Yesterday I was booked on Fox Business News with the plan of offering some comment on Leo di Caprio’s remarks at the World Economic Forum about how corporate “greed” is preventing global warming from being solved. (Then he hopped back on his private jet and flew away to one of his many mansions that have the carbon footprint of a small African nation.) But the market crash of the morning changed the topic literally on my way to the Fox studio in LA, and I ended up just doing a very short segment on oil prices instead.
But why let a bunch of good Leo di Caprio material get lost on the trading floor. Fox’s loss is Power Line’s gain! And as Dennis Teti pointed out to me, it would make me perhaps the only person in the known universe who writes about Leo Strauss and Leo di Caprio.
I suppose since he played The Wolf of Wall Street di Caprio thinks he’s an expert on greed. Hopefully his agent will cast him in a more appropriate film, such as The Jackal of Common Sense, of perhaps The Great Gasbag. We’re used to Hollywood hypocrisy on a grand scale, but di Caprio really does abuse the privilege.
Greed? From someone who commands $25 million a picture plus a cut of the gross while some of his co-stars get as little as $60,000 (Jonah Hill’s reported salary for his rather substantial role in Wolf).* Greed? In an industry that demands tax breaks and subsidies to film in desirable scenic locations, and shoots more and more productions up in non-union Canada to cut costs?
* Ed Driscoll helpfully points us to di Caprio’s salary page on IMBD; good grief, he makes almost as much as that other film star, Al Gore, but at least Gore has won an Oscar:
