The riddle of the niggardly billionaires

"It may be a corruption of the Amharic 'negus,' meaning of course 'king.'"

Unfortunately, I recently had to delete a million-view tweet because of a grammatical error. In this unfortunate tweet—this fatal banger!—I described the behavior of our beloved tech billionaires as “negrous.” My enemies pounced.

The correct English word, I was rapidly informed (not soon enough, alas, to edit the tweet!), is “niggardly.” “Negrous” is not, in fact, a word. It may be a corruption of the Amharic “negus,” meaning of course “king.” Sorry, kings! Gray Mirror regrets the error. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

It felt especially proper to delete, since my tweet was not just dramatic but actively misleading. The answer to the riddle is this: it’s not personal.

In general, our genius billionaires are not personally niggardly. They are structurally niggardly. They are objectively niggardly. But, personally, as human beings, they are not niggards. Their characters are impeccable. Their strategies are just ineffective.

For the most part, of course. There are a few shining points of exception, which prove what exceptions prove. The rule, even in 2025, remains the rule. Let’s look at why that is and imagine how it might change.

Philanthropy and power

Philanthropy should not be confused with charity. The purpose of charity is to succor our fellow human beings as all major religions demand. The purpose of philanthropy is to convert money into power: more specifically, structural or “soft” power.

The word “philanthropy” is not even a euphemism. The great irony is that 20th-century philanthropy, properly directed, is the real “effective altruism.” Used for good, power is better than charity. Charity is a gift. Power is a gift that keeps giving. Of course, power can be used for good or for evil—but it always perceives itself as doing good. But it is not always wrong in that! History is always up to us human beings.

The 20th-century American left-wing philanthropic machine was already operating (Carnegie) before World War 1. Because the left-wing philanthropy of today is fat and soft and utterly dominant, it is not a good model for the situation of right-wing philanthropy today. While copying anything is never the right thing, the left-wing philanthropists of a century ago are a better model.

The best way to figure out how to be a right-wing philanthropist is to start from the strategies of left-wing philanthropists a century ago. (This is only a start, though! Never just copy—understand.)

Philanthropy is not lobbying. Lobbying exercises power directly. Philanthropy creates structural power. The dividends of lobbying are direct, and generally aimed at some financial return. Lobbying converts money to power back to money.

Philanthropy generates power by generating prestige. “Soft power” is the attribution of prestige to a perspective. However many tanks the Red Army still had, the USSR was doomed once Western New Left ideas had established themselves among its young elites. Fashion flows downward. The ideas of the elites quickly become the ideas of the masses. All regimes rest on public consent.

Always and everywhere, prestige is generated by “elite human capital.” The power strategy of philanthropy is to capture, maintain and improve this human capital, which has or will obtain high status, causing its ideas to flow naturally down the stream of fashion, thus acquiring structural consent and becoming governing ideas. New, radical ideas first become socially acceptable, then socially required. This process is not fast. At least, it is not naturally fast. But its result is very stable.

Fundamentally, there are two ways to pursue prestige: inside prestige and outside prestige. Inside prestige is prestige within existing prestige-creating institutions. Sometimes, inside prestige is formal (ranks, credentials, offices, etc), sometimes it is reputational, and sometimes, lo, it even correlates with actual merit.

Outside prestige is prestige outside of existing institutions, unconnected to power. There is little outside prestige in the present world, but there is some. It can only correspond to two things: merit, and money.

Outside prestige may even include credentialed insiders—but rank them on a divergent reputation schedule. Their outside identities may even be opaque pseudonyms, to which this prestige becomes attached. Insiders are not bad. We love our insiders. Their inside rank, however, is not our outside rank.

Prestige, popularity, merit and money

The problem with outside prestige is that the signal of outside merit is much weaker than the signal of outside popularity.

Outsiders—habitual, congenital, or both—are all too prone to the pernicious myth of “vox populi, vox dei.” This democratic fallacy, so universal in our decaying time, generates lucrative, fallible, forgettable, useless slop. As with porn, anyone who works a day of his life in any such slop factory will forever reek of it.

My theory is that the customer does not even want slop, not even the proliest of proles—he is just used to slop. What he wants is excitement. What he wants is something to happen. What he needs is the pilot to come on the PA and announce that the plane, which has been on the runway for a while, is actually going to take off. What he needs to do is return to his seat and fasten his seatbelt. As long as he stays out of the aisles and can refrain from rushing the cockpit, we will get him to his destination—a world he never dreamed could exist.

The alternative to both democratic slop and bureaucratic slop (which not even the ruling class wants, either) is premium aristocratic content. The alternative to slop is patronage—which is the only way to fund premium aristocratic content.

Patronage is the creation of prestige. Prestige has to be its own reward. In certain cases, it may be profitable. If profit is its incentive, it will optimize for slop. In our situation, the only possible prestige lies in merit. If merit and popularity are confused, the result will be neither prestigious nor popular. Slop is a great craft, if not quite an art, and should be left to its craftsmen.

Since we are creating outside prestige, in this case, patronage is the creation of merit through money. Merit, of course, cannot be created. It can only be curated. Moreover, inside and outside prestige are never perfectly separated. Things can cross over in weird ways. However, this also cannot happen if merit is confused with popularity. The creation of popularity through money is a different, more ephemeral, industry. Note that it is also a mistake to confuse power with popularity. For my whole life at least, mass immigration has never been popular, but it has always been powerful.

The only meaningful mission of right-wing philanthropy (not lobbying) in the 21st-century is to use patronage to develop informal networks of outside prestige. These networks must blossom into institutions, which will develop soft power.

If these institutions are designed to be self-funding, they will turn into slop factories, or fail. Or both. But success has to be tested. Money is easy to test. How can we test prestige? There are actually two questions here: whether we can define it, and whether we can measure it. Immeasurable success is still success, if it can be defined.

We can define prestige as suction—human suction. What do the best people want to do? Who do the best people want to be? To be prestigious is, inherently, to be envied. What does the envy graph tell us? Let’s look at the 20th century’s prestigious institutions and how they were built.

Consider the New Yorker. While the New Yorker is not my favorite publication, it is prestigious. Why? Because not only does everyone who subscribes to the New Yorker wish they could write for the New Yorker, everyone who doesn’t subscribe to the New Yorker wants to be someone who subscribes to the New Yorker—even if they hate it. Draw that as a social graph. It is not a symmetric graph. Fashion flows downward.

And always, money complicates the picture. New Yorker writers are not well-paid. They are, in fact, terribly paid. Yet it is not hard to recruit for the position. Whether or not the magazine as a whole turns a profit is unclear—it might—but if it does, its market cap might not buy Jeff Bezos’s shoes. It would certainly not buy his yacht.

Generally speaking, although some media companies are profitable, they are the exception that proves the rule. Unless they are slop populist media, they exist in order to matter, not in order to profit—regardless of the details of their corporate structure.

While it is difficult to recognize the very lucrative New York Times as a patronage organization, it is absolutely that—with an absolute hereditary monarch, no less. The NYT could not go out of business. Before it would go out of business, it would turn into ProPublica. It can be a business—it does not need to be a business.

But the NYT unites existing prestige and existing power. It is specialized in sitting on the throne, not in getting the throne. If we want the left to give us lessons in getting the throne—we have to look to the past.

Prestige and power in the past

Perhaps the best practical use of soft power in history was not the postwar fall of the USSR, but the interwar capture of European intellectual leadership by the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations, which funded many professors in Europe and many more as refugees.

The result was a postwar European academy uniformly seeded with impeccably native Europeans of the most American possible perspective. Needless to say, none of this funding ever returned a dime to its foundation. But there have been few more efficient conversions of money to power.

Think about the intellectual graph leading into and out of these professors. It is a pretty… red… graph. McCarthy was definitely on to something. But was he looking at it from the right end? Sometimes we think of all these mid-century sociology professors as tools of Moscow. While there is something to that, it might be more correct to say that, especially during the golden age of the Popular Front, they saw Moscow as a tool of theirs. The Cold War happened not because they realized that Stalin was a bad guy, but because they realized that he was not theirs and would never truly serve them.

The Eastern bloc is only a side channel of the mainstream of 20th-century left-wing thought. The central channel is in England and America. Do you want to understand the history of American Communism? You can understand it by watching four very good Hollywood movies: “Reds,” “Oppenheimer,” “Hail, Caesar,” and “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”

These films portray the movement across four generations—from John Reed and Robert Oppenheimer (def a commie himself sorry), to Herbert Marcuse and Charles Manson. Once you find it hard to imagine Manson without Marcuse, Marcuse without Oppenheimer, and Oppenheimer without Reed, you have the whole picture.

While the film lets you believe that Oppenheimer was not in the Party (he was probably the cell leader), it shows you that everyone else in the Berkeley physics department was. Like Reed and his Byronic buddies, these people were the cutting edge of the future—and they knew it. They literally conquered the world. This is how Marcuse in the ‘50s and ‘60s wound up teaching everyone, or at least our whole institutional ruling class, how to think.

What did Americans turn into when Herbert Marcuse and his ilk were programming their minds? They turned into hippies. What did the hippies turn into? Well, lots of things—including the American mainstream—but also including Manson. Without John Reed, Charles Manson is unimaginable.

The 1960s were not the decade in which American communism withered and died. They were the decade in which American communism went mainstream. While the Communist Party USA certainly withered, that was the “Old Left.” The 1960s were the “New Left.” While the boundary between the Old Left and the liberal elite was by no means clear, there is no boundary at all between the New Left and the liberal elite. What we call “woke” is simply the mainstreaming of the most obnoxious residues of New Left ideology—most of which was generally installed by 1975, if not 1935. There is very little left to mainstream, save only pedophilia and other really marginal paraphilias. And, of course, “freedom fighters.”

(If you doubt this narrative, here are two Wikipedia pages to read: “Stanley Levison” and “Southern Christian Leadership Conference.” Tell me how these pages should be fixed, in order to agree with each other, about each other! Or explain why the horizon of your near-term history has a big canvas seam running down the middle. My explanation is that it is not history at all—just a history-based narrative, no different or more trustworthy than what you would find in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. I hope you’re not hearing this for the first time.)

For instance, one of the most influential human beings of the 20th century (in soft-power terms) was the Swedish professor Gunnar Myrdal. The view of race taught in every elementary school in America today is a mix of Gunnar Myrdal (Rockefeller supported) and Frantz Fanon (CIA supported). (But mostly Myrdal, with just a spicy splash of Fanon—“kill whitey” mildly hinted at, at most.)

What was great about Myrdal is that he was a respected social-democratic European economist, not some notorious stooge of Moscow. It would obviously be a slur to associate him with communism. Claude admits that “in his early career during the 1930s, Myrdal held more radical leftist views and was influenced by Marxist economic analysis, which was common among many European intellectuals of the time… by the time he gained international prominence, he was firmly positioned as a liberal social democrat rather than having any meaningful Communist Party associations.”

In other words: the facts that Myrdal was preaching the Communist Party line on race, and had been associated in the early 1930s with the Party, must be treated as a coincidence. The good professor had “positioned” himself beyond “meaningful” Party associations. This is not history. This is public relations. As soon as you stop with this kind of “history,” you start to realize just how important American communism was.

Whether or not this is a hallucination, it is a typical career path, and I am only using Myrdal as an example. You have to admire these weasel words, “positioned” and “meaningful.” This is like George Michael denying being gay.

In America in 1944, when Myrdal’s gigantic Race: An American Dilemma (mostly not his personal work actually—just published under his personal brand) went viral among the NPR class of the day, was he—popular? Not particularly, although I’m sure his royalties were nothing to sniff at.

But in terms of writing the textbook for how everyone in the postwar world was supposed to think about race, his prestige—measured in objective future influence—was out of sight. “Investing” in Myrdal, though it never returned a dime, was the philanthropic equivalent of being the first check into Uber. Myrdal was a leading indicator. Almost everything that he and his friends believed in 1945, most Americans believed by 1985, and basically everyone in 2025. What’s funny is that they thought they lived in the “free world.” They lived in a matte painting. We still pretty much do.

Why am I describing all this? Well: who funded Myrdal and Marcuse, and many others like them, in the 1930s? It was oil and steel money: not the Tech Right, but the Industrial Left. Not Thiel and Musk, but Carnegie and Rockefeller. And Ford and Gates and… we are all living in the cultural and political world the Industrial Left made. Maybe in the end Marx was right, history is deterministic, and there was only one way they could act. But act they did, and they certainly had an impact—especially in Europe. Soft power is real power.

While it is not strange that Europe is (in certain ways) more uniformly American than America, it is certainly counterintuitive. But think of the spread of any invasive species, which is always a monoculture outside its home range. History does not repeat, but there is something to learn here. We are planting intellectual seeds that will come to shade the world.

They say that there are two best times to plant a tree: fifty years ago, and now. The best way to say that anything needs to be done now is to point out how much better a position we would be in, if it had been done earlier.

Could this 20th-century culture shift be repeated, in reverse, in the 21st century? Of course not. Everything is different. The people are different. The technology is different. And most important, right and left are fundamentally different.

The five filters

Let’s look at the filters that make the “tech right” punch far below its weight in the philanthropic department.

The first filter is that most people who matter or want to matter are liberals, because liberalism is the ideology of mattering.

Every element of liberal ideology makes sense only when you realize that the ideology always has to match what makes liberals matter more. Normal rich people want to matter and so are infected by the normal ideology.

The second filter is that the people who are left may be weirdos, but they aren’t idiots. Very few billionaires are idiots. It happens, but…

Because they are not idiots, they realize that any public action against the regime will, at least in the short term, have negative personal expected value. While sponsoring outside prestige is one of the least confrontational possible actions, it still marks you as an enemy. Who needs that? Whose life is too easy? Certainly not a billionaire. It’s not like he’s retired. These people don’t retire.

Scientists estimate that just these two filters remove 98% of the financial potential for (genuine) philanthropic action. Worst, these are the most sensible people. The remaining 2%, though priceless and essential, are all unstable or irrational in some way. They are not responding in a normal way to normal human drives and incentives.

The third filter is that the tech billionaires are not actually interested in power. If they were interested in power—if they were, in fact, power junkies—they would be (a) normal human beings, (b) liberals. While they would have various rationalizations to justify their perspective, it would always be the most powerful perspective available—which, almost by definition, is the insider perspective.

Now, since they are human, they do respond emotionally to power. Not everyone who drinks is an alcoholic. It’s fun to matter. But people who are not power addicts do not care about mattering in general. They care about specific matters.

While generic power can act on specific matters, it always seems more reasonable to optimize for the matters that actually matter to you. This is an error. Here, even if you only care about specific matters, focusing on generic power is usually more effective.

This is because most significant results are regime-complete—not attainable at all without plenary power. The easiest path to solving any regime-complete problem runs through regime change. To solve the problem, forget the problem. The only problem is regime change. As the regime ages and its flexibility decreases, every significant change becomes regime-complete. Change the regime—then the problem is easy.

When we take the collective power of everyone working on regime-complete problems—and there are an enormous variety of these problems, since the regime in general has very little remaining power to change what it is doing within its own system—we see an energy that would be almost irresistible if everyone realized that their first step was the same thing.

But they don’t. They keep looking for specialized solutions to their private problems, and declare victory if they can so much as put a bandaid on the tumor—when, acting in concert, they could create and install a next regime which could administer any kind of therapy. Not that the malignancy is necessarily curable! It would just be nice to have a chance.

Even ants who only care about their own thing should all be pulling the breadcrumb in the same direction. And who really cares only about only one or two things? The most powerful use of power is not spending power to get results. It is investing power to get more power. Obviously, this gives you more results in the long term.

If there are multiple steps toward plenary power, each step must make further steps easier. Each use of power must create more power. It must not spend power—for example, achieving some kind of objective improvement in governance, at the cost of weakening the movement.

This strategic principle, though completely logical, is the most foreign to those who pass all the other filters, because these people tend to be really good people—and they associate this kind of “Machiavellian” strategic thinking with (a) evil in general, (b) their enemies in specific.

I think there are billionaires who understand this filter. But understanding is not sufficient in this situation. There are only two ways to pass this the filter: instinct (that power instinct normally found only in libs), or logic (as above). The logic chain is quite deep, however.

The fourth filter, which is the most ironic, is that rich enemies of the regime are rare enough that the regime can paint them with the blackest dye it owns. One element of this dye is the entirely veracious picture of progressive philanthropy, inverted and projected onto the dissident billionaires.

Part of the false narrative of these people is that they are just as interested in power as liberal billionaires, and just as effective at wielding it. The result is that they get a public reputation for doing something that they either are not doing, or are doing but in a very different way from the way the public imagines. While in some ways this reputation is negative, in others it is positive.

The positive result of this false narrative is that its targets gain the social reputation, or at least many aspects of the social reputation, that they would have if they followed the philanthropic practices of their opposite numbers on the progressive side. Since they get all of this reputation without doing all of the work, taking all of the risks, or spending all of the money, why do any of these things?

No one thinks this, of course. It’s just how it is.

The fifth filter is that even donors who understand all this logic (and there are some) have the wrong structural processes and habits. These processes are dysfunctional because they are adapted from functional processes in a different field: venture capital.

There are actually two kinds of potential tech donors: entrepreneurs (who are men), and venture capitalists (who are women). The role of the entrepreneur is to initiate the encounter (pitch). The role of the venture capitalist is to reject (usually) or accept (rarely). Swipe left, swipe left, swipe right. The entrepreneur is from Mars. The VC is from Venus.

Entrepreneurs are not usually the best donors, because entrepreneurs are people who like to do things themselves. There are plenty of exceptions, of course. These exceptions are generally familiar with venture capital and pattern their efforts on it.

VCs, like patrons, do help other people do things. However, confusing either role for the other is a serious mistake. Let’s compare the two and look at why.