Jimmy Carr on Elon Musk

Part of Jimmy Carr’s comedy act involves taking on hecklers. This heckler asked the following question and Jimmy nailed it.

Question: What do you think about Elon Musk being a trillionaire?

Jimmy responded brilliantly.

“What’s interesting is I think Elon Musk is a nonfungible human. There’s no one else like Elon Musk. He’s kind of a weird guy, but he’s doing a lot, right?. He’s created this thing, he’s created that kind of value. I mean, have you ever read Peter Turchin? Peter Turchin, he’s a great writer and he says that in society, empires fall because of two reasons.

One is inequality of wealth. It’s never been wider right and we have social media to supercharge that so we can see who has yachts. We didn’t know who had a frigging yacht 30 years ago, we were just living our lives quite happy.

Comparison is the thief of joy.

That’s one thing that causes it.

The other thing is the overproduction of elites, right? The overproduction of elites is like everyone’s got a university degree now. The school leaving age now is twenty-one. That’s freaking crazy. There aren’t enough sort of positions for people to fill. So you get the elite, but then you get the counter elite of people that are angry because they work very friggin’ hard and they haven’t got the life that they were promised.

It is a recipe for friggin’ disaster.”

Here’s the youtube video