Terry Prone: From Kanye West to Elon Musk, wealthy exploiters kept on getting their own way

It was only when I was going home that “‘esprit de l’escalier” kicked in and made me want to fight the point.

The notion that making money is indicative of some kind of unique brainpower or talent is without foundation but never goes away. People line up to revere the intelligence, insight, persistence, and resilience of the rich.

This reverence is greatly stimulated by rich people writing books to hammer home that they didn’t get gold-plated by accident, that it took intelligence, insight, and all the rest.

Plus vision and that current virtue, disruptiveness. 

The fact that they usually write these books when they’ve been handed a few million and asked to leave the premises is beside the point. They couldn’t have got as far as they did if they hadn’t been human jewels. That’s the narrative and God help us, generation after generation buys it.

It never seems to sink in that throughout history, most of the people who made lots of money did so by picking their parents (royalty/industrial giants), by crookedness (let’s not get into the history of corrupt tendering in this country), by luck, or by being vicious exploiters of human beings.

It’s difficult to come up with even one name of someone who, from a standing start without a mouth rattling with silver spoons, managed to make themselves a fortune. The seminal US rich folk such as Flagler, Carnegie, and Rockefeller were similar in their luck, their opportunism, and their disregard for law, written or unwritten.

Carnegie alone had the wit to do long-term legacy PR through investing back some of the wealth he accrued exploiting humans into providing those exploited humans with libraries so they could read when they could no longer work or walk, due to a work life spent sweltering in his steel smelters.

John Dalberg-Acton’s famous statement that all power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely also applies to wealth. Being rich corrupts and being filthy mega rich corrupts absolutely, for the simple reason that it removes the individual from any understanding of the lives of ordinary people and what they contribute to their wealth.

Witness Elon Musk’s bafflement in the face of hostile reaction to his thousands of firings. Not that Musk ever had an understanding of the lives of ordinary people. Every step on the way to becoming Twitter boss was a warning, unheeded. 

Unheeded partly because if you believe being rich establishes the rich guy as clever, cool, or philanthropic, you’re not going to let a few ex-wives or children or pissed-off colleagues take the shine off your worship.

Much research into violent criminals establishes that precious few of those who beat their partner or child to a pulp or choke the life out of them simply “snapped”. 

Until relatively recently, this was the toffee around the bad apples who got caught, even the spree and serial killers. The trope was that something just set them off. You know when you’re having a bad day and someone just tips you over the edge? Of course you do. You’ve had those days, but the amazing thing is that they never tip ordinary decent humans over the edge into strangling the offender or taking a sub-machine gun into a class full of toddlers. Even the most desultory investigation of the past of such a killer reveals dozens of warning signs.

It’s the same with the rich blokes who lose their marbles. 

Kanye: The $igns were there all along

Take Kanye West, a genius and multi-billionaire. From a reasonably propitious background, given that the parent who reared him, his mother, was a professor of English. 

But, as early as 20 years ago, he was signalling a skew from the norm that was largely shrugged off at the time, due to him being a multi-billionaire genius, even then.

So, eyebrows were raised when he marched out of the American Music Awards because they gave the Best New Artist prize to someone who wasn’t him, and George W Bush wasn’t happy when the rapper deviated from the agreed script during a nationally televised concert for hurricane relief to announce that Bush didn’t care about black people. Now, George W Bush wasn’t any pioneer of egalitarianism, but it would be difficult to find evidence to support that particular slur.

And yet Kanye West was given a free pass, again and again, because he was rich as Croesus. 

He bounced onto the stage at the MTV Video Music Awards ceremony in 2009 and snatched the microphone from Taylor Swift. Then he came up with a tweet questioning whether Bill Cosby had assaulted the 50 women who accused the comedian. He also publicly commented that slavery for 400 years sounded like a choice to him.

For a long, long time, the big organisations using him as a brand ambassador had no problem feeding millions into the open maw of his variously named identities, despite the prophetic signs writ large, long before he finally fulfilled the malign promise his behaviour had always hinted at, by making antisemitic statements. It was only then that some of his biggest sponsors said “we’re out of here”. 

Them withdrawing their money will have no effect on him, because he’s too rich to notice. But that’s not the point.

The point is Kanye West was protected by his fame and wealth for more than two decades before advertisers finally decided enough was enough. 

Not unlike Musk, who has given plenty of evidence, down the years, of being interested only in his own performance. 

He can’t even do sums, apparently, boasting about charging lads such as Stephen King for the validation blue tag that proves they are who they say they are. Totting up all those remotely likely to stump up in this way doesn’t produce a total sum likely to make any serious dent in Twitter’s financial problems.

To listen to Twitter employees on podcasts telling of the craziness of the contemptuous pressure Musk’s arrival has put them under is to understand the danger of glossing over the inhumanity of such men because they are rich and famous. 

It also underlines the tragedy of a generation that bought the myth of the free snacks and the table-tennis tables in the lobbies of Big Tech employers.

Bring in a new rich owner, whether it be Musk or “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap, and everything reverts to a grim norm: Savage the staff numbers and overload the survivors with so many tasks that they’re likely to end up sleeping on the ping pong tables.