One of the most vivid and powerful of contemporary American slang terms is the phrase “f**k you money.” To have “f**k you money” is to have acquired a level of personal wealth such as you are no longer obliged to do things you do not want to do, and are finally and inviolably master of your own domain. In the 2014 film The Gambler, adapted from Dostoevsky’s novel by screenwriter William Monaghan, John Goodman explains the concept with thuggish eloquence. “Somebody wants you to do something? F**k you. Boss p**ses you off? F**k you. Own your house, have a couple bucks in the bank ... A wise man’s life is based around f**k you. The United States of America is based around f**k you. You’re a king? You have an army? Greatest navy in the history of the world? F**k you.”
The concept is, in a way, a kind of contemporary transatlantic update of the principle that an Englishman’s home is his castle: an American’s wealth is his shotgun shack. For all its ugly acquisitiveness and crude individualism, there is something appealing in its vision of the liberating power of personal enrichment. Who wouldn’t want the kind of money that permitted them to look their every responsibility and obligation, everything that compromised and diminished them, dead in the eye and deliver that message.
I was thinking about this last week, as I watched a video of 13 American tech CEOs sitting at a White House dinner table and taking turns to praise President Trump for his generosity, vision and fearless advocacy of American business interests. Among the tech business leaders at the table are Apple’s CEO Tim Cook, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Google’s founder Sergey Brin and its current CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman. These people are all worth billions, and yet evidently not one of them has two dollars worth of f**k-you money to rub together.
The scene was a piece of Trumpian theatre par excellence. It began with the president, seated at the dinner table between the First Lady and Mark Zuckerberg, serving up one of his famous Trump word salads. “This group of people,” he said, is “leading a revolution in business, and in genius, and in every other word I think you can imagine. There’s never been anything like it. The most brilliant people are gathered around this table. This is definitely a high IQ group and I’m very proud of them.”
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Then, one by one, the CEOs were invited to speak, and one by one they thanked him for his leadership, and for the opportunity to dine in his presence. Trump was roundly thanked for his administration’s policy of deregulating AI, the development and growth of which everyone at the table seemed to believe to be the most important question for humanity, and for America. Sergey Brin – accompanied by Gerelyn Gilbert-Soto, described by Trump as Brin’s “really wonderful Maga girlfriend” – made a point, too, of commending Trump for “applying pressure” on Venezuela. (The dinner took place a couple of days after the US used a drone to carry out the extrajudicial killing of 11 people on a boat allegedly carrying illegal narcotics from Venezuela.)
Tim Cook, having announced Apple’s $600 billion commitment to US manufacturing, said: “I want to thank you for setting the tone such that we could make a major investment in the United States.” The primary means by which Trump had set that tone, of course, was by threatening to impose tariffs that would cripple Apple’s distribution. As Brian Barrett of Wired magazine pointed out, this was “like thanking the school bully for setting the tone such that you can give him your lunch money”. Cook’s self-abasement was exacerbated by the fact that he sounded weirdly terrified, his mouth audibly dry and his voice croaking with discomfort.
The issue of tariffs did not come up at all, in fact, nor did that of immigration – previously a major locus of discord between Silicon Valley and the Trump administration – despite the fact that many of the people sitting at the table were themselves immigrants. Brin, Oracle CEO Safra Catz, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Pichai, and the president’s own wife are all immigrants. Conspicuous by his absence was America’s most famous immigrant tech CEO Elon Musk, who earlier this year had a very public falling out with Trump. (In a social media post, Musk claimed that he was invited, “but unfortunately could not attend”.)
[ Larry Ellison overtakes Elon Musk to become world’s richest personOpens in new window ]
As I watched this round-robin ritual of corporate self-abasement, I couldn’t help but feel slightly short-changed. Regular readers of this column will not be surprised to learn that, all things being equal, I would quite enjoy watching the ritual humiliation of Silicon Valley’s most powerful chief executives. But not like this. No, not like this. (I can’t help but maintain, against my better judgment, a sneaking regard for Bill Gates. This has nothing to do with his philanthropic endeavours through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and everything to do with having learned, from a Netflix documentary about him a few years back, that he brought my first book with him on a trip to Switzerland. Really, how bad could he be, was my thinking. I love all of my readers, even the software billionaires.)
I did find myself asking what had happened to the concept of f**k you money – but only momentarily. Because it is obvious that something more important than dignity was at stake here, something more potent than a desire for mere self-determination. Real money, the kind of money these people deal in, does not speak disrespectfully to power. That kind of money only comes from an accommodation with power, however oppressive, and no matter how humiliating that accommodation might be.
And there is, too, the sense that many of these people are possessed of an unshakeable conviction that the project of building a so-called superintelligent AI supersedes any questions of mere politics. The threat of the US falling behind China in the race to develop such a technology dwarves any trifling concerns about the environmental or economic effects of building it. If democracy must be sacrificed, so be it.
There is nothing surprising, and nothing new, about capital lining up behind right-wing authoritarian power. It is more or less an iron law of politics, one we have seen play out many times, in many disastrous ways. The tech money is saying f**k you all right, but just not to Trump.
