The Meritocracy Trap: From Open Source Ideal to Billionaire Weapon
Part 3: When Billionaires Redefined Merit
In Part 2, I shared how the open source movement created genuine meritocracy based on contribution, only to watch it get captured by corporate interests who redefined merit to serve their needs. But that was just the opening act. In the 2010s, Silicon Valley's new billionaire class would transform meritocracy into something far more disturbing: divine justification for unlimited wealth and an explicit attack on democracy itself.
The moment I knew something had fundamentally broken was when Marc Andreessen tweeted that billionaires were 'the most persecuted minority in America.' This was 2014. The financial crisis had made them richer than ever, and they'd convinced themselves they were victims.
He wasn't joking. The financial crisis of 2008 should have discredited the idea that wealth equals merit. Instead, it created a new breed of tech billionaire convinced that their survival proved their superiority. While others lost everything, they'd thrived. In the perverse logic of market meritocracy, this didn't make them lucky. It made them chosen.
The Philosopher King
Peter Thiel understood the implications before anyone else. While other tech leaders still mouthed platitudes about "making the world a better place," Thiel said the quiet part loud: democracy and freedom were incompatible.
"I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible," he wrote in 2009. The statement should have ended his influence in any sane society. Instead, it launched him as Silicon Valley's intellectual leader.
Thiel believed the masses would always vote to constrain genius, to redistribute wealth, to limit the exceptional. True progress required escape "in all its forms" from politics. He funded seasteading projects, cryptocurrency schemes, anything to build systems beyond democratic reach. When those failed, he decided if you can't escape democracy, you might as well buy it.
In Thielverse, merit wasn't about contribution to society. It was about winning. And winning meant accumulating capital faster than anyone else. This philosophy might have remained academic if not for the disciples who followed. Marc Andreessen transformed from open web advocate to preaching that winner-take-all dynamics were features, not bugs. When Biden proposed taxing unrealized gains, Andreessen flipped overnight from Democratic donor to Trump supporter. The government touching billionaire wealth wasn't just bad policy. It was an attack on merit itself.
But these were still philosophers and funders. The movement needed someone to embody their beliefs while commanding public attention.
It needed Elon Musk.
The Perfect Synthesis
Musk took everything the philosophers preached and made it real. He wasn't just wealthy; at his peak, he controlled resources that would take eleven millennia to accumulate at $100,000 per day. Let that sink in; you would need to save $100k per day since before the dawn of civilization. Yet he genuinely believes every penny reflects superior merit.
"I've done more for the environment than any single human on Earth," he told the New York Times. Not as hyperbole. As fact. Building expensive electric cars for rich people while launching rockets that burn tons of fuel makes him, in his mind, humanity's environmental savior.
But Musk's transformation of meritocracy goes deeper than delusion. Look at the pattern with Tesla: he joined after it was founded, became CEO through boardroom maneuvering, then successfully won the legal right to call himself 'founder.' At PayPal, he was replaced as CEO but still claims credit for its success. In Musk's meritocracy, taking credit matters more than creating value. The market rewards it, therefore it's meritorious.
His true innovation was making the implicit explicit. On Bill Maher's show, when asked about the "woke mind virus," he defined it: "I think we need to be very cautious about anything that is anti-meritocratic."
Seems reasonable, right? Who could oppose merit? But look at what else he considers part of this "woke mind virus": diversity programs, content moderation, environmental regulations, unions, and progressive taxation. Each of these, in his framework, is "anti-meritocratic" because they constrain the wealthy or help those who haven't succeeded in the market.
Then look at his actions. He spent over $270 million to elect a man who tried to overturn a democratic election. He attempted to create a lottery that would pay $1 million daily to registered voters in swing states, essentially trying to buy votes. When Mars colony planning comes up, he envisions a system where creating laws requires more votes than removing them, because too much democracy might constrain the exceptional.
This is how the word completes its journey. What Young created as satire, what open source embraced as "contribution valued over credentials," what corporations corrupted into "whoever profits most wins," Musk transformed into its final form: a weapon against any force that might constrain billionaire power. Democracy, with its pesky one-person-one-vote principle, becomes just another "anti-meritocratic" obstacle to optimal sorting.
The War on Helping
Nothing revealed this twisted meritocracy like the reaction to MacKenzie Scott. After her divorce from Jeff Bezos, Scott did something unforgivable: she gave billions away to the people billionaires ignore. Not to space ventures or immortality research, but to food banks, homeless shelters, community colleges. The unglamorous organizations that help ordinary people survive.
While Gates built institutions and Buffett made pledges, they still operated within billionaire logic: grand initiatives, naming rights, control over implementation. Scott did something different. By 2024, she'd donated $19.3 billion to over 1,600 organizations with minimal restrictions, trusting recipients to know their own needs. No strings. No boards. No perpetual oversight.
This violated the new billionaire orthodoxy. Musk's response was immediate and revealing: "'Super rich ex-wives who hate their former spouse' should be listed among 'Reasons that Western Civilization died.'"
Think about that logic. Helping struggling communities doesn't just waste money. It threatens Western civilization itself. Why? Because in Musk's meritocracy, the poor deserve their poverty. They've been sorted by the great algorithm of capitalism and found wanting. Helping them interferes with natural selection.
When challenged, Musk deleted the tweet. Even he recognized he'd revealed too much. But the mask had slipped. We'd seen what "meritocracy" really meant to its most powerful advocate.
Democracy as the Enemy
By 2024, Musk had moved from philosophy to action, demonstrating what happens when someone who views democratic constraints as "anti-meritocratic" gains real power.
When Thai cave rescuers rejected his submarine idea, he called the lead diver a "pedo guy." How dare they reject genius? When public health officials contradicted him on COVID, he promoted conspiracy theories. Merit means never being wrong. When Twitter employees fact-checked him, he bought the platform and fired them. The meritorious shouldn't face accountability.
His companies survived on government subsidies while he railed against government. He demanded regulations be eliminated for his businesses while using regulations to attack competitors. He preached free speech while silencing critics. The contradictions don't matter when you believe wealth proves righteousness.
This wasn't traditional corruption. In Musk's framework, it was meritocracy perfected. The most "meritorious" man reshaping society to serve the "meritorious" class. Democracy, regulation, charity, even basic human dignity became obstacles to optimal sorting.
The Culmination
Young predicted meritocracy would create psychological damage at scale. He underestimated the scope. It didn't just damage the poor by making them internalize worthlessness. It damaged the rich by making them internalize godhood.
When humans believe their wealth reflects cosmic judgment, they become capable of anything. When they're told democracy constrains their excellence, they'll work to destroy it. When they're convinced helping others threatens civilization, they'll let millions suffer rather than corrupt the sacred sorting.
By 2024, Musk represented the perfect synthesis of billionaire meritocracy:
Thiel's anti-democratic philosophy
Andreessen's market fundamentalism
The resources to implement it
The platform to promote it
The shamelessness to say it out loud
Most dangerously, he had followers. Millions who believed that if the richest man opposed democratic constraints, maybe those constraints were the problem. If he said charity threatened civilization, maybe we should stop helping people. If he declared himself humanity's savior, maybe we should let him save us.
This is how democracy dies: not in coups or revolutions, but in the gradual acceptance that some people deserve more say than others. That wealth proves wisdom. That helping the weak harms the strong. That meritocracy matters more than human dignity.
Musk isn't just a warning. He's the culmination of everything Young feared, everything the open source movement accidentally enabled, everything the billionaire class was building toward. He took their implicit beliefs and made them explicit, their private philosophy and made it public, their theoretical authoritarianism and made it real.
The question now is whether we'll let him and his fellow billionaires complete their project.
Next: Part 4 - The Architecture of Capture. Peter Thiel paid $15 million to buy J.D. Vance a Senate seat. Now Vance is Vice President, Musk runs government efficiency, and Thiel's people control the agencies regulating their companies. But seizing America isn't their endgame. They're building escape routes: Mars colonies, life extension, digital worlds where they'll live as immortal gods while the rest of us die naturally. The future is being decided right now.