Re: <nettime> Tom Hodgkinson: What do they do with all that money? (The

On Thu, 25 Apr 2019 at 22:09, Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl> wrote:

...

Jeff Bezos spent $1.6m and Uber boss Dara Khosrowshahi spent $2 million
on personal security, suggesting that while very important, they are not
quite as important as Zuckerberg. The other point to make is that if
they hadn't made themselves into such arseholes in the first place they
wouldn't have become so paranoid. Most of us spend £0 a year on our
personal security because no one hates us that much.

At one TED or the other, it was in Long Beach so after 2008, I happened to sit next to Bezos and his then wife for breakfast several days in a row. While none of them looked up from their respective screens, it struck me that there was no security whatsoever around them. Inside the TED area, there were at least the Mickey Mouse security of the hired hands of some local bouncer firm, but here we were alone with only the poorly trained waiters. So, has the "keep me safe and comfortable at all costs" trend in the last ten years gone from mosque tourists looking nervously over their shoulders at any backpack without an obvious owner all the way up (sic) to billionaires in the last decade? We know that a body guard can be turned against you just like any weapon can, so it makes little sense to me. I think Bezos is just using media to convey a message here: "Look away". Which is what I did at those breakfasts already.

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