Silicon Valley plutocrats are different than you and me

They really, really like paranoid, contrarian cranks:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a crank. His views are a mishmash of right-wing fantasies mixed with remnants of the progressive he once was: Bitcoin boosterism, anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, assertions that Prozac causes mass shootings, opposition to U.S. support for Ukraine, but also favorable mention for single-payer health care. But for his last name, nobody would be paying him any attention — and despite that last name, he has zero chance of winning the Democratic presidential nomination.

Yet now that Ron DeSantis’s campaign (slogan: “woke woke immigrants woke woke”) seems to be on the skids, Kennedy is suddenly getting support from some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley. Jack Dorsey, who founded Twitter, has endorsed him, while some other prominent tech figures have been holding fund-raisers on his behalf. Elon Musk, who is in the process of destroying what Dorsey built, hosted him for a Twitter spaces event.

So what does all this tell us about the role of technology billionaires in modern American political life? The other day I wrote about how a number of tech bros have become recession and inflation truthers, insisting that the improving economic news is fake. (I neglected to mention Dorsey’s 2021 declaration that hyperinflation was “happening.” How’s that going?) What the Silicon Valley Kennedy boomlet shows is that this is actually part of a broader phenomenon.

What seems to attract some technology types to R.F.K. Jr. is his contrarianism — his disregard for conventional wisdom and expert opinion. 

[…]

Tech bros appear to be especially susceptible to brain-rotting contrarianism. As I wrote in my newsletter, their financial success all too often convinces them that they’re uniquely brilliant, able to instantly master any subject, without any need to consult people who’ve actually worked hard to understand the issues. And in many cases they became wealthy by defying conventional wisdom, which predisposes them to believe that such defiance is justified across the board.

Add to this the fact that great wealth makes it all too easy to surround yourself with people who tell you what you want to hear, validating your belief in your own brilliance — a sort of intellectual version of the emperor’s new clothes.

Reflexive contrarianism is very, very annoying coming from a random pundit. From people with real money it’s something considerably worse than that.