And among tech oligarchs, Bezos is all too typical. Peter Thiel, for one, once revealed that his three best ideas for achieving true freedom are “cyberspace”, “outerspace” and “seasteading” (the idea of building new countries on floating oil rigs). In other words, this man, whose enormous wealth affords him access to the most spectacular settings our planet has to offer, actually believes these three cold, dead places are superior to the Earth we have, verdant and alive.

Something similar seems amiss with Elon Musk, a man who seems to look up at the wonders of the night sky and see only opportunities to fill that inky unknown with his own space junk. The venerable novelist Joyce Carol Oates highlighted these apparent limits in the fall of 2025 when she roasted him ruthlessly on his own platform, X.

“So curious,” she wrote, “that such a wealthy man never posts anything that indicates that he enjoys or is even aware of what virtually everyone appreciates – scenes from nature, pet dog or cat, praise for a movie, music, a book (but doubt that he reads); pride in a friend’s or relative’s accomplishment; condolences for someone who has died; pleasure in sports, acclaim for a favorite team; references to history. In fact he seems totally uneducated, uncultured. The poorest persons on Twitter [X] may have access to more beauty & meaning in life than the ‘most wealthy person in the world.’”

The observation clearly got under the tech baron’s notoriously thin skin: he called her “a lazy liar” and began posting approvingly about various movies to prove Oates wrong.