The billionaire mindset I learned at Bezos' private party: "Empathy is a weakness, there is no failure, none of it matters."

Noah Hawley, the creator of the series Fargo, published a long-form article in the May issue of The Atlantic. He recalls being invited to Jeff Bezos’s private "Campfire" gathering in 2018, where he spent three days with over 80 celebrities. In the piece, he observes that when wealth becomes so vast that everything is essentially free, the word "failure" loses its meaning, and the empathy of these extraordinary capitalists begins to fade. Figures like Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, and Trump no longer pretend to be constrained by the rules of society. The full text is translated by "Fan Shu Ge," and the complete content follows below. (Context: Charles meets with Jensen Huang, Bezos, and four other giants to discuss the "Valley of Death" for startups: "You are all lethal competitors.") (Background: New York Times: Musk treats SpaceX like a personal piggy bank, borrowing $500 million in ultra-low-interest loans.) At the end of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 film There Will Be Blood, the oil tycoon Daniel Plainview, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, is old and wealthier than Croesus of ancient Greece. He beats the preacher Eli Sunday, played by Paul Dano, to death with a bowling pin. Dano’s character, Eli Sunday, was Plainview’s nemesis during his rise to fame and had returned to sell him a piece of land rich in oil. But Plainview no longer needed the land because he had already drained all the oil from beneath it from the adjacent plot—"like a milkshake with a straw"—one of the most famous monologues in modern cinema history. Desperate, Eli begs for money. Plainview refuses, instead chasing him down the bowling alley and gleefully killing him. Afterward, the butler comes over to see what happened. "I’m finished," Plainview shouts. No matter how many times I watch this movie—and I have watched it many times—I have never interpreted this line as "I am done for, my actions will have consequences." On the contrary, the line means that Plainview has completed his journey. Through the accumulation of wealth and power, he has reached a realm beyond the moral universe. In other words, he no longer has to pretend that the rules of human society apply to him. In 2018, I was invited to Jeff Bezos’s "Campfire" gathering in Santa Barbara, California. It is an annual event where the Amazon founder invites over 80 guests—stars, artists, intellectuals, and anyone he finds interesting—to stay at a private resort for three nights. I had recently turned down an offer from Amazon to move my film and television career from Disney, and perhaps because I had refused, Bezos’s team invited me to Campfire, likely to show me just how much influence he wields. On a warm Thursday in October, a fleet of private jets was dispatched to airports in Van Nuys and New York to transport guests to Santa Barbara in the most dignified manner possible. At the time, I only had a vague idea of who else would be there: celebrities, wealthy people, influential figures, and me. The staff told me the guest list would be released only upon arrival. Families were welcome; each child was assigned an on-site nanny. So my wife and I flew from Austin to Los Angeles with our two children, then took a 45-minute private jet flight north, sharing the plane with a television mogul and a comedian. Bezos had booked the entire Biltmore resort and the beach club across the street. He hired a security firm from Las Vegas to ensure our safety and privacy. The weather there felt "expensive," and when we were led to our rooms, they were filled with gift bags packed with luxury goods. Every morning, we gathered in an auditorium to listen to lectures; if you have watched a TED Talk, you understand the format. The year I went, a sitting Supreme Court Justice was interviewed, and a neuroscientist spoke about technological advancements in prosthetics. In the afternoons and evenings, we were encouraged to exchange ideas at cocktail parties and four-course dinners, with no set agenda—simply put, socializing with some of the most elite people on Earth. The most common question I heard was: "Why am I here?" "Why am I here?" asked a 1980s heavy metal singer. "Why am I here?" asked a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, a renowned anthropologist, and a presidential historian. Only movie stars and billionaires didn't ask, because they had done this sort of thing before. It turns out there is a touring circuit called the "Ideas Festival," which many tech billionaires host. If you make it onto the right list, you can spend the entire year traveling the world, eating Wagyu beef, and discussing how to make the world a better place with