What happens when you’re too rich to hear no?

Some of the richest and most powerful people in the world are making decisions that could reshape how the rest of us live, while building themselves very comfortable escape routes from the consequences. Which tells us quite a bit about what extreme wealth does to the human brain.

For about a month now, Silicon Valley has been having what I can only describe as a very public existential crisis.

In September, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned, accusing the leading AI labs of “gambling with our lives.” But have no fear, a former colleague of his, Evan Hubinger, reassured everyone with this tweet:

After everyone understandably freaked out, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” arguing the industry needs to slow down and accept more oversight. Meanwhile, the company is gearing up for an IPO that could value it at more than $2 trillion.

I have my own cynical beliefs about why so many tech leaders are calling for regulation, but either way, imagine the CEO of Boeing announcing that its newest aircraft had a 10% chance of killing everyone on board, then explaining that production would continue because a rival airline manufacturer might build something even more dangerous. I imagine there would be some questions.

There are plenty of explanations for the AI industry’s apparent death wish, which have been covered extensively and better than I can (see here, here and here), but I can’t help but wonder: If you genuinely believed the technology you were building could kill everyone, why would you keep building it?

Reminds me of this scene ^

I think the answer has something to do with how enormous wealth changes our relationship with risk, responsibility and the people around us.

We want money because it gives us the freedom to say no, whether to a terrible job, an emergency or a life with fewer choices. But taken to its extreme, wealth offers a more nefarious kind of freedom, which is the ability to insulate yourself from the people, institutions and consequences that everyone else has to deal with.

And once you can afford to escape nearly every inconvenience, disagreement and (importantly) mistake, you risk losing the information that keeps your judgment tethered to reality.

So what happens when you become rich enough that nobody can say no to you?

Money is a form of insulation

As a certified financial planner, I spend a lot of time helping people build financial security, and much of the advice I give is organized around the same underlying desire: escape.

We build emergency funds to protect ourselves from disaster, save for retirement to become less dependent on an employer, and pursue financial independence so we can eventually arrange our lives around something other than earning a paycheck. The entire FIRE movement is essentially an elaborate strategy for opting out of the traditional working world.

Wealth-building, at its core, is an attempt to reduce how much control other people have over your life. That’s a perfectly reasonable thing to want (I’d go so far as to say it’s the whole point of my job!) right up until you have so much of it that the nature of the thing changes.

Past a certain level, an extra million (heck, an extra billion!) doesn’t change what you eat, where you sleep or how nice your sheets are. What it buys instead is control over your environment, your schedule and the people around you, which adds up to the ability to decide which parts of reality you have to participate in. Lines are for other people, as I’ve written about, and so are airport security, waiting rooms, public transit and, at its end stage, anyone who disagrees with you.

You may be wondering whether this is such a bad thing. So rich people fly private and live in gated communities, who cares? But I’d argue something real gets lost when you can opt out of nearly every shared human experience, and it matters a great deal more when their decisions shape everyone else’s lives.

Unfortunately, hearing no can be good for you

In Plato’s Republic, Glaucon tells the story of a shepherd named Gyges who finds a magic ring that turns him invisible (no, not that ring, put down your copy of The Fellowship). Suddenly able to move through the world without being seen or held accountable, the shepherd uses his newfound power to seduce the queen, murder the king, and take control of the kingdom.

The thought experiment, known as the Ring of Gyges, asks what happens to human morality when people acquire the power to act without fear of consequences. Would somebody still behave ethically if nobody could observe or punish their behavior?

A surprising amount of human behavior is governed by our desire to generally not be regarded as an asshole. Gossip, embarrassment, the fear of being the person everyone at the dinner party talks about on the drive home … social consequences are an effective and wildly underrated form of regulation.

And most of us live in a world where other people’s preferences matter, whether we like it or not. We have to negotiate with landlords, answer to bosses, accommodate partners, and occasionally deal with an airline who told you, on the phone, they could change your flight at the airport, but upon arrival told you it was against their policy and you would either have to a) rebook the entire flight for $1,500 or b) go to the airport seven hours early and attempt to fly on stand-by.

I digress.

The point is that living alongside other people requires a certain amount of compromise. Social norms encourage cooperation and curb anti-social behavior (sometimes for worse!). They also help hold people accountable for harmful behavior.

But what happens when you have enough money to avoid most of that? And what happens when that money also gives you the power to make other people accommodate you?

The psychology of power

Psychologists have spent decades studying what happens when people acquire power, and the results are not particularly flattering.

Research has found that people who feel powerful can become less inclined to consider other people’s perspectives, more confident in their own judgment, and less willing to take advice, even when doing so would improve their decisions.

From a fantastic Rolling Stone article on this topic.

Psychologist Dacher Keltner describes a phenomenon called the power paradox: some of the social skills that help people gain influence, including attentiveness to others, can deteriorate once they have it.

Power and money are intrinsically tied together. Money gives you resources and the ability to withdraw from situations you don’t like, while power gives you influence over what happens to other people, whether that be through political authority, corporate ownership, employment, etc. When the two converge, as they increasingly do, you get people who can make decisions affecting millions of lives while remaining unusually protected from the consequences.

Rich people aren’t universally selfish or incapable of caring about others, and plenty of research suggests money mostly magnifies whatever was already there. But there’s a relationship between money, power and how much you depend on other people, and the less you need people, the easier it gets to ignore what they think.

Nobody tells the king

Okay, so you have money and now you don’t care what anyone thinks. Fine. But what happens when your wealth also gives you control over the people around you?

Imagine you’re a billionaire CEO who comes up with an absolutely “brilliant” idea after your third glass of wine at Zero Bond. Your employees think it’s terrible, but their salaries depend on keeping you happy. So do your advisers’ retainers, and probably a decent portion of your friends’ investment portfolios. By the end of the meeting, everybody agrees you’re a visionary, and you’ve learned absolutely nothing about whether your idea is any good.

Hans Christian Andersen figured this out in 1837 with The Emperor’s New Clothes, and Shakespeare got there even earlier with King Lear. The modern version is Glass Onion, in which tech billionaire Miles Bron is surrounded by friends whose careers (and bank accounts) depend entirely on him, which is why nobody says anything until Benoit Blanc does: “It’s so dumb, it’s brilliant! No. It’s just dumb.”

One of my favorite shows,Succession, does a brilliant job of capturing a social universe organized entirely around Logan Roy’s money. Everyone in the family makes terrible decisions, partly because none of them has any idea how ordinary people experience the world.

The common thread is the absence of meaningful disagreement. When the people around you depend on your approval, you can end up with an extraordinarily distorted understanding of your own judgment.

There’s a concept called hubris syndrome, describing patterns of grandiosity, contempt for criticism, and excessive confidence that can develop in people who hold enormous power for years with few meaningful checks. The interesting part is that it’s acquired.

If you’ve spent years making decisions that other people praise, and rarely experience meaningful consequences when you’re wrong, you might start believing you’re exceptionally good at making decisions. And sure, perhaps you are. But no one is perfect, and no one should operate without checks and balances, especially when other peoples’ livelihoods are on the line.

It’s one thing for an ordinary person to develop an inflated sense of their own intelligence. They might wind up making some bad investments, alienating their friends, or (many such cases) starting an advice podcast. It’s another thing when the person with the blind spot controls billions of dollars, thousands of employees, or a technology that their own researchers think might end the world.

Rich enough to be wrong

Think about how you’d respond to losing $10,000. If that’s your entire savings, you’re going to spend a lot of time thinking about what happened and how to never do it again, because the loss has a direct and painful effect on your life.

Now imagine losing $10,000 when your net worth is $10 billion. You may not even notice.

At a certain level of wealth, almost no personal financial loss can change your quality of life. You can make a terrible investment, fund a doomed company, or buy Twitter for $44 billion and watch big investors mark down its value by more than half, and you will still have a house with more bathrooms than children.

Economists call this protection from risk a moral hazard. If the cost of being wrong rarely lands on you, you’re probably going to take more risks, and you’re going to have a much harder time understanding how those risks land on everyone else.

As researchers at Yale found in 2024, affluent Americans who believed their money and personal connections could protect them from problems with public institutions also tended to underestimate how difficult those problems were for other people.

The most extreme version of this ended up in court. In 2013, a Texas teenager named Ethan Couch killed four people while driving drunk, and a psychologist testifying for the defense argued he suffered from “affluenza,” meaning he’d been so insulated by his family’s money that he’d never learned actions have consequences. He was sentenced to probation, which, if you think about it, proved the point.

When you can afford to escape a problem, the problem can start to feel less serious, even when it could be devastating for everybody else.

The luxury of leaving

In 1970, economist Albert O. Hirschman publishedExit, Voice, and Loyalty, which offers a useful framework for understanding how wealth can change our relationship with society. When we’re unhappy with an institution, Hirschman argued, we can either leave it (exit) or try to fix it (voice), and money makes the first option considerably easier.

If your kid’s public school is underfunded, you can show up to school board meetings, organize the other parents and fight for more resources, or, if you have enough money, you can send your kid to private school and never think about the school board again. The same logic goes for healthcare, transportation and public safety.

Robert Reich wrote about this “the secession of the successful” more than three decades ago, arguing that wealthy Americans were steadily withdrawing from the public institutions that connected them to everyone else. Today you can buy a private version of nearly every public service, while the rest of us are left arguing about why the public version keeps getting worse.

You can empathize with someone’s circumstances without living them yourself, of course. But if you spend enough time outside the institutions that govern everyone else’s lives, your understanding of how those institutions work is going to get less accurate. I believe the technical term for this is being out of touch.

The bunker economy

In 2023, WIRED dug into Mark Zuckerberg’s sprawling compound on Kauai, which included plans for an underground shelter with a blast-resistant door, along with extensive security and private infrastructure — a project estimated at upward of $270 million. Zuckerberg is hardly alone here in his pursuit of post-apocalyptic escape.

And if you’ve seen Don’t Look Up, Mark Rylance’s tech billionaire talks the president out of deflecting the comet because there’s money in mining it, and when it hits, he and a few hundred of his closest friends leave on a spaceship. (Things don’t go great for them on arrival, which is about as close as that movie gets to optimism.)

If you’ve spent your whole life making problems go away with money, eventually every problem starts to look like something you can buy your way out of. If you can skip the traffic jam or the broken health care system, why wouldn’t you? And if that’s worked for every problem you’ve ever had, why wouldn’t you apply it to bigger ones, up to and including the end of the world?

The problem is that the consequences don’t stay inside the gates. When a billionaire becomes detached from reality, the rest of us still have to live in the reality they help create. And if you’re used to a world where nearly every risk can be managed with money, connections and a blast-resistant door, your sense of how dangerous a technology is will look very different from that of someone with no realistic way out.

For paid subscribers, I’m turning the lens on the rest of us: the insulation most of us buy in much smaller doses, the self-audit I’d give a client, and a few ways to get more (good) friction in your life.