Failure is Not An Option

Noah Hawley in The Atlantic (Gift Article): What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat. “Any asset can be acquired but nothing can ever be lost, because for soon-to-be trillionaires, no level of loss could significantly change their global standing or personal power. For them, the word failure has ceased to mean anything. This sense of invulnerability has deep psychological ramifications. If everything is free and nothing matters, then the world and other people exist only to be acted upon, if they are acknowledged at all. This is different from classic narcissism, in which a grandiose but fragile self-image can mask deep insecurity. What I’m talking about is a self-definition in which the individual grows to the size of the universe, and the universe vanishes.” (Remember, this is less the era when Trump empowered these guys than it is an era when these guys decided who they wanted to empower.)