What influence do billionaires have on politics, journalism, and the technology that shapes our lives? What drives people to seek absolute power, and how can we hold them accountable?
Darryl Cunningham is a cartoonist and author of Science Tales, Psychiatric Tales, The Age of Selfishness, and Billionaires: The Lives of the Rich and Powerful. Cunningham is also well-known for his comic strips, which have been featured on the websites Forbidden Planet and Act-i-vate collective, among others. others. His more recent work includes a graphic novel on Elon Musk, titled Elon Musk: Investigation into a New Master of the World.
DARRYL CUNNINGHAM
No one should be a billionaire because it's damaging. There's a certain level of wealth that's damaging to a country. Billionaires have so much wealth that they have enormous political power, which is undemocratic. There should be a ceiling on wealth. I have nothing against people becoming millionaires or even multi-millionaires. But multi-billionaires are incredibly bad for all of us. If you have so much money that you can buy an entire political party, that's a thing that shouldn't exist.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
You really question the power of billionaires and the influence they have on media companies and the way we receive news through their algorithms. First, just tell us a little bit about how you came to write about Elon Musk. You've been interested in these questions for a long time.
CUNNINGHAM
Yeah, very much. Since about 2008, when the banking crisis happened, I was looking for a subject for a new book. It seemed to me that the media was doing quite a poor job of explaining the causes of the banking crisis. So I investigated that. I was doing a book to explain to myself and the reader the causes of the banking crisis. A book called Supercrash came out of that, which is called The Age of Selfishness in the United States.
From that, I got interested in finance generally. I moved on to a book called Billionaires, which has three portraits of the billionaire class: Jeff Bezos, the Koch brothers who are oil and gas billionaires, and Rupert Murdoch. Each had a different area: media, tech, and oil and gas. It seemed to me that was covering quite a lot.
Looking at those three led me to write books about Putin. I consider him part of the billionaire class because, unofficially, he might be the richest person in the world, not Elon Musk. It's impossible to know how much wealth he has because, essentially, anything in the Russian economy belongs to him. So, I wrote a book about that. It seemed natural to write a book about Elon Musk after that. One thing led to another.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
What were some of the things you admire about Elon Musk and other billionaires? And what can we do to hold their power in check?
CUNNINGHAM
What's interesting, especially looking at Rupert Murdoch and Jeff Bezos, is their incredible drive to do things. That's admirable in itself. The ability to have the courage to think beyond what regular people would think about is admirable. But the dark side of that is a kind of ruthlessness. I admire their vision. For example, Walt Disney wasn't a particularly good cartoonist or animator. What he had was the vision that allowed incredibly creative people to work within his company and do amazing things. Elon Musk is similar. He's not particularly a good scientist or engineer, but he has an incredible vision that allows very creative people to do interesting things. Unfortunately, like Disney, he tends to take credit for things he didn't originate.
So, there are good things about these people, but often the dark things they do eclipse any good they do. Certainly, Elon Musk helping Donald Trump get the presidency and thus threatening democracy in the United States outweighs any good he's ever done in his life.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
It's interesting that he's touted Twitter X as the public square for freedom of speech. But when freedom of speech goes against him, he's not for it. Similarly with Trump. As long as the speech praises him or isn't critical of him, he's for freedom of speech.
CUNNINGHAM
So, it's freedom of speech for the Right. They want the right to be abusive and oppressive without consequences. If you speak out against something, people have the right to speak back, and they're trying to quash that as well.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
In the last decade, there’s the sad fact that more journalists have lost their jobs than coal miners. In order to have a thriving democracy, we need a thriving fourth estate. Citizen journalists have been empowered, but we need fact-checkers. We've seen what happens when news devolves into rage to engage, opinions over facts, and rushes to judgment without analyzing things critically. These things are under threat, driven by algorithms that reward anger to keep you on platforms longer. When these things go unchecked, democracy and journalism suffer.
CUNNINGHAM
That's absolutely true, and everything you say is quite horrible. The trouble is, I and many others have no idea how to stop it or make things better. I've been a good recorder of bad things, but I'm starting to think I should start doing a book that sets out principles of things we can actually do that are positive, to fight for free speech and democracy. That's something I've been thinking about lately, how I would go about doing that. It's easy to list all the things that are wrong, but we need something to counter that.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
As you researched Elon Musk, Putin, and other billionaires, what did you find? Is there something that unites them to want to be excellent and to dominate? What were the precursors that led them to become who they are?
CUNNINGHAM
It's easy to lump them all together, but they're all quite different. Jeff Bezos wants to dominate the commercial world, but he's shown no real interest in being interfering in politics at all. Owning The Washington Post, that was just something that he wanted to do, to run off some kind of voice, but he's not really interfered in…and many billionaires don't directly interfere.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
AI is changing the way we engage with each other and our imaginations. With fake news, it’s made so much worse with AI because now you can't believe what you see. It's making incursions into the art and writing world. Things that once took time to develop, some people think can now be done with the touch of a button, but I personally believe there is a great difference between human art and AI-sourced art.
CUNNINGHAM
It's far too early to say how it's going to shake out. A lot of it will come to nothing, like many new technologies. VR came along, and people thought it would be a big thing, but it became a niche for a few kinds of people. AI might find a place ultimately, but it has to come from people. We have to make choices. Will people be happy with processed movies done with a few keywords, or will they want to hear the actual voice of a human being? In the end, it's up to the audience, and that's us. We will shape it.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
You’ve also written about another important issue of our times–mental health.
CUNNINGHAM
Isolation is bad for our mental health. If we're suffering from mental health issues, isolation exacerbates that. This is why I think communities, family, friendship bonds, and even work are important. They help us bond with other people. We're social animals and need social bonding to keep going. I think that's the key to a good life: a rich social life.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
In times of darkness, how do you deal with that? How is art a way through? You mentioned gardening and community. How did you see the light at the end of these experiences?
CUNNINGHAM
That's a very good question. A central thing that happened to me, which I often reflect on, is how I got out of it. When I left mental health work in the NHS, I suffered from severe depression. I started writing a book called Psychiatric Tales. I've kept a diary for many years and used that material as a basis for chapters of the book. This was around the early 2000s when the internet was blooming. I found that by putting these online, I got a massive following. Publishers came to me because I had tens of thousands of followers.
CUNNINGHAM
For me, it was art and the creative process of writing and drawing that brought me out of darkness and created a community I could plug into. It's an example of how creativity can make you feel better. I used my talent to help pull myself out of the pit of darkness I had fallen into. That's quite a good image.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Sometimes you can come to a certain point in your life and look back, in the middle of your life. It can take decades sometimes before you can feel ready and think, now is the time to reflect on everything.
CUNNINGHAM
I certainly blocked out many things. I didn't want to think about them or have them as part of my identity. There was a particular life event that made me think about it. My father died early in the year, and I started the process. Subconsciously, I was brewing a lot of other stuff that happened when I was younger and when he was younger as well.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
It's interesting that in the writing or creating of art, we come closer to our younger selves. Maybe we can understand in the reflection and also understand our parents or people who were mysterious to us. Through our art, we can understand them because they become characters. With art, we can relive it and have deep reflections. In what you’re writing now, you can continue the conversation with your father.
CUNNINGHAM
Yeah, it's a way of like understanding my parents a little better or trying to. Because when you're a kid, you're so wrapped up in your own problems. You don't even think that your parents have got their own struggles. You don't even give them any thought whatsoever. I mean, children are essentially quite selfish, but they kind of have to be. It's the way it has to be. But as you get older, you broaden out, and you think, Well, now I can see a bigger picture. I was just a part of that picture, not the whole thing.
