I love human psychology. And there's one concept I keep coming back to when I try to understand people in power: the Dark Triad. Yesterday I argued that Macron isn't cynical, that he sincerely believes in a worldview built on false axioms. A lot of you replied: "Sincere? Come on." Fair challenge. So let me go one level deeper, because I think both things are true at once, and the Dark Triad explains how. First, what it is. The Dark Triad was described by psychologists Delroy Paulhus and Kevin Williams in 2002. It groups three personality traits that overlap but are distinct. Important point: these are not diagnoses. They're dimensions. Everyone sits somewhere on each spectrum. What matters is how far along you are, and in what combination. The first is narcissism. Grandiosity, a sense of being exceptional, a deep need for admiration, and above all a fragile relationship to being wrong. For a narcissist, admitting a major mistake isn't an intellectual update. It's an injury to the self. The second is Machiavellianism. Strategic thinking applied to people. Long-term planning, reading others to use them, a willingness to do whatever the objective requires. The Machiavellian is patient, calculating, and treats relationships as moves on a board. The third is psychopathy, in its subclinical form. Low empathy, emotional coldness, a certain detachment from the consequences your actions have on others. Not the serial killer from the movies. More the person who can make decisions that hurt thousands of people and sleep perfectly well. Researchers have found these traits overrepresented in positions of power. Which makes sense: the path to the top often rewards exactly the qualities that make someone harder to live with. Now let's look at Macron through this lens. Not a diagnosis, nobody can give one from the outside. Just his public behavior, measured against the three dimensions. Narcissism is the easiest to see. Before he was even elected, he explained that the presidency should be "jupiterian," a president above the fray, like the king of the gods. He built a movement from scratch with his own initials. He speaks in long monologues, in a register of someone explaining things to people who haven't quite understood yet. Machiavellianism shows up in the strategy. In 2017 he walked into a political system dominated by two parties and dismantled both of them in a matter of months. "At the same time" is not just a slogan, it's a method: occupy every position so nobody can occupy any. The 2024 dissolution of the National Assembly was a pure chess move, taken almost alone, with consequences the whole country is still living with. The third dimension is the one I'd be most careful with. But there's a pattern in his words. "People who are nothing." "I cross the street and I find you a job." "We spend a crazy amount of money on welfare." "Gauls resistant to change." "I really want to piss off the unvaccinated." Each one, taken alone, is a slip. Together, they draw a relationship to ordinary people that is distant, abstract, sometimes contemptuous. People as variables in a model, not as lives. Now here's where it connects to yesterday's thesis. The Dark Triad doesn't contradict sincerity. It locks it in place. Remember the gear spinning in a vacuum, the flawless reasoning built on false axioms. Why doesn't he ever stop and say "I was wrong"? Because for a high narcissist, that sentence is almost unbearable. Admitting the axioms are false would mean admitting the last fifteen years were a mistake. So the dissonance doesn't get resolved. It gets defended. Machiavellianism then does the rest. Sincere about the ends, ruthless about the means. You can genuinely believe you're saving the country and still treat every institution, every ally, every election as a tool. And the emotional distance makes the cost invisible. When reality hurts people, a more empathetic person would feel it and start doubting. When you see society from far above, the pain stays abstract. It doesn't reach you. It doesn't correct you. The last ingredient is intelligence. Macron is clearly very intelligent, but it's a specific kind: verbal, academic, brilliant at building coherent systems and at arguing for them. Much less at testing them against reality. And research on motivated reasoning points to something counterintuitive: intelligence doesn't protect you from self-deception. Often it makes you better at it. The smarter you are, the more convincing the justifications you build for what you already believe. Put it all together: a strong verbal intelligence, high narcissism, strategic coldness, and an emotional distance from consequences. You get someone who can't see that he's wrong, who has every tool to stay in power anyway, and who doesn't feel the cost of his mistakes. That's not a villain. It's something more dangerous: a brilliant mind sealed off from feedback, with no internal mechanism that would ever force it to change course. The real question isn't whether Macron is good or bad. It's how a system ends up putting this exact profile at the top, and why it keeps doing it.

I love watching the world and connecting the dots. And if there's one thing that has always bothered me in how people talk about billionaires, it's the box. The group. On one side: "Eat the rich. Every billionaire is a policy failure." On the other: "Every billionaire is a genius who earned it all." Same mistake, opposite directions. Both throw a few thousand very different human beings into a single box and stop thinking. Billionaires aren't a category. They're a spectrum. I've been writing about the Dark Triad: narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy. And about my theory that these traits are essentially a toolkit for power games, which are zero-sum, a pure social construction. Building is the opposite. It's a game against reality, and it's positive-sum. So here's how I see the billionaire spectrum. Not good versus evil. Players versus builders. At one end, the purest player: George Soros. Look at the founding act. In 1992, he bet massively against the British pound, forced it out of the European exchange rate mechanism, and made around a billion dollars in a day. Nothing was built. No product, no factory, no new technology. A bet on the weakness of an institution, won against an entire country. Then look at what the money was used for. For decades, his fortune has been poured into reshaping politics and societies: networks of NGOs, campaigns, causes, candidates, in dozens of countries. His family is still one of the largest political donors in the United States. Every dollar points at the same target: not reality, but power over the rules of the game. And here's the twist that connects to what I wrote about Macron. I don't think Soros is a cartoon villain. I think he sincerely believes in his vision of an "open society." That's exactly what makes the model so powerful. A sincere ideologue with nearly unlimited resources, playing the long game with institutions, convinced he's on the right side of history. It's Macron with a checkbook. At the other end of the spectrum: Elon Musk. Almost every dollar he's made has been thrown back into reality. Rockets, electric cars, batteries, satellites, tunnels, brain interfaces, AI. Bets that most experts said were impossible, many of which nearly killed him financially. When Tesla and SpaceX were both close to bankruptcy, he put in his last money rather than pull it out. His fortune isn't a lever on other people's decisions. It's a lever on physics. He's not a saint either. He's stepped into the political arena, spent heavily, and taken the hits that come with it. Even the purest builder gets pulled toward the power game. But his center of gravity is clear: what he cares about is whether the rocket lands. And in between? Almost everyone. That's the part that matters most, and that the box hides completely. Most billionaires aren't bad guys. They built something real, often something extraordinary. Then wealth pulls them, slowly, toward the left side of the spectrum. Media, foundations, policy influence, global agendas. The game shifts from "build something people want" to "shape what people are allowed to want." And yet many of them redeem themselves on specific things. Bill Gates built one of the most important companies in history, and his foundation's work on malaria and polio has saved an enormous number of lives, even if it later drifted toward steering global policy. Jeff Bezos built a logistics machine nobody thought possible, and keeps pouring billions into space. Mark Zuckerberg made his share of mistakes, and then open-sourced some of the most powerful AI models in the world. Nobody is fully on one side. Every billionaire is a mix of builder and player. The question is never "is he good or evil?" The question is: where does the money go? Into reality, or into power? Here's why this matters for you, even if you'll never be a billionaire. That spectrum doesn't only exist at the top. It runs through every company, every team, every career. Every single day, you choose where your energy goes. Into the work itself, or into the politics around the work. Into the product, or into the meeting about who gets credit for the product. Into building, or into positioning. The player's game is seductive. It gives quick wins, status, influence. But it creates nothing. At the end of a lifetime of power games, the world has been rearranged, not enriched. The builder's game is harder. Reality says no all the time. Rockets explode. Products fail. Customers leave. But every time you win against reality, you leave the world with something that didn't exist before. The richest man in the world got there by building things. The most influential players got there by moving things around. Choose your side of the spectrum. Stop playing. Start building.