Latest news with #techbillionaires
Gizmodo
30-06-2025
- Business
- Gizmodo
Even MAGA Is Pissed Off About Tech Bros' Dream of Bulldozing Federal Lands to Create New Cities
In recent years, a cadre of tech billionaires have become obsessed with a deeply unconventional idea: the creation of new, privately owned cities. Dubbed the 'Freedom Cities' movement, backers say they'd like to create new special development zones in the U.S. that would allow such cities to be built. In these zones, private investors could write their own laws and set up their own governance structures. According to this project's backers, such communities would be corporately controlled and wouldn't involve a traditional bureaucracy. Of course, to do all this, developers will need a lot of land. The 'Freedom City' movement found its legislative champion in the form of Mike Lee, a deeply out-of-touch, politically unhinged Senator from Utah. In recent months, Lee introduced a provision to Trump's 'One Big Beautiful Bill,' that would have brought tech billionaires' dream one step closer to reality: Lee's bill text would have offered up 1.2 million acres of federal land to be sold off by the Bureau of Land Management and then developed for the purposes of 'affordable housing' and other private interests. Much of that land, some of which sits adjacent to some of the nation's most popular national parks, would have been sourced from 11 Western states. Perhaps aware of how unpopular his proposals were, Lee was attempting to cram through the policy without any sort of public comment. American Progress notes that Lee's bill required 'some consultation with local government, governors, and Tribes' but otherwise offered 'no opportunity for public input.' However, Lee's effort has officially floundered. Over the weekend, the Senator pulled his provision from the Trump megabill due to ongoing opposition within Congress—including from conservative lawmakers in Western states. Those lawmakers, including Republicans from Montana, Idaho, Washington, California, and Oregon, were planning to torpedo Trump's whole bill if Lee's provision remained inside of it. 'We cannot accept the sale of federal lands that Sen. Lee seeks,' the legislators wrote in a letter sent last week. Rather than be the reason that Trump's omnibus legislation floundered, Lee put his tail between his legs and withdrew the provision on Saturday. 'Over the past several weeks, I've spent a lot of time listening to members of the community, local leaders and stakeholders across the country,' Lee wrote on X on Saturday. 'While there has been a tremendous amount of misinformation — and in some cases, outright lies — about my bill, many people brought forward sincere concerns.' For the moment, millions of Americans can breath a collective sigh of relief. The National Parks Conservation Association has said that the bill, had it gone through, would have opened up federal lands directly adjacent to national parks for development—a policy that could have resulted in luxury housing or hotels being built right next to iconic vistas like Zion National Park. Almost nobody wanted this thing to happen. In addition to concerns from Lee's fellow lawmakers, a recent poll by Colorado College found that, of several thousand people surveyed who live in Western states, a vast majority of them support protections for public lands, and are more interested in conservation efforts than they are in development. Indeed, even Trump voters have come out to decry the proposal. 'Strong majorities of Western voters – including self-identified 'MAGA' voters – support policies that focus on the protection and conservation of public lands and oppose policies that would open public lands up to drilling, mining, or other development,' the pollsters found. Viral MAGA influencers—many of whom happen to live in rural communities—had been openly badmouthing Lee's plan to privatize public lands. Indeed, one Trump-voting hunter and gun rights YouTuber, Cameron Hanes, has been posting long, detailed videos slamming Lee's bill. 'It's all BS what he says,' Hanes says in one video, claiming that Lee has been spreading 'misinformation' about who is criticizing the bill. Hanes notes that it's 'actually both sides of the aisle—it's left and right' that hate the proposal. Hanes additionally urged his followers to 'please call [Congress] and make us impossible to ignore.' He added: 'The collective voice of the average American is our only hope.' It isn't hard to see why people like Hanes were so critical of Lee's proposal, as American Progress has noted that 'well-loved recreation spots, popular areas for hunting and fishing, prime wildlife habitat, and even sacred or historic sites' could have potentially been privatized under the bill. Despite aggressive disinterest from a majority of Americans, the lobby to create tech billionaires' network of libertarian dystopias is still in place, and efforts to deregulate and ultimately develop public lands are still ongoing. That's concerning, given this is clearly a government that doesn't care much for the environment. Indeed, the Trump administration recently opened up tens of millions of acres in national forests to potential logging. It just goes to show, you can't keep a bad idea down (as long as the idea belongs to a billionaire).
News.com.au
27-06-2025
- Business
- News.com.au
Truth behind the Bezos lavish Venice wedding
In an arts centre slash club in Venice's least touristy neighbourhood they gather. A high school teacher. A receptionist from a small hotel. A university researcher. They are here for one reason – to tell one of the richest men in the world where he can shove his superyacht. In a matter of weeks the grassroots No Space For Bezos campaign, spearheaded by everyday locals, has become a global story and the wedding this weekend of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez has become a tipping point. The brewing public anger and antipathy towards tech billionaires has truly boiled over and they have become the bad guys of 2025. It's not just about Bezos but also Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley's 0.0001 per cent of the one per cent with their competing rockets that definitely aren't compensating for something. Not that long ago these men were being hailed as visionaries and hoodie wearing prophets the subject of fawning Time covers but who are now some of the most publicly hated people on earth who don't have their nuclear stockpiles. (Yet.) The techno-oligarchy? The Bezos wedding has crystallised the global turn against them. In an increasingly polarised world where we are all segregated in our filter bubbles, there is, shock horror, a very clear trend in sentiment. 74 per cent of Americans disapprove of Zuckerberg and 67 per cent disapprove of Bezos, according to polling commissioned by the Tech Oversight Project this month. Musk is disliked by 57 per cent of Americans, according to a survey from The Associated Press-NORC Centre for Public Affairs Research at around the same time. Around the world, the campaigns against them is only growing. In Marion in South Australia a proposal for a Tesla battery factory saw about 950 people going to the hassle of lodging submissions to try and block it. Such was the vehemence, the Guardian reported, official records had to be redacted, with the paperwork including comments like 'Elon Musk and Tesla are a [redacted] on humanity', 'Elon Musk is a full blown [redacted],' and 'Elon Musk is a [redacted] human being and a [redacted]!'. In London, for much of this year, real-looking ads began appearing at bus stops with slogans like 'ELON MUSK IS A BELLEND. Signed, the UK'. They are the brainchild of a British group called Everybody Hates Elon that grew out of a 'ranty group chat' into such a force the New Yorker recently profiled them. In April, a private donor provided the group with a Tesla and invited the public to smash it. One hundred people turned up. In New York, in April, the Washington Post reported on an 'anti-billionaire bash' that drew 50 people dressed up as Bezos, Zuckerberg and Sanchez to cheekily voice their antipathy towards this new class of men. I'll keep going. Across the US, in states from California to Louisiana, to Nebraska, Utah and Texas more than 100,000 people got off their couches to support Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's recent 'Fight Oligarchy' tour. Hollywood has picked up the anti-tech billionaire theme and is running with it. One the buzziest movies of the moment is Succession creator Jesse Armstrong's Mountainhead about four tech bros who gather at a remote Utah mansion while an algorithm one of them created triggers global violence and apocalyptic danger. Even the new Toy Story is joining in, with the baddie of the fifth movie, set to be big tech in the form of a tablet called Lillypad. What has changed is that Bezos et al are longer seen as, or at least just, bright thinkers giving us exciting new digital toys, but men defined by naked grasping for more sticky billions and unmitigated, unchecked self-entitlement. Zuckerberg, a man who reportedly used to shout 'domination' at the end of staff meetings, was recently photographed landing in a helicopter on his superyacht and does interviews wearing a $1.3 million watch. Musk has 14 children and had a go at dismantling Washington because it took his political liking. Fundamentally, they treat the world and the people in it like their playthings. Bezos wanted to stage what sounds like a little, wee coup of Venice so he could celebrate his second marriage. Musk dumped nearly $440 million into Donald Trump's campaign and, many believe, swung the election in the favour of a man with 34 felony convictions and who was found by a New York court in 2022 of having sexually abused writer E. Jean Carroll in the 90s. In 2018, Facebook admitted the platform had been used to incite violence in Myanmar. The year before, the country's military unleashed a sweeping campaign of massacres, rape, and arson, according to Human Rights Watch. Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk and countless other billionaires zip around the planet in carbon emission spewing private jets and have homes, boats, choppers and transport fleets that have to be counted by the dozen. Basically, they come across as people with absolutely zero regard for what their actions, business and choices might be doing to lesser mortals. They act like demi-deities. Now it feels like all of this has boiled over in Venice. It turns out that even hundreds of billions of dollars and your own space force can't guarantee you the wedding of your dreams. This week, Everyone Hates Elon joined in on the action, banding together with Greenpeace to take over Venice's famed San Marco square with an enormous banner reading 'If you can rent Venice for your wedding, you can pay more tax'. At the time of writing, the anti-Bezos movement appears to be winning. In a matter of weeks the group of everyday Venetians have forced a man with more money than Midas armed with a tungsten Amex to, at the 11th hour, rip up his plans and move the reception to a far less historic backup venue. (Think more concrete by the cubic tonne and less Cannaregio-ish.) This weekend the Bezos-Sanchezes will be forced to toast one another in a building in the city's Arsenale area, full of warehouses, and not the majestic 16th-century Scuola Grande della Misericordia after protesters threatened to block canal access with hundreds of inflatable crocodiles. 'Obscene wealth,' Marta Sottoriva, a 34-year-old Venetian protester told the Guardian, should not 'allow a man to rent a city for three days'. And 'obscene' is exactly the word. This wedding, by some accounts, will cost $71 million. Sanchez will have 27 outfits, reportedly. More than 90 private jets are currently parked on the runway at the Marco Polo airport. It has been rumoured that the bridegroom has flown in ex-marines to secure the event where 200 guests, including Queen Rania of Jordan, Leonardo DiCaprio and Ivanka Trump, will stay in $16,000-a-night hotel rooms. Kardashians? They've got two. All of this in a tiny city where 1000 council homes have been abandoned and are crumbling for lack of funds. You have to wonder how well the Bezos-Sanchezs have thought about their plans. Reportedly also on the schedule, a pyjama party, a foam party and a Great Gatsby -theme event. Things don't turn out too swell for Jay Gatsby, shot dead, the famed novel in part, a take down of the rich. This year F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic turns 100 and in it he writes of a super wealthy couple who are 'careless people'. 'They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness … and let other people clean up the mess they had made'. Maybe Jeff should buy himself the book.
Daily Mail
23-06-2025
- Science
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE The pantry biohacker: I reduced my biological age by 10 YEARS with easy diet changes anyone can do - proving you don't have to be a billionaire to turn back the clock
Longevity is having a moment. From tech billionaires testing stem cell transfusions from their teenage sons to hyperbaric oxygen chambers and infrared saunas, it seems 'reverse ageing' is the latest obsession of the super-rich.
New York Times
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Fantasy of Breaching the Tech Bro's Retreat
Mark Zuckerberg has his Hawaiian ranch with its blast-resistant bunker. Elon Musk, his secretive Texas compound to stow his growing brood. Jeff Bezos, a $500 million superyacht reachable by his fiancée's helicopter. The private retreats of tech billionaires are absurd in their inaccessibility. But on the screen and on the page, they are now hard to avoid. Aboard the plush business jets of the Facebook tell-all 'Careless People' and the luxe 'Triangle of Sadness' yacht, inside the alpine lodge of the HBO satire 'Mountainhead' and the hyperreal virtual worlds of 'Black Mirror' and 'Made for Love,' we are invited to trail tech leaders into their secluded dens. As we hop from the private island of the silly murder mystery 'Glass Onion' to the private island of the pop-feminist caper 'Blink Twice,' we spy from the keyhole as they insulate themselves from reality, responsibility and humanity itself. We cannot escape the material and psychic influence of the technological elite — and now, in our escapist entertainment, we imagine that they cannot escape us. We play at sneaking into their opulent dens, assessing the décor and unlocking a deeper fantasy that somewhere within their fortified walls lie the secrets to their eventual ruin. In these plots, we see how their tech could be unplugged, their power revoked, their private deeds exposed. All it would take is one interloper — usually a woman, often working-class — who has the insight and guile to blow the house down. The villain has always had his lair. In the Bond movies (and their Austin Powers spoofs), tech-adjacent tycoons attempt to take over the world from some underground bunker, space station or mountain retreat. Now that such figures have acquired ever more political and market power, entire films, television series and novels squat inside their private arenas. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Guardian
07-06-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
It's my goal to live to 100 – and it's not just diet and exercise that will help me achieve it
For much of the past century, life expectancy continually increased. In most countries in the world, children could hope to live, on average, longer, healthier lives than their parents. This expectation is still true of the mega-wealthy. In fact, tech billionaires and multimillionaires have recently been fixated on finding the secret to longer life, convinced that with enough money, technology and cutting-edge science, they can stave off the inevitable for a few more decades to reach 120 or even 150 years old. But their efforts aren't trickling down to the rest of us. The world's health crises are getting worse, with life expectancy going backwards in several high-income countries, such as the UK and US. In Britain, stagnation started before the Covid pandemic and has decreased by six months, and in the US by 2.33 years. Obesity rates are rising – not just in wealthy countries, but also in places like Ghana, which has experienced a 650% increase in obesity since 1980. Not 65%; 650%. Clean air is a rarity in most places in the world. Mental health conditions like depression are on the rise, worsened by financial precarity and stress. We've been told for decades that if we just optimise ourselves, we can live longer, healthier lives. So how can we explain the gap between our growing knowledge about living longer and our collective health going backwards? Personally, I've set myself a suitably ambitious goal: to live to 100 with good health and to help others to do the same. According to the ONS life expectancy calculator, I have a 9.3% chance of making it that long (although even more challenging is to have a quality life during this time). As someone who has a strong interest in and passion for health, I follow the latest research on superfoods and what to eat. I've tried sugar-free diets; I went vegan for a period. I've tried all kinds of different exercise regimes from running long distances to intervals to HIIT (high intensity interval training) to Hyrox, outdoor bootcamps, spin, hot pilates, barre and paddleboard yoga. In my mid-30s, I decided to become a personal trainer to combine my interest in fitness, nutrition and wellbeing. However, every time my mind goes down the 'optimisation' route, I'm reminded of my main job and lifelong career as a public health scientist, looking into the factors that affect how long we will live. Most of these are out of individual control and have to do with the country and community we live in. The truth is, this 'self-help' narrative doesn't reflect the reality of how health works. In fact, the focus on personal responsibility and self-improvement has distracted us from the real issue –the impact that public policy, infrastructure and community make in affecting our health chances and longevity. In public health, research projects have studied places where people live significantly longer, healthier lives – think of Japan or South Korea, or within Europe, Zurich, Madrid or Sardinia. In these places, chronic diseases like heart disease and obesity are far less common. Take Japan, which has 80% less breast and prostate cancer than North Americans and half the risk of hip fractures. Much work has gone into analysing the behaviours of people living within these cities and regions. Based on this, we get lists of changes we could be making at an individual level to live longer, such as moving to a largely plant-based diet, sleeping seven to nine hours a night and exposing yourself to a certain amount of sunlight each day. These are of course helpful, but I suspect that hardly anyone in the areas above has read a self-help book or has a daily health 'to do' list. What stands out about these places is that the people living there don't just make individual choices that lead to better health – they live in places where healthy lives are normalised by government and culture. Take the issue of obesity: the UK isn't fatter than Japan because it is a country filled with fundamentally different people who choose to be overweight or are lazy or stupid – that kind of logic is not only naive, but it stigmatises overweight people. In fact it seems like at the level of choice, the UK is more interested in dieting, with a diet industry estimated to be worth £2bn annually and diet books selling millions of copies each year. In contrast, Japan's diet industry is tiny, worth only $42.8m. The main difference is actually in the food environment – including affordable fruit and vegetables, nutritious school meals and support from the government – meaning that it's far easier for an individual to stay within a healthy weight living in Japan. The odds are stacked against you in Britain. You can become the healthy 'outlier' or bubble yourself off from larger societal challenges if you have wealth, time and resources. You can carry an air purifier, drink a matcha latte, swim in expensive leisure centres, even hire a chef to bake you fresh bread and prepare nutritious meals. There's a reason that being a royal or marrying into royalty is one of the surest ways to live a long and healthy life. But for those of us who are commoners, there's no fully opting out of the societal factors completely: we have to go outside to breathe air, walk and cycle the streets, drink tapwater and eat the foods available near where we live or at school. As I talk about in my new book, if I'm going to live to 100, I need more than fastidiously counting my calories and posting pictures of myself exercising on Instagram (which I am guilty of). I need to live in a world where health is a collective responsibility, not an individual one. This means supporting policies that make us all healthier – and politicians who prioritise the conditions for good health such as nutritious food especially for children, active cities, clean air policies, preventive healthcare and public provision of water, which should be at the core of what a government provides its citizens. There are lessons in how to improve life in all of these areas across the world: these are places where good health is built into daily life. If we think of Ponce de León's quest for immortality in the 16th century – at a time when life expectancy in his native Spain was just 25 to 30 years, perhaps the lesson is that the answer for longer, healthier lives wasn't in a fountain of youth but in the rise of stable government, public services, science and community. Tech billionaires could take note. Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, and the author of How Not to Die (Too Soon)
