Does becoming a billionaire turn one into an insufferable jerk, or is that an innate quality they bring to the position?

Big-name billionaires — Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg — literally flaunt their irrepressible jerkism, but the disease seems to inflict their entire class of uber-rich corporate royals. Its telltale symptoms are not their grandiose mansions and yachts, but their sudden impulse to instruct us regular people on how to think. In particular, they're now demanding that we get out of their way so they can remake society in their image.

Jensen Huang, for example, a Silicon Valley techno-whiz who heads Nvidia, is now the world's richest corporation. He's demanding that we transform our economy and social structure into a new order of AI dominance, piously chiding those of us who're angry about AI's destruction of our jobs, communities, water, farmland and democracy itself. Tut-tut, the gabillionaire scolds, you petty people must "create new social norms" to advance AI.

Then there's the little-known honcho of SoftBank, a multi-trillion-dollar Japanese tech powerhouse trying to impose AI supremacy worldwide. He's now asserting a corporate "morality" of wealth, calling People who question AI "foolish." He philosophizes that TechWorld "will transform our lives completely and do so in a way that generates profits."

For whom? For billionaires, of course. So there you have a clear statement of the values and goals of AI profiteers: More for them, no matter the cost to everyone else. SoftBank's imperious boss laughs at those of us who dare question his vision of an AI plutocracy, calling us fools who are "spitting upward."

No sir, look again. We are spitting straight at you.

WHY TRUST HIGH-TECH BILLIONAIRES TO SAVE HUMANITY?

Here's an interesting fact: Dinosaurs dominated Earth for 165 million years — and they assumed they always would.

Which brings us to ... well, us. We bipedal, far-ranging Homo sapiens have certainly established our dominance over modern-day Mother Earth. And even though our reign has only lasted about 200,000 years, we 21st-century humans grandly assume that we're ordained by the gods to rule ad infinitum over our planet (and beyond).

But — oops! — unfortunately, we've based our preeminence on the unsustainable consumption of our domain, rather than on stewardship for the ages. Under the global misguidance of corporate, political, religious, academic and other Powers That Be, our large-brained species has ended up making an awful mess of the nest we inherited. Elite plunderers and profiteers have imposed an ethic of greed, inequality and even inhumanity that is devouring everything from Earth's climate to our basic human values of fairness and justice.

Leading this careless assault is a clique of arrogant and abusive high-tech gabillionaires who consider themselves geniuses because, well ... they're rich! Consider Elon Musk, presently the richest of the world's richest, who postures as an uber-brained deep thinker, social engineer and whirling corporate dervish. He presently runs not one, but three mega-corps (Tesla, Twitter and SpaceX) while also rewriting the rules of free speech, telling Americans how to vote and claiming he'll save humanity by colonizing Mars.

But wait — strip away the hype and Musk is just another self-serving plutocratic ravager, a cartoonish robber baron whose "genius" lies in (1) taking credit (and profit) from other people, (2) demanding subsidies and special breaks from government, (3) cheating workers and customers and (4) suing everyone for his failures.

If billionaire humanoids like Elon really wanted to save us from extinction, they should do the honorable thing ... by going first.

To find out more about Jim Hightower and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Timon Studler at Unsplash