2022 Was the Year the Overconfidence Man Fell Back to Earth

First, a parable. It’s about a guy you’ve never heard of, and that’s the point. Ernie Garcia II could very easily have landed on this list. In fact virtually all the variables were in place for that exact circumstance to materialize. But he chose a different adventure from which we could all learn. 

See, for a fleeting moment last year Ernie was not simply a billionaire; he was approaching Zuckosphere levels of wealth. The pandemic had shut down car dealerships, stalled assembly lines and produced a singularly disruptive chip shortage at the precise moment urban Americans were fleeing cities, causing used car prices to explode. The market capitalization of Carvana, the cash-incinerating car vending machine Ernie’s son had founded with his backing, had surged to a comical $60 billion. But while the inimitable strangeness of the COVID era had blessed Ernie with unique and preposterous good fortune, he lacked one fatal character trait that would have surely left him a national laughing stock when Carvana’s stock (inevitably) became the second worst performing stock in America in 2022: Overconfidence. 

Unlike the other characters on our list, Ernie did not believe his own press or drink his own Kool-Aid; no. He cashed out, and then (and this is the important part) he shut up. Retreated to obscurity with his pride and billionaire status intact. 

This is the story of all the chumps who didn’t do what Ernie did, and chose instead to make total asses of themselves in 2022. Call it the problem of The Overconfidence Man: hopped up on free money, the internet’s incessant notifications to its most inveterate addicts that they are “literally” followed and liked by millions and billions, and the media’s dutiful amplification of everything that trends, The Overconfidence Man flew too close to the sun, only to plunge back to earth as a weary nation logged off and started leaving the house again. 

Naturally, Elon Musk, the platonic ideal of the peculiar self-aggrandizing, self-parodying personality type that thrived during the Trump years and peaked during the pandemic, tops this list. And, while in certain ways a male trope, women also joined the Overconfidence set, among them a certain Supreme Court justice and a prime minister whose term, it was said, equaled “roughly the shelf-life of a head of lettuce.” 

10. Sam Bankman-Fried 

Just months before Covid broke out, Sam Bankman-Fried moved out of the country, allegedly to dodge being served with a racketeering lawsuit brought by a crypto investor who alleged he was manipulating the market. (The plaintiff, a crypto ambulance chaser of sorts, voluntarily dismissed the suit.) Within a year SBF was Joe Biden’s second biggest donor. By Biden’s inauguration, he was a billionaire. By 2022, the media had pronounced him variously the next Warren Buffett, J.P. Morgan and Charles Koch. And just about as soon as anyone knew who he was at all, in April, SBF was casually describing his business as a ponzi scheme to a Bloomberg podcast. The SEC now says his crypto exchange FTX was fleecing customers from its 2019 inception.

The $8 billion grift was fueled by ADHD meds, gam(bl)ing addictions, Ben Bernanke, the secular Prosperity Gospel espoused by his law professor parents, Covid stimulus funds and age-old cliches about the “liberal media” that only seem to get cheaper and truer. But it was also, mostly, the inevitable result of a deranged system that has inculcated everyone under 35 in the (generally accurate) notion that “fake it till you make it” is the single viable operating philosophy for staving off death of despair. A deluge of elite posts marveling over how careless/sloppy/brazenly illegal the whole thing turned out to be mostly ignored the underlying issue of the unrelenting ponzification of everything — and whether “society” should maybe attempt to do something about it. 

9. Warren Buffett 

If 2022 was a tough year for wealth amassed through fraud and speculation, it was also a year we became thoroughly disgusted by empires built “the old fashioned way” through labor exploitation, which brings me to America’s dark lord of “value” investment, Warren Buffett. 

As Elon Musk has observed, no billionaire has cultivated a more insufferably consistent personal brand than Buffett, who “has managed to create a great image for himself as a kindly grandfather, which is maybe overstating the case.” No shit: the great cornerstone of the Buffett brand is that he thinks he should pay higher taxes, though the effective tax rate of 0.1% he paid between 2014 and 2018 makes this conviction pretty worthless. Like SBF’s effective altruists, Buffett has always planned to offset his avarice by giving the vast majority of his fortune away — to tax-exempt foundations controlled by him and other billionaires.

In the short term, meanwhile, Buffett and his longtime protege Bill Ackman, who own two of the seven (soon to be six) monopoly freight rail systems and major stakes in most others, have wrung nearly a trillion dollars in profit out of the battered lives and gutted families of railroad workers, whom Americans in 2022 learned are on call virtually 24 hours a day, 365 days a year because Buffett et al have shed more than 50,000 of their colleagues in recent years to fund stock buybacks. The scheme relies on loopholes unavailable to mere multimillionaires: freight railroads are essentially protected by federal law from competition and worker strikes; Buffett doesn’t even have to compensate railroaders, or truckers for that matter, for the time they all waste waiting for catastrophically overlong trains to show up.  Even Republicans sided with workers against the Oligarch of Omaha, adding seven GOP votes to a Bernie Sanders-led effort in November to give Buffett’s workers seven paid sick days. It couldn’t muster the sixty necessary to break a filibuster, but the saga underscored a unique theme of the chastening of 2022: outside Capitol Hill, no one’s buying the old Calvinist tropes that have enabled and sustained most great Overconfidence Men for centuries. Even amid unprecedented polarization and media-addled misanthropy, public approval of labor unions is at a 57-year high, while just 11% of voters under 30 approves of billionaires.

8. Sean Patrick Maloney 

The lame duck New York congressman was one of those invincible golden children of Democratic Party leadership whom everyone actually involved in Democratic politics cannot stand. Ahead of the midterms, he became chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the election fundraising operation that largely determines who gets to run for Congress, what their hysterical spam emails will say, and how many TV slots they’ll get for commercials maligning their opponents as MAGA wingnuts. 

Last November six vulnerable Democratic members convened to accuse Maloney of sabotaging their chances at reelection by flatly refusing to endorse campaign ads or marketing materials that focused on anything but the “All January 6, all the time” messaging that had just backfired spectacularly in the Virginia gubernatorial race. But Maloney doubled down, brushing off serious questions about inflation by counseling voters to “eat Chef Boyardee.” Then, in May, in a move the Intercept called “the most brazenly selfish district hop in American political history, Maloney switched districts so that he could run in a neighboring district (already represented by a popular incumbent) with a higher population of Democrats. Reader, he lost. 

But it gets better, because in December the New York Times published an unbelievable story about Republican congressman-elect George Santos, who had flipped a blue district just south of Maloney’s despite having apparently fabricated literally every detail about his life, career, education and the nonexistent animal rescue charity he claimed to have founded. Maloney’s DCCC had produced an 87-page dossier on Santos: his researchers simply hadn’t caught a single one of the fabrications. 

7. Dan Price 

Speaking of due diligence failures: whoa. Dan Price was a class-traitor CEO whose Seattle credit card processing firm, Gravity Payments, paid every employee at least $70,000 a year. He was also a Giant of Populist Twitter, whose feed became a frankly indispensable resource on corporate greed and worker exploitation. There were posts about how delivery apps extorted from independent restaurants, comparing the 93% rise in hospital CEO pay to the 3% rise in nurse pay over the same time period, and cheering on striking John Deere factory workers for demanding “a piece of the pie” while their bosses were raking in record profits. 

It turns out that Price’s whole personal brand was not just a fraud, but a Ponzi scheme of damage control and cover-up efforts. Price hired a ghostwriter and threw his social media operation into overdrive in an attempt to bury an analysis by an independent investigative journalist that suggested Gravity’s entire business model relied on defrauding restaurants and credit card issuers, and possibly concocted the $70,000 minimum wage idea in the first place to discredit allegations he had been embezzling company funds. (Price denies all this, and in 2016 he prevailed in a lawsuit, brought by his brother, that accused Price of overpaying himself.) Price resigned from Gravity after the New York Times detailed allegations of serial sexual and physical abuse. In January, he’s scheduled to stand trial for misdemeanor assault of a 26-year-old woman. Price’s seven-year reign as America’s IRL Robin Hood underscored the impotence of cancel culture as a force for good. If it couldn’t unmask the prolific sexual predation of a leftist Twitter celebrity — real journalism had done that — maybe it was only really good for tearing down dead guys and non-famous, non-powerful people. 

6. Liz Truss 

But if Price’s long con was vexing for the seven years it took to culminate in his cancellation, the 45-day rise and fall of Liz Truss, Britain’s “Disruptor in Chief” with a “planet-sized mass of overconfidence and ambition” (in the words of one conservative columnist) who catapulted to the UK prime ministership, was unnervingly swift. 

Like most Tories who had held the job, Truss’s political platform consisted of slashing government worker wages, cracking down on unions and cutting taxes on banker bonuses. But for reasons that are not entirely clear, even the bankers despised her. And after she fired an 84-year-old civil servant named Lord Butler, a cabal of them sent the pound into freefall. The Economist quipped that the Pruss prime ministership had had “roughly the shelf-life of a head of lettuce,” which in turn inspired a tabloid to buy a head of lettuce and set up a livestream asking viewers to bet on which would last longer. 

In any event, the spectacle brought a much needed bit of levity to fellow Overconfidence Men around the world. “bye bye @trussliz Congrats to lettuce”, tweeted Putin’s one-time stand-in Dmitry Medvedev, to which Elon Musk could not resist replying, “pretty good troll tbh.” 

5. The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (not the global movement)

“Black lives can’t matter under capitalism,” Black Lives Matter cofounder Alicia Garza once fatefully said. “They’re like oil and water.” The more pointed question, in retrospect, was how the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, the charity Garza and her friend Patrisse Cullors had co-founded to expand on their viral hashtag, could forge a more-just path. Given the group’s origin as a Twitter hashtag and its headquarters in Los Angeles, it was hard to be astonished by news of improprieties, but the dozens of grassroots affiliates BLM had ghosted or decisively antagonized even as the group was sitting on at least $90 million in donations were a potent reminder of the fundamental hollowness of social media activism. Garza, who left BLMGF years ago, portentuously criticizing the group for caring too much about online influencers and too little about “knocking on doors” and “building a base.” 

In January, New York Magazine exposed the group essentially as a hipster real estate portfolio with a million Twitter followers. But Cullors dug in her heels, blaming bad press on her house-buying spree on a right wing plot. In April, another bombshell: BLM had made other, secret real estate purchases no one knew about, in particular a $6 million, 6,500-square foot Malibu mansion with no apparent purpose beyond hosting parties for Cullors. 

4. Brett Favre 

As if on cue, news of the “BLM influencer mansion” was followed just two days later by an explosive Mississippi Today series on the shocking $77 million plunder of another pool of funds designed to help the poor and vulnerable at the hands of, among other assholes, the decorated former NFL quarterback Brett Favre. Favre says he’s being “smeared” and had no clue about the intended purpose of the block grant he skimmed to build a stadium for his daughter’s college volleyball team, while the state has sued Favre and 38 others to recoup the money. 

But where the BLM scandal had underscored the folly of conflating social media virtue signaling with real life progress, the Favre saga — abundant with endless emoticon-strewn texts between the quarterback and the governor, the governor and his appointed custodian of the Mississippi state Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, Favre and a pharma bro business partner he helps to secure welfare funds — offered a sinister glimpse into the abyss of a society that had comprehensively fore-sworn even pretending to care about the weak and vulnerable in its midst. In one exchange Favre asks the governor if he knows anyone who might be able to work on the stadium’s then-unfinished locker rooms “in their spare time” — like say, “the prison industry” — which after all, incarcerates a bigger portion of the Mississippi citizenry than any other state or country in the world.

3. RBG 

It was a little surprising, and not entirely rational, when the shock of Dobbs finally knocked the wind out of the stubbornly bloated stock price of one Ruth Bader Ginsberg, whose personal brand had theretofore sustained a cottage industry of T-shirts and tote bags, children’ books and craft gins and even a downtown Washington DC hotel. 

RBG’s death in 2020 had been greeted something like the death of Queen Elizabeth by the Pussy Hat set — as though the grim ramifications of the occasion on the reproductive organs referenced by said headwear were not immediately, terrifyingly obvious. (One Stanford law professor credited the late jurist with bestowing upon her generation “the right to be a lawyer, the right to be a doctor, the right to attend elite colleges, or any college,” and “everything that came after.”) Of course, there was no denying after Dobbs that RBG’s inflated sense of her irreplaceability — or was it invincibility? — had taketh away our uterine sovereignty. After all, the frail octogenarian was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer way back in 2009, a year into Obama’s presidency, and back when Democratic control of the Senate meant speeding through any successor he chose. But no: RBG, high on her own Girlboss supply, wanted her successor to be appointed by the first female president. Instead, we got Donald Trump, and he got the power to shift the balance of the court. 

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As the aforementioned gushing Stanford professor put it: “She gambled with the rights of my daughter and my granddaughter. And unfortunately, that’s her legacy.” It’s also the legacy of the upper middle class delusion that affluent female careerism somehow constitutes a righteous political project, but perhaps that is just the hubris that makes her truly “Notorious.”

2. Vladimir Putin

About ten months into Vladimir Putin’s diabolical Ukraine war, the New York Times Moscow bureau chief Anton Troianovski revealed something singularly illuminating about its origin: the Russian president didn’t seem to have actually talked about it to anyone. In the dozens of military commanders, experts and current and former confidantes to whom he had spoken about the war, no one believed that Putin had “a single meeting before the invasion where the wisdom of going to war was discussed openly.” He had sworn off most meetings entirely during the pandemic, limiting his social circle to a tight “pod” of insiders. “One person I spoke to compared it to a social media algorithm,” Troianovski said; wherein loyalists “read his mood and start to slip him that kind of stuff” they think he wants to hear. A physical world version of some Boomer social media feed, in other words, had essentially helped steer one of the last true Machiavellians of geopolitics into perpetrating a sickening, pointless human sacrifice on Ukraine and his own people. 

2022 Putin was more irrational than the Russiagate junkies had ever fever dreamed. He made the realists look dumb for taking him at his word he was not actually interested in reuniting the Soviet empire. He made the hawks look dumb for warning us the first few months would be a cakewalk. Hell, Putin’s monstrous war even provoked a departure from the usual trainwreck solipsism from Elon Musk, who polled his followers on his own (frankly, reasonable) proposal for a potential peace deal on Twitter in October a few weeks before he formally unleashed his own kamikaze attack upon the social media platform.

1. Elon Musk

It’s weird to recall now that Elon Musk once seemed like, graded on the billionaire curve anyway, a net positive for a cursed American society. Indeed, in the weeks before he took control of Twitter, his company SpaceX was completing its first manned mission home from the International Space Station in “delightfully boring” glory — ending an embarrassing 11-year period during which NASA was forced to pay Russia $80 million a pop to transport astronauts to the station. But then, he succumbed to a raging five alarm social media addiction, and volunteered to pay $44 billion, or a 38% premium to its market cap, to buy Twitter. Which: Who buys the cow when you have 125 million followers for free?

Over the following month, Elon Musk — his brain apparently warped by the insular cesspool he’d purchased — found an staggering assortment of ways to make an ass out of himself: Alienating Twitter’s advertisers, laying off thousands of employees while forgoing the federally mandated 60-day notice, and, just for good measure, running roughshod over the basic notions of free speech he had claimed to seek to restore. He started charging $8 a month for “verification” — but without delegating the task of checking the identities of, say, someone looking to dress up as Eli Lilly for a few hilarious hours. He restored the accounts of hatespeeching wingnuts and suspended accounts that posted the whereabouts of his private jets, citing an alleged “stalker” confrontation whose details he seems to have liberally massaged. The spectacle was alarming enough that the NASA Administrator phoned his contacts at SpaceX to figure out if there was anything he needed to be concerned about. There probably wasn’t: clearly Musk’s companies have only proven capable of producing cars and rockets and solar energy systems in spite of their infantile leader and his overconfidence.