{"id":2690,"date":"2026-08-15T02:53:12","date_gmt":"2026-08-15T02:53:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/?p=2690"},"modified":"2026-08-15T02:53:12","modified_gmt":"2026-08-15T02:53:12","slug":"its-time-to-talk-about-billionaire-math-mother-jones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/?p=2690","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s Time to Talk About Billionaire Math \u2013 Mother Jones"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div id=\"\">\n<div class=\"hero is-image \">\n\t<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\"><span class=\"media-caption\">NEW YORK, NEW YORK &#8211; NOVEMBER 16: President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk pose for a photo during the UFC 309 event at Madison Square Garden on November 16, 2024 in New York City.<\/span><span class=\"media-credit\">Jeff Bottari \/ Getty<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"mj-text-cta\">Get your news from a source that\u2019s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.motherjones.com\/newsletters\/?mj_oac=Article_Top_No_Oligarchs\" data-ga-category=\"TopOfArticle\" data-ga-label=\"NewsletterPromoCovid\" data-ga-action=\"click|https:\/\/www.motherjones.com\/newsletters\/?mj_oac=Article_Top_Support\">Sign up for the free <em>Mother Jones Daily<\/em>.<\/a><\/div>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><span class=\"section-lead\">Let me tell you<\/span> about the very rich.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">They own yachts that have yachts. They leave Earth just to feel something. They buy art they don\u2019t like and tout books they don\u2019t read and play God with things they don\u2019t comprehend. Above all, they live by their own set of rules.<\/p>\n<p><div class=\"youtube-embed\" data-video_id=\"SVRcKv33qkw\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Billionaire Math Doesn&amp;apos;t Add Up the Way Yours Does\" width=\"696\" height=\"392\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/SVRcKv33qkw?feature=oembed&#038;enablejsapi=1\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\n<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There is a crude but undeniable logic to the rise of the American Oligarchy. As I argued in a cover story <a href=\"https:\/\/www.motherjones.com\/politics\/2026\/04\/american-oligarchy-hyperscale-data-centers-meta-openai-oracle-x-musk-altman-zuckerberg-bezos\/\">for the magazine<\/a> earlier this year, decades of deregulation, concentration, opportunism, and no small amount of generally-quite-legal corruption have allowed a small group of people (mostly in Silicon Valley) to control an ever-greater share of the economy and bend the political process toward their own ends. Money begets power begets money. It\u2019s why, laid out on the page, the net worths of the world\u2019s richest men currently look like they\u2019re heading for outer orbit. Seriously, have you <em>seen<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.motherjones.com\/politics\/2026\/04\/number-go-up\/\">the charts<\/a>?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But as I\u2019ve delved deeper and deeper into this world <a href=\"https:\/\/www.motherjones.com\/politics\/2024\/01\/american-oligarchy-introduction-essay-russia-ukraine-capitalism\/\">over the last few years<\/a>, the thing I keep coming back to is not how all of these structures favor the very rich, but how wealth and power, in large enough quantities, allow you to simply bypass the structures that constrain everyone else. Gravity doesn\u2019t really exist in the same way when you\u2019re an oligarch. If your products drove people insane, they would be taken off the shelves. If you did a Hitler salute, people would probably just call it that. If you were responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, you would be ostracized from polite society, and maybe even CNBC. If you invented the Metaverse, people would stop asking you to invent more things. And if you didn\u2019t pay taxes, dear reader, you might eventually go to prison.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It\u2019s this alternative physics that gives the American oligarchy, at this particular moment, its uniquely off-putting funk\u2014a sense that, beyond all the hockey-stick wealth charts, the centibillionaires of Silicon Valley can pursue whatever bored or perverted or maniacal project they want without fear of censure or even market correction. Time and money just don\u2019t mean the same things they do to the rest of us. (Maybe that explains <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ft.com\/content\/22c024b6-1963-45d6-90bc-e19192d0faaa?syn-25a6b1a6=1\">the clock<\/a>.) Laws become more like suggestions. Deadlines aren\u2019t real. Or at least: They don\u2019t <em>have<\/em> to be.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Welcome to Billionaire Math, where we make sense of the things that don\u2019t make sense about the world\u2019s ruling class.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.motherjones.com\/politics\/2026\/08\/its-time-to-talk-about-billionaire-math\/\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NEW YORK, NEW YORK &#8211; NOVEMBER 16: President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk pose for a photo during the UFC 309 event at Madison Square Garden on November 16, 2024 in New York City.Jeff Bottari \/ Getty Get your news from a source that\u2019s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2691,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-usa-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2690"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2690\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}