I Have Thus I Deserve
written on January 11, 2026
This post has no point.
Silicon Valley loves a success story and America celebrates the winner. In podcasts and blog posts, founders tell us how they made it. Luck and starting circumstances are footnotes at best, except for when they can be used to emphasize the story. The message is clear: I made it, so can you.
This belief does something to a person. If success is earned, then failure must be too. If I have then I deserve and if you don’t have, well, then you didn’t try hard enough. Or something else is wrong with you.
And sure, it’s not all luck, you don’t become a billionaire by just being in the right place at the right time. You have to work hard, be smart, take risks. But starting conditions matter a lot, and so do the freedoms you have. Many of the people who built tremendous wealth in the US, were not born there, and came there because the immigration system allowed them to.
Today many of these billionaires are supporting the current US administration. Conversations about inequality, about civil rights, about the vulnerable; they’ve seemingly become annoying to people with money. For years those same people ran DEI programs at their companies, talked about social impact and all this disappear overnight when the winds changed in Washington.
If you have power and money, you deserve being listened to.
I was a lifelong Democrat, I was a megadonor to the Democrats, you know, like, dinner-with-Obama level donor. OK? I couldn’t get a fucking phone call returned from the White House to save my life. The Trump administration is totally different. […]
A friend of mine’s company was really impacted with these tariffs in a bad way. And I was able to call the deputy chief of staff.
— Chamath Palihapitiya
Money buys access and influence. That never was surprising, but in a way we thought of this as being something that you were trying to hide. Not anymore.
It’s so convenient to align with the administration and the solutions of the administration are simple. That they cause fundamental, societal divisions is a price that everybody seems to be willing to pay. After all the message is simple: if you are American, the solution to your problem will emerge once we kicked out the illegals. Then you can take their place and be better off.
Topics of inequality in the world, lack of rights, are cast as distractions, as vibes-killing, as the reason society is supposedly falling apart. The people pointing at problems are blamed for the problems themselves and if for whatever reason the blame cannot be placed there, then it’s other countries.
Many of these billionaires themselves were immigrants, benefiting from America’s immigration system of the past, now they are willing to dismantle it for others.
Without doubt, the numbers indicate that the economy is doing well: stocks are up. Below the surface maybe it’s a bit more complex, after all it seems like the AI boom is carrying it, but still. Many people who are thriving in this economy are cheering on an administration that is dismantling civil liberties at a pace that courts cannot keep up with.
And what does that alignment buy silence on?
People are now powering through any controversy that stands in the way. An innocent woman who was killed by an ICE officer? That person was being attacked and described as the agitator. The victim was attacked online for being gay, for being at the wrong spot, for having not considered her children and provoked the situation. Anyone was at fault, other than the person that pulled the trigger. It really shows how much of humanity is quickly losing out. ICE operates with impunity and with full backing of the administration, even if they cause the deaths and harm to innocents.
What billionaires believe about themselves, America now believes about itself. Might is right and it’s now foreign policy. The US openly discusses seizing Greenland from an ally, captures foreign presidents, wages economic war on partners, inches toward real war. Because it’s powerful, so it deserves. The most powerful economy must also be the most just, the one that deserves to lead.
And the numbers don’t lie, right? The economy is up. It must be fine.
I don’t want to overstate historical parallels. This is not 1938, but there is a pattern worth noticing: economic booms can coexist with and even be fueled by the erosion of social cohesion. Germany’s economy improved dramatically after 1933 and Austria welcomed Hitler’s annexation with open arms. For a while, it felt like winning.
The crash, when it comes, won’t be visible in the economic numbers at first. The changes happen under the surface and they require individual reconciliations. When one’s neighbor is rounded up in the night one will need to come up with a story that makes it okay. If you are a business owner, you will have to come to terms with the fact that rules will become more arbitrary and you need to align with those in power, and why that is how things should be.
But these reconciliations are already happening — and not just among billionaires. The logic trickles down. If you’re not the target, you must be on the right side. If you’re safe, you must deserve to be. The neighbor who got detained must have done something wrong. You didn’t, so you’re fine.
By the time the economy reflects the rot, the damage is already deep.
I don’t have a conclusion here. I just keep watching people I know — smart people, successful people — look at what is happening and see only the upside. And all I can think is the upside can’t be the whole picture.