selfish to become ultra-wealthy. At some point people who believe that they became rich not by their own merit would start to distribute some wealth around. While selfish and egotistical people would hoard all their wealth, compounding it into ultra-richness.
Skill and effort obviously has a part in explaining success.
That aside, I can’t be the only person tired of people bringing envy politics to this forum, trying to shoehorn wealth into every single discussion involving someone who is wealthy, as if that’s the only, or even a valid, way to look at everything they do.
There's a trove of truth in this <lottery / denial> perspective. It happens on all levels of success. But what a profoundly different world it would be if wholesome humility was the default tendency. I'm not saying it would be a panacea, but understanding the dynamics, even intuitively, of the myriad interdependencies that allow our every action would be a humble leap in a better direction.
For me, the only thing anyone deserves is what everyone else deserves, and everything else is a form of lottery. There's simply no place for arrogance other than delusion. It's good to remember who built the foundations you've succeeded on, and if not beyond one's capacity, with a little dose of reverence, respect or something other than self immersion. Zuckerborg is a mirror for many.
In order to get into Zuckerberg’s position in the first place, you need to have a highly competitive personality type. And competitive people want to win at EVERYTHING, all the time. It’s a constant compulsion. Even if they might intellectually understand the distinction between “just a game” and “actual serious time”, they don’t “feel” that distinction in their bones. They have no off switch.
I think there are some similar remarks on Bill Gates in another good memoir by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen [1]. Even on his school days, Gates was so sure he will not have a competition on Math, since he was the best at math at his school. When he went to Harvard, (which I somehow remember as Princeton(!) as pointed out by a commenter) and saw people better than him, he changed to applied math from Pure math. (Remarks are Paul's)
> I was decent in math and Bill was brilliant, but I spoke from experience at Wazzu. One day I watched a professor cover the black board with a maze of partial differential equations, and they might as well have been hieroglyphics from the Second Dynasty. It was one of those moments when you realize, I just can’t see it. I felta little sad, but I accepted my limitations. I was OK with being a generalist.
> For Bill it was different. When I saw him again over Christmas break, he seemed subdued. I asked him about his first semester and he said glumly, “I have a math professor who got his PhD at sixteen.” The course was purely theoretical, and the homework load ranged up to thirty hours a week. Bill put everything into it and got a B. When it came to higher mathematics, he might have been one in a hundred thousand students or better. But there were people who were one in a million or one in ten million, and some of them wound up at Harvard. Bill would never be the smartest guy in that room, and I think that hurt his motivation. He eventually switched his major to applied math.
Even Paul admits, he was torn between going into Engineering or Music. But, when he saw his classmate giving virtuoso performance, he thought "I am never going to as great as this." So, he chose engineering.
It's not competition that they like. It's winning.
Competitive athletes expect to lose. They don't want to lose, but there's only one winner (or three podium spots) in any given contest. They turn "not wanting to lose" into their motivation for getting better, still knowing that they are fairly likely to lose. The competition is the point, and when they lose, they are still a little happy if they did better than they did last time.
The people who want to win regardless of the competition, regardless of the rules: we call those people bullies.
> In order to get into Zuckerberg’s position in the first place, you need to have a highly competitive personality type. And competitive people want to win at EVERYTHING, all the time.
Many competitive people want to win, but they want to win the real game, not a rigged version.
>A couple years back, I got a job offer from an investment bank to help them win zero sum games against people who didn't necessarily deserve to lose. I had tried very hard to get that offer
I think that while the trait itself is fairly common the ability to bully and pressure everyone around you to give in to this level of petty and demeaning deference is quite rare. You only see it in powerful people because they're the only ones who can actually make people do this.
I have an aunt like this and she's super annoying and largely ostracized and in constant conflict with people around her, but if she had $175 billion she could probably surround herself with people who would indulge her.
A few years back (2015ish?) I read a big magazine profile of Michael Jordan in his post-basketball life and I was really surprised by how unhappy he seemed - extraordinarily competitive at everything, even casual games of golf, running up huge gambling debts, etc.
This is a guy who was the most dominant athlete of his generation, arguably the greatest the ever play the game, and yet he can't turn it off, he can't relax and rest on his laurels. The same personality quirks that drove him to win at basketball mean he can't tolerate losing in any arena.
I can recall being this way as a small child. So had I not been disciplined as a child so that I would not be a sore loser, did this blunt something that would have led to my being more "successful"?
I have trouble believing that highly competitive people enjoy winning against people who aren't trying to win.
Catan has a lot of luck, you'd expect to lose a lot of games.
I'm pretty sure this is the correct and intuitive reason.
In a competition to be 'ever above everything else',
tragically it selects for the most pathologically ruthless behaviour pattern,
be it Musk or Putin.
If there were a contestant even more unscrupulous than you,
he'd take your place.
So, as long as we allow/tolerate obscene wealth, we invariably get this.
And if we try to avoid it the wrong way, we get Stalin.
I think it's easy to believe a narrative like this about someone generally disliked, but the reality about basically everyone is that we have good moments and bad moments. People that are famous are constantly being watched and evaluated.
Given the inevitability of those bad moments being observed and reported, I don't think it's a good foundation for evaluating someone's character. In this case, it's mostly useful for confirming an already negative point of view.
from the article you linked, it seems that Zuck told everyone else to gang up on the next hardest player so he could win.
That they went along with it is... kind of in line with what Wynn-Williams said.
Would they still have all teamed up on Zuck's opponent if Zuck hadn't been their boss?
I know a number of wealthy folks, many of them, actually really decent people. They deserve their wealth, and I have no issues with it. They tend to have somewhat different value systems than I do, but we get along, anyway.
I have learned that one word they pretty much never hear, is "No."
Even the very best of them, gets used to having every whacked-out fever dream their Id squeezes out, treated like God's Word.
People who aren't very good at self-analysis and self-control, can have real problems with it.
We are watching a bunch of very public examples of exactly this, right now.
How wealthy are the wealthy folks you know ? a quant or faang principal engineer making 1.5-2 million/year is wealthy and worked hard to get there (although, luck is still a big part of it) yet they're much closer in wealth than a fast food employee than they are to the super rich. Someone who has accumulated 50 millions of assets is wealthy, yet they'll never afford a super yacht or the lifestyle that billionaires can afford.
In the 1800s in Spain, king Ferdinand VII, was famously keen on playing billiards while being a really bad player. His opponents were known to, not only play badly, but play so that he would get easy positions to shoot.
"Así se las ponían a Fernando VII" is even nowadays a popular -though not that widely used today- expression to tell someone the task in front of them is an easy one nobody can fail.
Being ultra wealthy/famous/powerful would have a lot of negative psychological pressures that would likely effect all of us in that situation. Personal growth is difficult. Acknowledging negative parts of ourselves is difficult. Many times, we are forced to confront something negative about ourselves because of how it effects our lives and our relationships.
I think we have all had that friend at some point that was a poor sport. They were poor losers, gloating winners, and just unpleasant to play games with. Usually that person stops getting invited to game night, or you have a “come to Jesus” talk with them about their behavior. The social pressure of losing friends is a powerful motivator.
But what if that person has an unlimited supply of people that would validate, flatter, and reinforce their bad behavior? When you are thinking about who to hang out with from your unlimited rolodex, you will likely subconsciously lean towards people that make you feel validated, understood, respected, etc. Slowly, by degrees, over years, you could find yourself surrounded by sycophants, where you more and more validated and catered to, and are less and less used to hearing constructive criticism of your behavior.
It reminds me of how highly processed “junk” foods can short circuit a lot of our physiological mechanisms around overeating. Basically unlimited availability of junk food is part of why obesity is has shot up. Being ultra wealthy/famous/powerful is the highly processed food of the psyche. It doesn’t mean every rich person become psychologically unhealthy but it makes the rates of it shoot up.
> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
Yes. As a kid, I read a legend that one of the Charlemagne's knights got so annoyed for losing a game of chess that he killed his opponent with the chessboard.
I agree that such an event would demonstrate insecurity. I would also argue that past elites were not “that insecure”, because they put their lives at risk by waging wars. Of course, later elites figured out ways to address the downsides.
>> Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy? Does anyone who fails to bend over backwards for them just end up getting exiled? Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
There is a long history of wealthy elites wanting to always win, even at games, and who want to be the center of attention.
Kaiser Wilhelm II had many of the same characteristics seen in today's ultrawealthy elites. When he commanded forces in German military exercises his side was always the side that won because it was his side.
"Wilhelm II's reign marked a departure from the more restrained leadership of his predecessors, as he sought to assert direct influence over the German Empire's governance and military affairs. This shift toward a more "personalist" system, where loyalty to the Kaiser outweighed true statesmanship, weakened the effectiveness of German leadership and contributed to its eventual strategic missteps."
>This shift toward a more "personalist" system, where loyalty to the Kaiser outweighed true statesmanship, weakened the effectiveness of German leadership and contributed to its eventual strategic missteps."
I'm not convinced there has ever been a positive or constructive outcome from cults of personality.
> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
This is very Roman Emperor behavior. Or Chinese Emperor, for that matter. It has pretty much always been the case that power and privilege lets you get away with bad behavior while simultaneously holding your subordinates to onerous standards and/or inflicting punishment on a whim.
Building a court who will steer you away from bad ideas rather than surrounding yourself with yes-men requires active effort, and enough humility to be aware of that risk.
The other constant historical trope is of course the abuse of power for sexual purposes.
I had a conversation with one of these types. He honestly told me, "I really feel I am superior to most people". He was very frank with me. (And, in the things he did, he was actually much better than most people - he did have great talent but also spend almost all of his time on that.)
So my pet peeve theory is when they feel they are not superior and other people are better than them in activities that involve logical thinking for example, they feel extremely uncomfortable as their perception of themselves gets weaker, hence these strange behaviors.
When someone builds their whole identity around being "the smartest person in the room," any situation that challenges that (even something as trivial as losing a game) can feel like a threat to their entire self-image. It's not just ego, it's almost existential.
I think you'll see this kind of thing in many professions. Some doctors, who are highly specialized and highly trained in their field, act like they should automatically be great at skills they barely have experience with, and then get frustrated when they don't immediately excel or when people with less impressive credentials end up being better at something.
My family member who taught flying to hobbyist pilots always said physicians were the most dangerous students because of their "know-it-all" attitude.
There's lots of talk in the entertainment world, from the long-term famous, about how money and fame tend to be fundamentally warping. Bill Murray said to Pete Davidson that, once it happens, nearly everyone is an asshole for about two years. People fawn all over you; they do things for you. They give you things for free. You can get things normal people can't get. If you're making a few million a year, you have economic power beyond nearly everyone you've ever known. At a certain level, travel is a whim, not a slog through TSA and airport lines. And you lose the ability to deal with pushback of any kind.
The smart ones -- the ones with some capacity for self-awareness -- course-correct. The others don't.
But in Hollywood, one assumes, the bubble is far less perfect than the one around someone like Zuck, whose power over Facebook is absolute and inviolate, and who has money and power beyond almost every other person on the planet. So there's only a very small chance of any course-correction, and thus he stays an asshole, and that assholery extends to insisting that he win at trivial board games.
Success has a part of skill, and a part of luck. It hurts to be reminded about skill issues.
Board games aren't as simple as time invested. I could spend my whole life studying chess, and some 13yo prodigy will handily beat me blindfolded, while juggling three other boards.
Board games cannot be conquered with wealth or a successful business. Or, rather, they can, but only by pressuring your underlings into letting you win; giving you the feeling you crave.
Naw, the rare super talented 13yo child that excells at such games will have also spend an incredible amount of time learning everything there is about it - leaving very little time to pursuit outside of that discipline to improve themselves.
There is a grain of truth to what you're saying, obviously - as Magnus has proven when he started to enter chess tournaments... Outplaying people with decades more experience. But you're also ignoring that he spend pretty much every waking moment of his thinking life playing chess.
Board Games in the same vein as grand strategy/4x with a dizzying number of rules like Catan or HOI4 are very much initially a function of time invested, otherwise you literally have no idea what you're doing.
At the Versailles court of the Louies there were constant parties and games, gambling and otherwise. It wasn't to bond or for fun, it was to keep the aristocracy too busy to threaten the dictatorship, as well as letting the king exert an immediate influence over them through a borderline insanity.
Infamously the first or second Versailles Louis, I forgot which, got very aggressive around the topic of toilet excretions, basically forcing aristocrats to try and handle being drunk and desperately needing both to piss and stay in his vicinity. The ceremony around the parties and the court in general over time got more and more intricate and maddening, causing the aristocracy to spend more and more resources on getting clothes and drinks and showing up at the right time and doing the right thing and being on top of the fashion of the day.
It would be weird if a late modern corporate dictator didn't apply similar tactics, since they are known to work and didn't come to an end until the guillotines rolled into town. Things like sleepovers in the office, ceremonial games, constant 'after work', oddball demands regarding clothing and behaviour, intimate surveillance and gossiping, and so on.
>Things like sleepovers in the office, ceremonial games, constant 'after work', oddball demands regarding clothing and behaviour, intimate surveillance and gossiping, and so on.
That sounds more like a cult than a company.
I don't understand why anyone would put up with that, if they had any other alternative. And most people do have alternatives.
Louis XIV had a notably insecure childhood, with portions of the nobility were in open rebellion. When he came of age, he set about to make damn sure that they were under his thumb.
But the parallel seems lacking to me: Musk and Zuckerman can't jail recalcitrant managers.
Being an Olympic gymnast or marathon runner or boxer is not, broadly speaking, healthy. These pursuits require you to make sacrifices that push your body to extremes, to its physical limits, and not only you are selected for a very particular set of traits, there are also lots of health and psycho-social compromises that are entailed by those traits and by your training process. That is the cost of competition.
Likewise running a company. You guys are, to be blunt, freaks. It requires very particular psychological and social conditioning to be in that place doing that thing, it demands specific types of personality traits and adaptations, and that probably doesn't make you, the successful CEO, a well-balanced, "normal" person.
Now take that person, who is a little bit alien in the first place, and ask what happens when they can choose everything about their surroundings, when they get fitted for their GERDpod https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtV33YSKOJk . They still have the same personality quirks, traumas and experiences that got them to this place, but now they're rich beyond imagining, every whim trivially achievable except power over other people (and that only minimally constrained). Like a person stuck in a perpetual state of orgasm, the question of whether they like it or not and really isn't relevant to whether we're going to be inviting them to the cookout or how they're going to behave in church. Any interaction, they're going to make it weird. Because they're weird. Their situation is weird, and the mentality that brought them to that situation is independently weird. A normal person would have pursued normal fulfilling things in life, and they chose entrepreneurial ambition.
Good point, and it made me think about a more general point about people:
It's often the same underlying trait that gives someone qualities that we like/admire but also the qualities we don't like.
When we evaluate each other, we sometimes have thoughts like "she has <good quality>, but if only she'd work on <bad quality>".
Over the years I finally realized that's not how we work. Our traits aren't always connected to isolated levers that we can pull independently.
The really good sales guy might exaggerate fibs in personal convo. The girl that moved from Germany to Mexico to start a successful hostel also has a hard impulsiveness that's hard to get along with. The really attentive mother is risk-averse to a point of absurdity. All examples of friends off the top of my head. Or me: I can find happiness anywhere that I am (good), but it also means I don't have the drive to rock the boat when I should (bad).
There doesn't necessarily exist the possibility of preserving the good part if you were to fix the bad part since the fix might require changing the underlying trait.
> And anyway, if you're playing games for fun and to bond with people, you probably shouldn't be playing tryhard optimal strategies every game, and should instead explore and experiment with more creative strategies.
Agreed. I have played some truly awful strategies in games (Azul: Queen’s Garden comes to mind) where it was clear within a round or two that it was doomed to fail; my wife / gaming partner expressed dismay that I was doggedly continuing, but to me, I had to see it through without introducing other variables so that I could definitively know (modulo luck of tile draw) that the strategy sucked. I thoroughly enjoyed losing.
EDIT: if anyone is curious, the strategy was to maximize high-point (5/6) tokens above everything else, eschewing end-round bonuses, brief tactical shifts, etc. Turns out it’s really hard to collect enough sets of them to count at game end, and you’re giving up compounding points along the way.
Right? I had a sort of respect for the Zuck, same partner for a long time, seems nice to his children, does charity… And then he gets one of those mega yachts and he can’t stand loosing at board games. So disappointing.
Surprise surprise, probably the image you had of Zuckerberg was not an intimate look into his personal life but instead a carefully crafted image created by an professional agency whose life and blood is creating neat images of famous people.
Somehow, actual real life details are starting to come out (he does seem more "daring" as of late, might be why), destroying the picture painted by the professionals for all this time.
Celebrity worship really needs to end, including the worship of the celebrity programmer. We're all humans, with a bunch of flaws, and it's easy to forget when what you're consuming is a fake impression of someone.
Imagine being so spineless, so utterly desperate for power, that you’re willing to contort your public persona just to appease a man who made lying a brand. Zuckerberg didn’t just sell out—he gift-wrapped his integrity and hand-delivered it to Cheetolini.
I know these types of people, a lot of them, but I am not one of them. I was a student at Harvard, I've dated the daughter of a film studio owner, the daughter of the then-owner of Gucci, I've worked at an Academy Award winning VFX studio, I know celebrities and CEOs, and I married an Academy Award winner. I know these people.
There is a mechanism in high wealth investment circles that seeks very ambitious and simultaneously low self knowledge individuals to invest heavily. They tend to be driven and charismatic in that drive, while being very ignorant of their negative impact on others. Many high net worth individuals see themselves in such youth, and invest in them, their ideas and their drive. They create psychopaths, and celebrate their mistakes as fuel for control of them later. This mechanism I am describing is very powerful, dominating.
Really rich people aren't any different from the rest of us. You quickly realize that what sets them apart is privilege. You see behaviors in the wealthy that if they were poor they'd be locked up for. "They just let you do it if you're rich" comes to mind.
There is also a feedback effect. Most people are part of groups which aren't strongly selected for moral character, but the rich and powerful become surrounded by people who are after money and power, unless they deliberately manage to avoid that. So some of their bad behaviour is because the availability heuristic tells them that that's how most people behave, and fills them with cynicism and contempt
> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
The modern phenomenon, relative to history in general, is that upsetting an elite doesn't get you immediately killed or sold into slavery. But yes, they have always been like this. Behind every great fortune is a crime, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
I think that successful people tend to be people who pay a lot of attention to "winning" in as many situations as possible. If you accept losing as a part of life and move on, you're not going to be successful, because you don't spend time thinking how you could've won. Of course this looks funny in situations where one cannot win, but it's really helpful when it comes to fixing your mistakes, allowing you to be successful.
> but it's really helpful when it comes to fixing your mistakes, allowing you to be successful.
It would be helpful if they'd take a loss as a learning opportunity. But as stated in the original quote they threw a tantrum and accused the opponent of cheating, taking away no lesson to improve the next time around.
No one deserves that much more than others. No one believes they don't deserve what they have. People work backwards to justify why they need so much more power, control, and wealth than others. Worse for Zuck b/c his special shares.
The ambition/success feedback loop never stops, which is why the folks on top seem somehow less secure and content than the rest of us. Most of us figure out we probably won't be the #1 anything pretty early in our journey and stop fixating on comparison and focus on maximizing ourselves.
Most people have to make peace with not being №1, and in doing so, they actually get a shot at real contentment. But when you're at the top, the game never ends. There's always another metric to dominate, another threat to neutralize, another narrative to control.
It looks at loads of dictators from history - Stalin, Hitler, Saddam Hussein.
What they all have in common is a love for loyalty and subservience. And they demand loyalty and subservience be constantly proven. Often in very weird and trivial ways.
Eg. Saddam Hussein liked to have a BBQ where he would cook (but not eat) and make the food inedible spicy. Then he would force his top people to eat it while he laughed at them.
They of course had to keep up the pretence that the food was delicious and pay him lots of compliments.
Probably have been told their whole lives that they are so smart, clever, and special, that they will (and rightly should) always win. So any loss immediately looks to them like foul play by their opponent(s). Even if it's just a casual game. Anyone telling them otherwise doesn't last long in their orbit. As they gain power, they naturally grow a bubble of sycophants who reinforce their "I always win" beliefs.
There's also no shortage of people willing to tell Zuck and Musk (from a relatively safe distance, like in public here at HN) that they're insecure manbabies born into wealth who don't deserve a fraction of the power they've managed to claw themselves. I suspect that we, and the desire to show us wrong (or at the least spite us) are also part of the equation for why the current crop of billionaires are as they are.
We all have personal quirks which would appear silly if publicly known. But most of us are not billionares, so these quirks do not come to light, or do not seem that strange in ordinary people. "Not wanting to lose at board games" is actually quite a mild personal quirk compared to some of the things I know about myself or about my close friends. I know a guy who spends 20 minutes picking out tomatoes.
> Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy?
Who says it's limited to the ultra wealthy? My network has a lot of people who have net worths of under $5-6 million USD and a lot of them are highly insecure.
I've witnessed several of them going out of their way to tear down people who are fitter or more attractive than them as well.
Look at the manbaby actions through that lens and you might get some insight.
Hmm. So highly insecure people have to "win" (however it's defined at the moment) in order to bury their insecurities for the moment, but ultra wealthy individuals 1) have more power, so they can make it so that they win more often, and 2) are noticed more (or at least by a wider circle), so when they do it, a lot more people pay attention.
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
It’s possible that exact personality trait is what drove them to such success in the first place. Perhaps like an obsession with winning.
> Being a billionaire must be insane. You can buy new teeth, new skin. All your chairs cost 20,000 dollars and weigh 2,000 pounds. Your life is just a series of your own preferences. In terms of cognitive impairment it's probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day
It’s more so related to power. Once you’ve acquired enough power, it consumes most people. They don’t like having their power challenged or put in a weakened state. Many of these people are acquiring power via some form or their “genius”. Technical wunderkind, military strategy genius, etc. So that drives their ego. But, they probably know they’re not actually a genius and plenty of people could have done what they did but they got lucky. So they end up getting defensive and insecure when anything challenges their power, risks to expose their genius as a fraud, etc. They’re operating on a mental house of cards and are volatile due to it. For regular people, they seem to be triggered by small things like losing a card game but it’s probably just that, a trigger that unleashed a wave of pent up insecurity.
The need to dominate can be a favorable trait for success. It can also be all consuming that you can't easily turn off. Like...ok Zuck, you won the f'ing lottery. You could spend the rest of your life on an island or helping orphans, but you still work at Facebook - why? Because he's wrapped up in it. It's a miracle Bill Gates managed to step down.
It can also be unsettling to know that, just as easily as you killed off competitors, competitors could unseat you.
So yea, you might sleep a bit easier at night if you can just win at the things you can control, like that darn Settlers of Catan game.
Also someone who reflexively accuses the other of cheating while playing a game likely has a hard time admitting they failed at something. Not an admirable trait in a leader.
f you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
Zuck 'earning' another billion probably means nothing to him. I doubt he can even keep count. All of that sense of self-worth that people derive from their career or wealth is lost in the noise of Meta's stock price for him. But winning a board game is tangible. It's right there in front of him, as a direct result of his own actions. He can feel that.
If you couple that with him being surrounded by people who know that losing to him makes him feel good, and that Zuck is more generous when he's happy, you can see why people lose on purpose.
These guys are sort of like a type of inherited wealth. They created companies at a time where you could go public and have no accountability to a board with power.
When you take a genius and drown them in good fortune… you sometimes get a sense of personal infallibility.
He should have eaten his own dog food and played the games inside the Metaverse where he could have had the environment ensure his desired outcome. But maybe the Metaverse itself is now a painful reminder of failure.
They think their wealth, position, etc. is a result of merit. However, they know their wealth was not earned, but given. At best, they were born into a position of privilege and simply used their existing, unearned, wealth to build more.
Losing at a board game forces them to confront the fact that they aren't any more clever than their peers. They didn't get to where they were on their wits alone; they started the game with a few routes already developed.
Probably he is insecure?
Put too much into how much people think about him. And believes that being a big person he needs to be the best at everything, while - and this is a positive trait actually - he knows that he is not that big, needs to overcompensate and project much more than he possesses - which is a common trait on Facebook. Overreacts to the ubiquitous life experience of loss.
I think it's easy to unknowingly surround yourself with yes-men and become insulated from failure. Losing then seems like an exception to the rule, a bug.
The problem is also the justification stories they excrete to justify the wealth the capital machine pours on them. The whole gods choosen, superior, natural strong willed aristocratic uebermensch bottled into one cyst of sycophants. Totally unable to connect with "easily distracted by the trivial" normies, barely able to talk to the monomaniacs they once where themselves. Not a good show.
Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
It's always been this way, more or less.
If you look back at the ultra-wealthy in any age, you'll find just these sorts of people. It's in 20th-century literature. It's in classic literature. It's in the Bible. It's probably in ancient Greek literature, but I'm not well-versed there.
At least in the early part of the last century, there was some hope. A number of ultra-wealthy people decided that instead of building a faster steam engine or racing to pump more oil, they'd engage in benefiting society as an alternative penis-measuring contest.
They were happy to pour the equivalent of today's billions into projects like paying artists to spend 30 years documenting the fading culture of the American Indian, or funding scientific expeditions to improve our understanding of ancient history.
Today's billionaires are, instead, trying to one-up each other on getting 12-year-old girls addicted to their apps.
It's weird how moments can go from "we were playing a game when.." to "The New York Times is covering a game we played 15 years ago". What I've heard from people who were in the game was that he wanted to go to bed so he was trying to negotiate a quick end to the game. There was a time at a con where I did something similar (i.e. we had to finish, we couldn't just leave the game setup and play later.)
Everything is viewed through a mirror darkly.
"HE FORCED OTHERS TO KNEEL BEFORE HIM, EVEN IN BOARD GAMES!1!" vs. "He wanted to go to bed so made a dickhead comment that would let him both win and sleep." Think back to your 20s, which feels more likely.
It raises the question: where is the crack in this structural system, and how can we pry it open? Perhaps the vulnerability lies in the desire of the ultra-rich and powerful for societal respect—whether born of love or fear hardly matters. How should society respond? Mercilessly mock them.
> If you're wildly successful at something … why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
> And anyway, if you're playing games for fun and to bond with people…
That's interesting becasue at least with Zuckerberg, he entered a local bjj tournament under a fake name.
And tbh if you eventually do find yourself against him your going to want the opportunity to say you submitted him. No one's letting him win at a tournament
It's an old problem. Medieval kings had this problem. One way around it was the fool/jester, who could (within limits) say the things that nobody else was free to say.
John Major, who was prime minister of the UK in the 90s, has talked a bit about how isolated a position like that makes you, and how unprepared he was for it. Few of the normal pressures of life apply you in a position like that: you can't get fired (not really), you don't have to accept consequences (not really), and perhaps most importantly: you don't have anyone tell you "you idiot, that's fucking mental". No one that you can just dismiss anyway.
I can't find the interview right now, it was a while ago, but I thought it was pretty interesting. Major was a man in his 50s when he became PM. Zuck was in his early 20s. You have to wonder what that does to a person. People like Zuck are more or less like child actors that made it big: everyone bends over backwards to deepthroat them and they've got a view of the world that's just delusional. I'd feel sorry if it wasn't for the highly negative and caustic effects.
> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
I don't think _all_ the superrich _are_ this insecure. Like, the obvious examples of this sort of behaviour are Trump (golf, in particular), Musk (video game nonsense), Zuck (this). But all three of those are very obviously fucked-up, socially maladjusted people in _other_ ways, too. Potentially the issue is more that being very rich allowed them to _get away_ with this behaviour; poor weirdos have more incentive to suppress it because people will only accept it from rich weirdos.
Though the phenomenon of "adult manbaby gets upset when not allowed to win game (especially by his partner)" is _absolutely_ out there, even for non-absurdly-rich people; see any subreddit about relationships for examples.
That phenomenon is certainly not exclusive to men. All it takes is someone insecure enough to feel that losing a game threatens their sense of worth as a person.
>There's a story about when I was playing Mark Zuckerberg at Catan. Sarah suggests I was deliberately letting Zuckerberg win the game, and "brazenly" dismissing her strategic guidance. It's a lovely anecdote that positions our heroic narrator as some sort of principled mind surrounded by a sea of yes men or something, and that we all liked to let Zuckerberg win.
Yeah, except that's not what happened at all.
they know deep down that they don't deserve their status which makes them insecure and needing to constantly defend the narrative that they are in fact better.
you'll see this behavior fade in the presence of someone who they themselves perceive as superior by whichever metric
you're getting the order of events backwards. it's not "Become a billionaire, then become a baby who insists they be allowed to win board games". The order is, first you're an entitled, manipulative jackass with absolutely no bottom for unethical behavior and zero tolerance for "losing", then become a billionaire by being so brazenly shitty in all areas of life and getting people to go along with you. Caveat, you have to be a white guy for this to work and it works much better if you already inherited millions from your dad.
As an exercise, apply this rule to all the other billionaires you know.
I tend to agree with you, but I also tend to believe that indeed, having a billion dollars (read: having no constraints) will tend to bring out the worst in anyone.
Another way to say this is, most people who earn obscene wealth who would be offended by the obscenity of it would work hard to give most of it away. Those who are not offended by the obscenity of it will be happy to keep it, so there's a selection bias to it.
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
All the other comments are about Zuckerberg being an out-of-touch egomaniac, but I think this is a reflection of people.
We want our leaders to be infaliable and we use the stupidest metrics to judge people. Remember how Ed miliband eating a sandwich became a scandal? For every one person that would see losing as not a big deal, there's like ten people that will think "this guy can't win a game of settlers of Catan, and he's running the company???".
I am reminded of that joe rogan clip where he's just in awe of Elon Musk because of his Diablo rankings or something. People feed into the mythology.
It's all stupid and insane, but I don't see how anyone can look at the current state of politics or the stock market and not say that the world is full of crazy things that just run on vibes.
i see it in local politics a lot too, people don't dare to contradict the leaders, who in turn end up believing they are right on everything, it's a sad thing really
I think power sometimes leads to this kind of insecurity, but a bigger factor is that people with narcissistic personalities often succeed because ordinary people are unaccustomed to dealing with them. Narcissists often come off as unusually competent, confident, and intimidating. This leads normies to want to follow them and give them what they want.
Narcissists are always extremely insecure, usually because someone crushed their ego during childhood. (There also exist people with intact egos who are simply arrogant; I'm not talking about them. The arrogant are easy to distinguish from narcissists after you study them a bit.)
My point is that Zuck was probably very insecure before the creation of FB, and he became rich partially because he was an insecure narcissist.
It’s part of the pathology. So much so it’s violating otherwise core tenets of their culture and customs:
Look, today meritocracy and brutal honesty are absolutes, they’re considered critical, exactly to overcome biases that stand in your way. The Zuck types are 100% believers in this (heck they accelerated it), yet they still need positive affirmations like winning board games.
Most people (especially smart and opportunistic ones) fold because they know winning a private board game means nothing.
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
Deep running narcissism, bordering on sociopathy or psychopathy.
Anyone with a conscience would worry about having the work of your lifetime being used in genocide. Zuck isn't like that. He doesn't care. What he cares is winning at board games.
Given this, I don't want to imagine how much Elon Musk is suffering right now for the bullying he gets and for Tesla, which have higher stakes than a tabletop game.
He doesn't care about Tesla anymore. His president will kill EV subsidies and give them to coal. He never cared about the mission of Tesla, and anyone working at Tesla who still believes in it is a sucker.
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
Billionaires are highly psychologically disordered individuals. This is an expression of unrestrained narcissism in a "man" who has fully neglected to grow character as an individual, because his obscene wealth allows him to get through life with the emotional maturity of a teenager. Same with Musk, same with Trump, same with most other billionaires. Bill Gates is another great example.
People hate to admit it, but apparently having a billion dollars either makes one a narcissist, or it takes being a narcissist to make a billion dollars. Either way, just from the data we have in front of us, there's a very strong correlation there.
I’m only part of the way through the book, so have nothing to spoil here. But it’s entertaining. And shocking. The author will relate a scene that’s so absurd that you think “ah, this can’t be true, this is made up for dramatic effect, nobody would act like that” and then you Google it and you realize the absurd thing is totally true and was fully documented at the time. All the author is adding is a perspective from the inside.
I understand why Facebook people might have wanted the book to go away. That their attempt to do so comically backfired and resulted in entirely the opposite effect, well, that’s also pretty much what you’d expect from this crew after reading the book.
I was tempted to stop reading after the shark attack story when she wakes up in the hospital and declares "I saved myself". Ugh. But I think it makes narrative sense: why would a good person stay at the company after all she has witnessed? It also makes the company leaders seem so much worse in comparison.
One more thing: Is it credible that she had such a high profile job for so long and still be worried about money?
> One more thing: Is it credible that she had such a high profile job for so long and still be worried about money?
Read threads at bogleheads for a month or so. The eighth post that is a variation on "we have fifteen million dollars in cash, and more in stock, can we afford to buy a used 2008 Accord" and you'll go insane.
> why would a good person stay at the company after all she has witnessed?
Wait, is the angle of the book that she’s a good person? That can’t possibly be right… it’s a book about all the horrible things she tried to help Facebook do.
The title of the book doesn’t suggest she was disappointed in their morals. It suggests she was disappointed in their ability to do their jobs.
Many times its easier to look back over a period of time and see the differences than when you are gradually exposed to those things over time. Thats kind of how I'm understanding her recollection about it all. I do tend to take things with a grain of salt, not all Americans are as ridiculous as some of the people she makes us out to sound like. She does paint broadly with the "international community is all good and Americans are all morons" brush, again grain of salt.
About the money thing, I think she was probably compensated better at some point, probably when she was more involved with sandberg and zuck. But also sounds like she was working constantly so she may not have had time to worry about it or worry about spending it. I'm only ~20 chapters in, when they move to MP.
Overall I like the author/narrator, we all tell our stories from our perspective and I just keep that in mind.
It's kind of amazing that people still hit this, really. Like, if you're Facebook's lawyers, how are you not telling them "don't talk about this; anything you say or do will only promote it further"? The lawyers must _know_.
> completely uninterested in the author’s “job pitch”
It's central to the arc of the narrative though. She begins with the idealistic possibilities for Facebook; and now, in a real-life epilogue, is concluding by pulling back the curtain on how horrible these people are. And by extension this company.
The book is a good read and she also testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee[0], repeating many of the claims from the book under oath. One of the striking things is that it's clear that Mark and several others from Facebook perjured themselves in prior hearings. I expect there will be no consequence for this.
I believe it will take at least a couple of generations after a new political ideology is cemented in the USA to change anything.
Market fundamentalism has been the game since the 80s with Reagan, it was building up to it but Reagan was the watershed moment when it really gripped. You see it everywhere now, here on HN especially, any deviation from the dogma of market fundamentalism is met with the usual retort about "innovation", "growth", and all the buzzwords implemented to make it seem to be the only alternative we have. Any discussion about regulation, breaking down behemoths wielding massive power, betterment of wealth distribution, workers' rights, etc. will attract that mass who are true believers of the dogma.
To undo this will require a whole political ideology from the ground up in the USA where the two parties are just two sides of the same coin, I really cannot see how this can realistically change without a series of major crises, bad enough that people will rise and understand who exactly is fucking them... It's sad to realise there's much more pain to happen before it might spark real change, we are kinda bound to live in the aftermath of the erosion of society brought by "shareholder value"-hegemony.
I mean, I guess the obvious question is if one person lied under oath (her) or several (all the people that her testimony implies perjured).
The book sounds pretty outlandish. That's not to say that Zuck and co aren't just a whole gang of melodramatically evil and stupid people, but it a priori it seems just as probable to me that she's the one that is? I don't know much about her. Is she a reliable witness?
She didn't respond, which is fair enough, it's probably not big enough to be interesting to her. But then I got auto-added to her PR mailing list. I didn't ask or consent to be on the PR mailing list (all the page says as of now is "To contact Sarah, please complete the form below"). Seems I was just added because I used the "contact" form.
Auto-adding someone who contacts you to a PR mailing list is a dark pattern. Seems she learned something at Facebook. I found it ironic.
This review is as naive as Wynn-Williams portrays herself in her memoir (which I enjoyed!)
In the book, Wynn-Williams described herself as a wide-eyed, almost helpless person, which doesn't align with her pre-Facebook career as a lawyer in the a diplomatic corps. And when at FB, she was in the rooms where it happened, and had a job enabling some of it. She could've quit, but did not.
She was one of the titular careless people at the time, and excuses it now by pointing at others who were even more careless. It's not atonement, it's whitewashing.
How does her attempt to change things from the inside, by confronting their higher ups, who constantly put her down for it and collectivizing with other insiders, still lead you to such a harsh judgment of her character?
a crucial weighting is -- how much was this person implementing the things being decried, versus "change from the inside". Without having read this book, I will personally take away the benefit of doubt on "change from inside" given that this person is an attorney by trade, and has been hired for real money by this company.
It's interesting, this concept of "just following orders" recurs so much in almost all contexts. War behavior really seems to be the baseline of human interaction.
This may be a little naive from my side, but I'm wondering - is every big tech company the same as Meta and it's leadership? Or is there something special, a perfect storm of circumstances that we only hear so much about so many instances of outright - can't even find the right word here - evil, stupidity, brashness?
If we assume that every big (let's say FAANG) company is the same, why we hear about Meta time and time again?
Bias disclaimer: I've worked at multiple FAANGs and Meta isn't one of them, but as with anyone in the industry I've had friends at all of them.
Meta feels very different - both at the top, with Zuckerberg's immunity from the board, full control, and personality "quirks" on public display - but also at the lower levels. Every company has a stable of people who will do what they're told to collect a paycheck but Meta had a much higher ratio of people - including people I know, respect, and consider very smart in other aspects - who bought in to the vision that what the company was doing was good for the world even in a post-2016 world when all of the consequences of social media and Meta's specific actions were fully evident.
My Amazon friends won't defend the bad things Amazon does, my Alphabet friends love to gripe, my Microsoft friends....you get the idea. But my friends at Meta would repeatedly try to defend bad things in a way the others don't.
I share this experience -- had a friend who left from IG to form a startup and came back to FB a couple of years later. His entire perspective on the company shifted and he left after only 2 months. Complete disillusionment at all levels. "This is not the same company."
That said, I do think this kind of behavior extends across the industry. I've seen all sorts of wild things like founders&insiders starting a separate encrypted messaging company just so they had an app to send messages between each other about all of the illegal shit that they were doing in the main company.
I worked at a FAANG company that was not Meta. I'm not going to defend everything they did, but the culture was set up in such a way that people at all levels of the organization considered how their decisions would impact customers, and they had some sense of obligation to question harmful decisions.
Afterwards, I went to a startup, and the company leadership was shockingly callous about doing things that would harm customers. Some lower-level people spoke up about it, but nobody in a leadership position seemed to want to hear it.
It doesn't have anything to do with this though. It has to do with having so much power and money in a "meritocracy" and the mental gymnastics needed to maintain those two opposing propositions.
Meta's core product is a machine to sell ads, just like YouTube, TikTok, Netflix (now), etc. It's not that unique. And these stories are all over the valley for even much less powerful individuals
Zuckerberg is unusually powerful in the company, due to how it's structured (note that few companies of this sort of size are run by their founders...), and he's unusually unhinged.
I was the TL on a Facebook app feature driven by us, the engineers, that was 100% in the category of "good for humanity and it solves a problem for billions of people". I had to fight internal org leads to launch it, because there was almost no benefit for FB.
Jane leaked the feature and put this entire 'evil Facebook' shade on it, with no real proof, just wildly false speculation based on what she thought the feature is. That's when I realized how easy it is to present anything Meta works on through the lens of "stealing people's data" and "ads bad". Oculus headsets? VR ads. Smart glasses? AR ads. Spyware. Facebook app feature? Must have some privacy issue.
I'm not saying it's not deserved, with all the scandals, just that at some point it was getting a bit ridiculous with all the "Facebook bad" articles, at least one of which I knew first-hand was complete nonsense. It did seem like news outlets were grasping at straws to write yet another article to put Facebook in a bad light.
It's low-hanging fear-mongering fruit that gets the clicks and it's hard to disprove (not that PR/Legal would let us refute anything in the first place) because the trust is broken.
You did something good while working for the devil, people were right to be suspect. You gain no redemption points from pointing out the people describing facebook as evil misunderstand the precise bounds of facebook's evil.
Also, you didn't address parent's question about the uniqueness (or lackthereof) of Meta. Feeling targeted because people on the outside don't have the visibility to properly understand the nature of the evil is shared with at least 3/4 of the remaining FAANG letters.
Tell us the feature so we can evaluate your claim. Absolute certainty, bitter criticism, and expectation of unearned trust do not build confidence in your ability to judge what is good for humanity.
Their product is somewhat different though, Amazon sells stuff and cloud. Microsoft sells business tools and cloud. Google sells Gmail, a declining search engine and cloud. Apple sells iphones and macs. Facebook sells people's data, advertising and opinion.
Not that others wouldn't and don't manipulate the market and lobby policy, and exploit humans in bad ways, but the basic precept makes it that Facebook needs to protect something fundamentally more immoral than others, hardened behavior and corruption is somewhat to be expected.
It's nice to know that despite playing fast and loose with the facts, the film The Social Network does capture something fundamentally true about Zuckerberg's psychology. The pathological need to dominate can be disguised when you're the underdog, but the more power you accrue the more it becomes the sole motivation. To paraphrase Robert Caro, "power does not corrupt, it reveals."
Doctorow touches on this, but I really think the biggest problem with society today is simply that too many people in power simply don't experience consequences
I think that's true for our society in general at the moment. Everyone can behave like an asshole and it's completely OK for a society if they say "I had a tough childhood and haven't received a professional help".
Literally none of these people claims that. What they actually say is "acting like an asshole is a cool manly thing".
Meanwhile, the help for people with tough childhoods is slashed and protection for kids is scaled back. People who had tough childhoods and did not received professional help are getting roughly no help or benefit of doubt.
I think the problem is people feel so entitled they think they can avoid consequences. And much to everybody’s surprise, they can do it if they pay the right people.
Readit News
Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy? Does anyone who fails to bend over backwards for them just end up getting exiled? Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game? Being good at any kind of game is mostly a function of how much time and energy you've invested into it. If you claim to be an extremely hardcore worker who has any kind of family life there just aren't any leftover hours in the day for you to grind a top position in a game. And anyway, if you're playing games for fun and to bond with people, you probably shouldn't be playing tryhard optimal strategies every game, and should instead explore and experiment with more creative strategies. This is a lesson that took me a while to learn.
So what will happen? Everyone you hire ends up patting you on the back, telling you what a great guy you are.
Does anyone actually believe that hard work and talent are either zero or negatively correlated to success? I don't think the correlation is 1.0, but I firmly believe that it's positive for both.
Yes, but where does this drive come from?
I haven't the faintest idea, however we can extrapolate from some facts.
One fact is that they have a lot of money. Duh... But also money is the key metric to measure success, so a lot of other people flock around those who have money so that it rubs a bit off of them, that Midas touch.
Suddenly these ultrawealthy are surrounded by an endless wave of gold diggers. The immediate thing that follows is flatter, and then echo chamber.
Now imagine that goes for years and years. Slowly this metaphorical richy's whole world views -- and also how he view himself, his identity and his relationship with the things around him -- gets tied absolutely to that notion that he is right.
For this imaginary person, losing a game isn't just am innocent loss anymore. It's a direct question of his own identity.
I think this explains a lot, but I'm not psychologist so it's just a wild guess.
That aside, I can’t be the only person tired of people bringing envy politics to this forum, trying to shoehorn wealth into every single discussion involving someone who is wealthy, as if that’s the only, or even a valid, way to look at everything they do.
For me, the only thing anyone deserves is what everyone else deserves, and everything else is a form of lottery. There's simply no place for arrogance other than delusion. It's good to remember who built the foundations you've succeeded on, and if not beyond one's capacity, with a little dose of reverence, respect or something other than self immersion. Zuckerborg is a mirror for many.
Like Steve Jobs dominating the whiteboard, or Elon Musk angrily emailing in early Tesla after not being mentioned by PR at the beginning.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
> I was decent in math and Bill was brilliant, but I spoke from experience at Wazzu. One day I watched a professor cover the black board with a maze of partial differential equations, and they might as well have been hieroglyphics from the Second Dynasty. It was one of those moments when you realize, I just can’t see it. I felta little sad, but I accepted my limitations. I was OK with being a generalist.
> For Bill it was different. When I saw him again over Christmas break, he seemed subdued. I asked him about his first semester and he said glumly, “I have a math professor who got his PhD at sixteen.” The course was purely theoretical, and the homework load ranged up to thirty hours a week. Bill put everything into it and got a B. When it came to higher mathematics, he might have been one in a hundred thousand students or better. But there were people who were one in a million or one in ten million, and some of them wound up at Harvard. Bill would never be the smartest guy in that room, and I think that hurt his motivation. He eventually switched his major to applied math.
Even Paul admits, he was torn between going into Engineering or Music. But, when he saw his classmate giving virtuoso performance, he thought "I am never going to as great as this." So, he chose engineering.
Maybe it is a common trait in ambitious people.
Edits: Removed some misremembered information.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Man-Memoir-Cofounder-Microsoft/d...
Competitive athletes expect to lose. They don't want to lose, but there's only one winner (or three podium spots) in any given contest. They turn "not wanting to lose" into their motivation for getting better, still knowing that they are fairly likely to lose. The competition is the point, and when they lose, they are still a little happy if they did better than they did last time.
The people who want to win regardless of the competition, regardless of the rules: we call those people bullies.
Many competitive people want to win, but they want to win the real game, not a rigged version.
>A couple years back, I got a job offer from an investment bank to help them win zero sum games against people who didn't necessarily deserve to lose. I had tried very hard to get that offer
https://www.hgreer.com/PlayingInTheCreek/
I have an aunt like this and she's super annoying and largely ostracized and in constant conflict with people around her, but if she had $175 billion she could probably surround herself with people who would indulge her.
This is a guy who was the most dominant athlete of his generation, arguably the greatest the ever play the game, and yet he can't turn it off, he can't relax and rest on his laurels. The same personality quirks that drove him to win at basketball mean he can't tolerate losing in any arena.
https://youtu.be/YUGk30Wy8vU?t=175
https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-board-game-c...
I think it's easy to believe a narrative like this about someone generally disliked, but the reality about basically everyone is that we have good moments and bad moments. People that are famous are constantly being watched and evaluated.
Given the inevitability of those bad moments being observed and reported, I don't think it's a good foundation for evaluating someone's character. In this case, it's mostly useful for confirming an already negative point of view.
But at this point it would be hard to say that Zuck is not a toxic individual. Not everyone is toxic.
That they went along with it is... kind of in line with what Wynn-Williams said. Would they still have all teamed up on Zuck's opponent if Zuck hadn't been their boss?
I have learned that one word they pretty much never hear, is "No."
Even the very best of them, gets used to having every whacked-out fever dream their Id squeezes out, treated like God's Word.
People who aren't very good at self-analysis and self-control, can have real problems with it.
We are watching a bunch of very public examples of exactly this, right now.
"Así se las ponían a Fernando VII" is even nowadays a popular -though not that widely used today- expression to tell someone the task in front of them is an easy one nobody can fail.
I think we have all had that friend at some point that was a poor sport. They were poor losers, gloating winners, and just unpleasant to play games with. Usually that person stops getting invited to game night, or you have a “come to Jesus” talk with them about their behavior. The social pressure of losing friends is a powerful motivator.
But what if that person has an unlimited supply of people that would validate, flatter, and reinforce their bad behavior? When you are thinking about who to hang out with from your unlimited rolodex, you will likely subconsciously lean towards people that make you feel validated, understood, respected, etc. Slowly, by degrees, over years, you could find yourself surrounded by sycophants, where you more and more validated and catered to, and are less and less used to hearing constructive criticism of your behavior.
It reminds me of how highly processed “junk” foods can short circuit a lot of our physiological mechanisms around overeating. Basically unlimited availability of junk food is part of why obesity is has shot up. Being ultra wealthy/famous/powerful is the highly processed food of the psyche. It doesn’t mean every rich person become psychologically unhealthy but it makes the rates of it shoot up.
Yes. As a kid, I read a legend that one of the Charlemagne's knights got so annoyed for losing a game of chess that he killed his opponent with the chessboard.
I agree that such an event would demonstrate insecurity. I would also argue that past elites were not “that insecure”, because they put their lives at risk by waging wars. Of course, later elites figured out ways to address the downsides.
There is a long history of wealthy elites wanting to always win, even at games, and who want to be the center of attention.
Kaiser Wilhelm II had many of the same characteristics seen in today's ultrawealthy elites. When he commanded forces in German military exercises his side was always the side that won because it was his side.
"Wilhelm II's reign marked a departure from the more restrained leadership of his predecessors, as he sought to assert direct influence over the German Empire's governance and military affairs. This shift toward a more "personalist" system, where loyalty to the Kaiser outweighed true statesmanship, weakened the effectiveness of German leadership and contributed to its eventual strategic missteps."
Source: https://www.deadcarl.com/p/the-kaiser-and-his-men-civil-mili...
Lots of historical echos in the state of the world today.
I'm not convinced there has ever been a positive or constructive outcome from cults of personality.
This is very Roman Emperor behavior. Or Chinese Emperor, for that matter. It has pretty much always been the case that power and privilege lets you get away with bad behavior while simultaneously holding your subordinates to onerous standards and/or inflicting punishment on a whim.
Building a court who will steer you away from bad ideas rather than surrounding yourself with yes-men requires active effort, and enough humility to be aware of that risk.
The other constant historical trope is of course the abuse of power for sexual purposes.
So my pet peeve theory is when they feel they are not superior and other people are better than them in activities that involve logical thinking for example, they feel extremely uncomfortable as their perception of themselves gets weaker, hence these strange behaviors.
My family member who taught flying to hobbyist pilots always said physicians were the most dangerous students because of their "know-it-all" attitude.
There's lots of talk in the entertainment world, from the long-term famous, about how money and fame tend to be fundamentally warping. Bill Murray said to Pete Davidson that, once it happens, nearly everyone is an asshole for about two years. People fawn all over you; they do things for you. They give you things for free. You can get things normal people can't get. If you're making a few million a year, you have economic power beyond nearly everyone you've ever known. At a certain level, travel is a whim, not a slog through TSA and airport lines. And you lose the ability to deal with pushback of any kind.
The smart ones -- the ones with some capacity for self-awareness -- course-correct. The others don't.
But in Hollywood, one assumes, the bubble is far less perfect than the one around someone like Zuck, whose power over Facebook is absolute and inviolate, and who has money and power beyond almost every other person on the planet. So there's only a very small chance of any course-correction, and thus he stays an asshole, and that assholery extends to insisting that he win at trivial board games.
Board games aren't as simple as time invested. I could spend my whole life studying chess, and some 13yo prodigy will handily beat me blindfolded, while juggling three other boards.
Board games cannot be conquered with wealth or a successful business. Or, rather, they can, but only by pressuring your underlings into letting you win; giving you the feeling you crave.
There is a grain of truth to what you're saying, obviously - as Magnus has proven when he started to enter chess tournaments... Outplaying people with decades more experience. But you're also ignoring that he spend pretty much every waking moment of his thinking life playing chess.
It seems like there must be another component, but maybe it is just that simple.
Infamously the first or second Versailles Louis, I forgot which, got very aggressive around the topic of toilet excretions, basically forcing aristocrats to try and handle being drunk and desperately needing both to piss and stay in his vicinity. The ceremony around the parties and the court in general over time got more and more intricate and maddening, causing the aristocracy to spend more and more resources on getting clothes and drinks and showing up at the right time and doing the right thing and being on top of the fashion of the day.
It would be weird if a late modern corporate dictator didn't apply similar tactics, since they are known to work and didn't come to an end until the guillotines rolled into town. Things like sleepovers in the office, ceremonial games, constant 'after work', oddball demands regarding clothing and behaviour, intimate surveillance and gossiping, and so on.
That sounds more like a cult than a company.
I don't understand why anyone would put up with that, if they had any other alternative. And most people do have alternatives.
But the parallel seems lacking to me: Musk and Zuckerman can't jail recalcitrant managers.
Likewise running a company. You guys are, to be blunt, freaks. It requires very particular psychological and social conditioning to be in that place doing that thing, it demands specific types of personality traits and adaptations, and that probably doesn't make you, the successful CEO, a well-balanced, "normal" person.
Now take that person, who is a little bit alien in the first place, and ask what happens when they can choose everything about their surroundings, when they get fitted for their GERDpod https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtV33YSKOJk . They still have the same personality quirks, traumas and experiences that got them to this place, but now they're rich beyond imagining, every whim trivially achievable except power over other people (and that only minimally constrained). Like a person stuck in a perpetual state of orgasm, the question of whether they like it or not and really isn't relevant to whether we're going to be inviting them to the cookout or how they're going to behave in church. Any interaction, they're going to make it weird. Because they're weird. Their situation is weird, and the mentality that brought them to that situation is independently weird. A normal person would have pursued normal fulfilling things in life, and they chose entrepreneurial ambition.
It's often the same underlying trait that gives someone qualities that we like/admire but also the qualities we don't like.
When we evaluate each other, we sometimes have thoughts like "she has <good quality>, but if only she'd work on <bad quality>".
Over the years I finally realized that's not how we work. Our traits aren't always connected to isolated levers that we can pull independently.
The really good sales guy might exaggerate fibs in personal convo. The girl that moved from Germany to Mexico to start a successful hostel also has a hard impulsiveness that's hard to get along with. The really attentive mother is risk-averse to a point of absurdity. All examples of friends off the top of my head. Or me: I can find happiness anywhere that I am (good), but it also means I don't have the drive to rock the boat when I should (bad).
There doesn't necessarily exist the possibility of preserving the good part if you were to fix the bad part since the fix might require changing the underlying trait.
Agreed. I have played some truly awful strategies in games (Azul: Queen’s Garden comes to mind) where it was clear within a round or two that it was doomed to fail; my wife / gaming partner expressed dismay that I was doggedly continuing, but to me, I had to see it through without introducing other variables so that I could definitively know (modulo luck of tile draw) that the strategy sucked. I thoroughly enjoyed losing.
EDIT: if anyone is curious, the strategy was to maximize high-point (5/6) tokens above everything else, eschewing end-round bonuses, brief tactical shifts, etc. Turns out it’s really hard to collect enough sets of them to count at game end, and you’re giving up compounding points along the way.
Somehow, actual real life details are starting to come out (he does seem more "daring" as of late, might be why), destroying the picture painted by the professionals for all this time.
Celebrity worship really needs to end, including the worship of the celebrity programmer. We're all humans, with a bunch of flaws, and it's easy to forget when what you're consuming is a fake impression of someone.
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There is a mechanism in high wealth investment circles that seeks very ambitious and simultaneously low self knowledge individuals to invest heavily. They tend to be driven and charismatic in that drive, while being very ignorant of their negative impact on others. Many high net worth individuals see themselves in such youth, and invest in them, their ideas and their drive. They create psychopaths, and celebrate their mistakes as fuel for control of them later. This mechanism I am describing is very powerful, dominating.
To get where they are, they need to be quite smart, competitive, and ruthless.
As soon as they succeed, they become magnets to yes-men and people trying to ride their coat-tails.
So you end up in a position where the majority will ask "how high?" when you tell them to jump, and who will never question you.
Do that for a couple of decades, and something has to change - psychologically. You become condition to it.
Really rich people aren't any different from the rest of us. You quickly realize that what sets them apart is privilege. You see behaviors in the wealthy that if they were poor they'd be locked up for. "They just let you do it if you're rich" comes to mind.
The modern phenomenon, relative to history in general, is that upsetting an elite doesn't get you immediately killed or sold into slavery. But yes, they have always been like this. Behind every great fortune is a crime, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I think that successful people tend to be people who pay a lot of attention to "winning" in as many situations as possible. If you accept losing as a part of life and move on, you're not going to be successful, because you don't spend time thinking how you could've won. Of course this looks funny in situations where one cannot win, but it's really helpful when it comes to fixing your mistakes, allowing you to be successful.
It would be helpful if they'd take a loss as a learning opportunity. But as stated in the original quote they threw a tantrum and accused the opponent of cheating, taking away no lesson to improve the next time around.
The ambition/success feedback loop never stops, which is why the folks on top seem somehow less secure and content than the rest of us. Most of us figure out we probably won't be the #1 anything pretty early in our journey and stop fixating on comparison and focus on maximizing ourselves.
It looks at loads of dictators from history - Stalin, Hitler, Saddam Hussein.
What they all have in common is a love for loyalty and subservience. And they demand loyalty and subservience be constantly proven. Often in very weird and trivial ways.
Eg. Saddam Hussein liked to have a BBQ where he would cook (but not eat) and make the food inedible spicy. Then he would force his top people to eat it while he laughed at them.
They of course had to keep up the pretence that the food was delicious and pay him lots of compliments.
Not that this means we're wrong, exactly.
Who says it's limited to the ultra wealthy? My network has a lot of people who have net worths of under $5-6 million USD and a lot of them are highly insecure.
I've witnessed several of them going out of their way to tear down people who are fitter or more attractive than them as well.
Look at the manbaby actions through that lens and you might get some insight.
It’s possible that exact personality trait is what drove them to such success in the first place. Perhaps like an obsession with winning.
> Being a billionaire must be insane. You can buy new teeth, new skin. All your chairs cost 20,000 dollars and weigh 2,000 pounds. Your life is just a series of your own preferences. In terms of cognitive impairment it's probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day
https://x.com/Merman_Melville/status/1088527693757349888
It can also be unsettling to know that, just as easily as you killed off competitors, competitors could unseat you.
So yea, you might sleep a bit easier at night if you can just win at the things you can control, like that darn Settlers of Catan game.
Also someone who reflexively accuses the other of cheating while playing a game likely has a hard time admitting they failed at something. Not an admirable trait in a leader.
Zuck 'earning' another billion probably means nothing to him. I doubt he can even keep count. All of that sense of self-worth that people derive from their career or wealth is lost in the noise of Meta's stock price for him. But winning a board game is tangible. It's right there in front of him, as a direct result of his own actions. He can feel that.
If you couple that with him being surrounded by people who know that losing to him makes him feel good, and that Zuck is more generous when he's happy, you can see why people lose on purpose.
When you take a genius and drown them in good fortune… you sometimes get a sense of personal infallibility.
Losing at a board game forces them to confront the fact that they aren't any more clever than their peers. They didn't get to where they were on their wits alone; they started the game with a few routes already developed.
It's always been this way, more or less.
If you look back at the ultra-wealthy in any age, you'll find just these sorts of people. It's in 20th-century literature. It's in classic literature. It's in the Bible. It's probably in ancient Greek literature, but I'm not well-versed there.
At least in the early part of the last century, there was some hope. A number of ultra-wealthy people decided that instead of building a faster steam engine or racing to pump more oil, they'd engage in benefiting society as an alternative penis-measuring contest.
They were happy to pour the equivalent of today's billions into projects like paying artists to spend 30 years documenting the fading culture of the American Indian, or funding scientific expeditions to improve our understanding of ancient history.
Today's billionaires are, instead, trying to one-up each other on getting 12-year-old girls addicted to their apps.
Yay, progress.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/11/08/elon-musk-almost-need...
Everything is viewed through a mirror darkly.
"HE FORCED OTHERS TO KNEEL BEFORE HIM, EVEN IN BOARD GAMES!1!" vs. "He wanted to go to bed so made a dickhead comment that would let him both win and sleep." Think back to your 20s, which feels more likely.
It makes a better story in a tell-all memoir?
> And anyway, if you're playing games for fun and to bond with people…
I see you answered your own question.
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And tbh if you eventually do find yourself against him your going to want the opportunity to say you submitted him. No one's letting him win at a tournament
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I can't find the interview right now, it was a while ago, but I thought it was pretty interesting. Major was a man in his 50s when he became PM. Zuck was in his early 20s. You have to wonder what that does to a person. People like Zuck are more or less like child actors that made it big: everyone bends over backwards to deepthroat them and they've got a view of the world that's just delusional. I'd feel sorry if it wasn't for the highly negative and caustic effects.
I don't think _all_ the superrich _are_ this insecure. Like, the obvious examples of this sort of behaviour are Trump (golf, in particular), Musk (video game nonsense), Zuck (this). But all three of those are very obviously fucked-up, socially maladjusted people in _other_ ways, too. Potentially the issue is more that being very rich allowed them to _get away_ with this behaviour; poor weirdos have more incentive to suppress it because people will only accept it from rich weirdos.
Though the phenomenon of "adult manbaby gets upset when not allowed to win game (especially by his partner)" is _absolutely_ out there, even for non-absurdly-rich people; see any subreddit about relationships for examples.
Dex Hunter-Torricke:
>There's a story about when I was playing Mark Zuckerberg at Catan. Sarah suggests I was deliberately letting Zuckerberg win the game, and "brazenly" dismissing her strategic guidance. It's a lovely anecdote that positions our heroic narrator as some sort of principled mind surrounded by a sea of yes men or something, and that we all liked to let Zuckerberg win. Yeah, except that's not what happened at all.
Read on: https://www.threads.com/@dextorricke/post/DHCUpnssuuw/theres...
I for one don't believe it.
you'll see this behavior fade in the presence of someone who they themselves perceive as superior by whichever metric
As an exercise, apply this rule to all the other billionaires you know.
Another way to say this is, most people who earn obscene wealth who would be offended by the obscenity of it would work hard to give most of it away. Those who are not offended by the obscenity of it will be happy to keep it, so there's a selection bias to it.
All the other comments are about Zuckerberg being an out-of-touch egomaniac, but I think this is a reflection of people.
We want our leaders to be infaliable and we use the stupidest metrics to judge people. Remember how Ed miliband eating a sandwich became a scandal? For every one person that would see losing as not a big deal, there's like ten people that will think "this guy can't win a game of settlers of Catan, and he's running the company???".
I am reminded of that joe rogan clip where he's just in awe of Elon Musk because of his Diablo rankings or something. People feed into the mythology.
It's all stupid and insane, but I don't see how anyone can look at the current state of politics or the stock market and not say that the world is full of crazy things that just run on vibes.
Narcissists are always extremely insecure, usually because someone crushed their ego during childhood. (There also exist people with intact egos who are simply arrogant; I'm not talking about them. The arrogant are easy to distinguish from narcissists after you study them a bit.)
My point is that Zuck was probably very insecure before the creation of FB, and he became rich partially because he was an insecure narcissist.
Yes Zuckerberg won the lottery. But at the same time his business acumen and ruthless personality put him in a position to win the lottery.
Look, today meritocracy and brutal honesty are absolutes, they’re considered critical, exactly to overcome biases that stand in your way. The Zuck types are 100% believers in this (heck they accelerated it), yet they still need positive affirmations like winning board games.
Most people (especially smart and opportunistic ones) fold because they know winning a private board game means nothing.
Deep running narcissism, bordering on sociopathy or psychopathy.
I quit playing completely when my opponent accused me of cheating because I made a high point move and was winning.
Get decent and dominate a few rounds? Here's a kick ban, must be cheating. Couldn't be because they keep bunching up.
Anyone with a conscience would worry about having the work of your lifetime being used in genocide. Zuck isn't like that. He doesn't care. What he cares is winning at board games.
And I don't feel bad for it
Billionaires are highly psychologically disordered individuals. This is an expression of unrestrained narcissism in a "man" who has fully neglected to grow character as an individual, because his obscene wealth allows him to get through life with the emotional maturity of a teenager. Same with Musk, same with Trump, same with most other billionaires. Bill Gates is another great example.
People hate to admit it, but apparently having a billion dollars either makes one a narcissist, or it takes being a narcissist to make a billion dollars. Either way, just from the data we have in front of us, there's a very strong correlation there.
I understand why Facebook people might have wanted the book to go away. That their attempt to do so comically backfired and resulted in entirely the opposite effect, well, that’s also pretty much what you’d expect from this crew after reading the book.
[mild spoilers ahead]
I was tempted to stop reading after the shark attack story when she wakes up in the hospital and declares "I saved myself". Ugh. But I think it makes narrative sense: why would a good person stay at the company after all she has witnessed? It also makes the company leaders seem so much worse in comparison.
One more thing: Is it credible that she had such a high profile job for so long and still be worried about money?
Read threads at bogleheads for a month or so. The eighth post that is a variation on "we have fifteen million dollars in cash, and more in stock, can we afford to buy a used 2008 Accord" and you'll go insane.
Wait, is the angle of the book that she’s a good person? That can’t possibly be right… it’s a book about all the horrible things she tried to help Facebook do.
The title of the book doesn’t suggest she was disappointed in their morals. It suggests she was disappointed in their ability to do their jobs.
About the money thing, I think she was probably compensated better at some point, probably when she was more involved with sandberg and zuck. But also sounds like she was working constantly so she may not have had time to worry about it or worry about spending it. I'm only ~20 chapters in, when they move to MP.
Overall I like the author/narrator, we all tell our stories from our perspective and I just keep that in mind.
It's central to the arc of the narrative though. She begins with the idealistic possibilities for Facebook; and now, in a real-life epilogue, is concluding by pulling back the curtain on how horrible these people are. And by extension this company.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3DAnORfgB8
Market fundamentalism has been the game since the 80s with Reagan, it was building up to it but Reagan was the watershed moment when it really gripped. You see it everywhere now, here on HN especially, any deviation from the dogma of market fundamentalism is met with the usual retort about "innovation", "growth", and all the buzzwords implemented to make it seem to be the only alternative we have. Any discussion about regulation, breaking down behemoths wielding massive power, betterment of wealth distribution, workers' rights, etc. will attract that mass who are true believers of the dogma.
To undo this will require a whole political ideology from the ground up in the USA where the two parties are just two sides of the same coin, I really cannot see how this can realistically change without a series of major crises, bad enough that people will rise and understand who exactly is fucking them... It's sad to realise there's much more pain to happen before it might spark real change, we are kinda bound to live in the aftermath of the erosion of society brought by "shareholder value"-hegemony.
The book sounds pretty outlandish. That's not to say that Zuck and co aren't just a whole gang of melodramatically evil and stupid people, but it a priori it seems just as probable to me that she's the one that is? I don't know much about her. Is she a reliable witness?
https://sarahwynnwilliams.com
She didn't respond, which is fair enough, it's probably not big enough to be interesting to her. But then I got auto-added to her PR mailing list. I didn't ask or consent to be on the PR mailing list (all the page says as of now is "To contact Sarah, please complete the form below"). Seems I was just added because I used the "contact" form.
Auto-adding someone who contacts you to a PR mailing list is a dark pattern. Seems she learned something at Facebook. I found it ironic.
In the book, Wynn-Williams described herself as a wide-eyed, almost helpless person, which doesn't align with her pre-Facebook career as a lawyer in the a diplomatic corps. And when at FB, she was in the rooms where it happened, and had a job enabling some of it. She could've quit, but did not.
She was one of the titular careless people at the time, and excuses it now by pointing at others who were even more careless. It's not atonement, it's whitewashing.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders
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If we assume that every big (let's say FAANG) company is the same, why we hear about Meta time and time again?
Meta feels very different - both at the top, with Zuckerberg's immunity from the board, full control, and personality "quirks" on public display - but also at the lower levels. Every company has a stable of people who will do what they're told to collect a paycheck but Meta had a much higher ratio of people - including people I know, respect, and consider very smart in other aspects - who bought in to the vision that what the company was doing was good for the world even in a post-2016 world when all of the consequences of social media and Meta's specific actions were fully evident.
My Amazon friends won't defend the bad things Amazon does, my Alphabet friends love to gripe, my Microsoft friends....you get the idea. But my friends at Meta would repeatedly try to defend bad things in a way the others don't.
It does feel slightly cathartic to reject someone's resumè for having any time at Facebook on it.
That said, I do think this kind of behavior extends across the industry. I've seen all sorts of wild things like founders&insiders starting a separate encrypted messaging company just so they had an app to send messages between each other about all of the illegal shit that they were doing in the main company.
Afterwards, I went to a startup, and the company leadership was shockingly callous about doing things that would harm customers. Some lower-level people spoke up about it, but nobody in a leadership position seemed to want to hear it.
Meta's core product is a machine to sell ads, just like YouTube, TikTok, Netflix (now), etc. It's not that unique. And these stories are all over the valley for even much less powerful individuals
Jane leaked the feature and put this entire 'evil Facebook' shade on it, with no real proof, just wildly false speculation based on what she thought the feature is. That's when I realized how easy it is to present anything Meta works on through the lens of "stealing people's data" and "ads bad". Oculus headsets? VR ads. Smart glasses? AR ads. Spyware. Facebook app feature? Must have some privacy issue.
I'm not saying it's not deserved, with all the scandals, just that at some point it was getting a bit ridiculous with all the "Facebook bad" articles, at least one of which I knew first-hand was complete nonsense. It did seem like news outlets were grasping at straws to write yet another article to put Facebook in a bad light.
It's low-hanging fear-mongering fruit that gets the clicks and it's hard to disprove (not that PR/Legal would let us refute anything in the first place) because the trust is broken.
Also, you didn't address parent's question about the uniqueness (or lackthereof) of Meta. Feeling targeted because people on the outside don't have the visibility to properly understand the nature of the evil is shared with at least 3/4 of the remaining FAANG letters.
Tell us the feature so we can evaluate your claim. Absolute certainty, bitter criticism, and expectation of unearned trust do not build confidence in your ability to judge what is good for humanity.
Not that others wouldn't and don't manipulate the market and lobby policy, and exploit humans in bad ways, but the basic precept makes it that Facebook needs to protect something fundamentally more immoral than others, hardened behavior and corruption is somewhat to be expected.
Meanwhile, the help for people with tough childhoods is slashed and protection for kids is scaled back. People who had tough childhoods and did not received professional help are getting roughly no help or benefit of doubt.
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