Some good points here, but I’m still a little skeptical that you’re really talking about the elite of the elite, not the ordinary professional class. If an ordinary trader loses a ton of money for their firm, do they get sacked? If an ordinary academic writes tons of nonsense (as defined by their discipline — the incentives for some disciplines as a whole to produce nonsense are a different issue), do they get denied tenure? (Still, I agree with you that the Larry Summerses of the world are scandalously insulated from the consequences of their actions.)

In terms of Trump, Thiel, Musk, Zuckerberg, the conversation seems to have shifted from “risk of not being in the 1% any more” (which they no longer experience) to “risk of not being quite as billionaire-ey as they might otherwise be. And sure, they experience that latter kind of risk, but that isn’t the kind of risk I understood Taleb to be talking about — -that kind of risk is consistent with their immense wealth being in an absorbing state…