And among tech oligarchs, Bezos is all too typical. Peter Thiel, for one, once revealed that his three best ideas for achieving true freedom are “cyberspace”, “outerspace” and “seasteading” (the idea of building new countries on floating oil rigs). In other words, this man, whose enormous wealth affords him access to the most spectacular settings our planet has to offer, actually believes these three cold, dead places are superior to the Earth we have, verdant and alive.
Something similar seems amiss with Elon Musk, a man who seems to look up at the wonders of the night sky and see only opportunities to fill that inky unknown with his own space junk. The venerable novelist Joyce Carol Oates highlighted these apparent limits in the fall of 2025 when she roasted him ruthlessly on his own platform, X.
“So curious,” she wrote, “that such a wealthy man never posts anything that indicates that he enjoys or is even aware of what virtually everyone appreciates – scenes from nature, pet dog or cat, praise for a movie, music, a book (but doubt that he reads); pride in a friend’s or relative’s accomplishment; condolences for someone who has died; pleasure in sports, acclaim for a favorite team; references to history. In fact he seems totally uneducated, uncultured. The poorest persons on Twitter [X] may have access to more beauty & meaning in life than the ‘most wealthy person in the world.’”
The observation clearly got under the tech baron’s notoriously thin skin: he called her “a lazy liar” and began posting approvingly about various movies to prove Oates wrong.
Well can they hurry up and fuck off already cause I’m sick of them
It’s time to hasten their exit from this earthly plane.
Via some rational, humane process, ideally involving a sharp angled blade attached to a heavy weight.
This was the plot to Stark by Ben Elton. I want to read fiction again.
Lies!
I dare you to prove it and read weird fiction!
You won’t!
pokes with stick
In other words, this man, whose enormous wealth affords him access to the most spectacular settings our planet has to offer, actually believes these three cold, dead places are superior to the Earth we have, verdant and alive.
Uhh, i don’t want to contradict your narrative, but from his perspective, that actually makes sense.
If you look at the evolution of life, complex life developed around 300 million years ago, around at the same time that life learned to thrive on land. Just as a reminder: Living on land is extremely dangerous. There’s not enough water, you’re out-of-water around 90% of the time (except when it rains), there’s a shortage of various minerals, especially these minerals aren’t evenly distributed in an aqueous solution that you have always available, then there’s this aggressive sunlight all the time … the freezing cold in the day and the temperature differences between day and night.
you have none of these challenges if you just stay in the sea. and yet, life somehow managed to evolve to live in these harsh conditions. and in fact, life on land is typically more complex than life in the sea, because it has to be. For example, almost all photosynthetically active organisms in the sea are cyanobacteria (small cells without even clear structure within the cell), while on land it’s mostly eukaryotic plants, which are often much more complex and mechanically larger. So there’s clear developments there!
Now imagine if you continue this process, by going to a land that’s even more difficult to live in …
but from his perspective, that actually makes sense
You then proceed to give the perspective of things that are not human.
Which, sure, I’ll grant you that these gigawealthy arseholes are so out of touch they barely consider the human perspective any more.
complex life developed around 300 million years ago
LOLWAT
I wouldn’t even pin the Cambrian explosion as the beginning of ‘complex life’, yet it’s almost twice as far back as your date.
if he meant multicellular animals, its around 700mil years ago, when the first sponge appeared, eukaroytes at least 2 bn before, and algae around 1bn years ago. OP is off by a few bn years.
The jump to multicellular life was about a billion years ago.
Nope, you are incorrectly portraying evolution as a progression towards complexity and sophistication, it is not. Evolution is the process of adaption, whether it be towards simplification or complification is circumstantial.
If you are going to be the pro bono (really you are doing it for free?) devils advocate, at least be right.
But yeah the devil has enough lawyers already.
we uhhh don’t need eugenics gandalf, thanks
Holy shit! Elon the incel is one fediverse! What’s up snowflake?
Glad to see that a fellow mod has already hit the “eat a bag of jerkied dicks” button.
but from his perspective, that actually makes sense.
He probably wouldn’t understand half of what you said under this. Very parasocial comment lol.
This comment is a bit funny (I know it wasn’t about him) considering that Musk hates the idea of O’Neill cylinders for some reason. (It is either because Bezos introduced him to the idea, or that they are not called Musk/X cylinders. See this 2019 article about it (ignore the billionaire fellating tone)).
The whole ‘going to a place even harder’ falls flat a bit depending on which you think is harder.
Not that it matters, as they don’t really seem to care about space at all. See how after the trip with Bezos William Shatner got all depressed about how little Bezos seemed to care, and how he just wanted to spray champagne over women, or how Musk is now obsessed with other toys and racism.
