Latest news with #techbillionaires
New York Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Fantasy of Breaching the Tech Bro's Retreat
Mark Zuckerberg has his Hawaiian ranch with its blast-resistant bunker. Elon Musk, his secretive Texas compound to stow his growing brood. Jeff Bezos, a $500 million superyacht reachable by his fiancée's helicopter. The private retreats of tech billionaires are absurd in their inaccessibility. But on the screen and on the page, they are now hard to avoid. Aboard the plush business jets of the Facebook tell-all 'Careless People' and the luxe 'Triangle of Sadness' yacht, inside the alpine lodge of the HBO satire 'Mountainhead' and the hyperreal virtual worlds of 'Black Mirror' and 'Made for Love,' we are invited to trail tech leaders into their secluded dens. As we hop from the private island of the silly murder mystery 'Glass Onion' to the private island of the pop-feminist caper 'Blink Twice,' we spy from the keyhole as they insulate themselves from reality, responsibility and humanity itself. We cannot escape the material and psychic influence of the technological elite — and now, in our escapist entertainment, we imagine that they cannot escape us. We play at sneaking into their opulent dens, assessing the décor and unlocking a deeper fantasy that somewhere within their fortified walls lie the secrets to their eventual ruin. In these plots, we see how their tech could be unplugged, their power revoked, their private deeds exposed. All it would take is one interloper — usually a woman, often working-class — who has the insight and guile to blow the house down. The villain has always had his lair. In the Bond movies (and their Austin Powers spoofs), tech-adjacent tycoons attempt to take over the world from some underground bunker, space station or mountain retreat. Now that such figures have acquired ever more political and market power, entire films, television series and novels squat inside their private arenas. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Guardian
07-06-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
It's my goal to live to 100 – and it's not just diet and exercise that will help me achieve it
For much of the past century, life expectancy continually increased. In most countries in the world, children could hope to live, on average, longer, healthier lives than their parents. This expectation is still true of the mega-wealthy. In fact, tech billionaires and multimillionaires have recently been fixated on finding the secret to longer life, convinced that with enough money, technology and cutting-edge science, they can stave off the inevitable for a few more decades to reach 120 or even 150 years old. But their efforts aren't trickling down to the rest of us. The world's health crises are getting worse, with life expectancy going backwards in several high-income countries, such as the UK and US. In Britain, stagnation started before the Covid pandemic and has decreased by six months, and in the US by 2.33 years. Obesity rates are rising – not just in wealthy countries, but also in places like Ghana, which has experienced a 650% increase in obesity since 1980. Not 65%; 650%. Clean air is a rarity in most places in the world. Mental health conditions like depression are on the rise, worsened by financial precarity and stress. We've been told for decades that if we just optimise ourselves, we can live longer, healthier lives. So how can we explain the gap between our growing knowledge about living longer and our collective health going backwards? Personally, I've set myself a suitably ambitious goal: to live to 100 with good health and to help others to do the same. According to the ONS life expectancy calculator, I have a 9.3% chance of making it that long (although even more challenging is to have a quality life during this time). As someone who has a strong interest in and passion for health, I follow the latest research on superfoods and what to eat. I've tried sugar-free diets; I went vegan for a period. I've tried all kinds of different exercise regimes from running long distances to intervals to HIIT (high intensity interval training) to Hyrox, outdoor bootcamps, spin, hot pilates, barre and paddleboard yoga. In my mid-30s, I decided to become a personal trainer to combine my interest in fitness, nutrition and wellbeing. However, every time my mind goes down the 'optimisation' route, I'm reminded of my main job and lifelong career as a public health scientist, looking into the factors that affect how long we will live. Most of these are out of individual control and have to do with the country and community we live in. The truth is, this 'self-help' narrative doesn't reflect the reality of how health works. In fact, the focus on personal responsibility and self-improvement has distracted us from the real issue –the impact that public policy, infrastructure and community make in affecting our health chances and longevity. In public health, research projects have studied places where people live significantly longer, healthier lives – think of Japan or South Korea, or within Europe, Zurich, Madrid or Sardinia. In these places, chronic diseases like heart disease and obesity are far less common. Take Japan, which has 80% less breast and prostate cancer than North Americans and half the risk of hip fractures. Much work has gone into analysing the behaviours of people living within these cities and regions. Based on this, we get lists of changes we could be making at an individual level to live longer, such as moving to a largely plant-based diet, sleeping seven to nine hours a night and exposing yourself to a certain amount of sunlight each day. These are of course helpful, but I suspect that hardly anyone in the areas above has read a self-help book or has a daily health 'to do' list. What stands out about these places is that the people living there don't just make individual choices that lead to better health – they live in places where healthy lives are normalised by government and culture. Take the issue of obesity: the UK isn't fatter than Japan because it is a country filled with fundamentally different people who choose to be overweight or are lazy or stupid – that kind of logic is not only naive, but it stigmatises overweight people. In fact it seems like at the level of choice, the UK is more interested in dieting, with a diet industry estimated to be worth £2bn annually and diet books selling millions of copies each year. In contrast, Japan's diet industry is tiny, worth only $42.8m. The main difference is actually in the food environment – including affordable fruit and vegetables, nutritious school meals and support from the government – meaning that it's far easier for an individual to stay within a healthy weight living in Japan. The odds are stacked against you in Britain. You can become the healthy 'outlier' or bubble yourself off from larger societal challenges if you have wealth, time and resources. You can carry an air purifier, drink a matcha latte, swim in expensive leisure centres, even hire a chef to bake you fresh bread and prepare nutritious meals. There's a reason that being a royal or marrying into royalty is one of the surest ways to live a long and healthy life. But for those of us who are commoners, there's no fully opting out of the societal factors completely: we have to go outside to breathe air, walk and cycle the streets, drink tapwater and eat the foods available near where we live or at school. As I talk about in my new book, if I'm going to live to 100, I need more than fastidiously counting my calories and posting pictures of myself exercising on Instagram (which I am guilty of). I need to live in a world where health is a collective responsibility, not an individual one. This means supporting policies that make us all healthier – and politicians who prioritise the conditions for good health such as nutritious food especially for children, active cities, clean air policies, preventive healthcare and public provision of water, which should be at the core of what a government provides its citizens. There are lessons in how to improve life in all of these areas across the world: these are places where good health is built into daily life. If we think of Ponce de León's quest for immortality in the 16th century – at a time when life expectancy in his native Spain was just 25 to 30 years, perhaps the lesson is that the answer for longer, healthier lives wasn't in a fountain of youth but in the rise of stable government, public services, science and community. Tech billionaires could take note. Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, and the author of How Not to Die (Too Soon)
Telegraph
01-06-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
Trump is breaking up with the tech bros, here's why
As Elon Musk steps down from his role at the White House, there are signs Donald Trump's love affair with Silicon Valley could be on the rocks. The president sailed to election victory in November buoyed up by a wave of support from tech billionaires. But as his America First measures on immigration, university funding, tariffs and energy begin to bite, a tech bro break-up looms. 'There's definitely some buyer's remorse on the right,' said Nu Wexler, a former policy communications executive at Google. Having previously blocked the president from all Meta platforms, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg sought to make amends first by dining with Mr Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in November, and then by donating $1 million to his inauguration fund. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, caused outrage in February when he shook up The Washington Post's opinion section, ordering the paper to support 'personal liberties and free markets', in a move widely interpreted as a courtesy to Mr Trump. He also made overtures to the first lady, paying $40 million for a Melania Trump documentary – nearly three times the next highest bid. Meanwhile, Tim Cook, the Apple CEO, was hailed as tech's Trump whisperer after he donated $1 million and is said to have sweetened the deal with promises to start manufacturing products in the US. Their support for Mr Trump was not without reason. During the election campaign, the president promised to unleash innovation by stripping back regulations he said hindered the development of artificial intelligence (AI) under the Biden administration. Mr Trump is currently also making good on promises to make permanent the cuts to corporate tax rates, which he slashed from 35 per cent to 21 per cent in his first term. And he has set about implementing a bold programme of financial services deregulation, particularly around cryptocurrency. But the flattery of Mr Trump has not had the anticipated effect. It was widely expected that antitrust lawsuits against Facebook, Google and Amazon would soon disappear. Yet Mr Trump has so far declined to intervene. Meanwhile, his relationship with Mr Cook appears to have soured after Mr Trump criticised the Apple billionaire for building factories in India. At the same time, the knock-on effects of Mr Trump's broader policy agenda have sent Silicon Valley reeling. Mr Musk said this week he was 'disappointed' with the president's 'big, beautiful' spending bill, warning that it 'undermines' the work of the Department for Government Efficiency (Doge) to bring down the deficit. Despite Mr Musk's comment, the pair apparently remain great friends, with the president presenting the billionaire with a golden key to the White House during a farewell press conference on Friday. However, Mr Musk's concerns were echoed by Chamath Palihapita, a former Facebook senior executive and host of the All In podcast, who warned that the financial markets would 'punish' the Trump administration for driving up national debt. Immigration, too, has proved a dividing line between Mr Trump's Maga base and his Silicon Valley allies, with Mr Musk pledging to 'go to war' over visas for skilled immigrants. Around 70 per cent of H-1B visa holders in the US are employed in the tech industry, and the SpaceX founder has likened the need to attract engineering talent from overseas to a professional sports team bringing in foreign players. The president's repeated attacks on universities have also set pulses racing in Silicon Valley, with the scientific research programmes that transformed America into a technology superpower facing billions of dollars in cuts. For decades, the US has stood unrivalled as the world's leader in scientific discovery and technological innovation thanks to government-backed projects that have created everything from the internet to mRNA vaccines. However, the amount of money disbursed in grants by the National Science Foundation, which funds much of the scientific research at American universities, has plummeted by 51 per cent this year so far, compared to the average over the past 10 years. 'Killing the golden goose' 'There are a lot of people in Silicon Valley who worry this is going to kill the golden goose,' said Darrell West, a senior fellow in the Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings Institution. 'A lot of America's competitive advantage has been in digital technologies, and we're now making it difficult to finance the next generation.' Mr Trump's tariffs agenda has triggered widespread alarm in the tech sector as well. Having successfully won an exemption from a 145 per cent tariff on iPhones assembled in China, Apple was caught off guard last week by Mr Trump threatening 25 per cent tariffs on all iPhones made outside the US. 'I don't want you building in India,' the president warned Mr Cook during his recent Middle East tour. Moreover, Mr Trump's moratorium on new clean energy projects risks driving up energy prices in California, where renewables account for 54 per cent of the state's total electricity generation. Data centres – sprawling warehouses full of computer servers that power AI – are reliant on cheap electricity to keep them running, with experts warning that even small increases in energy prices could have 'catastrophic' consequences. His plan to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act also spells bad news for California's world-leading energy storage industry by removing tax cuts that spurred investment in the technology. From the moment Mr Musk pranced on stage at a Trump rally in October wearing an 'Occupy Mars' T-shirt, some critics said the president and Silicon Valley made strange bedfellows. A far cry from the casual-dressing tech bros of San Francisco, whom Mr Trump recently called 'these internet people', the president is rarely seen without a suit and tie (when he's not on the golf course). 'Tech investors are not a logical fit for the grassroots Maga movement. It is more a relationship of convenience right now,' said Mr Wexler. A loveless marriage it may be. But a messy divorce could have devastating consequences for the future of Mr Trump's coalition. 'He's tacked his administration to tech billionaires. They're a very powerful group and very well connected,' said Mr West. 'If they start to turn on him, that's a political nightmare.'
The Verge
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Verge
Mountainhead succeeds at showing you how truly deranged the billionaire mindset can be
The degree to which Mountainhead, HBO's new black dramedy from Succession creator Jesse Armstrong, will make you laugh depends almost entirely on how much news you consume about tech billionaires who see themselves as übermensch chosen by fate to shape the arc of history. The more time you've spent listening to Silicon Valley types wax poetic about reality being a simulation, ' universal basic compute,' and how humanity is a 'biological bootloader' for artificial intelligence, the less Mountainhead 's CEO characters come across as being amusing caricatures. But if you're part of the lucky bunch that has never bothered listening to billionaires insist that they're going to achieve immortality in preparation for colonizing Mars, Mountainhead might strike you as an incisive send-up of the uber-wealthy oligarch class. Especially in this moment where we've all been able to watch some of the world's richest tech overlords prostrate themselves before Donald Trump in hopes of amassing even more power, the movie's depiction of tech bros flirting with the idea of taking over the world seems so plausible that it almost doesn't work as satire. But each of Mountainhead 's lead performances is infused with a manic, desperate energy that makes the film feel like an articulation of the idea that, when you strip all the self-aggrandizing mythos away, billionaire founders are just people with enough money to make their anxieties and insecurities everyone else's problem. Though it's narrative territory we've seen Armstrong explore before, Mountainhead is no Succession. Compared to Armstrong's more expansive episodic work, there's a breathless urgency to his first feature that reflects the speed with which he wrote and shot it. But the film does make you appreciate how dangerous and divorced from reality today's titans of industry tend to be when left to their own devices. Set almost entirely in a palatial lodge nestled high up in the Utah mountains, Mountainhead revolves around a quartet of absurdly wealthy frenemies who come together for a weekend of rest, relaxation, and metaphorical dick measuring while the rest of the world hurtles toward a doomsday scenario. On some level, social media tycoon Venis (Cory Michael Smith) knows that the new generative AI tools rolling out on his Twitter-like platform, Traam, have the potential to incite chaos by feeding people deepfaked footage designed to keep them angry and endlessly scrolling. Venis has seen the news reports about multiple outbreaks of violence targeted at immigrants and ethnic minorities. He's also heard commentators linking his creation to a widespread erosion of trust on a societal level. But with his net worth at an all-time high, it's easy for the twitchy CEO to ignore all that bad press and dismiss the disturbing imagery flooding Traam. Similar to Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, Mountainhead frames AI's ability to obfuscate the truth and manipulate people's perceptions of reality as the kind of threat that should give everyone pause. But rather than telling a story about humans racing to stop a tech-driven apocalypse, Armstrong is much more interested in exploring the ways in which artificial intelligence's potential for harm is directly connected to the worldviews of those who create it. Venis isn't the only tech mogul ready to roll his eyes as Traam's AI continues to stoke unrest and violence around the globe. Almost all of his closest friends — a small group of men who call themselves the Brewsters — feel exactly the same way. James (Steve Carell), a steely Steve Jobs type who refuses to accept the reality of his terminal cancer diagnosis, sees Traam's popularity as a sign that Venis is on the right path and setting himself up to corner the market on digitizing human consciousness within a decade. Even though Jeff (Ramy Youssef), the creator of a rival AI toolset that can reliably identify deepfakes, has gone on the podcast circuit understandably trash-talking Venis, he can't deny that Traam's dangerous slop has led to an exponential growth of his own valuation. And as the 'poorest' member of the Brewsters, multimillionaire health nut Hugo / 'Soup Kitchen' (Jason Schwartzman), is more than willing to cosign basically anything his friends do. Some of it boils down to Soup's need for an influx of cash for his next business venture — an ill-conceived wellness and meditation app. But the deeper truth that Armstrong repeatedly highlights is that groups like the Brewsters always need someone around who's willing to play a game of boar on the floor or eat a soggy biscuit to make themselves feel like they're all having a good time. The desire to have a good time is ostensibly why Soup invites the other Brewsters to come spend the weekend at Mountainhead, his drearily chic vacation home that reeks of new money and a juvenile obsession with Ayn Rand. But once the group has gotten together and sent their assistants — most of the movie's sparingly few women characters — away, it isn't long before the boys' deep-seated resentments of one another start bubbling to the surface. And when the unnamed president of the United States calls up Venis and Jeff to discuss how the Traam deepfake situation is getting worse by the minute, the group takes it as a sign that they might be looking at an opportunity to play and win a game of real IRL Risk. Given how relatively few places it physically takes its characters, Mountainhead does a solid job of not feeling like a claustrophobic play about delusional billionaires beefing on top of a mountain. Few of the Brewsters' digs at each other are truly laugh-out-loud funny, but what's impressive is how each of the characters feels like a distinct embodiment of the culture that gave birth to the modern celebrity tech founder archetype. Armstrong wants us to see these people as ghouls who are beyond high on their own supplies, but also as profoundly broken men whose fixations on biometrics and being seen as sigma men speak to a deeper sense of inescapable inadequacy. Things like James' tense relationship with his personal doctor and the odd, vaguely homoerotic game of wits Venis and Jeff start to play in Mountainhead 's third act are intriguing. But they're also part of what makes the film feel like it might have been more compelling as a miniseries with enough time and space to show us more of how the Brewsters move through the world and what besides their money would make these four men want to spend time with one another. Just when Mountainhead starts to get juicy and unhinged, it rushes to a dramatic climax that feels right-minded, but premature. It's almost as if Armstrong means to leave you unsatisfied as a way of emphasizing how people like the Brewsters seldom get what they really deserve. As a piece of eat (and ogle) the rich social commentary, Mountainhead works fine if you're craving a cheeky, surface-level indictment of tech barons who fancy themselves as gods. But if you're looking for something more dramatic and substantive, you might be better off just reading the news.
The Guardian
30-05-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Salutes, Maga hats and mass layoffs: Elon Musk at Doge
In his 130 days as a special government employee, the world's richest man slashed his way through federal agencies, laying off government employees and gaining access to data that will underpin a dismantling of the federal government. Elon Musk's role in the Trump administration is without modern precedent. Here's a look at some key moments in the brief tenure Musk had as a federal employee. Musk is at Trump's side, as are a host of other tech billionaires, as he is inaugurated. He also issues an apparent fascist-style salute on stage at an inauguration celebration, twice. The president issues an executive order that creates Musk's 'department of government efficiency' by renaming the United States Digital Service agency, which previously handled governmental tech issues. Trump's order includes only a vague mandate to modernize government technology and increase efficiency, but within days it becomes clear Musk and his team have far more expansive aims. Musk and Doge pop up at the offices of numerous government agencies, starting with the General Services Administration, to question federal employees and start gathering data and access to government systems. Doge's early days make headlines for targeting masses of government workers with layoffs and pushing others to resign, with more than 2 million employees receiving an email titled 'Fork in the road' that encourages staffers to take a buyout. The emails, which ask, 'What did you accomplish this week?' become a signature of Musk and his new bureau, sent again and again whenever staff began to prey on a new herd of government employees. As Doge staffers storm into the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in early February, they find themselves in a heated standoff with security officials who try to bar them from accessing a secure room which holds sensitive and confidential data. The confrontation ends with USAID's top security official being put on administrative leave, while Doge gains access to its systems. With no one to stop them, Doge staffers begin the process of hollowing out the agency that had once been the world's largest single supplier of humanitarian aid. More than 5,600 USAID workers around the world are fired in the ensuing weeks. 'We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,' Musk boasts days later on X, his social media platform. Musk tells a rightwing influencer on X that the GSA's 18F office, which helped build software projects such as the IRS's free tax filing service, was 'deleted' in response to an inaccurate post accusing the group of being radical leftists. 'We do need to delete entire agencies,' Musk tells attenders at a World Governments Summit in Dubai. 'If we don't remove the roots of the weed, then it's easy for the weed to grow back.' The Trump administration orders agencies to fire thousands of probationary workers – a designation that applies to employees who have been at their jobs for less than a year, including those who may have been recently promoted. Other workers soon receive an email from Doge that demand they list five things they did last week or face termination, a chaotic request that also turns out to be an empty threat. Cabinet officials privately deem it nonsensical. A 'Tesla takedown' protest movement and boycott starts taking off, targeting Musk's car company with protests at dealerships. A protest on this date in New York City at a showroom has a solid turnout. At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Musk stands on stage in a black Maga hat, sunglasses and gold chain, gleefully wielding a chainsaw that was gifted to him by Javier Milei, the rightwing Argentinian president. 'This chainsaw is for bureaucracy!' he says. 'I am become meme.' In the middle of the night, workers at 18F are notified that they will be laid off en masse. Court cases filed earlier in Trump's term begin producing rulings that curtail Doge's layoffs and temporarily block its access to data. Judges rule that the Trump administration needs to reinstate probationary workers they fired, limit some Doge access to databases at agencies such as the Social Security Administration, and order Musk's team to turn over internal records it had been seeking to keep private. The Department of Health and Human Services announces it is cutting 10,000 jobs to align with Trump's executive order on Doge. In a display of the chaos that Doge had inspired, the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, weeks later admits about 2,000 of those workers were fired in error and would need to be reinstated. The Tesla protests are working – stocks are falling. In response, Trump appears on the White House driveway in front of several parked Teslas, telling reporters he is going to buy one of them and praising Musk as a 'patriot'. Others in Trump's orbit, including the Fox News host Sean Hannity, also post sales pitches for the automaker. Musk's reaction to court rulings against Trump is a constant stream of attacks against the judicial system on X, which include demands that lawmakers 'impeach the judges' and claims there is a 'judicial coup' under way against Trump. Musk repeatedly amplifies far-right influencers saying the US should emulate El Salvador's strongman president, Nayib Bukele, whose party ousted supreme court judges in 2021 in a slide toward authoritarianism. A fully fledged international protest movement against Tesla and Musk is building. Thousands of people gather at showrooms from Sydney to San Francisco in a day of action, with organizers stating that 'hurting Tesla is stopping Musk'. Vandalism against Tesla dealerships, charging stations and cars also intensifies around the world, including multiple molotov cocktail attacks and incidents of arson. Trump and Musk call the attacks domestic terrorism, while Pam Bondi, the attorney general, vows to crack down on anyone targeting Tesla. Musk poured money into a Wisconsin supreme court race that would have tilted the swing state's high court toward conservatives. He and his groups spent more than $20m on this race, including a giveaway of $1m checks on stage. Susan Crawford, the Democrat, wins the race handily, showing Musk's money couldn't buy everything. A first-quarter earnings call reveals Tesla's performance was even worse than expectations, with a 71% drop in profits and 9% drop in revenue year over year. Musk announces he will spend significantly less time working on Doge starting some time in May. In a cabinet meeting, Musk puts on two literal hats – a 'dark Maga' hat covered by a 'Gulf of America' hat. After Trump compliments the double-caps, Musk jokes: 'They say I wear a lot of hats'. This is potentially Musk's final cabinet meeting. May finds a less vocal Musk than the aggressive tone he took the rest of the year, providing fuel for protests and lost revenue for Tesla. As Congress debates Trump's 'big, beautiful bill' that would slash government services, Musk says he's 'disappointed' by the bill because it doesn't cut enough on domestic policy. 'I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful. But I don't know if it can be both,' he tells CBS. Musk's time as a special government employee comes to an end, capping off the 130 days he is allowed to serve in this role.
