“How many yachts can you waterski behind?”

| 3:00 pm EDT October 29, 2024
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There’s a point of clarity in the movie “Wall Street.” Protagonist Bud Fox confronts antagonist Gordon Gekko when he finds out Gekko has betrayed him. Fox says to Gekko, “So tell me Gordon, when does it all end, huh? How many yachts can you waterski behind?” Gekko responds with a series of non-answers and cliches about the miracle of profit, commodities and wealthy people. The truth of the matter is Gekko doesn’t really know the answer. At some point Gekko sold his soul to money and he can no longer remember the reason, if indeed there ever really was a reason to begin with.

Most of us have all imagined being one of the super rich. We have imagined the good we would do with such wealth if we were. We are often puzzled why our imagined behaviour is so much different from theirs. I think I know the answer. First, let me tell you what the man who one day may become the world’s first trillionaire just did, and why he did it.

As many of you already know, the Washington Post declined to endorse Kamala Harris for President of the United States. That’s okay, Kamala doesn’t need the Post. She can win without them, thank you very much. But she was betrayed by the world’s next prospective trillionaire, Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon and the Post, for money and power. Bezos sent word down the chain of command that the Post was emphatically NOT to endorse anyone.

It was a coward’s response to a moral crisis. It was an example of the saying misattributed to Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” We don’t know who said that but we do know this. Bezos is an example of a (quote unquote) good man doing nothing when the safety and security of the world is at stake.

In 2016 the Post endorsed Hillary Clinton. It is believed that the Post’s endorsement meant Bezos lost out on a $10 billion cloud computing defense contract from the Trump administration. And, throughout Trump’s one and only term as “president” he repeatedly attacked Bezos and Amazon, accusing them of “scamming” the US Postal Service. Recall Trump called Bezos’ newspaper “the failing Washington Post.” He called Amazon “Scamazon.” And so on.

So Bezos doesn’t want to lose out on another $10 billion contract, or worse, be persecuted for his role in supporting Kamala should Trump win. So, according to Robert Kagan, one of the people who recently resigned in protest from the Post for their non-endorsement, Trump made a quid pro quo deal with Bezos. The deal boils down to this: if Trump wins he will look on Amazon and the Post with favourable eyes.

Remember, Bezos is worth more than 200 billion dollars. He’s only 60 years old. By the time he’s 70 he could be a trillionaire. Bezos might be the reason why my spell checker no longer flags the word “trillionaire” as a misspelling. It’s worth it to him to strategically withhold his endorsement. If Trump wins, he’s safe. If Kamala wins, he’s still safe, because he knows she won’t punish him. Such is the calculus of the super rich and super craven.

As Gordon Gekko says to Bud Fox, “It’s all about bucks, kid. The rest is just conversation.” While that tells us nothing about WHY it’s “all about bucks,” it does tell us this: some super rich people will do anything for their next dollar, and they don’t care who it hurts or what it destroys. It’s not that they are evil per se, it’s that they have reached the point where they don’t know anything else. Everything else has lost its appeal. The only thing they have left is money, and the only thing you can do about money is get more of it. It doesn’t improve with quality. A wrinkled 20 dollar bill will buy as much as a crisp and new one. It has no aesthetic value. It neither sings nor paints. It just is.

This may sound like sour grapes. I can assure you it is not. But Jeff Bezos is a man very much to be pitied. He just publicly told us why he is to be pitied. His reputation, his nation, his fellow Americans are worth nothing to him next to the prospect of being the world’s first trillionaire. And why would anyone want to be such a ridiculous thing? You and I imagine the good we would do with that much money. But people with money have long become immune to such imaginings. They are lost to the allure of the only thing that can fill the empty place that used to be their souls. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.