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Comment by ModernMech | Hacker News Reader

It’s funny that everyone is coming around to understanding the rich elite are mostly socio- and psychopaths. People who were clued into them early were told they were rude for calling them out but now the they are just admitting it straight up.

I’m sorry to say it but Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, Sama, and Bezos are clearly on that spectrum. And no, it’s not autism it’s sociopathy — they view us as NPCs and call empathy a weakness and a scam. And if you think this is rude to say, I don’t because the palpable lack of empathy at the highest echelons of power (from POTUS down) is becoming a real liability for humanity as a whole given the amount of power they have amassed.

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The double standard I see across all political and cultural lines is people that demand empathy for them while they demonstrate none for an arbitrary outgroup or one specific to their personal lived experience. This is basically using emotion to drive thoughts rather than emotions to inform thoughts. I have doubts this will go away anytime soon given it takes an incredible amount of effort for people to critically examine themselves. I liken it to debugging and reverse engineering your brain and nervous system.

Don't forget Lawnmower Ellison

Actually I would prefer to lol. But yes, him especially. I think there is a sort of necessary degree of narcissism and megalomania that must be involved to run corporations of this scale. Which is fine and all but when your product is a beta quality robotic death machine and you want to run your tests on public roads, or let’s get teens addicted to our product on purpose and who cares if they off themselves, that’s when it crosses from “quirky control freak” (jobs) to “dangerous megalomaniac” (the rogues gallery from the last post)

Agree

The dark triad personalities are over represented in the c-suites in general and other positions of power and status (ie politics) because they value nothing else - and are one of the greatest sources of human misery and atrocity there has ever been. Honestly, it's one of humanity's biggest unsolved challenges - how to structure society and institutions in ways that elevate benevolent competence and constrain or keep out the psychopaths

When they get the power of the state or state-like powers through technology, very bad things happen

I miss Alex Karp on your list.

I can tell you that even on HN, most people have still not come around to it. If in a thread about Ellisson or Thiel or their respective companies you point out that Bezos, Zuck and Sama - and as a result the companies they lead and the use of their capital - are in the exact same spot on the sociopathy spectrum, this immediately invites hordes of downvotes by the (ex-)FAANG HNers who can't come to terms with the fact their whole net worth is based on growing the power of just as despicable of leaders as the ones they're busy chastising.

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