From Freddie DeBoar, The Creative Underclass is Still Raging:
These people look out at a world filled with creators creating, look at the considerable benefits they accrue (in money, yes, but more importantly in status) and they want. They want what others have. And want breeds resentment, especially when it’s so plain that some of the people who have succeeded have done so despite no clear advantage in talent, worth, or effort. They have absorbed the contemporary left critique of capitalism as an arbitrary and fickle distributor of reward, but without the steadying influence of the old left’s valorization of
The anger and resentment he talks about is not just limited to social media or aspirations of media influence, but found in almost all communities that attract a certain well-educated, high-SES demographic. You’re not going to find it among the hoi polloi or more ‘normie’ communites (e.g /r/SquaredCircle), but it’s common on the ‘intellectual web‘ that attract this specific Very Online demographic. People are mad, and it cannot just be blamed on Covid restrictions anymore or politics. It’s a battle waged within the upper-middle class over social status and visibility, not necessities such as food or shelter.
If you ask people of their ideal or dream job, most would answer something predictable like being a CEO or other position that confers wealth or a prestigious job title (e.g. corporate lawyer, hedge fund manager, or venture capitalist). In this post I make the argument that thought leader or influencer is an even higher and rarer level of elite status. All you have to do is look at revealed preferences. Many of the wealthiest people in the world also want to be thought leaders. It’s not enough to have ‘FU money’ or producing products used by millions of people. For many of America’s most successful people–wealth, social status, and career success alone are insufficient. There is something else they want–that is–to also be seen as having valuable and important insights about society, or playing some role in shaping it.
Bill Gates for example recently published a novella-sized essay The future our grandchildren deserve, which weighs in at 7,000 words and is full of graphics. Obviously he put considerable effort into writing it and wants people to read and share it. Instead of chilling on a private island or on a mega yacht, the 3rd or (4th?) richest man in the world is essentially doing the job of a graduate student or an uncredited writer for The Economist. Elon Musk spends more time tweeting about politics than he does running his companies it seems. It’s like he wants the same job as someone like Noah Smith or Matt Yglesias, who are widely read and whose tweets garner millions of views and debate despite sub-billionaire status of either. Or Chamath, who through his Substack newsletter and podcast has tried to pivot from ‘SPAC salesman’ to pundit.
From the post Why Influence/Reach is Better than Power or Wealth, or Social Status:
Or just look at revealed preferences–that is–what people actually do. I know it’s coveted because why do wealthy CEOs and and other people who we assume are powerful and have high social status write (or more likely, ghostwrite) op-eds and books? Why are they not content with just power, wealth, and social status? Because none of those things are good substitutes for the validation that comes from having a large audience that is directly receptive to your message. Sure, a boss has underlings, but this is not an audience.
Whether it’s going into politics (e.g. Mitt Romney, J. D. Vance), backing political causes (e.g. Robert Mercer, George Soros, Peter Thiel), or explicating their ‘world vision’ in ghost-written autobiographies that also serve as manifestos, financially-successful people want to have an impact on broader society than the hyper-localized work environment. Being the best regional manager or meeting a high sales quota may mean accolades and a promotion, but otherwise no one cares or knows. Being a thought leader means people actually care about your opinions, that your opinions matter, and most importantly, your opinions are debated and discussed and may even have some lasting impact on society, which money alone is no assurance of. Conversely, thought leaders don’t strive to become wealthy businessmen. I’m sure David Brooks could have stopped writing a decade ago and settled into some lucrative consulting gig, but that would mean relinquishing that appellation he knows is priceless.
Global GDP as of 2025 stands at $100 trillion. The national debt is somewhere at $36 trillion, give or take a trillion, with another trillion added every month or so without much as a passing concern except strong language about how it’s a problem, but apparently not bad enough that anyone who is in charge is compelled to do anything about it. Even if under a mountain of debt, Americans are the wealthiest they have ever been, anxieties about civil unrest or China notwithstanding. As of 2024, something like one in fifteen Americans is now a millionaire. However, unlike economic growth and wealth, which are generally monotonically increasing–when the trend pauses, it’s called a recession, and there have only been eight or so over the past century, to get an idea of how uncommon of an occurrence this is–status by definition is relative and zero-sum: for someone to gain status implies someone else must lose some. Because America has become so wealthy, the accumulation of wealth, in and of itself, has stopped signifying elite status. So becoming elite includes things in which money alone is insufficient, like academic prestige, top college admissions, punditry, etc. Harvard knows it has to keep a tight lid on its enrollment if it’s to maintain its exclusivity even if that means possibly leaving some money on the table. As soon as a price tag is put on something, suddenly it becomes more commonplace.
Even luxury goods and fancy cars, which thanks to social media and Americans becoming much wealthier overall on a real basis, seem so commonplace nowadays and have become commoditized. As recently as the nineties there was two-tiered class hierarchy of automobiles: luxury cars, which typically cost $50,000 or more, and everything else (e.g. the generic mid-sized sedan, minivan, compact car, or small pickup truck). But the 2010s era of extra-large SUVs and luxury lifted trucks, especially post-Covid, flooded the market with automobiles that are more common and more expensive than your typical luxury car. Or social media, where everyone seems to have a luxury car or a luxury purse. So to stand out you need something like a Lambo, which runs in the six figures. Same for the Rolex, a cultural mainstay of the pre-social-media era that used to signify elite wealth, that has been surpassed by the much pricier and exclusive Patek Philippe or Audemars Piguet.
But at the same time in the ’90s being a thought leader was not that lucrative. Maybe you published some monographs that no one read, or some books which paid a lower-middle-class salary. Unless you were Stephen Hawking or Carl Sagan, hardly anyone was making that much money. It was like that for most professions (except for rappers, like Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer). Even athlete salaries were not that inflated, unlike the mouth-watering eight or even nine-figure contracts that have become seemingly quotidian. Yes, even NBA players flew commercial as recently as the Clinton era. Same for lottery jackpots. It used to be that $10-million-dollar jackpots were uncommon and a big deal, but now hundred-million-dollar or even billion-dollar jackpots have become typical, tracking the wealth inflation seen elsewhere in the economy. Some attribute these inflated jackpots to inflation in how the annuity is calculated, but during the ’80s and ’90s inflation was also high, yet jackpots were much smaller on an inflation-adjusted basis. A generation ago, $70-80k/year was considered competitive pay for a prestigious job, well below the mid-six-figure salaries like seen today at today’s top tech and finance firms; adjusted for inflation, this is still a huge increase.
A bigger, more interconnected world thanks to globalization and social media, means greater personal returns to high status, including thought leaders. Someone like Matthew Yglesias or Matt Taibbi, who have highly profitable and visible Substacks and social media accounts, reach more people than possibly even world leaders of over a century ago, during the era of telegraph and radio, but also make a very nice living at it, too. It’s not just about being the biggest fish in the pond, but being the biggest fish in the ocean, that being the vast expanse of the social media pundit landscape (or hellscape depending on how you view it). Metrics of engagement and popularity makes status quantifiable and known, such as visible follower counts or retweets, which alluding to Freddie’s point, creates a sort of anxiety and envy among those who see they are missing out even if otherwise materially successful. The guy with 100k YouTube followers or a hundred academic citations, for all intents and purposes, has more status than someone with 50k followers or fifty citations.
All too often people conflate money with power. Or the ‘Executive Office’ with power. What does it mean to have real power anyway? In the US it would seem hardly anyone has true, unalloyed power. We saw this during Covid, in which the CDC and the WHO were limited to making easily-ignored, unenforceable recommendations and warnings, unlike in China, in which people were forced to comply. Or most of Europe overall, such Italy, Ireland, and Germany, which had sweeping lockdowns and other restrictions. Given that lawmakers have arguably lost power over the past decade, it possibly means more power for a miscellany of elites who don’t have power in an official sense, but express power through ideas–be it in tech, academia, or punditry–to fill the vacuum.
Regulators and politicians constantly complain about how tech companies flagrantly violate user privacy or engage in uncompetitive practices, but there isn’t much they can do about it, assuming they even care that much. The last time any serious action was taken against a major tech company was in 1998, when the DOJ sued Microsoft, only for Mr. Gates to prevail by having to make small concessions [although the DOJ does have Google/Alphabet in its sights ]. Same for efforts at banning TikTok. It took six years for the most powerful nation in the world to summon the political will or motivation and clear the necessary legal hurdles to ban an app that was arguably a national security threat, yet the leaders of far weaker countries have no difficulties blocking sites for far smaller transgressions. But in America this is a major, fraught decision. If power is defined as the ability to force someone against his or her own free will, then the lowly police officer has the most power. Or district attorneys, who by decree can end anyone’s freedom. Even five-star generals and the POTUS himself does not have arrest powers.
As I discuss in the post Money Does Not Buy Popularity, Power, or Influence, the exchange rate of wealth into ‘permanence on the cultural Zeitgeist’ (or any influence or legacy) is very low. Does anyone remember Michael Bloomberg’s 2020 presidential bid, which is only noteworthy for how much he spent: $500 million in 4 months, only to drop out by February 2020 when it became apparent that he could not put a price tag on likability. But he did get a Wikipedia page out of it, which I guess is an indelible reminder of its existence (given how much he spent, he earned it).
Or how about the Pickens’s Plan? From 2007-2008 the late oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens spent hundreds of millions of dollars of his personal fortune to promote a wind power energy initiative, which for a year generated extensive media coverage, especially on CNBC. His objective ultimately was having the incoming administration (presumably John McCain) adopt his ‘plan’. McCain lost, and the plan went into the dustbin of other costly, failed ego-driven billionaire initiatives (which I’m sure the ‘Metaverse’ will be among them), but he did also get a Wikipedia page out of it.
Sure, billionaires and CEOs can have buildings or organizations named after them, as any elite college administrator knows all too well, but buildings are static, immovable things, quite literally. Ideas are dynamic. They propagate, not stand still. Artistic expressions such as music and books are immortalized by people who care about them and willingly pass them down, compared to having to pay the upkeep or outbidding a wealthier billionaire for a coveted placard. Yes, billionaires can also bankroll causes and politicians, notably George Soros, Peter Thiel, and Robert Mercer, but this means not getting the name recognition or credit that comes with being front and center as a thought leader. Your role is that of the helper, like being Engels instead of Marx.
Books written by academics who lived pauper-like existences are still hotly debated online, like the works of the ’60s French postmodernists, Marxists, and social social critics, such as Debord, Deleuze, and Baudrillard. Or that 1983 Paul Fussell book on class, which people still cite heavily and the legacy of which endures in blog posts. Same for Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation theory. Or ‘the beats’ e.g. Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsberg. The Classics are still debated, as well more contemporary offerings, such as David Foster Wallace’s doorstop-sized Infinite Jest, which has been reviewed more times than it has been read in its entirely and continues to garner discussion long after the author’s suicide in 2008. But will anyone debate the merits or lack thereof of Ray Dalio’s 2017 book Principles: Life and Work (again with Wikipedia) 50 years from now? The odds are not good, no matter how rich he is or how large Bridgewater’s AUM is. Buffett to his credit has never written a book or tried his hand at punditry in his 60+ year career (except once, in 2008, telling people to buy stocks), because he knows as successful as he is at investing and as rich as he is, any lasting impact he has is through the economic impact of his companies (you can thank him for those annoying Geico commercials), not his ‘thoughts or opinions about society’.
Billionaire hedge fund manager Jim Simons recently died at 86. His eponymous foundation has given billions of dollars to fund various research projects and grants in math and science, including founding Quanta Magazine, with billions more pledged after his death. His donations probably made some difference at the margins in some uncredited way, but it’s hard to pin precisely what it has accomplished. Now imagine if instead of working at a hedge fund, he held an academic post at a top university and wrote a book about his social vision. And this was in the early nineties, before mass media became diluted by the World Wide Web and there was still a huge, credulous public and Post-War-era policy-elite that would lap this stuff up. And then this book was a success, and not only sold hundreds of thousands of copies to the general public, but also found its way into the hands of this elite who acted on it, and also served as a guiding principle or blueprint for subsequent generations of bureaucrats, lawyers, and academics. This would have more of an impact at no cost than even billions of dollars of grants or political donations. It does not have to be a non-fiction book either. Robert Heinlein books are argued to have provided inspiration for Silicon Valley libertarian culture and were (and probably still are) widely read by elites in politics and business.
The objective of a donation is to try to put someone in a position of power who will hopefully carry out such a vision or plan, but a persuasive book or study can sidestep all of this. Stanford University professor Paul R. Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb, although although manifestly wrong in its forecasts of worldwide famine owing to overpopulation, its warnings were taken seriously at the time by policy elites and the media. India went so far as to embark on an ill-fated sterilization initiative, likely inspired by the warnings in the book, “In the 1970s and ’80s, India, led by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay, embraced policies that in many states required sterilization for men and women to obtain water, electricity, ration cards, medical care and pay raises.”
Concerns over overpopulation continue to this day, long after the book’s dire predictions and warnings failed to materialize. But where his book succeeded was implanting in the public consciousness the possibility of an overpopulation crisis as something to be taken seriously, a century after ‘Malthusianism’ had fallen out of favor, proving that bad or wrong ideas do not die, but rather hibernate until resuscitated at the right opportunity or with the right spokesperson. Or Ralph Nader, a consumer protection advocate whose 1965 book Unsafe At Any Speed led to congressional hearings and the ratification of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966, which mandated federal safety standards for motor vehicles. His impact would go far beyond consumer advocacy, and despite spending no money did more to upset Gore’s campaign than the billionaire-backed Bush political machine, which incidentally also proves my point.
Think tanks, for example, employ academics who write policy proposals and research papers that can affect policy directly, a notable example being supply-side economics, which was originally conceived by Chicago-School economists (e.g. the Laffer curve, named after University of Chicago associate professor Arthur Laffer, who aporically described the concept at a dinner in 1974, although by his own admission he did not invent it) and then implemented directly by President Ronald Reagan. This is seen a lot in regard to education policy, in which a tenuous study provides the intellectual bedrock for an overhaul of the entire system by desperate policy makers looking for any way to improve test scores and America’s competitiveness, notably ‘head start’ and ‘no child left behind’. Or the ‘phonics’ system of reading, which also took the world by storm. One such influential text in this regard of shaping US education policy is A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, 1983.
When pundits talk about how ‘useless degrees’ don’t pay well (despite those very pundits possessing said degrees), or jokes about basket weaving or ‘learn to code’, maybe people have preferences that are not aligned with the accumulation of money, but rather things like ‘social influence’, which as discussed above is surprisingly hard to buy. History and literature majors do not need to be reminded that their degrees are not as remunerative compared to, say, computer science. But compare the candidacies of Bloomberg, who spent $500 million and got nowhere, compared to Obama. How are these pitiful basket weavers beating you then in government or ‘DEI’ if their degrees are so worthless, huh? Why are we constantly reading the opinions of humanities-degrees-wielding journalists or pundits, not people with ‘hard’ degrees? It finally took someone like Elon Musk $20 billion of his own fortune (with others putting up the rest of the money) to buy Twitter, the cheapest of the major social networks (and now even cheaper), to compete with the left as far as social networking is concerned, as many alt-tech platforms had failed to gain traction. That was the price tag. By comparison, the left does it in reverse (e.g. colleges, which act as tollbooths to the middle class, in which students pay to be indoctrinated).
Richard Hanania put it well when he said, “Normal people who just want to grill and prioritize other areas of life over politics seem to believe that they have a God-given right to have just as much influence over how society functions as those who become full-time activists, but that’s not how the world works.” You have to choose between one or the other: activism or money, although there are exceptions (such as Wallace Stevens, a poet who was also an insurance executive). You cannot make a career in the private sector, and then just jump into the ‘sphere of ideas’ and expect your business expertise to be an asset or confer a head start. In reality, you’re starting at a major disadvantage compared to people who prioritized ideas or activism over money, and have years of connections and experience, but more importantly, intellectual credibility, to show for it, which money cannot buy. Being one of the Forbes’ or Fortune’s “40 Under 40 Disrupters of New Media!” does not help when trying to disrupt centuries-old institutions. Business is all about efficiency and expediency, or results that can be measured, tracked, and optimized. The spread of ideas is the opposite.
There are notable exceptions such as Paul Graham and Marc Andreessen who transitioned from careers as technologists and venture capitalists to successful pundits. But they have been at it for decades, making it a full-time job, like on Twitter, instead of the occasional press release or op-ed, and their success is hardly representative of most who try their hand at punditry. Unlike Pickens or Bloomberg, they built the necessary intellectual credibility to be taken seriously without spending much money (Paul Graham’s writes his articles on his personal blog in ’90s barebone HTML style). Unlike Bloomberg, who for months blasted the public with expensive and forgettable ads in the hope something would stick, Andrew Yang’s perceived intellectual credibility (even if his policy ideas were unworkable and he was a poor debater) garnered him considerable coverage at almost no cost.
I think also CEOs and other rich people know or have some intuition that not all followers or press is equal, and that no amount of flattery is a substitute for the deeper-level criticism and analysis afforded to actually serious ideas and people. Having Fortune and Forbes articles lauding your very existence and overinflated accomplishments, that are likely survivorship bias anyway or even outright fraud, does not have the same weight as a more discriminating, smarter audience of other thought leaders, academics, or even low-ranking journalists like on Twitter or YouTube. Even the very recipients of those generic business magazine puff pieces know they are bullshit, too.
Same for having tons of social media followers, which does not carry the same cachet of elite status as having your ideas gain currency in academia, which is a smaller but much more exclusive audience that imparts far more influence on a per-capita basis. I’m sure Bill Gates wishes academics would take up his ideas more, like about malaria, vaccines, or Third World development, but usually the only time academics talk about him is in the context of wealth inequality or monopolies.
Reality distortion fields are real. The media has warped people’s perceptions of what is real or not, such as how wealth is distributed in America. The media would have you believe that America is full of struggling people, with a handful of plutocrats at the very top, and not much else. But alluding to earleir, America is overflowing with rich people. For example, someone is five times more likely to be a millionaire than smart enough to qualify for Mensa, an organization in which eligibility is restricted to only the top 2% of IQ, or about 132. If you polled people, most would probably assume that it’s equally likely or even reversed, with millionaires being less common.
Online, it seems like people with self-reported IQs above 130 are a dime a dozen, and on Quora especially, but for many people a million dollars still seems like an unobtainable amount of money, especially with endless headlines by the media about poverty, poor/indebted millennials, and such. Indeed, someone who brags in passing about having a 140 IQ (1 in 250) is much more likely to be lying or pretending than someone who ‘flexes’ his luxury car collection on Instagram, yet we tend to assume the car guy is pretending, such as renting the cars.
As it turns out, contrary to the media, America is overflowing with rich people, but unlike college-educated intern journalists writing for a pittance, these millionaires generally aren’t making their opinions known (typically they are retired, or close to it). This is also why wealth alone is so insufficient and hardly an assurance of success (outside of the ‘thing’ which one became wealthy by doing) compared exceptional IQ or talent, which are more rare. Making money is a different skillset from being an erudite, worldly, or engaging person, which are the necessary attributes for success at the ‘ideas game’, and more difficult to do and are in shorter supply than just being competent or hard-working enough to make a lot of money.
But going back to the main point, that being envy among the creative class, centuries ago the elite sought to separate themselves from the masses, living far away or secluded in castles or gilded mansions, and with distinct tastes and cultures. Nowadays it would seem the elite take great pains to fit in, at least superficially, and to downplay their wealth. Centi-millionaire athletes get glowing praise by the media for driving old cars. Same for billionaire CEOs earning $1 salaries. Celebs are seen on the sidelines of sporting events, separated by mere feet from ordinary spectators. This need to fit in I think creates confusion among non-elites as to just how stacked the odds really are. This is yet another type of distortion field.
The category of thought leader is just another form of elite status, which to Freddie’s point is perceived as somehow being more attainable, even if it’s not. Becoming the ‘next Nate Silver’ may as well be in the same the category or level of difficulty or rarity as becoming the next CEO of a Fortune 500 company. And even then, there are five-hundred of them, plus a much larger rank of highly-paid executives. Also, CEOs and other executives come and go, but thought leaders like Nate Silver, Matt Yglesias, and others have only grown bigger and more important over the past decade as social media has grown in importance, along with the rise of Substack. Joe Rogan is more popular now than ever before, but who remembers who the last CEO of McDonald’s was (or even who the current one is?). Rogan has been a top podcaster for a decade, in the same time McDonald’s has cycled through three CEOs (apparently, the job of selling a cheap, highly addictive food item is harder than it sounds). And unlike CEOs, they don’t have finite tenures, even when wrong or discredited, like Max Boot, Jonah Goldberg, John Podhoretz, and David Frum (among others) who supported the Iraq War but have retained audiences, credibility, and authority.
This has always irked me about the thought-leader class. They try to pass their jobs or success off as something that is not that special or as happenstance. It’s like, “No, do you not realize your success is more uncommon than even being an executive of a Fortune 500 company?” Regular people do not post videos that routinely get ‘hundreds of thousands’ of viewers. Regular people do not write tweets routinely read by tens or even hundreds of thousands of people. The CEO on Twitter whose tweets routinely get millions of views also happens to own the site, and then it’s a sharp drop-off from there. The second-most popular CEO also happens to be the president…of the United States.
Same for a livestreamer or content producer on YouTube who earns millions, but has not changed his set or drab wood paneling recording background, so as to downplay his newfound wealth and fame to seem ‘relatable’ to his vast audience, which again creates a false sense of attainability. The irony is that this makes someone like Andrew Tate, who is criticized for being so flamboyant, more honest and transparent at least as far as his wealth is concerned. He’s not trying to ‘fit in’ by driving a used Toyota. Maybe the solution to some of the resentment is for rich people to start acting rich again. Even if CEO pay is too high, this is a role that is at least borne out of some function of economic necessity, but how many more centrist contrarian pundits or angry self-help podcasters does the world need?