This bewildering world has robbed everyone from limelight-seeking political leaders to greedy investors of their senses. On the same day, a bizarre hi-tech huckster, once no less fawned over, was convicted of a $10bn fraud and faces imprisonment for up to 110 years. Thus the spectacle of the British prime minister fawning over the banal utterances of the world’s richest man as prophecies from an entrepreneurial god who deigns to walk among us.
Great wealth has always signified status, but today tech wealth also signifies having special futuristic insights denied the rest of us, which the Silicon Valley billionaires are all too ready to dispense and we are too ready to receive.