No, Donny. These Men Are Losers.
Image Sources: Screenshot from The Big Lebowski. Photo of Zuckerberg by Xavier Lejeune. Photo of Bezos by Sgt. Adrian Cadiz. Photo of Musk from Office of Speaker Mike Johnson. Crude photoshop work done by Nathaniel St. Clair.
Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk. Three of the wealthiest and most powerful men to ever exist. Yet beneath their towering tech empires lies a common truth: they are groveling losers.
Take Jeff Bezos, for instance. Occasionally the richest person on Earth—depending on stock market fluctuations and divorce settlements—Bezos built Amazon into an online shopping juggernaut, where everything is cheap and delivered with lightning speed by exploited workers. He also owns The Washington Post, which adopted the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” at the beginning of Donald Trump’s first presidential term. This was both a clear jab at Trump’s authoritarian tendencies and a calculated appeal to thirsty Resistance liberals and Never-Trump conservatives. Bezos seemed to be trying to position himself as a “benevolent billionaire” in the general public’s eye, in contrast to Trump’s extravagant vulgarity.
Fast forward to Trump’s second term, and Bezos has done an about-face. He quashed The Washington Post editorial board’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, and the once-fiery slogan was swapped for the tepid, corporate-friendly “Riveting storytelling for all of America.” Bezos has now made peace with his short-lived rival, trading in his performative principles and press credentials for the possibility of even greater profits, weaker labor laws, and a front-row seat at the indoor inauguration. Too cold outside for these “strong men.”
Now let’s turn to Meta mastermind, Mark Zuckerberg. For years, he cultivated the image of an apolitical tech genius, a robotic and detached coder indifferent to public perception. His bowl-cut hairstyle, drab hoodies, and the general absence of charisma added to this illusion. Some even found his lack of affect intriguing—a man driven purely by programming and data analysis.
However, in the most recent election cycle, Zuckerberg has unveiled a dramatic transformation. Gone is the low-key tech nerd. With a quick software update, Mark 2.0 had arrived, kitted out with conditioned curls, a hypebeast wardrobe, a gold chain that screams “someone else is dressing me now,” and even an orange-tinted Trumpian tan. Instead of hiding away in his Hawaiian compound, he’s now making the rounds on the bro-podcast network, delivering cringeworthy performances of masculinity and lamenting the rise of “culturally neutered” companies. This rebranding is a painfully awkward attempt to reassemble himself as “a cool dude who likes to surf more than just the web!”
But this goes beyond a shallow makeover; it reflects deeper compromises. Zuckerberg has bent the knee to Trump, doing away with diversity initiatives, scrapping fact-checking on Meta platforms, and fully embracing a flood-the-zone with shit content policy. For someone who once seemed so indifferent to external validation, Zuckerberg’s newfound image—and his surrender to Trump’s influence—reeks of desperation.
And at last, we arrive at perhaps the most pathetic of them all: Elon Musk—or should I say Adrian Dittmann? Or @Ermnmusk? (Two of his alleged Twitter burner accounts.) The so-called real-life Iron Man. Musk, the innovator and maverick entrepreneur, prepared to rescue Earth from climate chaos with sleek electric vehicles and solar panels! At least, that’s what his PR machine convinced much of the public to believe—until his belligerent Twitter use and increasingly erratic decisions revealed his true, petty little self.
Much like how Donald Trump leases his name to already developed buildings, Musk buys companies and pretends he built them from the ground up. Despite his lofty rhetoric about revolutionizing transportation, his real focus is on impractical vanity projects like the clunky child drawing of a car brought to life, Cybertruck, and the overhyped Hyperloop (essentially tunnels for Teslas). Instead of trying to save the planet we live on from environmental disaster, he’s more interested in playing spaceman conqueror of Mars!
Then there’s Twitter. Musk didn’t buy the platform to save free speech—he bought it to tweak the algorithm so his posts could dominate your feed. The entire endeavor stinks of insecurity and a frenzied need for attention. And let’s not forget his personal life: a deadbeat dad who got “red-pilled” by the “woke mind virus” because one of his children came out as transgender. Musk is no hero—he’s a social-media-addicted vaporware huckster who habitually overpromises and underdelivers.
So yes, these are three of the most powerful and wealthiest men to ever exist—now falling all over themselves to kiss the gilded ring of Donald Trump, a convicted felon, professional grifter, and serial abuser of women who is, once again, President of the United States. These are con men, not confident men. Their actions are driven not by strength but by insecurity and insatiable greed.
But don’t mistake their lack of character for a lack of danger. Over the next four years, they will smash and grab as much as they can from this country, exploiting every opportunity to grow their wealth and power. And they will use the most vulnerable people in society as scapegoats and smokescreens, drawing our outrage and attention toward manufactured cultural battles while they rob us blind.
The post No, Donny. These Men Are Losers. appeared first on CounterPunch.org.