I actually think it’s pretty simple and not even that sinister, although I do think you need to have certain undesirable, in my opinion, character traits.

I’ll preface this by stating I know nothing about this stuff, I’m a software developer.

These people, for the most part, come from money so I doubt that’s ever the goal. Like I said it’s power. To your other point about thinking they’re better than us, I think they do and mainly because when you get this much wealth and power you’re surrounded by yes men.

So take someone like Harvey Weinstein; people don’t go from 0-100 in the crazy shit to do scale. But imagine you’re surrounded by yes men, so you do something at level 3 on the weirdness/creepy scale and nobody challenges you and it becomes the new baseline. Now you escalate to something at level 7 on the scale and so this goes unchallenged and the new baseline. After a while you get people doing and getting away with the craziest shit.

I think this applies to people like Elon Musk, Russel Brand, Trump, and many other folk who seek out power or an audience.