You can get "just rich" by being a doctor, or a partner at an IT consulting firm, without screwing people over.
But to be "mega-rich", you have to be OK with screwing people over any chance you get. Over time, that behavioural trait has a compounding effect where you don't see things as "right" and "wrong" anymore. That perspective is accelerated further as their money and power insulate them from consequences due to the political and legal latitude it can buy.
Bill Gates plotted to dilute Paul Allen's Microsoft shares because "he wasn't pulling his weight" when he was undergoing cancer treatment. Goldman Sachs' top legal counsel Kathryn Ruemmler accepted expensive handbags from Epstein and called him "uncle" in communications after he was re-arrested on trafficking charges. Bezos, Musk, Zuck, Ellison...need I say more?
This vortex of temptation appears to have many points of origin, such as cults like Scientology, or particular persons such as the casually described "gold diggers", or... whatever organization Epstein is a part of, etc.
The kind of person that thinks "I've got more than enough money, I might as well use it to help others" doesn't get to be a billionaire.
The wife too, "If I were a billionaire…"
I have to stop her right there. I stop myself there too. Neither one of us could, in any iteration of life, become billionaires.
(There's a time-travel story for someone. Like the movie Primer but with one person who round-trips through time—placing stock bets and other investments in order to become wealthy. When they screw up an investment they get a do-over.
Life also happens though: a relationship, marriage… This aspect though begins to play on a sense of guilt and he resists do-overs in the relationship.
By the close of the story his pursuit of wealth wanes, evaporates completely. Contentment comes finally from his relationship, from accepting his missteps, from embracing the uncertainty of the future. The machine is scrapped, no more do-overs.)
They have a police/military force whose job is to locate and hunt down time travellers from the future as they can be so disruptive to the economy etc and there's lots of people wanting to travel back from the future due to it being a dystopia.
It is not always brilliance that drives the relentless accumulation of wealth, but a deep, unresolved hole...an inner void shaped by trauma, by the need for validation never received from a parent, a world, or a past self.
That constant dissatisfaction fuels an endless pursuit of wealth they imagine will finally provide meaning or peace, yet never does. The accumulation becomes the self justification. The proof of worth in a game that can never truly be won. And from that height grows the contempt... Not for ignorance, but for poverty itself. Not because the poor are seen as incapable, but because they serve as a reminder of everything these individuals fear becoming.
That's our success symbol, in this age. A sad time.
/s (but not much)
Pretty clever but to be clear he is an incredibly dodgy human being
Tbh it's kind of a genius move when countless comments like GP tags the antichrist as just slightly malicious or weird comment by him.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/4ZjhdkOf0_E
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/s-BQhXdCs8Y
https://www.tiktok.com/@eddiethemediatrainer/video/752115237...
How did you get that from the linked videos?
Somehow I'm supposed to be led to believe this makes Thiel come across as stupid. My only guess as to how is because the OP must think that shooting CEOs in the street is an obvious rational good and that opposing such is idiocy, or reactionary fascism (in leftist usage, a synonym for idiocy), or so on.
It is easy to see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=belter
the submission track of the account, to see you are being untruthful.
The same way you are untruthful, about not disclosing to the community the silently throttling back many of many accounts, not allowing them to post or even reply to comments in a middle of what you decided is acceptable discourse. All the while, at the same time you have here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
Accounts associated with VCs, that do 10 to 20 submissions a day.
You also have been allowing accounts that systematically down vote tech related posts or comments, who are not sympathetic to the current administration. Is that also engaging in political discourse?
And worst you are untruthful, to the community, in not disclosing the main page is manually curated. You actually move posts post with 400 comments within minutes to the 20th or 40th page, if they are somewhat uncomfortable. While pushing to the main page every single submission from OpenAI or Anthropic even if they have 2-3 comments.
Compared to a few years ago, you let the HN main page, transform itself into 90% submissions on Agentic AI. It might serve the 600 billion critical investment of your pay masters, but transformed something where a few years ago, you had posts from Philosophy, Physics, Math, Literature, etc... to nothing more than a marketing poster to the AI VC bros.
Understand that the vast majority outside Silicon Valley, does NOT care about AI, GenAI , AI code generators. They are Hackers...not VCs
We've asked you repeatedly to stop breaking the site guidelines and explained to you more than once that using the site primarily for political or ideological battle is against the rules. You've continued to post lots of flamewar comments and even many of the non-political ones have been snarky or aggressive. That's a lot of poison added to the ecosystem. What made you think that was ok? We told you repeatedly that it wasn't:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43755154 (April 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43142554 (Feb 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35605974 (April 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27397254 (June 2021)
When I saw you getting aggressive with that other user yesterday, for me it was the final straw and I banned your account. (The other user also, of course, but whether your account was breaking the rules has nothing to do with what someone else was doing.)
You've listed a lot of grievances here, which I suppose is natural at such a moment, but I don't know if it makes sense to go through them in detail. I do want to point out that this bit is wrong: "you are untruthful, to the community, in not disclosing the main page is manually curated": https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I/we have nothing against you personally, and if you genuinely want to use HN as intended, we can unban your account. The main thing we'd need to do that is some reason to believe that you've had a change of heart about how to contribute to HN and will follow the rules in the future.
evil, sun of satan, bringer of the end of times
Examples: Every billionaire. Every single one - except Chuck Feeney who proved the rule.
IMO those are really two separate axes, you can be very smart and also completely evil or quite dumb but a genuinely good person
It does take intelligence of a particular kind to examine yourself and what makes you happy, fulfilled. And it takes a certain kind of stupidity to become greedy for more and more and more, neverending.
I don't believe that intelligence is a single axis. You can even have different levels of intelligence on different days for the exact same topic; even on the same day from one hour to the next.
Some people might be great at set theory but terrible at calculus; some people might be great with their hands at sewing but clumsy with glasswork. People are weird and complex.
But what's clear is when people don't even try to be good people. And that requires a particularly dense form of stupidity.
Try and spread a mind virus, see if a "flock" forms behind him.
These people want to fill Trump's shoes when he's gone, that's very obvious. But I think - and hope - that Trump's fans will notice what they're doing and not be charmed by it.
You run into people sometimes, where you realize they're testing the waters constantly to figure out where they have you and what they can get away with.
People like this don't hold many sincere beliefs, they spend their time thinking about what they should present to you, not what they should actually believe.
Boris Johnson (or his PR team) did it with the bus thing, and cheese [0].
Yes, Thiel has nutjob beliefs. Utterly insane.
No, this wasn't one of them. Too calculated. Too sweaty.
We're talking about one of the guys connected to Cambridge Analytica here.
0 - https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/boris-johnson-google-search...
If your claim is that he doesn't believe Greta Thunberg specifically is the Antichrist, then sure. But that's just listening to the words that he says. He never says he believes Greta is actually the Antichrist.
"In our world, [the Antichrist] is far more likely to be Greta Thunberg [than Edward Teller or other mad technologist, or implicitly weapons and surveillance tech manufacturer Peter Thiel himsef]."
He does actually believe this.
So yes OP is correct that Thiel said and does actually believe Greta "is potentially" the Antichrist. But that's a different claim than saying that she actually is the Antichrist. There are thousands or millions of people (most unknown to Thiel) who could fit into the Greta-Antichrist category broadly. So it's a much weaker claim than that Greta is herself singularly the Antichrist.
Both claims are equal levels of insane though. If you believe the weaker claim that the Antichrist would be someone like Greta, it requires exactly zero additional insanity to believe the stronger claim that Greta is actually the Antichrist.
I assume Peter Thiel, and many similar people, are basically the same. If less competent at it. That you've met him doesn't mean you know his sincere beliefs - I think a good default assumption is that he doesn't have many, since sincere beliefs get in the way of getting the kind of power he has.
Sometimes people just believe insane shit.
"Standard religious orthodoxy for major religion but stated explicitly in relation to modern events" isn't even on the outer perimeter of insane. In principle, billions of people believe most of what Thiel believes.
It's just unusual to hear an allegedly smart person actually say it out loud in earnest, because when you do, a smart person realizes that in fact mainstream religious views (any Abrahamic religion's apocalypse lore) are fucking insane.
But that's just reason to think Thiel has some more courage, more confidence, or less to lose than your standard intelligent Christian. All of which is obviously true. It is not reason to believe he doesn't earnestly believe basic tenets of his own religion, which you have provided no evidence for.
> He took pride in "befriending" both Røed-Larsen (architect of the Oslo agreement, moderate on Israel) and Noam Chomsky (big Israel critic) at the same time he was shooting the shit with ethnic supremacists.
There's literally nothing even contradictory in this, so not sure what you think this demonstrates. One can simultaneously be friends with all of the above characters -- in earnest.
Traditional response to a rich person saying nutjob shit: That's really interesting, especially as it connects to this thing I am working on that needs funding
Facebook's modern response to anyone saying nutjob shit: Check out this other nutjob shit
ChatGPT's modern response to anyone saying nutjob shit: You've nailed it. You're thinking about this exactly how a professional philosopher would.
We do not need professional activists, quite the contrary.
Do they? Or do they get convinced by adverts that their lives won't be complete unless they spend more than they can afford on an endless stream of shiny promises?
I've always found it very easy to put a huge fraction of my income to one side because all my hobbies are cheap or free.
I've sometimes expressed surprise at how much other people buy, or spend regularly, and in one case the response was approximately "of course I need to spend £2500/month after my mortgage, there's the £50/month phone and same for internet, there's Netflix, I eat out twice a week, there's the car (which I like taking across the channel to France and driving around a lot), there's …"
Meanwhile, I'm mostly content living off my €1k/month passive income, of which 25% is spent on mandatory social and health insurance; and the only thing I'm unsure about at this income level is visiting friends and family on the other end of a 2h flight where the airport isn't all that close to any of them.
> Meanwhile, I'm mostly content living off my €1k/month passive income
This means you have sufficient capital to sustain yourself this way, and probably a place to live with no rent or mortgage. This also means you had either a rich family or earned quite a lot in the past what allowed you to collect this capital. And lastly this means you don't have family to support.
Well, maybe everyone could decide to grind few years (though in my country the minimal wage is not much greater than your "passive income", so grind options are limited) and then decide to not have a family and don't buy a phone. We would then have a whole society of full-time political activists, but then there is a question why any action matters.
Your comment reeks of classism. "Oh, they really do not try enough. Just get up earlier and cancel your Netflix sub".
Last I checked, neither does Greta Thunberg.
As she's the one whose lifestyle you find to be a "serious question", this feels like you're making an "arguments as soldiers" reaction here rather than taking the actual point that it is very possible to live cheaply if this is your goal in life.
> This means you have sufficient capital to sustain yourself this way,
Irrelevant. My income being €1k/month is what matters, not how I get it.
> and probably a place to live with no rent or mortgage. This also means you had either a rich family or earned quite a lot in the past what allowed you to collect this capital.
And in my example I wrote the other person saying "after my mortgage", for a reason.
That aside, it can also mean I live somewhere cheap: I've always been able to live this cheaply, even when I was renting. It's been a while since I was at university so double these numbers for inflation, but University halls were about £70/week at the time for the nice option; the cheap ones (which I was dumb enough to go for in the final year, do not recommend) were £40/week.
I was still paying rent through the pandemic. At every point in my life, when I have paid rent, it has always been low enough that a £1k/m or €1k/m income would have had enough left over for food and bills, yes including during the pandemic. That my income was often higher is of course how the savings I do have, happened.
At university, I made a game of the food options, which was in retrospect not actually sustainable, but what was sustainable last I checked (pandemic) was £1/day. I didn't spend all of my student loan (£3k/year but also that's only spent term-time and see previous point about inflation), even without part-time work at university.
Living cheaply is possible, if that is your goal.
> Well, maybe everyone could decide to grind few years (though in my country the minimal wage is not much greater than your "passive income", so grind options are limited)
She's Swedish, Sweden is in the EU, she clearly has a good gasp of English, so she has many minimum wages to choose from.
> and then decide to not have a family and don't buy a phone.
She's 23. And now you seem to be saying that people shouldn't be free to choose to not have families before turning 23.
Also, there's a big gap between "don't buy a phone" and "spend £50/month on the contract".
> We would then have a whole society of full-time political activists, but then there is a question why any action matters.
I could say this about 100% of professions. Even if we were all farmers, or all poets, or all software developers, or all soldiers. And, of course, politicians, who are, you know, paid to do politics full-time. Or worse, lobbyists, who are what you imagine Greta Thunberg to be, except they wear suits and don't hitch lifts and do get paid enough to support a family.
It's called "division of labour".
> "Oh, they really do not try enough. Just get up earlier and cancel your Netflix sub".
My Netflix example was simply one item on a long, long list. Hence the bit where I wrote about the example person, "spend £2500/month after my mortgage". Because that was what he spent, after his mortgage, every month. On himself. With no family.
This was a real person who made regular trips to France in a huge Lexus and drove without regard to fuel efficiency or indeed the speed limit. They couldn't imagine not spending all the money they spent, having all of the things all of the time. They were also single, living alone in, if I remember correctly, a 5-bed house they owned. They could not even imagine earning less than £60k in c. 2010, when the median UK wages were less than half that (and full-time minimum wages were about £12k) and unlike him those lower wages everyone else had often did support a family.
Overall, a lifestyle such as the visible parts of Greta Thunberg's (I have no idea what her hobbies are, naturally) can be sustained by part-time minimum-wage work.
If her goals in life are to be what she appears to be, that's not expensive, it's about knowing people who let you bunk on a sailing boat for a fortnight; and not a fancy one either, the kind small enough that, to quote: "the Malizia II has no toilet, fixed shower, cooking facilities or proper beds".
If you're complaining that people shouldn't be free decide not to be parents by 23, that people shouldn't be free decide to spend two weeks at a time in those conditions for what they believe in, because *you* prefer to raise a family and find such conditions appalling, that's your mistake, not a "serious question" about her.
Honestly? Your inability to imagine that Greta Thunberg's lifestyle could be anything other than a "serious question" sounds very much like the thought process I saw in my example of Mr. speeding-Lexus-lives-alone-in-5-bed-house, though obviously his specific details were different, he couldn't imagine anyone choosing to have kids for one.
Also kids need to manage their expectations and instead of having active hobbies (that require some minimum hardware but lots of activities), they should try sculpting with clay instead. Especially that with the asthma they'll get from the black mould they'll be in no position to be very active anyway.
I've seen clay on the field, so we'll save money here. We can also collect their art through the winter to bake them in the sun once they're ready (to save on the oven).
School? Right, we need to move to the closest one, why let them have friends or aspirations.
Now work, hmm, that's easy. Instead of going to the work I get paid a lot but commute cost over £5k a year, I'll take something that pays 1/6 of my original salary but we can save on the commute. Will he'll with arguing why we need to move to the smaller place and ditch their activities.
Living costs a lot.
And if I sound absurd so do you by suggesting your life choices are applicable to everyone or they're just convinced by adverts to spend.
Especially as this was in the context of how Greta Thunberg, who, to the best of my knowledge, has no kids of her own and thus doesn't need to also cover the cost of their hobbies or how to get them to school, and furthermore in the context of "how does she manage to be a full-time activist with no obvious means of support?" where such things as "commuting" is more like "hitchhiking on someone else's yacht for 2 weeks": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_voyages_of_Greta...
You can do a lot of travel very cheaply when your reputation alone is sufficient for people to give you a free lift across the Atlantic ocean as part of your own activism against, in that case, the CO2 emissions of flying. Should that be limited, given the travel itself was part of the attempt at activism to move people away from air travel, but also it took 2 weeks and therefore probably wouldn't do any such thing?
(For those without this advantage, I'm reminded of Tom Scott explaining how he managed to do so much on-site filming around the world for relatively little money; my own cheapest flight was under a tenner, an effect somewhat spoiled by the cost of the British Rail ticket from the airport to my actual destination).
And comes from the rich middle-class background. But let's ignore that, because all that matters is small financial discipline.
I didn't say to ignore it.
I said it's possible to live cheaply.
Vimes' Boots isn't nothing.
You said this was a "serious question"; but do you now recognise that a simple observation of "oh look, she's from a rich middle-class family" (a fairly large group) means it is not?
That means I phrased my comments badly, to whit I was trying to make the point "this attempt to dig dirt is simply not interesting because…", which is neither virtue nor lack of it, but a lack of stickiness to what appears to be an implicit claim of vice.
The cost of any trip to the UK is a constant...
Hah at one point they were saying an online furniture shop is a website for trafficking children hiding in plain sight, using coded messages to describe said children (something like "leather sofa" meaning "blonde teenager" or some insanity like that). Come on you freaking geniuses, the Epstein emails show that they don't need codes on a public website, they just talk to each other in plain speech, but over email!
Seems to me, like all legends, it started on a kernel of truth, then it evolved into something of its own. Not sure why you believe Pizzagate to be totally unrelated to Epstein.
To be honest I haven't been looking out for them, but I imagine the news/the Internet detectives would've covered them.
"Kernel of truth", hah. Feels more like a distraction tactic. "Oh, Trump barged into dressing room of teenage pageants, let's accuse the other side of running a trafficking ring!"
The latter part tending to both create more problems and give cover to the existing ones.
And that's where QAnon started.
So now we have meta-conspiracy theories about who started conspiracy theories.
QAnon was always controlled opposition, unlike the website that was monitored then closed by the feds (CF) via false flag attack.
the US Gov doesn't need to go to 4chan, they can get headlines in the Washington Post and NBC.
why would Q-anon continue to advocate for Jan 7th and overthrowing the gubmnt even after Biden won?
You sound like yet another conspiracy nutjob, but to be explicit: What website? What controlled opposition, where's your info from? I don't know if I'm just feeding a troll who'll be gleeful because in his brain he "knows" something others don't know, so that makes him special; or if I actually want to learn about whatever other meta-conspiracy that made you special...
However, Greta Thunberg stands for evrrything he despises. She should be givimg massages and shut up.
> Peter Thiel<Peter Thiel>
> to jeffrey E.
> Sep 12, 2014 6:02 AM
>
> 1
Code? Can't just be a mistake, there's too many of them: https://jmail.world/search?q=1&from=pid%3Apeter-thiel
https://youtu.be/klRb0_BAX9g @ 2:11:11
Thiel appears to be a Russian asset since he meets with Russians at Epstein’s properties per the files.
Musk is different. He simply begs Epstein to let Musk and his then wife Talulah Riley attend the “wildest party” on the island. Epstein even warns him that the “ratio” on the island may not be to his wife’s liking but Musk insists on coming to such a party.
Their approaches to defend themselves are different too. Thiel is silent. Musk has made huge numbers of posts, retweets, and replies trying to pretend he’s not part of the Epstein class, pointing fingers at others, and claiming he’s never been to the island. And he hasn’t ever explained why he was asking Epstein about the wildest parties.
Keep in mind that Elon was asking Epstein about these island parties years after Epstein was already a convicted child sex offender. He knew what was happening and wanted in.
Somehow, this guy had time to have regular email conversations with about 1,000 of the most powerful people in the planet (the head of the Nobel Prize Committee was one).
And he did this before LLMs.
What a way to totally burn your brother.
Thiel and especially Trump though are very different story. Trump happily dived in all the crime he could get.
There is a meme for this.
... Wait, okay, I realise Musk isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, but just how stupid do you think he is? Anyone corresponding with Epstein after his first conviction knew very well the sort of person they were dealing with; they just didn't care.
But that's the positive spin, where Musk actually didn't know and was simply an idiot, and at this point I'm tired of giving him the benefit of the doubt.
https://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/sex/billionaire-palm...
Apparently AI does deadpan sarcasm now?
More seriously, is there a technical write up on how they are generating these wiki pages from the emails?
You’re writing a lot here to obfuscate that. If Mr. Thiel didn’t know, that is at minimum a reason to question his judgment.
Quite a statement to protect the president that claimed immigrants ate cats and dogs, and the base had no problems with it. There are problems with the left, but this is a hypocritical take.
> Something about how the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
Well, have you tried to educate them instead of insulting them? Like Carlin said, there are a lot of dumb people out there. But belittling them doesn’t seem to be the solution if you actually want a functioning democracy. Education doesn’t seem to be anywhere near the top priority for the right as that’s too woke these days.
We are actually saying that the president raped teen girls. Which is something that happens around the world - even happens within the orbit of Trump given the conviction of Epstein.
Monarchy? Le bad, because the king could be a pedo!
But yes such a critique would be interesting! I think all of Moldbug's florid prose about enlightened monarchism would land much differently if the apogee of that enlightenment isn't some sort of assumed societal grand plan or direction, but is rather just the old base desire for increasingly-immoral perverted debauchery.
Monarchy never had any of this nonsense. Bring back King George. We made the wrong choice.
And keep in mind that the monarchies of old were still constrained by religion, and by the lack of digital communications! What is being pushed today is better characterized as autocracy. The "monarchy" label is merely meant to evoke simpler-seeming times that are comfortably in the past.
Also I think you meant "capitalists" rather than "anti-capitalists". That people who were successful under capitalism want to move to a different system does not imply that their favored system is also capitalist! If monarchy/autocracy is "capitalist" then North Korea is also "capitalist" and the word is meaningless.
(also it seems like you're still in denial about the implications of Epstein's emails, regardless who was or was not partaking in the minors)
No, I'm very much talking about talibanized socialists/communists/whatever they want to particularly call themselves. "Eat the rich" has become "The rich eat babies" because it doesn't matter what you try and get people to believe as long as they align themselves with your side and against the people you don't like. The Big Lie of our times, perhaps?
Ad hominem attacks for me but not for thee?
So you're just bashing a strawman that you've pigeonholed all opposition into? Okay then...
We had a previous exchange that I ended up dropping. I was a bit sorry about that because I thought it would have been interesting to critique "universalism" on its own merits, rather than the term generally only being mentioned by its detractors.
(For context here I was reading Moldbug while he was writing, and spent a bunch of time internalizing other reactionary writings. I actually credit Moldbug with my transition from a right-Libertarian to an unaligned libertarian that sees left vs right as mere modes of thinking, each with their own merits)
But after seeing how quickly this conversation went downhill, I'm not sure that conversation would have been terribly productive either!
If you think radicalized left-wingers are a strawman, you live in a separate universe from mine. Unfortunately, I live in the one where I have to wake up and see flyers around my town unironically claiming Trump ate kids.
Can we swap?
I'm sure some of it is due to getting older, but with open cult-of-personality autocratic authoritarianism (aka fascism) upon us I have become quite conservative. I had been taking a lot for granted about the freedoms we do have, and the position of the Western world. Don't let a desire to make things better goad you into wanting to destroy what we do have.
But regardless, if you recoil from the groupthink of the leftists you should be similarly allergic to the groupthink of the rightists. They have taken up the mantles of so many of our longstanding societal problems, only to be led by outright con men and liars who are doing nothing to actually address those problems. And I don't just mean hate-but-hold-your-nose-for-some-greater-good, but rather hold them in the same exact regard as the leftists. Especially as that red tribe groupthink is now in power, and its results are not pretty.
Considering that both the FBI and DOJ themselves seems to be compromised and more interested in a cover-up than finding the co-conspirators, who exactly would you expect to bring up charges here, if FBI and DOJ basically been put out of play?