These rich Americans are the undisputed masters of opening their mouths to insert their feet. If we are being generous, we can say they are thoughtless. The truth is, they are so out of touch they may as well be orbiting on one of Elon Musk’s satellites, trying to read the room down here.
Here are some of their finest.
1. Elon Musk
In a July interview, Musk told The Economist that money “won’t matter in 2036,” because robots and AI will produce more than anyone could consume. But consider the timing. SpaceX had just gone public at a valuation counted in dollars, and its investors expect to be paid back in the same currency Musk says is on its way out. His own interviewer flagged the problem on the spot.
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2. Donald Trump
Asked at a 2015 town hall whether he’d ever been told no, Trump reached for a humble origin story: His father gave him “a small loan of a million dollars.” A million-dollar loan sounds pretty easy to most people, the moderator noted. Trump dug in, saying a million “isn’t very much compared to what I’ve built.”
Records later showed he collected hundreds of millions from his father’s business. The bootstrap came with a very large boot.
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3. Jeff Bezos
Fresh off his 10-minute flight to the edge of space, Bezos used the post-landing press conference to thank the people who paid for it: “I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer, ’cause you guys paid for all of this.”
It landed differently for warehouse staff who’d spent the pandemic fighting the company over wages, now told their labor had bankrolled the boss’s ride.
4. Kevin O’Leary
At the Trump Account summit, O’Leary called the government’s new children’s savings accounts “better than Social Security. It really is.” Better is a load-bearing word.
Social Security pays an inflation-adjusted benefit for as long as you live and does not run dry when the market drops. A funded account guarantees none of that. Treating the two as the same product is where the claim comes apart.
5. Bill Gates
Put on the spot during a 2018 guessing game, Gates valued a box of Rice-a-Roni at $5. It was $1. He pegged Totino’s pizza rolls at $22, nearly triple the real $8.98, and guessed $4 for Tide Pods that rang up at $19.97. The last time he’d been in a supermarket, he admitted, was “a long time ago.” For anyone who tracks prices by the week, it showed.
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6. Mark Zuckerberg
On a widely shared podcast, the Meta chief predicted that by 2025 his company would have AI doing the work of a mid-level software engineer, with app code eventually written by machines. Those engineers earn well above six figures. The forecast aged badly.
By 2026, Meta’s own town hall conceded the technology “hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected.” The end of someone else’s career is easy to call from the top floor.
7. Jamie Dimon
At a 2019 congressional hearing, Rep. Katie Porter walked the JPMorgan chief through a real teller’s budget: $16.50 an hour, a single mother sharing a one-bedroom with her daughter, $567 short every month after rent, food and child care. How should she manage?
Dimon’s answer, three times over, was, “I don’t know; I’d have to think about it.” His $31 million and her $567 hung in the room together.
8. Kim Kardashian
Asked for advice for women in business, Kardashian offered this: “Get your a** up and work. It seems like nobody wants to work these days.” She’s a billionaire whose father was a prominent attorney and whose early fame arrived preloaded with the kind of connections most people never get near.
Effort is real. So is a running start, and pretending only the first one exists is the tell.
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9. Lloyd Blankfein
A year after the 2008 crash, with his bank paying out billions in bonuses and public anger still hot, Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfein described what bankers do as “God’s work” in a newspaper interview. His point, that finance helps companies grow, is defensible on its own.
The delivery, while his industry was still blamed for the wreckage, made it one of the great tone-deaf lines in modern finance.
10. Michael Bloomberg
Bloomberg once explained he could teach anyone to farm: Dig a hole, drop in a seed, add water, up comes the corn. It takes, he said, less “gray matter” than the information age. Farmers weren’t charmed.
Growing food at scale runs on soil science, weather, machinery and margins thin enough to punish one bad call. Calling it simple is ignorant, erphaps willfully so.
Meanwhile, back on Earth
Or maybe not. These individuals live on a different planet, figuratively speaking. They are followed, revered, and listened to as the voices of reason around the U.S. economy. What they say matters, but does it actually mean anything?