The popular mythology of the billionaire visionary, the lone genius whose restless mind leaps from industry to industry, dragging civilization forward, collapses on contact with the historical record. What actually characterizes the ultra-wealthy tech and finance class is something far more pedestrian: herd behaviour, fad-chasing, and the recycling of a small pool of ideas drawn from science fiction, libertarian theory, and each other’s dinner tables. Each new “world-changing project” is greeted with reverent media coverage, pursued with billions, and quietly abandoned when the next shiny obsession arrives. The fads change; the pattern doesn’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The billionaire space race launched a rivalry between Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, each founded by men who made their fortunes in unrelated industries: computing, retail, and music and aviation. The pitch was civilizational: Mars colonies, cheap orbital travel, the rescue of humanity from a single planetary basket. Government contracts from NASA’s Commercial Crew and Artemis HLS programs pumped billions into these ventures, blurring the line between private vision and publicly funded infrastructure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Branson’s Virgin Galactic collapsed spectacularly after years of delays and a fatal test crash; Virgin Orbit was cancelled entirely. Blue Origin spent two decades and enormous capital underperforming SpaceX, only scrambling to mimic its rival’s operational tempo after installing new leadership. Musk’s Hyperloop, announced as a “joke,” developed as a tunnel for regular cars, and finally abandoned in 2021, traced exactly the same arc: grandiose promise, scaled-back reality, quiet death, and zero acknowledgment of failure. The idea was borrowed from science fiction, specifically Isaac Asimov’s\u00a0Foundation<\/em>\u00a0series and retrofuturist aesthetics, repurposed as personal branding rather than genuine inquiry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When space felt crowded, billionaires pivoted to owning the ground beneath people’s feet. Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and their network backed “startup societies”: privately governed city-states designed as exits from democracy, taxation, and accountability. Around 120 such ventures were catalogued by 2025, ranging from crypto compounds to semi-autonomous zones like Prospera in Honduras, a for-profit city planted on a Honduran island with the backing of Trump-adjacent tech money. The pitch borrowed from libertarian theory and tech-startup ideology: run a government like a company, eliminate friction, attract the “right” people.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Google’s Sidewalk Labs smart city project in Toronto died after failing to work constructively with local government and businesses. Prospera and its siblings reproduced, almost exactly, the company town model of 19th-century American industrial barons, low wages, unsafe conditions, and corporate control over basic infrastructure. The fad quietly faded as it became clear that governing people is not the same as deploying software, and that 90 percent of startups fail within five years.<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n As private cities stalled, billionaires and their aspirational imitators flooded into cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens. Bitcoin attracted identified billionaires riding its 2021 bull run, with institutional adoption marketed as validation and inevitability. NFTs were sold as “the future of digital ownership” \u2014 a revolutionary blend of art, blockchain, and financial innovation \u2014 promoted through celebrity endorsements and engineered scarcity. Justin Bieber paid over a million dollars for a Bored Ape NFT whose value later fell more than 90 percent; Neymar Jr., Logan Paul, and others reported multi-million-dollar losses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By 2024\u20132025, NFT monthly trading volumes had collapsed by more than 80 percent from peak levels, average prices fell below $100, and the overwhelming majority of NFTs had negligible resale value. The structural flaw was identical to every preceding fad: no intrinsic value, manufactured scarcity, celebrity-driven misinformation, and regulatory absence. The cycle was documented in real time and ignored in real time, because the next fad was already loading.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Mark Zuckerberg’s 2021 rebranding of Facebook as Meta explicitly invoked Neal Stephenson’s 1992 cyberpunk novel\u00a0Snow Crash<\/em>, in which corporations replace governments in a virtual dystopia, presented not as a warning but as a business plan. Meta poured approximately $46\u201377 billion into Reality Labs, its metaverse division, over four years. By late 2025, Zuckerberg admitted the project had largely failed: Reality Labs reported a record operating loss of $17.7 billion in 2024 alone, with cumulative losses exceeding $70 billion. Budget cuts of up to 30 percent were planned for 2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Economist Dean Baker pointed out that this wasn’t just a bad corporate bet, it represented a societal misallocation, noting that the materials and talent consumed by Meta’s metaverse bet “could have been utilized more productively,” potentially building affordable housing in the Bay Area instead. The metaverse failed not because the idea was ahead of its time but because it was borrowed wholesale from fiction, dressed in investment language, and executed without genuine consumer demand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With the metaverse cooling and space tourism normalizing, the current status fad is the defeat of death. Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, Bryan Johnson, and their cohort are pouring hundreds of millions into longevity labs, anti-aging drugs, and extreme personal regimens. Johnson reportedly spends $2 million a year on his personal longevity protocol. Billionaires collectively invested approximately $5 billion in longevity ventures despite limited scientific evidence of efficacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The critical analysis that media mostly declines to run is simple: if these people extend their lives meaningfully before such technology becomes broadly accessible, they become landlords, employers, and political actors with even more decades to compound wealth, entrench power, and prevent succession. Critics have warned for years that unequal access to life-extension technology would deepen existing inequalities rather than address them. The Times noted as early as 2026 that “billionaires trying to prolong their life end up wasting it,” pointing to the irony that the extreme regimens themselves consume the very time they are supposed to preserve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The current prestige-adjacent fad pairs neatly with the longevity obsession: if you can’t defeat death, defeat narrative. Billionaire media acquisitions have accelerated sharply, with Oxfam reporting in 2026 that billionaires have tightened their grip on global media to an unprecedented degree. The Ellison family’s purchase of The Free Press for $150 million and the installation of Bari Weiss as CBS News editor-in-chief was presented as saving journalism for the “center-left to center-right 70 percent” of Americans. CBS Evening News has remained in third place, slipping below 4 million viewers in recent weeks, while the network cut 6 percent of its newsroom staff and shuttered a nearly century-old radio service.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Running concurrently with the immortality fad is its demographic twin: if you can’t live forever personally, seed the future with optimized versions of yourself. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and other Silicon Valley figures have adopted pronatalism, the ideological promotion of having as many children as possible, not as a general public health position but as a selective one, focused on ensuring that future children are “the healthiest, smartest, and best.” The movement explicitly ties reproduction to AI development and space colonization, framing elite reproduction as civilizational infrastructure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The ideas do not originate with the billionaires. They originate in a narrow cultural ecosystem: a handful of science-fiction novels, a small cluster of libertarian theorists, and the same conference circuit. Musk’s Mars obsession traces to Asimov’s Foundation<\/em>; Zuckerberg’s metaverse traces to Snow Crash<\/em>; the startup-city movement traces to Ayn Rand and a few libertarian economists. These are not diverse intellectual inputs. They are the same books, read by the same type of person, in the same formative years, generating the same conclusions about who should be in charge of civilization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n VC and billionaire herd mentality is well-documented in behavioral finance. Investors follow trends and peer opinion rather than independent analysis, driven by FOMO, social pressure within tight networks, and the fear of being the only person in the room not getting rich. What distinguishes billionaire fad-hopping from ordinary investor herding is the scale of capital deployed, the media apparatus available to legitimize each new obsession as “visionary,” and the total absence of accountability when each project fails.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ordinary investors face consequences for bad bets. Billionaires have constructed an immunity system. When the Hyperloop died, it was never mentioned again. When the metaverse collapsed, Zuckerberg pivoted to AI and the press obligingly reset the clock. When NFTs imploded, no prominent tech figure faced reputational damage proportionate to the billions lost by ordinary buyers. Silicon Valley’s ideological framework actively reframes failure as iteration, and access journalism cooperates.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n As one analysis put it, Silicon Valley’s model is “hyping specific technologies as universal, structural game-changers in accelerating hype cycles designed to fleece their marks quickly enough to drive growth and cash out before most people realise the technology simply doesn’t work as they were told.”<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n None of this machinery works without a press willing to treat each new fad as destiny. Billionaire “solutions” to aging, journalism, space, governance, or demographics are status projects that require prestige media coverage to feel real: to convert private neuroses into public “initiatives.” When the New York Times runs a long magazine feature on whether the rich and powerful might live forever, framed as a serious question of innovation and human destiny, it is performing a specific service: laundering elite death panic into public-interest journalism. Without that laundering, the immortality labs are just expensive spas for anxious men with too much money and not enough mortality acceptance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Strip away the branding of each fad and two drives remain constant: fear of death and fear of losing control of the narrative. Space colonization is an escape hatch from a dying planet; private towns are escape from democratic accountability; immortality is escape from biological limits; “saving journalism” is escape from a press that might one day say something unflattering. Each project is packaged as a gift to humanity and functions as insurance for its funders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The ideas are not original. They are recycled from fiction, borrowed from each other, and dressed in the language of disruption to disguise how profoundly conservative they are: the same people, with the same power, forever, on more planets, with better skin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The fads depend structurally on media amplification and audience engagement to survive. Billionaire influence on platforms and media is real but bounded by who stays engaged and who walks away. When coverage stops treating each project as visionary destiny and starts asking simple questions: Who benefits? What has actually been built? Who paid the cost of the last failure?, the projects deflate. The Hyperloop died in 2021 and was “never mentioned again.” NFTs collapsed once the celebrity endorsement cycle ran out of new marks. The metaverse became a punchline the moment mainstream media stopped running breathless features about virtual real estate.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n The implication is structural, not conspiratorial: journalists and audiences are not passive victims of billionaire narrative control. They are active participants whose continued engagement is the fuel. A coordinated “hard pass”, treat the next fad as what it is, a rich person’s hobby dressed up as progress, would not require legislation or collective action. It would require only that the press remember it has seen this movie before, and that the audience remember it already paid for the last ticket.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With research assistance from Perplexity.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Overview The popular mythology of the billionaire visionary, the lone genius whose restless mind leaps from industry to industry, dragging civilization forward, collapses on contact with the historical record. What actually characterizes the ultra-wealthy tech and finance class is something far more pedestrian: herd behaviour, fad-chasing, and the recycling of a small pool of ideas […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,460],"tags":[566,197,43,265,166,231,567,535,315,26,568,418,42],"class_list":["post-2546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alexandra-kitty","category-the-damage-report","tag-bryan-johnson","tag-david-ellison","tag-elon-musk","tag-jeff-bezos","tag-journalism","tag-larry-ellison","tag-marc-andreessen","tag-mark-zuckerberg","tag-peter-thiel","tag-propaganda","tag-richard-branson","tag-sam-altman","tag-united-states"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2546"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2546\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2547,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2546\/revisions\/2547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Phase 2: Private Towns and Startup Societies (2010s\u20132025)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Phase 3: Crypto and NFTs (2017\u20132024, peak ~2021)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Phase 4: The Metaverse (2021\u20132025)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Phase 5: Longevity and Immortality (2020s\u2013present)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Phase 6: “Saving Journalism” (2024\u2013present)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Bonus Phase: Pronatalism (2021\u2013present)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nThe Mechanics of Billionaire Herd Behaviour<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
A Closed Reference Pool<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Failure Immunity System<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Role of Media Flattery<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nThe Constant Beneath the Fads<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nWhat Happens Without the Spotlight<\/h2>\n\n\n\n