[Image: The Allegory of Immortality by Giulio Romano, c. 1540.]
At the end of the movie, There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis’s ruthless oil tycoon Daniel Plainview finally snaps. Cornering his long-time nemesis – the preacher Eli Sunday, played by Paul Dano – he beats him to death with a bowling pin in the basement of his mansion.
Before the butler arrives to investigate the noise, Plainview delivers one of modern cinema’s most chilling lines: “I’m finished.”
Most viewers might hear that as a man acknowledging the consequences of what he’s just done. But the line lands differently if you watch closely. Plainview isn’t saying he’s done for. He’s saying he’s finished pretending the rules apply to him at all.
This is the scene that played on Atlantic writer Noah Hawley‘s mind years later while sipping cocktails at a billionaire’s beachside idea-festival.
Back in 2018, Noah was invited to something called ‘Campfire,’ an annual retreat hosted by Jeff Bezos. Think TED Talk energy meets private-jet lifestyle. Roughly 80 guests – celebrities, intellectuals, tech figures and assorted famous types – are flown in for a weekend of talks, networking and the occasional Wagyu steak.
At the time, Amazon was poaching his film and TV business from The Walt Disney Company, and although he’d declined the offer, or maybe because he had, he was invited to the big-bro event – probably as a way to woo him over.
Private jets ferried guests from Van Nuys and New York to Santa Barbara. Bezos had rented out the entire Four Seasons Resort, The Biltmore Santa Barbara, along with the beach club across the road. Security teams from Las Vegas handled privacy. The weather felt suspiciously perfect, and when they arrived, luxury gift bags were waiting in their rooms.
Each morning started with lecture-style presentations – imagine a live TED conference but with better wine. A Supreme Court justice was interviewed, a neurologist discussed prosthetic technology, and a famous chef spoke about humanitarian work. The afternoons were left open for mingling over cocktails and long dinners.
The most common question floating around the resort? “Why am I here?” A hair-metal singer asked it. A Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist asked it. An anthropologist asked it. A presidential historian asked it. It was only the billionaires and A-list movie stars who seemed unfazed. Clearly, this kind of thing sits on a very particular social calendar.
It turns out there’s an entire circuit of these billionaire “ideas festivals.” If you land on the right guest list, you can spend your year hopping from one luxury conference to the next, discussing how to fix the world over fancy meals with famous people.
That was the vibe at the start of the weekend, but how it ended is absolutely bonkers.
Noah’s wife slipped on wet grass and broke her wrist, while both his kids and Noah came down with hand, foot and mouth disease. This is not even a joke – they flew home with one arm in a sling and three faces covered in angry red blisters.
If you’re the kind of person who believes the universe occasionally sends signs, getting hit with a biblical plague at a billionaire retreat might be one of them.
Needless to say, they’ve never been back to Campfire – not that they were invited, anyway.
One night over drinks, the head of a major talent agency asked what Noah thought of the whole thing. He joked: “I’ve spent my whole career trying to figure out how the world works. I didn’t realise I could just come here and ask the people who run it.”
Although he was in a room with the world’s elite, discussing world problems with gusto, he realised something not many of us will have the opportunity to realise in this lifetime. In Noah’s words:
“Sitting in the lecture hall, pencils out, listening to a famous chef explain his humanitarian work, it was easy to feel like the solution to the world’s problems lay within our grasp. And yet, looking around at faces I had only ever seen in a magazine or on-screen, I had an unsettling revelation: This is the hubris of accomplishment. To be declared a genius at one thing is to begin to believe you are a genius at everything.
Here we were, 80 individuals with a combined net worth that was greater than a small city’s yet infinitesimal compared with the wealth and dominion of our host. How did he view this exercise—as a first step toward changing the world, or as a performative display of his reach and influence?”
The real gravitational force in the room was Bezos. Back then, he’d recently become the world’s second centibillionaire with a net worth hovering around $112 billion. Today it’s roughly double that. Even the wealthy guests couldn’t help orbiting that level of wealth.
Bezos spent the weekend laughing loudly, wearing tight T-shirts and joking with his teenage sons. In hindsight, though, something felt performative. His marriage would end just weeks later, and the version of Bezos at Campfire still seemed invested in how people perceived him.
“He still believed that his actions had consequences. He had not yet freed himself – the way Daniel Plainview freed himself – from the rules of men.”
Fast-forward eight years, and that vibe feels almost quaint. Today, Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk seem to operate in an entirely different psychological atmosphere, one where normal rules barely register.
When wealth reaches that scale, everything effectively becomes free. Assets can always be replaced, loss barely moves the needle, and failure stops meaning anything. Once failure disappears, the feedback loop that normally shapes human behaviour vanishes too.
Psychologists have long argued that moral reasoning develops through consequences, not just punishment, but by experiencing how your actions affect others. When you can buy your way out of every mistake, fire anyone who disagrees with you and surround yourself only with people who need something from you, that learning process shuts down. Your world stops pushing back.
So when figures like Peter Thiel say things like “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” they’re talking about a very specific kind of freedom, which is not your freedom, but their own.
At one point, Donald Trump was asked what might limit his power. His answer was revealing: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” That means, the law and voters cannot change his ways – not even God – only himself. He’s probably never said a more terrifying truth.
Even empathy has become a target in some tech circles. Musk has described empathy as “the fundamental weakness of Western civilisation,” framing it as something society uses to manipulate people. If empathy is framed as a vulnerability, then lacking it becomes an advantage.
Noah then met Bezos properly on the final day of Campfire, shortly after his wife’s accident. He went over at lunch to thank Bezos for the invitation and casually mentioned what had happened.
“But when I told him what had happened, Bezos looked horrified. He did not say “I’m so sorry.” He did not say “Do you need anything?” Instead, he made a face, and in an instant, an aide came and whisked him away. When presented with the opportunity for empathy, even performative empathy, he chose escape.”
Hours later, they were flying home. Noah’s wife had her arm in a sling and his kids were covered in spots. A movie producer kindly offered her a blanket on the plane. Meanwhile, somewhere in the back of his mind, that line from Plainview echoed again.
“I’m finished.”
It seems that once you reach a certain level of wealth and power, everything goes. The rules, meaning, history, care. Everything gets turned in on the self. And so the quest for immortality begins…
[Source: The Atlantic]
