On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

by Nate Silver

We’re living in a world where focal points are becoming spikier, and wealth accumulation follows more of a power law. The ten richest people in the world were worth a combined $452 billion in 2013—by 2023, that had shot up to $1.17 trillion, about twice as much after adjusting for inflation.[*13] This is not, actually, intended as a standard lefty critique of capitalism, or necessarily as a critique of capitalism at all. Look, I play poker with venture capitalists and hedge fund guys. I’m a capitalist. Rather, I’m saying to take the observation seriously that totalizing utopian ideologies have the potential to be dangerous. And they are potentially more dangerous in a world where instead of power being entrusted to governments—kludgy as they are with checks and balances and that experiment we call democracy—it now increasingly resides in individual people or firms who can accumulate untold amounts of wealth and power almost overnight, as SBF did.