Every billionaire is a failure of government, culture, and society. Pablo Escobar is dead, why should I waste my breath on a corpse? Bill Gates behaves like a king, moving his pawns around the world, controlling people and resources in a way that Hitler could not even imagine. Zuckerberg benefits from, enables, and has helped fascists take power, commit genocides, and mislead hundreds of millions-billions of people while having a direct hand on scales of public discourse the world over. Musk is an imperialist technofacist. So, I guess a better question, is why do you revere these sociopaths and not the more overt ones too? What's the difference between idolizing a child pump, drug dealer, hit man, or racketeer and a person that treats their staff as slaves, or one who funds experimentation on humans in the third world, or who leverages their capital to coup a democratic government for natural resources? They're all the same scum to me. No amount of money spent on PR will erase the harm they caused to get their plunder.

>No amount of charity and spending such fortunes can compensate in any way for the misconduct in acquiring them. -Teddy Roosevelt

General background reading/listening

https://citationsneeded.medium.com/episode-45-the-not-so-ben...