From 538 Significant Digits:
$25,000 per hour
Hourly cost of the U.S. Air Force jet that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, independently wealthy from his time at Goldman Sachs, asked the government to use to fly him to his honeymoon in Scotland, France and Italy. The request to have the taxpayers fund the vacation was declined. [ABC News]
UPDATE 9/14/2017 at 5:25 pm. Oh boy, even the Times has weighed in.
I’ve been thinking about compiling incidents and quotes from the filthy rich as a way of proving that just because some people make an obscene amount of money, it doesn’t mean they’re smart.
I think it means they place an immense amount of importance, a single-minded drive at getting rich. It is their only goal in life. They have figured out or lucked into that one idea, that one area of commerce, that will get them rich.
Part of the “figuring out” seems to be an evaluation–maybe pre-conscious or instinctive–of their skills and focusing on the skill(s) that’ll get them rich.
And they get rich. Steve Mnuchin got rich. But he is not smart.
What about Marc Zuckerberg?
Picked this up from ProPublica on Twitter:
Michelle FieldsVerified account @MichelleFields 1 hour ago
Facebook allowed advertisers to reach people interested in topics like “How to burn jews”
How can Zuckerberg have allowed this to happen? Because he lucked in on one skill–inventing Facebook–before he developed a conscience or, I’d argue, a fully functioning brain. I’ll bet he doesn’t realize how bad this is, how bad it is he took Russian money (in rubles, I’ve just learned) for ads and fake news that deliberately went after our election.
And, as it happens, today’s news also concerns…
Source: Martin Shkreli Is Jailed for Seeking a Hair From Hillary Clinton – The New York Times
Is there anyone who believes that this guy–who did get very rich–has any moral structure at all?
These rich guys are all, to one extent or another, stupid, if only for saying or doing the things they’ve done that are so breathtakingly amoral, so bad the rest of us are saying WTF.