I Would Like to Forget All These Billionaires’ Names

How many billionaires can you name? There’s the obvious ones, the Zuckerberg and the Musk and the Bezos of it all. Then you’ll stop and think for a sec and probably remember Gates and maybe Bloomberg, or one of various Waltons. Names like Ellison or Buffett will percolate up from some corner of your brain that used to know how to do math. If you like sports maybe a Ballmer or Cuban pop up, or Jerry Jones, or Bob Kraft. Maybe some are just associated with the company — those Google guys, whatever their names. There are surely others you manage to drum up, depending on your particular media diet.

The answer is too many. You, and I, and most everyone now, know too many billionaire names. There is the now-familiar saw that “every billionaire is a policy failure,” but even beyond the societal implications of there being hundreds of people out there with enough money to buy a small country, it says something pretty dark about the nature of fame and media and politics that we all know so many names for little reason beyond that the number of zeroes in their net worth.

In today’s New York Times, an example: a report on how a number of Silicon Valley billionaires, including Musk, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, and venture capital ghouls like David Sacks are all openly at war over politics now, even though they “once worked side by side and attended each other’s weddings.”

To which I say: who cares! There is nothing mandating that we treat the people with the kind of financial heft that would drive almost anyone insane as if they are Hollywood power couples. Personally, I would like someone to show up at my doorstep with the Men In Black device and erase all their names from my brain. I would like to go to a bar’s trivia night, be confronted with the question “What mortgage lending billionaire recently bought the Phoenix Suns” and shrug happily to my teammates, who get mad at me because I’m supposed to be the guy who knows about the NBA.

Though some of these people have made a certain thing or other that we use all the time — Google, or Walmart, or an iPhone — many others have not. Why do I know Carl Icahn’s name?

There are, of course, some reasonable answers to that question, or these questions more generally. Knowing what people like Musk and David Sacks and Peter Thiel are up to can be an important part of understanding the politics and power of the country writ large, from presidential elections to trends in local housing ordinances. Campaigns are often measured in terms of fundraising achievements, and the billionaires out there can play obviously outsized roles in where that money flows. But every utterance of prominent wealthy people does not require 360-degree media coverage.

In the end, people this rich almost universally and solely end up caring about staying that rich and probably getting richer. Vinod Khosla, a billionaire whose only claim to fame according to the Times is being a “prominent investor” and who supports the Democrats at the moment, ended that story by undermining its entire premise. “I’ll work with almost anyone if what I’m working on can change the world,” he said.

Oh. Cool story then, I guess.

The very rich obviously continue to carry outsized influence on society. Good journalism on what they are up to is important, and should continue. I simply request that one of them invent a small non-invasive device capable of zapping individual names clear from my gray matter, once and for all.