There’s an often-misquoted sentence from the Book of Timothy in the Bible. “Money is the root of all evil,” is the version you may be familiar with. But it’s not money that the Bible says is the root of all evil; it is the love of money.
One stark fact about the global turmoil through which we are living is the concentration of more and more money – and power – in the hands of fewer and fewer people. The 2025 Forbes billionaires lists Elon Musk with $342 billion, Mark Zuckerberg with $216 billion and Jeff Bezos with $215 billion.
Each of these men alone controls a sum of money greater than the gross domestic product of most countries in the world. With such wealth comes enormous power, but because money has drug-like effects, it is never enough. And soon the quest for other types of power – political, particularly – begins to dominate.
Hence we see the remarkable spectacle of the president of the most powerful country in the world hunched over his desk as Musk, his four-year-old son accompanying him, declaims imperiously over his head about his plans for US government reform. If you needed an image to capture the toxic link between money and political power, then this was it. It was enhanced by the inauguration cameos of Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos flanking the newly inaugurated president like the Swiss Guard at a papal appearance.
In pictures: Nicola Coughlan and Maura Higgins stand out on TV Baftas 2025 red carpet
Spring/summer 2025 fashion trends can be achieved using your existing wardrobe. Here’s how
‘Am I too old to wear this?’: It’s a question I never thought I’d ask but here I am
I tried an ancient cure for procrastination for a month. It was grim
All three men showed a remarkable flexibility in their political outlook, moving rapidly to the right as the political winds changed.
Musk originally helped fund Open AI to make artificial intelligence (AI) freely available, so scared was he of the prospect of any one corporation gaining its power. Zuckerberg earlier introduced stronger measures to counteract misinformation and hate speech in his social media platforms. Bezos bought the Washington Post, bastion of journalism fearlessly speaking truth to power.
Fast forward to now. Musk is bidding to take over a commercial Open AI. Zuckerberg is weakening controls over a social media cesspit. Jeff Bezos is causing principled and distinguished journalists to resign from his newspaper because of his political interference in the Washington Post.
But that’s what the love of money does – the Bible’s Timothy had it nailed. Just as drug addicts can come to prioritise a fix over ordinary values such as family and work, so money and power addicts readily dispense with values that they seemed to hold, so that they can feed their habit.
Almost everything shaping US politics in 2025 has been about money. Even the war in Ukraine boiled down to a wrangle about mineral rights in Ukraine and great business opportunities in Russia. The ruins of Gaza became an eye-watering investment opportunity – a new Riviera even. And then, of course, there are the tariffs.
What is remarkable is the shredding of norms that we firmly believed were widely held and accepted. Norms are agreed standards of behaviour that constitute shared values binding people together and are the foundation of human co-operation and trust.
Yes, norms sometimes change: the ones guiding attitudes to women and gay people thankfully altered radically during my lifetime. But nothing compares with the sudden abandonment by key international players of long-established values, ranging from respect for borders, through to affirmation of human rights or simple dignified civility in exchanges with political leaders, diplomats or journalists. Rules are practical implementations of values, and the international rule book has been torn up. The new rules are quite simply those dictated by power and money.
[ Elon Musk has damaged himself and shows no signs of stoppingOpens in new window ]
As I’ve written here before, power changes people’s brains. Enormous wealth and its power make men feel god-like – hence the obsessions of Zuckerberg and Bezos with finding the secret of eternal life, or Musk and Bezos’s interplanetary dreams.
Gods don’t follow rules or yield to values; they set them for others. All that matters is what makes them gods – and that is money and power. That‘s why they can pivot on their politics in an eyeblink, soft left to hard right without a second thought. (Hey, weren’t Thor, Zeus and Jupiter capricious? This is what gods do, bro.)
And boy do the gods hate the EU: all these pathetic rules and values that they are expected to kow-tow to. Bloodless bureaucrats without a billion to their names having the insolence to levy fines on gods’ properties.
There was one billionaire notably missing from the inauguration Swiss Guard. Bill Gates and his $112 billion stayed at home trying to finish off the job of eliminating polio from the world. Gates doesn’t play god because he’s too busy trying to do useful stuff with his cash. He seems to love that more than he loves his money.
I have no idea how happy or unhappy Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos are. But if the research on ordinary mortals applies, it suggests people like Bill Gates are on average much happier and have a greater sense of purpose to the extent that they value human intangibles such as friendship, personal growth and compassion more than they love money, celebrity and power.
[ Jeff Bezos to sell up to $4.75bn in Amazon stockOpens in new window ]
Materialism as your central value is to your wellbeing what saturated fats are to your coronary arteries: Timothy’s “love of money”, in other words, is a global health hazard.
So, as our European Union tariff negotiators check their burner phones through security at Brussels Airport, is there any advice we can offer about how to operate in a world of shredded values where only the voices of money and power are listened to?
Our negotiators are well prepared to focus on the deal – the material benefits to the other side – and to forget appeals to norms that mean little to their counterparts. But one other thing to remember is that shared values are the biggest asset that a group of people can have, and the larger the group, the more precious they are. If your counterpart is dominated by money and power values, expect conflict, disagreement and contradictory positions. Ask Tim Walz or Steve Witkoff.
Human values bind while materialist values divide. That is our strength in a shrunken Liberal-Democratic West – and if we stick with them, eventually we will find a way through this turmoil.
Prof Ian Robertson is emeritus professor of psychology at Trinity College Dublin and author of How Confidence Works: The New Science of Self-Belief (Penguin, 2022)
