Biographies Of The Rich And Famous
What they would say if they were written honestly
Bill Gates was born into an ordinary upper-middle class millionaire family and faced a life of struggle to enjoy all the privileges that were handed to him. Forced to attend an obscure second-rank college called Harvard, Bill realized that hard work was what would carry him to fame and an even larger fortune: other people’s hard work.
Bill soon dropped out of college to pursue his dream: a software company where he could shout at hapless underlings and leverage his mother’s connections with IBM to be handed a contract for the operating system required by the behemoth’s forthcoming microcomputer. The fact that Microsoft (possibly the worst corporate name in history) didn’t actually have an operating system was no concern for Gates, who knew he could buy someone else’s OS for peanuts provided he never mentioned the IBM deal. And so one of the world’s most powerful software companies was born.
Later in life, Gates became a philanthropist under the mistaken notion that this meant he’d spend the rest of his days collecting rare and highly valuable stamps.
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Elon Musk’s life was defined by the childhood trauma of discovering that his parents had been unable to spell the name Elton correctly. Determined to inflict his humiliation and all-consuming rage on the world, Musk spent his early years fantasizing about stealing other children’s lunch money and spending it on Lego blocks so that he could construct all manner of unlikely shapes, most of which made little or no sense even to him.
As Musk grew older he looked for bigger and better sources of other people’s lunch money, finally hitting on the tactic of visiting wide-eyed and hopelessly naïve Silicon Valley venture capitalists and relieving them of billions of dollars so that he could construct all manner of unlikely companies, all of which are dutifully lauded by Wired magazine as The Next Even Bigger Thing Than The Last Bigger Thing.
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Mark Zuckerberg’s childhood experiences were primarily of being isolated in expensive and highly exclusive private schools where he was brutally forced to interact with other offspring of the wealthy and privileged. This naturally gave the young Mark deep insight into the wants and needs of everyone in the world and would later fuel his desire to appropriate other people’s ideas and codebase in order to create his first prototype social network designed to enable pubescent wealthy young boys to fantasize about pubescent wealthy young women.
As we all know, the entity now known as Facebook ultimately became the world’s dominant social media company. Zuckerberg has several times gone on the record as saying that Facebook’s success was “because I really cared about connecting people around the world (with the unwanted ads that have made me a multi-billionaire).” When asked about the repeated misuse of people’s personal information, Zuckerberg has said, “At Facebook we don’t feel it’s our job to say how people’s most intimate data is used (to exploit them).”
In recent years Zuckerberg has ensured that Facebook remains a platform where ordinary decent ultra-right-wing folk and Russian troll factories are free to send false information to millions of people under the guise of “free speech.” It is widely thought that Zuckerberg is planning to become President of the USA just as soon as his own personal Facebook page collects enough likes.
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Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II was born into an ordinary royal family no different from royal families the world over. As such, she enjoyed simple childhood games common to most of us: corgi-baiting, fox hunting, constructing pretend crowns out of real diamonds and gold, and as an occasional special treat she would enjoy a weekend shooting peasants on her private estate at Balmoral.
Later in life she became Queen, as so many of us do, and she underwent rigorous training to enable her to fulfil her arduous duties, most of which comprise waving at commoners, eating rich State dinners, and rubber-stamping whatever nonsense the current Prime Minister pretends will be “for the good of the people” (e.g. his/her prospect of being re-elected).
Now aged ninety-four, the Queen continues to perform her duties with unflagging energy, which has led to speculation that she actually died several years ago and was secretly stuffed with mechanical innards. As there would be no practical way to tell whether or not this is true, the British people continue, as is their custom, simply not to think about the possibility at all.
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When he was nothing but an egg comprising sixteen innocent yet unusually puffy cells floating down his mother’s fallopian tube, Donald J Trump was accidentally exposed to a massive dose of X-rays. His mother later explained that she fell asleep in the dentist’s chair and, through some unconscious twitching of her limbs, activated the X-ray machine four hundred and thirty-two times while it was positioned directly above her lower abdomen. While this unfortunate and entirely accidental event did not lead to a miscarriage, it did however result in Baby Donald (as he is still affectionately known to all who encounter him) being born with bright orange skin and irreparable brain damage.
Donald, or “youdumbfuckloser” as his father always lovingly referred to him, was sent to a variety of exclusive special-needs schools where he made rapid progress, learning not to eat his crayons at the early age of only twenty-seven and graduating in Velcro-fastening at age thirty-five. Leaving remedial education and starting from the very bottom with only the tiniest fifty-million dollar gift from his father, Trump clawed his way toward perpetually constipated mediocrity with a determination that surprised all of those unfamiliar with his early years of ripping open stolen packets of Crayola in order to consume the contents.
After a lifetime of serial failures and repeated bankruptcies, Trump finally discovered his true calling and in 2017 became President of the United States, having successfully presented himself to the unfortunate half of the Gaussian IQ distribution as “the greatest, the biggest billionaire, like, totally the richest, ’cause I’m so smart.” He was thus able to benefit from what journalists, in their habitual deeply insightful and subtly ironic way, characterized as “a protest against the elite.”
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Rupert Murdoch was born in Adelaide back in 1827 and at the age of three took over his father’s ailing local broadsheet the Herald & Weakly Times. Spicing it up with sensationalist coverage of white settlers happily lynching aboriginal children, and innovating his famous illustrated Page Three topless wallabies, the young Rupert was soon the most successful media baron in Australia. At the age of thirty-one he married his childhood sweetheart Patricia who was twelve at the time and who went on to bear Rupert forty-seven children, of whom five survived by means of eating their siblings.
Finding Australia too small to encompass his vast ambition, Murdoch set sail for Britain where he quickly founded a media empire built on lies, nudity, lies, lies, and more lies. This recipe was so successful in appealing to people with no frontal cortex that he was soon the wealthiest newspaper magnate in Europe. Realizing that the USA had a superabundance of similarly brain-dead citizens, Murdoch stole a steamship and made his way to the New World where he quickly made friends with leading Republicans and in a secret ceremony involving young boys and some rather elaborate iron artifacts, Murdoch was inducted into the Bostonian Society of Freemasons & Republican Pedophiles. Later, when it was pointed out that the last two designations were essentially synonyms, the Society was renamed Americans For Bigly Greatness.
Murdoch then rode a team of Native Americans across the continent until he reached Los Angeles where he created Faux News, a broadcasting network exclusively targeting people whose collective IQ is lower than that of a single amoeba. This enterprise was so successful that it became the driving force behind electing an uncountable (well, uncountable by Faux viewers, for whom all integers larger than 2 are simply “yuge”) number of Republican candidates to high office.
Aged and withered and cuckold though he may be, Murdoch continues to be driven by an unquenchable appetite for inflicting as much damage as possible on the entire world. Some have speculated that Murdoch sold his soul to the devil at a young age, but most people accept the more common explanation that the transaction was in fact the other way around.
