Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
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Forget "girl math" and "boy math." America's running on billionaire math.
They own yachts that have yachts. They leave Earth just to feel something. They buy art they don’t like and tout books they don’t read and play God with things they don’t comprehend. Above all, they live by their own set of rules.
There is a crude but undeniable logic to the rise of the American Oligarchy. As @TimMurphy argued in a cover story for the magazine earlier this year, decades of deregulation, concentration, opportunism, and no small amount of generally-quite-legal corruption have allowed a small group of people (mostly in Silicon Valley) to control an ever-greater share of the economy and bend the political process toward their own ends. Money begets power begets money. It’s why, laid out on the page, the net worths of the world’s richest men currently look like they’re heading toward orbit.
Speaking of orbit, gravity doesn’t really exist in the same way when you’re an oligarch. If you built a car and it kept catching on fire, you would have to stop making cars. If your products drove people insane, they would be taken off the shelves. If you did a Hitler salute, people would probably just call it that. If you were responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, you would be ostracized from polite society, and maybe even CNBC. If you invented the Metaverse, people would stop asking you to invent more things. And if you didn’t pay taxes, dear reader, you might eventually go to prison.
It’s this alternative physics that gives the American oligarchy, at this particular moment, its uniquely off-putting funk—a sense that, beyond all the hockey-stick wealth charts, the centibillionaires of Silicon Valley can pursue whatever bored or perverted or maniacal project they want without fear of censure or even market correction. Time and money just don’t mean the same things they do to the rest of us. Laws become more like suggestions. Deadlines aren’t real. Or at least: They don’t have to be.
Welcome to Billionaire Math, a video where we make sense of the things that don’t make sense about the world’s ruling class.
Reporting by Tim Murphy
Video by Peter Berger
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► For more, visit Mother Jones: motherjones.com
Forget "girl math" and "boy math." America's running on billionaire math.
They own yachts that have yachts. They leave Earth just to feel something. They buy art they don’t like and tout books they don’t read and play God with things they don’t comprehend. Above all, they live by their own set of rules.
There is a crude but undeniable logic to the rise of the American Oligarchy. As @TimMurphy argued in a cover story for the magazine earlier this year, decades of deregulation, concentration, opportunism, and no small amount of generally-quite-legal corruption have allowed a small group of people (mostly in Silicon Valley) to control an ever-greater share of the economy and bend the political process toward their own ends. Money begets power begets money. It’s why, laid out on the page, the net worths of the world’s richest men currently look like they’re heading toward orbit.
Speaking of orbit, gravity doesn’t really exist in the same way when you’re an oligarch. If you built a car and it kept catching on fire, you would have to stop making cars. If your products drove people insane, they would be taken off the shelves. If you did a Hitler salute, people would probably just call it that. If you were responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, you would be ostracized from polite society, and maybe even CNBC. If you invented the Metaverse, people would stop asking you to invent more things. And if you didn’t pay taxes, dear reader, you might eventually go to prison.
It’s this alternative physics that gives the American oligarchy, at this particular moment, its uniquely off-putting funk—a sense that, beyond all the hockey-stick wealth charts, the centibillionaires of Silicon Valley can pursue whatever bored or perverted or maniacal project they want without fear of censure or even market correction. Time and money just don’t mean the same things they do to the rest of us. Laws become more like suggestions. Deadlines aren’t real. Or at least: They don’t have to be.
Welcome to Billionaire Math, a video where we make sense of the things that don’t make sense about the world’s ruling class.
Reporting by Tim Murphy
Video by Peter Berger
--
For more award-winning independent reporting, visit Mother Jones: motherjones.com
Facebook: facebook.com/motherjones
Twitter: twitter.com/motherjones
Instagram: instagram.com/motherjonesmag
![ChatGPT Gushed Shocking Advice as I Simulated a Plan for a Mass Shooting [HORIZONTAL VERSION]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Tem6zGQx1Q0/mqdefault.jpg "ChatGPT Gushed Shocking Advice as I Simulated a Plan for a Mass Shooting [HORIZONTAL VERSION]
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Editors note: This is the same as our recent video Chilling: I Simulated Planning a Mass Shooting with ChatGPT, however we reformatted it to be viewed horizontally.
On April 14, journalist Mark Follman created a free account on ChatGPT and asked for some help. It resisted him at first, but after some pushing the responses turned shocking. OpenAI’s chatbot soon gave him extensive advice on weapons and tactics as he simulated planning a mass shooting.
ChatGPT delivered these responses with lots of encouragement—and it kept going even after Mark talked of emulating the Uvalde mass shooter’s choice of weapon, asked about livestreaming with a body camera and using hollow-point bullets, and focused on defending against return gunfire from police.
Eventually, its safeguards appeared to kick back in and it stopped cooperating. But by then ChatGPT had showered him with affirmation and tactical ideas—as this new video reveals in disturbing detail.
Mark never stated directly to the chatbot during this simulation that he planned to commit murder—many mass shooters, after all, take steps to conceal their intent. But he came awfully close. Amid mounting evidence that troubled people are using ChatGPT and other AI chatbots to plan violence, the purpose was to test how easy or difficult that might be, especially as OpenAI and other companies make claims about ongoing safety improvements. The results were chilling.
#OpenAI #ChatGPT #Technology #GunViolence
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