The Billionaires Forgot the First Rule of Being Rich: Shut Up

Dark money worked because it stayed dark. The new oligarch hobby is public worship, and it’s turning them into political liabilities.

The richest man in the world stood before a crowd in Pennsylvania and announced he would give away a million dollars a day to registered voters who signed a petition. The Department of Justice sent warnings. Legal scholars called it vote buying. Elon Musk kept doing it anyway.

This is what happens when oligarchs abandon stealth for spectacle.

For forty years, American billionaires operated through what Jane Mayer called Dark Money. The Koch brothers funded think tanks. They shaped policy from the shadows. They won by being invisible. That strategy is dead. The new billionaire class wants the spotlight. They want to be seen, heard, worshipped.

Turns out this was a terrible idea.

Historian Robert Darnton documented how the French monarchy collapsed not through economic crisis but through the destruction of mystique. In the 1770s, scandalous pamphlets called libelles exposed King Louis XV’s private life in graphic detail. His sexual dysfunction. His mistresses. The private brothel he maintained called the Parc-aux-Cerfs. These texts stripped the King of his divine aura by showing him as a pathetic man enslaved by his appetites. When the Revolution came, the monarchy had already been spiritually gutted.

The contemporary billionaire has become the author of his own libelle.

Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into his personal conspiracy theory broadcasting network. Bill Ackman offered the world his dating wisdom: May I meet you? The phrase became a global meme. In New York City politics, being laughed at is fatal. Ackman’s Super PAC spent millions trying to defeat democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani in the mayoral race. Mamdani won anyway.

Jeff Bezos married Lauren Sánchez in a ceremony estimated at $50 million, held on a $500 million superyacht in Venice. Defenders argued the cost was relatively cheap compared to Bezos’s net worth. This defense functioned as an indictment. To someone struggling with rent, the idea that $50 million qualifies as pocket change isn’t reassuring. It’s enraging.

The intellectual cover for this behavior comes from Balaji Srinivasan’s The Network State, which proposes that digital communities should crowdfund physical territory and become sovereign entities. Governance by smart contracts. No more pesky democracy. Just the elite, finally free from the unwashed masses. Critics have a simpler description: aristocrats fleeing to Coblenz while keeping all the wealth they extracted from the society they’re abandoning.