I grew up watching James Bond films, fully expecting the bad guys to be like the Bond villains. They're actually worse.

[PeaceWave]

Keep in mind, for a suburban kid growing up in the late 1970's, there existed only two Tolkienesque realms in the world - one composed of absolute good and the other comprised of absolute evil. The good realm was permeated with malls, arcades, video games, Dungeons & Dragons, bands like Led Zeppelin and Thin Lizzy, muscle cars we imagined we'd one day drive and the good old U S of A. The bad realm was littered with flea markets, Legos and all the other toys we'd outgrown, the dying embers of disco, AMC Pacers and the Soviet Union.

We were on the verge of adolescence and there were definite expectations of what the world we were on the verge of entering would be and what we would make of it. Nobody said it was going to be easy. After Vietnam, a general malaise pervaded everything we heard on the news and experienced at home - government block cheese anyone? One last colonialist venture for a nation too old to have made such an adolescent mistake. But still there was a sense that, going forward, the world would invariably be a better place - because of our generation.

Which maybe explains why, as kids, we queued up to drop our $2 to watch all those Bond (and later, Star Wars) films. In the movies, the bad guys would be wealthy, demented and flawed in the their pursuit of their truest lust, that for power. And, in our innocent minds, we knew that just didn't make sense. If we and our friends had one last dollar between us, it was getting split four or ten ways. Looking back, I guess there were other kids growing up in those years, the Musks and the Bezos, waiting for an entirely different world. One where all the wealth and all the power would, without flaw, be all their own.

&list=RDisAUOa50wdA&start_radio=1

[Ocelot II]

1. Bond villains were evil and sometimes crazy but they weren't stupid.

We have villains who are evil, and crazy, and really, really stupid. We have Dr. Evil and his Mini-Me (I'm not sure whether Trump or Musk is Dr. Evil), with Vance as Mr. Bigglesworth. If they weren't so fucking evil the whole thing could be another sequel in the Austin Powers series - wicked, incompetent slapstick villains.

[CentralMass]

2. A parallel to Musk might be Drax from MoonRaker.

"In the film adaptation, Hugo Drax is a lavish French-German billionaire who owns Drax Industries, a private company which constructs Space Shuttles for NASA. Though Drax lives in California, he resides in a fully authentic French chateau that was disassembled at its original site, transported to the United States, and rebuilt stone by stone. Drax also supposedly owns the Eiffel Tower, but has not been able to secure a permit from the French government to export it out of the country. He is an accomplished pianist, playing Chopin's "Raindrop" Prelude on his grand piano for his guests.

Bond follows a trail around the world to investigate the theft of a space shuttle that Drax had loaned to the UK. He begins his investigation in California at Drax Industries, and follows it to Italy, then to Brazil, then into space.

Drax reveals that he seeks to destroy the entire human race except for a small group of carefully selected humans, both male and female, that would leave Earth on six shuttles and have sanctuary on a space station in orbit over Earth. Using chemical weapons created by Drax's scientists—derived from the toxin of a rare South American plant, the Black Orchid—at an installation in Italy, he would wipe out the remainder of humanity. The biological agents were to be dispersed around the Earth from a series of 50 strategically placed globes, each containing enough toxin to kill 100 million people. After a period of time, when the chemical agents had become harmless, Drax and his master race would return to Earth to reinhabit the planet."

[CentralMass]

3. I think that the Elliott Carver character in Tomorrow Never Dies us likely Rupert Murdoch

[TheBlackAdder]

4. They're kinda the Max Zorin (Christopher Walken) type of psychotic.