#first trillionaire

[jingszo]

"At current rates, it will take 230 years to end poverty, but we could have our first trillionaire in 10 years," states the report, which highlights the growing inequality alongside the staggering net worth of the five men.

The emergence of a trillionaire already tells us that we've grown the pie big enough.

It's now time to think about how to divide the pie a little more equitably, or risk more social instability.

[derseprinceoftbd]

Imagine the unbearable pain of Alfred Quinque. Only person in the commune with a Real Job. I'd have killed myself way earlier.

[heyitslucky]

why am i cursed with being eepy at the wrong times of the day??? so stupid ughhh up all night even tho i got stuff to do tomorrow!!

thats it, tomorrow is also cancelled. everyone stay inside and eep❤️❤️

[rosicheeks]

I’m just so tired

[storm-of-feathers]

Like even millionaires aren't on the same level as billionaires. Do you know why? Bc if you made a dollar every second, you'd be a millionaire in a week and a half, and a billionaire in 32 years.

[rainingincale]

Bro no joke, forgetting that not everyone hates capitalism and then having to try have a reasonable conversation with someone about buying things... *eye twitch*

[thetrillionairelife]

Predicting the World's First Trillionaires

As of my last knowledge update in September 2021, it's challenging to definitively predict who will become the world's first trillionaire. The financial status of individuals can change rapidly due to various factors such as investments, business ventures, stock market fluctuations, and more. However, some of the well-known candidates who were often speculated to have the potential to reach trillionaire status included technology magnates like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other highly successful entrepreneurs in the tech industry. Please note that circumstances and rankings can change, and it's best to refer to the latest financial news and reports for the most up-to-date information on this topic.

[katakaluptastrophy]

The ships … the ships were still full of people. I reached our hand out into space. I extended. I struggled. He said, I bit through the sun first. It’s human nature. That started things going.

Imagine being on those ships (and remember, not everyone in those ships was a nefarious trillionaire) zooming away from earth.

Maybe you've watched mushroom clouds blossoming across the face of the earth as you pulled away, the lines of communication fizzing out and going dead.

Watched...something...happen to the earth. Watched the sun flare and then flicker out.

I sliced through Venus, Mercury, Mars … by that point a couple of the tugs had already launched through the Kuiper. I had to kill Jupiter and Saturn in a fucking hurry. I reached … they blinked away from me … all I could do was hope that they’d watched what I was doing and all died from fucking terror. You and I went full fucking Hungry Caterpillar. We took Uranus … Neptune … crunched down Pluto … found every satellite and craft, reached in, crunched up all the humans, moved on.

You try to make contact with the installations as you pass - the small city on Mars, the helium-3 capture facility at Jupiter, the mines on Saturn's moons, the skeleton crew constructing the shell on Uranus, the Kuiper platform. Maybe the comms are eerily quiet. Or perhaps, you make contact for just a moment, enough time to witness what happens when god doesn't kill people "clean".

As you speed away, the rings of the gas giants burst asunder and the planets seem to desaturate, the readings go haywire as their magnetic fields suddenly destabilise. And something, oh god, something seems to slip away from each one, some absolute acid trip of horror, like some kind of writhing, fleeing ghost.

The moment I found the fleet spinning up to enter FTL, it was too late … I could only grab one of them … and you and I held it in the palm of our hand. I was in there with them. All those frightened people. All those runaway rats.

And then something physically stops one of the ships. Alarms are going off, sparks are flying, lights are flickering, and there's a horrifying sense of presence (if John feeling Alecto's presence was unremitting screaming inside his head, what does the presence of the newly combined John and Alecto feel like? Because I don't think that invovles less eldritch psychic screaming, somehow).

And then you break free, and spin off into some kind of warp of time and space, with the knowledge that you are the last humans left alive in the universe and that something truly terrible lurks on the husk of the earth.

Imagine 5000 years of that tale being passed down through humanity (that's equivalent to the time that passed between the stone age and the present day), as civilisations rose and fell across planets and systems.

And then imagine, one day, being the ship that encountered something they'd never seen before. A ship, of an entirely unfamiliar design, bearing an unfamiliar symbol: a skull. The whole ship is covered in bones. Sleek, designed, inlaid bones. Human bones.

When they hail you, you see humans, but not like you've seen before. They're dressed in strange outfits: military uniforms and robes that look like something from a textbook of the most ancient history. They're carrying swords. Swords! Many of them seem starved and sickly, as if their bodies are consuming themselves. They speak of their empire and their god in strange, archaic words - an impossibly ancient language from the earth that was - of the resurrection of the dead, of the Lord over the River, of necromancy.

And you realise that however horrifying the tales of the earth's death in fire, there are things worse than death.

[babybutchianthe]

to the people who want to have a conversation about john's being an indigenous man, a māori man, i would like to remind you that the first time we see māori spoke onscreen it goes as follows.

one person in this room is interested in the cultures and languages of the world that came before, to the point her name and mission in life are respectively a human chain reaching back ten thousand years and justice for the destroyed earth: a mission that allowed her to persist beyond death, which brings her to being in control of cytherea the first's corpse. the other is john, who is disinterested in her idea of justice for them and speaks over her multiple times.

that human chain, her name? he doesn't respect it just as he doesn't respect her. this conversation is beneath him and so is her full name. he is annoyed into reciting it.

māori is spoken by john here, and it is spoken with contempt for the woman who wishes to avenge earth and whose name preserved a part of the language that he helped annihilate, along with aotearoa and all other māori people.

the first time māori is spoken in the series it is spoken by an indigenous man—who received an extensive colonial scholarship, who was alienated from his culture and sought respect and recognition in predominantly white academia, who was burned time and time again by the systems of oppression that formed the basis for climate change and the earth's abandonment by the trillionaires—who speaks it with a tone of condescension and a complete lack of gravitas because it is irrelevant to him. genuinely sad, bordering on very funny.

the second instance of māori is when he renames gideon the transliteration of her name into māori. she does not identify with it and she likely does not know its significance.

she is also a corpse: killed indirectly by cytherea the first, who presented a threat to harrow's life that could only be dealt with via her ascension to lyctorhood via gideon's death, who groomed gideon into accepting her role as cavalier primary to harrowhark nonagesimus.

killed by one of the emperor undying's fists and gestures, killed by the ideals of cavaliership which he societally instituted, killed due to cytherea the first's disillusionment with him leading her to go on a killing spree at canaan house in order to gain his attention, killed due to john and john's actions and the systems of the society he created.

the only time we see john use the māori language in a way that isn't dripping for contempt is when he renames his daughter's corpse, wherein he clarifies that she is prince kiriona gaia, heir to the emperor divine and the emperor's only daughter, the emperor's construct.

construct, like the skeletons that farm leeks on the ninth. she is not entitled to resurrection: she is to ownership, to being the ninth's chattel in life and her father's construct in death. he uses the language to declare her his.

gideon is the name of his saint, his oldest friend, spoken by the ghost of the woman that birthed her, to the nuns of her house—kiriona is john declaring a corpse his heir, and his daughter his construct.

there is a conversation i would love to have about john's indigeneity: it's the one where we acknowledge that after wakes death he has preserved the legacy of the māori language by using it to name his daughter, a māori woman killed by his society and the consequences of his actions, something she doesn't feel any connection to.

john is an indigenous man, a māori man, who was born into a land settled by colonisers who rendered it rife with systems of oppression that alienated him from his culture, and led him to fall back on the same systems of oppression when he founded the nine houses. indigeneity describes a relation to colonisation and settler capital, primarily in the form of dispossession; when john declared kiriona his, did he do so as an indigenous man or as the emperor of an empire that ships populations between planets like cattle?

[mysharona1987]

[zeestie]

୨ৎ rich girl ୨ৎ

I am so rich it is insane. I am the richest person to ever walk this earth. I have always been rich. I come from old money and my wealth just keeps on growing. I am deserving of all the money I have. I deserve to be showered with money. money is so easy to make. money has always been there. I never find it hard to make more money.

money just keeps on growing. money just keeps on coming from expected and unexpected sources. it is so easy to make money. I am a money making machine. I'm a magnet for money!! I love making money. I was born to be rich. it is my birthright. I'm rich. I am literally so rich it is insane. everyone wonders how I got this rich. I keep on getting money all the time. I make money in my sleep. I make money while having fun. I'm living my best life while also making money.

I make trillions every day. I am the first trillionaire ever to walk this earth. I broke records with the money I make. I make money the way I want to make it. I make money by inspiring others. I'm making money through helping others. all the money I have I got it cos I deserve it. I am so worthy of money.

people wanna give me money. people love giving me money. money is so fucking easy to make. money has always been there form me. I'm so loved by money. money loves me. I love money too, like it is not possible for me not to love her when she's always been there for me yk? money got me the lifestyle I want. I am blessed with the lifestyle I want, like God, thanks for all the money!!

I feel so happy that I get to make money and share it with others. I feel so relaxed and safe knowing that I don't have to work a day in my life. all the bills are paid for. I get to live anywhere. I am so excited to treat all my friends & family with the money I have. I am literally the rich aunt stereotype bumped to a 100!! it really do be so easy to make money!

I've never feared money cos I've always been abundant. I have been taught since I was a child that money is easy to make so that is why money is easy to make. I have amazing beliefs around money so that is what reflects back. my mind is so malleable, doesn't matter what I thought of before cos now ik for a fact that money is the most abundant resource in the world!! it is normal for anyone to get rich like millionaires are just regular people you see everywhere, I'm literally the perfect example of that. money has always been easy to make, it is literally paper, just a number.

I'm so grateful for the money I have right now. Thank you God for always helping me when it came to money. I am so grateful for all the freedom I get to have cos of the ridiculous amounts of money I got. my bank is full. people wonder how I got all this money. well it's with the power of my mind! I decided that I'm rich so instantly I became rich!!

[bb-enablefreebuild]

The funniest thing abt the Lyctors is how out of touch they are. John murdering an entire solar system to get revenge on the trillionaires. Mercymorn killed John even though she knew the consequences of killing millions of people in the Nine Houses System. She would NOT have killed him had his actions not directly affected her. AUGUSTINE TELEPORTING THE ENTIRE MITHRAEUM INTO THE RIVER TO KILL JOHN even though there were innocent people on the ship (Griddle and Ianthe). Gideon the First is dedicated to Duty no matter the price. Live laugh love the horrific results of being immortal <3

[fat-fuck-hairy-belly]

Really cool how Elon Musk is literally one of the most stupid people alive, but he's also predicted to be the world's first trillionaire by 2027.

[liesmyth]

would you be able to give examples/explain more about how race only impacts gideon in the tlt-universe? not being facetious or condescending, genuinely asking. thank you!

Hi anon! If you mean my tags to this post, I wrote

#earth conception of race doesn't impact any character in the series except the canonically brown main antagonist

By which I mean my Worstie and main antagonist of the series, John Gaius (PhD).

I don’t think TLT as a series engages with race in any especially meaningful ways. It’s set in a post-Earth society with entirely different social norms, and there’s no concept of race and ethnicity within the population of the Nine Houses. Physical descriptions of the characters are scarce to say the least, and they rarely spell out the kind of features that suggest specific racial connotations, because the POV characters don’t seem to think it’s something worth remarking upon. iirc, it takes until halfway through HtN for the narrative to confirm that Harrow has brown skin.

[See also Tamsyn’s GtN characters description post. It quotes passages from the book, and you can see how minimal the descriptions are, and she repeats several times that her characters’ appearances are up to the readers’ interpretations. It just doesn’t seem to be a big concern of hers]

Then there’s John, who grew up in twenty-first-century New Zealand and IS explicitly Māori in a way that absolutely impacted his character arc. It's not A major theme of his Nona chapters, but it’s there if you read between the lines. The boarding school he went to, which IRL had a high percentage of low-income Māori students on scholarship. The depth of his climate anxiety, his uncompromising “Nobody left behind” stance before the cryo project was halted, and his fervent hatred of ‘the trillionaires’ afterwards... these are all informed to some extent by his background as an indigenous man imo, and so was the global reaction to his developing powers. The “We were going to put you fellas in jail, weren’t we?” the way his initial attempts at publications are all flat-out ignored by the scientific community and dismissed as culty gimmicky faith healing until he leans into it.

John being Māori is just one of the many pieces of his backstory, and far from the most impactful to what eventually went down, but my point remains that he is the ONLY character in TLT whose racial background 1) affects his story arc and 2) is relatable to the audience. Everyone else is ten thousand years removed from Earth, and I’m just not very interested in using racial identifiers when exploring these characters and their dynamics, because the characters themselves don’t care and neither does the narrative.

[notedchampagne]

Honestly my biggest pet peeve is when people talk about any TLT character as purely evil or good.

The reason these characters are so compelling and this story has such a god damn strangle-hold on so many people is because the characters aren't one dimensional, even the worse man alive John "I did a genocide of everyone in the solar system" Gaius still has nuance, he had both a noble motivation at the start and an understandable anger at the trillionaires. It doesn't make his actions right or good, but he isn't just ontologically evil. Same with Nona being an the purest perfect little kind child.

Point being, these characters are so compelling because they are multifaceted and nuanced in such a human way and it just ticks me off when people treat the characters as if a single facet is all they are

treat! i cant even add anything to this this is all standard, must-read meta to me. i feel like i need to clarify im not being Smarter Than Thou about this - after first reading tlt i still believed in perfect lyctorhood and all of that jazz - but i think it should be a rite of passage for people to read statements like these and come out of it knowing better

[racefortheironthrone]

BOE, the Messenger(s), and the Trillionaires

Introduction

I’ve been doing a re-read of the Locked Tomb - although technically it’s a re-listen, because I like the audiobooks - and I stumbled across a particular passage that hadn’t stuck in my memory before that made me rethink my understanding of the origin of Blood of Eden. Ever since Harrow the Ninth and especially since Nona the Ninth, there’s been this common interpretation that the BOE are descendants of the trillionaires who abandoned Earth and that’s why John is at war with them. I’m not so sure that’s true any more. 

Here’s why. In Nona, when the whole business with Crown/Corona infiltrating the barracks kicks off, there’s an interesting exchange between Camilla and We Suffer about the Oversight Committee that includes this statement:

“Hect, what you must understand about Blood of Eden is that we own things in common, we share responsibilities and resources in common. She could have moved these resources at will...but I must make one move at a time. And above all, I must place the safety of...Blood of Eden’s continuity...even above the mission.” (Emphasis mine.)

This took me aback somewhat, because the emphasis on militant communal ownership doesn’t really fit with the idea of “descendants of trillionaires.” I suppose one could say that it’s been ten thousand years, cultures change and drift over time...except that, as I’ll get into later, the BOE seems very very insistent on cultural preservation, so it would be a bit out-of-character if they changed that stance on this one particular issue. 

And that’s what made me think: what if the BOE aren’t the descendants of the trillionaires? What if they’re the descendants of the non-trillionaires on the FTL ships?

East of Eden: A Theory About What Happened After the FTL Ships Jumped

So here’s the question that’s been percolating in my mind: once you’re out in space, why keep listening to the trillionaires, especially about the vital question of who owns the precious resources brought from Eden and who gets to decide happens next? There would probably be some residual cultural deference to the visionary disruptors, but the traditional answers of property law backed up by the state or men with guns paid to enforce the orders of the capitalists kind of break down when you consider that:

In John’s chapters (and verses) in Nona, we get an account of what happened leading up to and during the Resurrection: according to John, the trillionaires pulled a con job on the planet with their FTL ships, pretending that a fleet of twelve ships, each carrying a few thousand people (made up of “hand-picked guys” and “two hundred nominated people”), was merely the first wave of a planetary evacuation. As Mercymorn and others worked out, there were no future waves, no plan to come back and pick up more, the trillionaires had liquidated their cash and financial assets in favor of buying up material resources they’d need in space, and everyone else was being left for dead.

These twelve ships (possibly minus one, it’s not clear whether John managed to destroy the one he grabbed before it jumped) and the 20-odd thousand people on them must be the ancestors of exo-humanity as it exists in the myriadic year. But we know that of those 20-odd thousand people, only a “half-dozen” were the trillionaires. Everyone else was staff they’d selected to do the work of planetary colonization, plus a tiny group of people chosen by the governments of Earth Eden. 

other than 200 randos who are likely to be recruited from the ranks of elected officials and upper management bureaucracy rather than Special Forces, the forces of the state are not only light-years away but also just got eaten by John Gaius.

it’s a bit harder to pull off the Jay Gould method when you’ve turned all of your cash into raw materials, there’s nowhere to spend cash in space, and it doesn’t take long for men with guns in that scenario to decide that the resources belong to them actually, because they have the guns. 

While we know that some form of a market economy exists on New Rho and the other exo-planets, there doesn’t seem to be any sign of an oligarchical ruling class based on ownership of capital. Rather, we see a state of anarchy where there is no hegemonic entity but duelling centers of power. This suggests to me that the trillionaires’ power did not last very long after human settlement outside the solar system, possibly due to a (potentially bloodless) revolution in which the only surviving members of humanity just decided not to listen to six old (white) men and took their shit in order to survive.

In that scenario, I could see it being the case that the collective memory of communal ownership of property in the midst of a crisis could linger among a certain sub-population and provide the origin for this aspect of BOE’s internal culture. 

So where did BOE come from?

Well, in large part it emerged as an organic response to John Gaius’ imperialist campaign against exo-humanity. As I noted elsewhere, John’s revenge against those who abandoned Earth in her hour of need is essentially a re-enactment of colonialism - the Cohort shows up with their overwhelming military might, forces the local population into subjugation with unequal treaties, imposes its language and customs, destroys the natural environment in a drive for short-term resource extraction, and then forces people into an endless cycle of being resettled on reservations over and over again - which makes a certain sick sense, in that it’s probably the worst thing that a Kiwi of Maori heritage could think of doing to their enemies. 

He even goes to the extent of modelling the Cohort uniforms on 19th century British Army uniforms with the colors reversed, and coming up with his own gloss on the Christianity that was imposed on indigenous populations in the name of “civilizing” them. This campaign is only mystifying to outside observers like Augustine and Coronabeth because they don’t have the cultural context to know what John’s up to (in no small part because he’s used his necromantic powers and political position in order to suppress all knowledge of that context). 

And thus, it’s not that surprising that John’s imperialism provoked anti-colonial resistance: when his Empire made contact with exo-humanity, to the extent that anyone still remembered him, it was as the horrific necromantic cult leader who murdered the ten billion and destroyed Eden, and now he’s come to finish the job in the name of collective punishment for the sins of six dead men, and by the way he’s bringing death and the defilement of the dead and the destruction of everything you’ve ever built with him. There probably have been dozens and hundreds of resistance movements - some local, some planetary, some multi-planetary - that rose up and got crushed over thousands of years. 

So what makes BOE different from all other resistance movements?

The Messenger(s)

I want to go back a few thousand years and talk about what happened when the FTL ships managed to escape the solar system. While interplanetary colonization would always be an incredibly stressful experience even without a revolution, the fact that all of this was happening in the wake of John nuking Earth and killing the ten billion, then devouring the solar system, and their narrow escape from his wrothful grasp would have added an entirely different level of terror to the event - but also a new sense of responsibility. 

Because - regardless of whether people on the FTL ships knew about the trillionaires’ supposed plan to abandon humanity on Earth or believed John’s accusations - they were now the sole survivors of humanity, the carriers of all culture and history. The ao3 author Griselda_Gimpel has a really good series of fics imagining the development of exo-humanity from the FTL ships onwards, and in one scene they mention the enormous sense of cultural loss that people on those ships would have felt when they realized that the internet was gone forever. 

And this got me thinking: what if some nerds on those ships had that kind of profound reaction and decided to preserve as much of Earth’s heritage as possible? How would you do that with limited access to computer storage and humanity potentially scattering across multiple planets, and knowledge being lost forever with the march of time as the original settler generation died off and was replaced by new generations born outside the solar system? I think the answer is:

Oral tradition. See, one of the things that fans of the series have been talking about for a while is the implications of the myriadic duration of the Empire, what that would have done to language and culture in the Nine Houses and among BOE, how is it that people can still be speaking the same language or reading the same writing as from the time of the Resurrection, let alone remember memes and cultural references from the 21st century? This is a fair reaction from a Western perspective - after all, ten thousand years ago would be roughly 8000 BCE or smack dab in the Early Neolithic. Surely it would have been impossible for the memory of Earth to have survived that long. 

But, as people have said, Tamsyn Muir is writing a very Kiwi series. And one of the things that is very distinctive about the culture of Aotearoa is the oral traditions of the Maori and Pasifika cultures more generally. While Maori oral histories go back to the 13th century CE when Aotearoa was settled, Australian Aboriginal oral tradition goes back as far as potentially 30,000-40,000 years. Oral tradition is not perfectly reliable, it undergoes drift and change over time, it can experience loss and disruption (from colonization, for example), but it can endure across millennia. 

My theory is that these nerds on the FTL ships or their descendants dedicated themselves to the mission of cultural preservation through oral tradition, and thus the Messengers were born. And at some point, the Messengers met up with Blood of Eden and explained that John Gaius’ colonial campaign wasn’t just an unjustified act of aggression and imperialism, but an act of cultural genocide stretching back 10,000 years:

“I charge you with...the utter disintegration of institutions political and social, languages, cultures, religions, all niceties and personal liberties of the nations, by use of-”

“...they’re dead words--a human chain reaching back ten thousand years...how did they feel?” (Harrow the Ninth)

Somewhere around this point, then, BOE took as its mission the preservation of the Messengers, which is why they are given BOE bodyguards, why discharging a weapon in their presence is grounds for execution, and why they are both deeply respected and honored by BOE but kept away from sensitive missions and not necessarily kept in the loop on critical intel. 

Why AIM is “They”

This part of my theory suggested an explanation for why AIM is called “they” by Blood of Eden, and why Palamedes Sextus sensed a necromantic implant when they “stumbled” into AIM at the school. We know that the Sixth House has been in contact with Blood of Eden for a very long time, and that Cassiopeia was not only responsible for the Sixth’s “break clause” but also was BOE’s “Source Gram.”

My theory is that Cassiopeia and the Sixth, being a bunch of librarian nerds obsessed with the preservation of cultural knowledge, would never have been entirely comfortable with taking John Gaius’ word for what happened during the Resurrection and what life was like on pre-Resurrection Earth. The natural place to look for an alternate source of documentation would be exo-humanity, and I think she/they went looking clandestinely and came across the Messengers and BOE. Somehow, they avoided killing each other and came to a modus vivendi.

I think part of this modus vivendi was an offer by Cassiopeia/the Sixth to provide the Messengers with an improved means of preserving their oral tradition: namely, a necromantic implant that would preserve the ghosts of dead Messengers and let them communicate with their successors, ensuring that the oral tradition could be passed down perfectly from generation to generation. After all, not only are the Sixth House spirit magicians, but they are specialist psychometricians who know better than anyone else how to pull information about and from the past from material objects, and it was Doctor Sex who gave Palamedes the idea for preserving revenant spirits after death by giving them a physical anchor. 

Hence, AIM is they because they are a collective “human chain” of all the Messengers who came before them - they have the voices of hundreds of cultural preservations in their heads, telling them of all that was lost with the fall of Eden. No wonder they want to play school teacher and be “she” for a while. 

Conclusion

TLDR: BOE aren’t trillionaires, they’re commie terrorists with a fetish for cultural preservation. So I guess this makes the whole war a case of leftist infighting, considered in the long run?