Prime suspect

Jeff Bezos was jiffy-bagging copies of William Shakespeare’s plays around the time Leonardo DiCaprio was cast in the leading role for the 1996 Hollywood film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet.

Bring it to 2021, and the pair are rubbing shoulders at the same events. Bezos even gets to lord it over him as the world’s intermittently richest person. Unfortunately for the Amazon founder, though, that hasn’t stopped a viral video circulating of his partner, Lauren Sanchez, gazing adoringly at DiCaprio at a film gala.

His response? A death threat, of course! But no, that would go down about as well as fellow world’s intermittently richest person Elon Musk calling that diver who humiliated him a “pedo guy”. Maybe a tongue-in-cheek, implied death threat, then?

So off set Bezos to a steep cliff to find a sign that read “Danger! Steep cliff. Fatal drop”, remove his shirt and pose menacingly. He would then post the photo with a tweet: “Leo, come over here, I want to show you something…” At the time of writing, DiCaprio has left Bezos hanging like some lowly, basement-dwelling troll.

Where, then, do the likes of Bezos and Musk – who has put selling 10% of his stake in Tesla to a passive-aggressive Twitter poll over proposals of a billionaires tax – need to go to be respected, to be free of mockery and regulation? George Monbiot describes tech billionaires’ space colony dreams as follows:

“We would live under their total, unmediated control. With a flick of a switch, they could decide they didn’t like their experiment and kill us all. Their godlike powers would exceed by orders of magnitude even the powers they possess on this planet.”

High-school jocks have a lot to answer for.