It’s a new era of wealth, and we’re seeing how it’s being handled by this century’s luminaries. You’ve got a lot of people with a lot of money. This has happened many times before in human history, and there’s an interesting take on this as to how our world works now with so much concentration of wealth in the hands of very few. I wanted to dig into that a little bit today. We all know the classic example of this is the great amount of wealth that was centralized in the Medici family which helped fund a lot of the art and science that made up the Renaissance.

A very important leap forward in human knowledge was facilitated by the grand accumulation of wealth through a family that had massive influence in banking, in religion, I think they had 4 popes as part of that family, and then of course, all sorts of nobility as well, and just multiple centuries of dominance. 13th, 14th, and 15th century they spent accumulating this wealth. Eventually it has this sort of positive outcome insofar as looking at the Renaissance as a positive thing.

In today’s world, we have the equivalent of that family wealth in the Zuckerberg family. Interestingly enough, 12 years ago, Mark Zuckerberg was a student at Harvard, so we’ve compressed the amount of time that it takes to accumulate massive wealth and leverage by, oh, I don’t even know what that factor is, but 3 centuries versus 12 years, that’s at least an order of magnitude there. Additionally, as much as the Renaissance had global impact, it was … In large part, that influence started in

Carnegie funded many of the libraries in the United States, came directly from Carnegie or one of his companies or one of the charitable organizations that he set up. Going back and looking at the story now, we might be a little bit jaded. I say that from the standpoint that Carnegie was consistent with his time, a brutal businessperson. The most egregious of things that happened under Andrew Carnegie’s watch was basically a strike busting effort at one of his plants in Homestead, Pennsylvania, where he had Pinkerton murder, I don’t want to exaggerate the total or give an inaccurate total, but a dozen or so men. Imagine today if a dozen or so factory workers who were striking were to get gunned down by security people. It would be unbelievable. We can’t even fathom it, I don’t think, in this world today, at least here in the United States.

He was in all of this dirty business. He was a very ruthless guy, but eventually he put a library into Homestead, Pennsylvania. The natives there weren’t very happy to see him come. A history geek like me might be aware of that story, but for other people who are familiar with the name Andrew Carnegie, it means libraries or Carnegie Mellon University. It doesn’t mean a ruthless businessperson. Mark Zuckerberg is in that same tradition, along with Bill Gates and many others who came before, of accumulating massive amounts of wealth and then philanthropically donating it to causes that they optimistically see as worthwhile, skeptically see as the best way to exaggerate their aura. It’s all one and the same.

I predict … Right now, we look back. If you could read Carnegie’s bio, you’d say there’s nothing to admire about this guy. This guy’s an asshole, is what you would say today, 100 years later. I think 100 years from now, people are going to say the same shit about Mark Zuckerberg, because we’re going to see in retrospect the wastefulness, the foolishness of something like Facebook, all of the focus that goes into this type of very superficial social networking, or maybe the story will be how Facebook is like a virtual … Oh, what the hell is that machine in the casino?

Look, it’s a lot better than a guy like Steve Jobs who just sat on his cash and didn’t take that pivot into philanthropy to at least have a chance to give something back. To answer your specific question, it’s just the latest. It’s a long tradition. We could even take it back to Roman emperors with public works programs that were really ostensibly about taking their image and visage and blowing it out onto coins, into public spaces. It probably even goes back farther than that in ways I’m not familiar with, but it’s this long string of self-aggrandizement and attempt for some kind of immortality beyond what we would otherwise have. It works. It works.

Some of the exciting news coming out of that was that the 21st century royalty were also looking for solutions to climate change using their own money to back it, with Bill Gates being one of the front people for that and Mark Zuckerberg as well. It reminds me in a lot of ways of this … They’re not democratic representatives anymore. They’re private individuals with a lot of power accumulated in 1 generation. It seems to me that they are operating so far ostensibly for the public good, but outside of the bounds of our normal political process, of any sort of democratic process. They have global influence. They have a global stage for their works.

This is a post-corporate environment that I’m talking about, because you’re no longer talking about a corporation which is beholden to, at the very least, stockholders and maybe to some extent, employees and things like that. These are individuals now. As we understand that, taxes are a very important part of this. The tax burdens are spread out across multiple countries. They have more in common with each other than they have with the citizens of the United States or really any other country. This is sort of the digital pinnacle of power that we’re seeing manifest here. Good on them if they’re able to help mitigate climate change, but it’s sort of like, “Oh, there’s the President of the United States. There’s the President of France. Then there’s the Duke of Microsoft and the Baron of Facebook.”

There aren’t a lot of checks and balances anymore, or at least the ones that are in place are all artifacts of the 20th century and so not very effective. Whatever checks and balances are going to come, they’re not there yet. It’s an interesting time for this to happen, because we’ve got so many problems that we’d like to solve. At the same time, we have a new class of people who are outside of the bounds of nation-states and democratic process in a way that has not been seen exactly in this way before.