Charles Mackay’s „Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” (1841) is reviled by historians and revered among traders. The book is best known for its colourful passages on tulip mania in the 17th century and the South Sea bubble in the 18th. But those wanting to understand business in the 21st should instead turn to Mackay’s chapter on the „epidemic terror of the end of the world”.
Apocalyptic thinking is the strongest impulse in American capitalism today. Elon Musk, a character who could be straight from Mackay’s pages, will soon float SpaceX, a rocket company whose professed mission is to avert existential threats to humanity by establishing a colony on Mars. Mr Musk is America’s richest capitalist in part because he is its loudest Cassandra.
Mr Musk is rushing to list before two other prophets with similarly millenarian worldviews. Anthropic filed paperwork for a public offering this week. Dario Amodei, its boss, has made much of the destructive potential of his firm’s Mythos model, which has thus far been kept from the public. OpenAI, run by Sam Altman, will probably file its paperwork soon. The lab recently published a utopian plan for the social contract after (or, rather, under) AI.
