It’s time to put the tie. Let us judge, capitalism in T-shirt is collapsing in the United States. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, 38, has lost himself in the alternative world of the metarers where he has engulfed more than $ 23 billion; Tesla’s developer and creator of Space X, Elon Musk, 51, is damaged in tweets every day more inappropriate, accelerating by ricochet the collapse of the Tesla action, decreasing 60 % from its highest affected in april. As for Sam Bankman-Fried, 30, who was not satisfied with a T-shirt and added shorts, he languished in prison, probably for a long time, simply for having diverted the cryptocurrencies of his customers at FTX.
The T-shirt, the T-shirt!, So we would be tempted to incriminate, as Toinette accused the lung in the imaginary patient of Molière. The reproach is less paradoxical than it seems to read the test written in the Wall Street Journal by Adam Kirsch on “the rise and the fall of respectability”. The Malappris behavior of these billionaire geeks contrasts with the austerity of the 19th century industry captains eth century.
There is no question of defending the behavior of the king of steel and father of modern philanthropy, Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919), who certainly lived sober and gave his fortune to build libraries. His Protestant ethics could not make us forget that he gave wages of misery to his workers and that his second, Henry Frick, had the militia loaded in 1892 against the strikers of Pittsburgh (ten dead). But he inspired a behavior that was respected for decades and made social order if not acceptable, at least non-humiliating.
money, ultimate racketeer
Nothing like such in the twentieth e century where, social networks helping, the 2.0 bosses believe they are allowed: they display their yachts, their sentimental conquests, their obscene whims. If they allow themselves, it is because their donors, the venture capital, accept it, even are seduced, convinced that social transgressions reveal an economic transgression which will allow the creative genius to express themselves. Adam Kirsch quotes in the Wall Street Journal Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, who asserted himself vegetarian in a time when this diet seemed incongruous: “At the time, that was enough to report the rejection of the status quo, which is the main Silicon Valley directive. “
Let’s not be naive, in capitalism, you have to be both a little brilliant and a bit of a thug, to break the established order and make its first tens of millions of dollars with a founding crime, a dubious opa, A license obtained with interpersonal skills or battered rules. It works as long as it works, but the more it works, the more the guard is lifted: the safeguards that are the boards of directors become ineffective. Thus the bet of Zuckerberg on the metarers ruined for the moment the shareholders of Facebook-Meta-if he wants to make such a choice, he could after all launch a start-up; Bankman-Fried’s scam was fueled by the lure of the gain of his donors, delighted to make a fortune on cryptocurrency which each knows that their intrinsic value is zero. Finally, the increasingly Trumpist outings of Elon Musk undermine the Tesla and Twitter brands.
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