The US academic on why the Mr Burns caricature of rich people is wrong, the double-edged sword of godlike technologies, and why young people shouldn’t follow their passion
Scott Galloway is an American professor of marketing at New York University Stern school of Business. He has founded and sold several tech firms, and served on the board of directors of companies such as the New York Times and Urban Outfitters. With tech journalist Kara Swisher he co-hosts the hugely popular tech and business podcast Pivot. He is a fierce critic of tech companies and their business models and he has written five books, the latest of which is The Algebra of Wealth: A Simple Formula for Economic Security.
You spend a lot of time with wealthy and successful people. Do they have anycommon habits?
Well, the most common attribute I’ve registered is they were born at the right place at the right time. What I’ve found is that the majority of people’s success is not their fault. And I think something that plagues people, especially tech bros, is they conflate luck with talent. But across those who excel, the thing I have found is that if you want to be successful, you need to collect allies along the way. There’s this cartoon of Monty Burns in The Simpsons, the guy who owns the power plant, who has no friends, who lights cigars with a hundred dollar bill. But what I have found is that really wealthy people are constantly put in rooms of opportunities, because from a young age they’ve acquired allies.
Most “tech bros” aren’t even techies, they’re businessmen. Sam Altman and Elon Musk didn’t invent anything and don’t have a high degree of technical aptitude. They got where they are by investing and hyping things other people make. The only household name “tech bros” that actually have some claim to have done something intelligent in tech are the Google founders. I guess maybe Zuckerberg since he was at least involved in the coding of Facebook, though it’s hard to call Facebook innovation rather than, as Galloway points out, luck. But at least he wrote some code in the project that made him famous.
The fact that Elon Musk had to go to court to legally take the title of ‘Founder of Tesla’ away from Martin Eberhard should tell you how much “tech” bros know about tech.
Forums and messengers existed before Facebook came along. The one thing Facebook did right, was make it easier to access.
Same thing with Google, search engines existed, google just made it easier to use.
I am not sure if it was crypto, or NFTs, but something happened to these tech companies, they stopped making things easier to use, and started trying to make every byte of data into a dollar.
Advertising is what happened, and it mostly started with Google. Pretty much the only reason tech companies are so obsessed with hoovering up every scrap of info they can about their customers is to feed it into a model that can be used for targeted advertising. Advertising is in a very literal sense what the modern Internet is built on, for, and financed by. You can pretty much divide the history of the internet into pre-Google when advertising was all about user impressions (the era of page view counters), and the post-Googe era when advertising was all about user data (the era when every website wants you to login using your google or facebook account to better correlate your behavior).