Mostly, I think they silently cooperate in a way that looks coordinated, but is just individual self-interest that happens to line up.

Plato observed this. It's called oligarchy. He said the good news is that it eventually falls because of the lack of coordination, because oligarchs having their own interests end up conflicting one another. The people also always get fed up with corruption eventually. The bad news is that it will get worse before it gets better.

i think- i think the "invisible shadow government" conspiracies are a cope. if someone voted for the current government that is fucking things up (as the opposition said they would) then it might be hard to admit to having made the wrong choice whilst voting, especially if the current government claims to hold the same values as you "my wholesome christian government that said they'd help guys like me wouldn't be the ones making my life harder! it must be the secret cabal!!!"

i have an ur-conspiracy theory that every elaborate conspiracy theory is a distraction from a simple and straightforward conspiracy. for every "trump is trying to uncover a vast child sex ring" there's a "trump fucks kids and our system of capital protects him"

I think this sums up pizzagate. The actual evidence was woeful but some high up people got very scared and shut it down.

If you're into literature and willing to explore the absurdity of conspiracy theorists then Foucault's Pendulum by Humberto Eco is a great read.

And somehow prophetic regarding the post truth world...

Like Thiel and Ellison. They are pulling the strings like a marionette on our government, but they aren't household names.

If the rich people control everything then it would be normal to put the spotlight on each one of them once in a while just for society to know who holds the power. Instead newspapers gossip about movie stars and a small group of rich people. That's more than smartness.

It’s almost certainly both. It’s the ones we know about (all the stupid ones) and the ones we don’t know about (smarter.)

The only good billionaire is a dead billionaire

You can't be widely known and not known at the same time

He looks like a fucking tweaker

I don't really know how widely known Peter Thiel is. Like the circles I run in know him. He's known here. But does the average person on the street know who is? Not even that does the average news watcher/reader know who he is?

No, they're secret. No way to know. Unless you got insider information. i lick it boom boom dem

Gates made his money off monopolizing technology. You can find memos where he specifically leveraged his contacts with manufacturers to ignore specifications (which Microsoft helped specify) so FOSS like Linux wouldn't work properly.

I truly believe in a world without Microsoft that todays software would be much safer, private and advanced by quite a few years.

Gates only became a philanthropist after he married, there's probably a very good reason she left, even excluding the Epstein connections.

There are no good billionaires.