Pylimitics

One side effect of money, at least when there’s a lot of it, seems to be that the recipient often comes to believe they are special in some way other than being fortunate and (often) having superior ability in a particular area. Many, many people have superior ability in a particular area, of course, but they seldom believe that it generalizes as superior ability at anything or everything. But when your ability is connected to accumulating a great deal of money, especially quickly, as in founding a company that you sell, either to another bigger company or through an initial public stock offering. Paul Krugman touches on this in his piece The Pathetic Billionnaires Club.

Silicon valley is a hotbed of smart, fortunate children of privilege who come to believe that their ability, which might be in technology. It doesn’t matter (to them) what aspect of technology their success is built on. It might be coding, managing people, clever financing, sales, or even the hard-to-categorize ability to perform very good PowerPoint presentations in meetings. But they’re good at one or more of those skills, and come to believe that their superior ability in that activity can be generalized. They become convinced that they are, in general, smarter than other people, by which they mean that their good fortune will be repeated at anything they attempt. 

Dave Winer has a great term for those guys: wünderbrats. It is a wünderful sobriquet. “Guys” is pretty accurate too; having great fortune, often stemming at least partially from great privilege, affects younger men the most. Their great privilege means that by the time they reach adulthood their life experience is circumscribed and limited, and they aren’t aware of the extent of the things they’ve never experienced.