Meet SF's Billionaire Simps

On a balmy Saturday morning, a small smattering of people gathered at the far corner of Alta Vista Park — as high above the poor people as possible, and as close to the billionaires as they’ll let us get. The press and the counter-protesters arrived before the organizers. Together,  they outnumbered the billionaire-loving marchers throughout the day, with at least 15 different press outlets, and just as many creative counter-protesters present. 

Most of the approximately dozen pro-billionaire marchers seemed to stem from the same clique. Think relatively young and AI-industry adjacent individuals who are also effective altruists, transhumanists, or dreamers of outer-galaxy colonization. This was an “internet in real life” moment, as in a physical manifestation of some niche Discord server. 

Despite the swarming media and clowns, most protesters were sincerely and bravely standing on what they believed in. There were few who had qualms, though, with a close friend of lead organizer Derik Kauffman noting some confusion: “I’m not sure what the counterproposal is for how else we’re going to fund Medi-Cal, except for confiscating the wealth of billionaires, so I’m hoping to have a chat about that with Derik afterwards,” she said. 

Outnumbered and at times confused, the march nevertheless proceeded. Chants like, “Make wealth, don’t take wealth!”, “Enjoy wealth, don’t destroy it!”, and “Thank you billionaires, stay in California!” abounded as many more bystanders joined in to heckle and jeer. At one point, a counterprotestor took a sign from a protester, but was swiftly confronted and asked to leave the march for “committing a crime.” 

Amidst all the drama and chaos, we were able to chat with a few of the protesters, to hear from them in their own words:

Annie

Annie, a software engineer who moved from Sacramento two years ago, claimed the original idea for the march was hers, although Derik organized it. I asked “of the billionaires you know, are they pleasant people?” She had some interesting views:

“Yea [the billionaires I know] are awesome. I like everybody. I believe in diversity, I believe that you can love everybody, I’m a Christian, so I love everyone. Everyone’s made in the image of God.”

“I want to destroy socialists and anyone that supports them. I want to end journalism as a profession (no offense to you personally) because they’re professional liars. In the case of socialists, they are professionally jealous, envious, stupid people that want to destroy the wealth that beautiful, smart wealthy people have created in this country.”

“Yes, the parasites [referring to the labor union that crafted and proposed a California billionaire tax bill], the parasites do in fact want more blood, they always want this. My response to this would be: spend less money if you do not have enough money. It’s quite simple. They shouldn’t have been spending much to begin with, now that they’ve lost federal funds, they should be spending even less than they should’ve been spending to begin with."

Derik

Derik Kauffman, the lead organizer, moved here two years ago when his AI startup received funding by Y Combinator. He had a lot to say, too:

“I know a lot of people disagree with the framing of this, but I do really believe that billionaires have had a greatly positive influence on the economy.”

“....Every time I order something, some random thing I can never find around here and I get it the next day, I say ‘thank you Jeff Bezos!’”

Kauffman was a keynote speaker at the march. Once the march arrived at Civic Center, he mentioned that:

“Regardless of your opinions on tax rates, I hope you can join me in saying: Thank you to the Golden State billionaires! We’re so glad you’re here.”

Flo

Flo, who moved to SF from Sweden, heard about the March through Twitter. She, too, was an unambiguous billionaire stan: 

“What we’re supporting is not specific billionaires but billionaires in the abstraction. We want there to be billionaires, we want them to keep doing what they’re doing. Even if they’re prats, like Elon, or bad like Bezos. We want there to still be billionaires. There are no reasonable alternatives to venture capital for bringing us the future that we need.”

“[Our country] is not rich enough, we should be much richer. There’s not an abundance of wealth or resources. There never was abundant resources.”

“The only thing that has ever cured hunger is rich people.”

Pablo

Pablo, an unemployed software engineer who moved here from Spain two weeks ago, told us that:

“I didn’t know much about the proposal, but I didn’t like it. But also generally, it seems like people find it so surprising you can be not against billionaires as a group.”

“Billionaires are people too, they make valuable contributions to society.”

Hess

Hess, a software engineer and close friend of Kauffman, had some curious musings about private property and outer space:

“I really hope that we can create enough wealth quickly enough, such that everyone can have everything that they want. Where we give each current resident of earth one galaxy or something — but this is not actually easy to do because it’s an outer space treaty. So I think that space governance is a significantly under-researched area, because if we manage to take over hundreds of galaxies by the end of the century, how do we actually govern this new territory, or if OpenAI launches a bunch of space probes and claims a bunch of galaxies — this seems bad, there will be like an exponential amount of million/billionaires. At that point, sure, there will have to be some sort of wealth tax on the galaxies, we can’t just redistribute them to people. Hopefully, we will think of some sort of mechanism to distribute the gains from automation before we get to this incredible point of concentration.”

Ben

Ben, a software engineer who moved here from England six years ago, demanded “social peace”:

“I’m already predisposed to not be pro any kind of class warfare, and designating a subsection of society and being like ‘these are the bad people that we get to hate’, but I think more specifically that the tax that was proposed was blatantly punitive and had ‘abuse of power’ feelings to it that seemed insane.”

Alok

Alok, an AI safety researcher who heard about the march through friends, speculated on economics and on the psychology of the billionaire class: 

“I’m pro wealth… Like, I want people to be rich-er”

“Look at the graph of Elon’s Twitter usage after he bought it and went mad using it — even the billionaires go crazy the same way we do. Losing their mind on the internet, or just spending too much time playing video games or too much time on twitter. No different from someone that’s not that rich.”

"In my household, we don’t call him Jeffrey Bezos, we call him Jeff Daddy,"

Paul

Paul, a former Uber economist, heard about the protest via his East Bay “Rationalist” community:

“I went to school with Larry Page. In grad school, I could tell that he did not want to control the world, he wanted to control the galaxy. He already had plans for AI space satellites all over, creating a Kardashev shell, and we’re on that trip. We really are.”

“In my household, we don’t call him Jeffrey Bezos, we call him Jeff Daddy ever since Covid, because everyday, I’d walk to the porch and I’d say ‘let’s see what Jeff Daddy sent us today.’”