Chuck Darwin<p>"VC qanon" and the radicalization of the tech tycoons - Anil Dash</p><p>It's important to remember, nobody becomes a billionaire by accident. You have to have wanted that level of power, control and wealth more than you wanted anything else in your life. </p><p>They all 👉 sacrifice family, relationships, stability, community, connection, and belonging in service of keeping score on a scale that actually 👉 yields <a href="https://c.im/tags/no" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>no</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/additional" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>additional</span></a> real-world <a href="https://c.im/tags/benefits" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>benefits</span></a> on the path from that first $100 million to the tens of billions.</p><p>👉 So you have a cohort that is, counterintutively, <a href="https://c.im/tags/very" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>very</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/easily" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>easily</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/manipulated" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>manipulated</span></a>. </p><p>If you have access to a billionaire (and 👉 billionaires all have access to each other, because it suits their ego to think of each other as peers), most are very easy to program by simply playing to their <a href="https://c.im/tags/insecurity" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>insecurity</span></a> and desire for <a href="https://c.im/tags/acknowledgement" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>acknowledgement</span></a> of <a href="https://c.im/tags/exceptionalism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>exceptionalism</span></a>, 👉 and so they push each other further and further into <a href="https://c.im/tags/extreme" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>extreme</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/ideas" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ideas</span></a> because their entire careers have been predicated on the idea that they're genius outliers who can see things others can't, and that their wealth is a reward for that imagined merit. </p><p><a href="https://anildash.com/2023/07/07/vc-qanon/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">anildash.com/2023/07/07/vc-qan</span><span class="invisible">on/</span></a></p>