Great wealth has always signified status, but today tech wealth also signifies having special futuristic insights denied the rest of us, which the Silicon Valley billionaires are all too ready to dispense and we are too ready to receive. Thus the spectacle of the British prime minister fawning over the banal utterances of the world’s richest man as prophecies from an entrepreneurial god who deigns to walk among us. On the same day, a bizarre hi-tech huckster, once no less fawned over, was convicted of a $10bn fraud and faces imprisonment for up to 110 years. This bewildering world has robbed everyone from limelight-seeking political leaders to greedy investors of their senses. There has been a collective loss of our sceptical faculties.
The obstacle to any such scepticism is that amid the hype, banality, self-deception and sometimes outright fraud is the truth that, on occasion, real wealth and technological breakthroughs are being created at dizzying speed. Elon Musk, interviewed in that notorious “fireside chat” by Rishi Sunak after the prime minister had hosted the world’s first AI safety summit at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire last week, owes the bulk of his $200bn-plus fortune to the success of his electric car producer, Tesla. It has sold more than a million Model 3 vehicles, helping to deliver the death knell to the petrol engine and with it the age of fossil fuels.
