Guard Towers for the Gilded Class
The Financial Times just reported that the nation’s tech titans are spending record sums on personal security. Zuckerberg shelled out $27 million last year to keep himself and his family safe. Elon Musk reportedly travels with 20 bodyguards like some Bond villain or on-stage hip hop performer.
Even Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, the newly minted $153 billion man, had to bump his security budget 60% because people keep mobbing him at conferences—sometimes even in the bathroom (pardon me while I lose my lunch).
You could dismiss this as just another absurd detail from the endless parade of Silicon Valley excess. You know, things like gold-plated panic rooms and CEOs wives pumped full of enough silicon and botox they look like those evil balloons Joker had in the 1980s version of Batman.
But the truth is it’s not just about tech CEOs. It’s a preview of where America is headed. As the wealth gap widens, security for the rich won’t just be a quirky corporate disclosure buried in proxy statements—it’ll be one of the fastest-growing industries in America.
I’m a realist. I get that politics is full of hypocrisy on both sides, and I get that monetary policy is the sacred cow nobody dares touch. Republicans, Democrats—they bicker about culture war scraps, but on money-printing they’re a united front. And that’s the problem: the one thing both parties actually agree on is the very thing that’s quietly driving inequality into the stratosphere.
Both have embraced a de facto version of Modern Monetary Theory—aka the economic cheat code where the Fed can supposedly print infinite dollars with no consequences. It’s magical thinking, the kind usually reserved for children’s video games or, equally as unrealistic, Paul Krugman columns. The result? Every time the Fed steps in with QE, the rich get disproportionately richer, the middle gets squeezed, and the poor get flat-out suffocated.
Democrats, of course, claim to be the party of equity—no longer satisfied with equality of opportunity, they’ve graduated to demanding equality of outcome. But their policies betray them. Endless federal spending, limitless taxation, and a willful ignorance of fiscal discipline all conspire to supercharge exactly the thing they say they want to fix: inequality.
If equity is the goal, monetary sugar highs are not the way to get there. They are, however, the fastest way to ensure Jeff Bezos’ wife’s tits get even bigger.
Republicans at least pretend to care about deficits, chainsawing government budgets like teenagers at a lumberjack cosplay—until, of course, it’s time to pass tax cuts or defense bills, at which point the chainsaw mysteriously runs out of gas. Democrats, meanwhile, run the presses full blast and insist it’s fine because the U.S. dollar is the reserve currency. One side waves the flag of “fiscal responsibility” while quietly piling on its own debt; the other side waves the flag of “equity” while fueling the very inequality they rail against.
Different slogans, same result: taller fences around the rich man’s compound.
Which brings us back to Zuckerberg’s $27 million moat, Musk’s private army, and the bulletproof boardrooms of Bezos. These aren’t just vanity expenditures. They’re a flashing red signal of where the country is heading. If monetary and fiscal policy keep fueling this great divide, it won’t just be tech CEOs hiring phalanxes of ex–Special Forces to guard their mansions. It’ll be bankers, landlords, hedge-funders, crypto bros, influencers, and eventually anyone who happens to be rich enough to flaunt it.
The killing of UnitedHealth’s CEO by Luigi Mangione earlier this year was a horrific tragedy. But sadly, for the disenchanted, it also served as a dogwhistle of sorts.
Think about it: what happens when the bottom 50% sees its quality of life deteriorate year after year, while the top 10% buys new yachts, new estates, and new tits? You don’t need a PhD in sociology to predict the outcome. Human behavior runs on resentment just as much as it runs on survival. When the masses feel brutalized and disenfranchised, society doesn’t become more polite—it becomes more combustible.
To be clear, this isn’t a call to arms or some endorsement of populist rage. To me it just feels like behavioral economics in the raw. The more brutalized and disenfranchised the bottom 50% feel, the more obvious it becomes: if you’re rich in America, you won’t just need a financial adviser—you’ll need a private army. And judging by the $45 million already shelled out in 2024 alone, the rich already know it.
So yes, $27 million for Zuckerberg’s security detail is eye-popping. Musk’s 20-man entourage is absurd. Bezos building a bulletproof bunker in Seattle is darkly comic. But don’t laugh too hard. These aren’t outliers; they’re harbingers. Welcome to the golden age of widening inequality: gated, armored, and very well-guarded.
Your move, Jerome Powell.