Whenever I see people say: “I don’t get it, if I were <insert billionaire’s name here>, I’d immediately <do some selfless thing with my money>”.
Anybody who is the kind of person who would spend their money to fix societal problems isn’t going to wait until they’re a billionaire to do it. They’ll do it as soon as they think they have enough money to make a difference. That’s what will prevent them from ever becoming a billionaire. It’s a survivorship bias thing. Every billionaire you see is a person who could have fallen into the “trap” of helping other people with their absurd, vast wealth. But, they survived that temptation and instead kept accumulating wealth like a dragon in some fantasy story.
This is true and very well said. I don’t understand the accompanying graphic, however.
Brilliant — thanks. (:
I could see becoming a billionaire from an idea too quickly to spend it, but 99.99% of the time this is correct.
I think you’re dreaming if you think that’s possible.
It’s extremely unlikely, for sure, but not necessarily impossible. You could release a piece of digital content, like a game or an album or program, that becomes wildly popular extremely quickly. Again, not likely, but strictly speaking possible.
that becomes wildly popular extremely quickly
That’s not going to make you $1b. Maybe tens of millions, but not billions.
I guess you could sort-of argue that it’s what happened with Minecraft, though that took more than 5 years from the alpha to the eventual acquisition. But, it’s true that he went from typical middle class type wealth to a billionaire overnight when that deal closed.
But, in almost every other case someone’s going to make far less than $1b on their first deal. And then they’re going to be multi-millionaires who either start giving their money away, or try for $1b.
The only possible way that could happen is through inheritance
It’s seriously a mental illness, a “rich mind virus” if you will, and we should design the rules of society accordingly.
Some of these people have an innate drive and even some skills that could contribute to society in a positive way. There should be a place for them just like any other disabled person. But that doesn’t mean they should be able to run wild until they harm others.
We as a society need to get away from the tendency to categorize a person as good or bad based on one aspect of their life and generalizing that to everything else. Assuming that somebody is moral, ethical, honest, or a capable leader based on their net worth is definitely one of the more egregious examples right now.
It’s addiction.
Simple as that.
Just like a crackhead or a heroin junkie can do whatever crazy shit a non-addict would never even think of, so do the rich billionaire money-addicts.
Just look at the difference between CEO’s and mega-class actors. Lots of actors can be addicts, yeah, but not many of them are that addicted to money, and while they might buy things we consider ridiculous, they’re not actively ruining society, just benefitting from capitalism.
Whereas people like Bezos are addicted to money and actively ruining the world. He could lose 99% of his wealth and still live the same, barely fucking notice a thing in his quality of life.
NYTimes sucks and I don’t link them anymore but for thus exception as an opinion piece from Sam Polk.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/opinion/sunday/for-the-love-of-money.html
He wrote a whole book about it
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27274419-for-the-love-of-money
Some level of greed is normal in humans.
Excessive greed, especially when it damages others, is a mental illness.
IMO it starts way before 1 billion too.
Like what kind of moron do you have to be to have 250.000.000 in your bank account and wake up every morning thinking you need to get more?
It truly is a mental illness, and for the no-empathy part, we have no treatment.
Starts before that even…there are way too many “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” out there who are absolutely wrecking potential class solidarity while the rich just take us all for everything we’re worth. Many of them are MAGA, which does help to explain both the mental illness and burned out empathy circuits.
I would only want to accumulate more so that I could do more to help people. When you’re past a billion, you essentially print money on a near permanent basis on it just existing.
Spot on.
However, the enabling condition is anti-trust laws not being enforced.
…and the enabling condition for antitrust laws not being enforced is the existence of a capitalist class with enough wealth to direct politics.
They only managed it when they partnered with religious bigots. They were losing, the very existence of those antitrust laws is proof. Then they bought religion.
They weren’t losing. They were richer than ever before with leves of wealth inequality just recently matched. Then capitalism collapsed under the weight of that inequality into the Great Depression. Their winnings lead to collapse as they accumulated ever more resources that become unavailable to the people producing those resources. Then the cycle of accumulation and the power that comes with it started again. Antitrust got killed at one point. Unions were being killed before that. They used religion too but they were already beginning to win power again.
ROFL. That’s an ahistoric narrative. The Great Depression was caused by a lack of liquidity caused by a failure to respond to mass withdrawal. FDR then made it worse with the New Deal, causing a double-dip that only resolved itself with the WWII wartime economy.
It was the lack of Federal Reserve banks and the failures of their predecessor organizations. Vaguely blaming “capitalism” is purely ignorance combined with intellectual laziness.
The modern problems can be laid at the feet of Reagan and Nixon, mostly. Bush Sr and Bush Jr contributed. But it’s mostly Nixon and Reagan that helped corrupt the antitrust framework. The fallout breaking up Ma Bell and the Microsoft Antitrust case about Internet Explorer were both critical decisions instrumental to this deterioration.
And what caused the mass withrawal?
Feel free to read Friedman’s Economic History of the United States. His treatise is the most authoritative on the subject and has withstood decades of peer review.
There is quite literally no need to be making stuff up, like you’re doing.
Yeah cause religion was all pure and good before it was “bought” in the mid-1900s. \s \s \s
For a time, American Christianity taught that rich people didn’t go to heaven.
It was still a net harm on society, but it was no fan of the rich assholes and robber barons.
That then was warped into Prosperity Gospel.
They are that rich because monetary policy is frantically trying to force them to spend their money by dropping interest rates and doing QE; because the CPI excludes asset prices, substitutes goods for cheaper goods, and performs subjective deductions on goods to reduce their price in the basket even though they dont help the poor afford food and rent.
If the money supply grows at 7-8% and the stock market grows at 10% how can the poor possibly be made better off, when they are lucky to get a 2% cost of living adjustment and their minimum wage is actively being debased to push up stock values?
They gotta make it up in volume! /s
The systems they use also prevents feeling of empathy. They are far removed from the consequences so they never experienced them and doing so is so normalized in business that they are never made to feel guilt or shame. The system is as much responsible as any personal lack of empathy they have is.
Breaking the rules and getting away with it is how all of them become billionaires. It isn’t work ethic or tryhardism. They knowingly gain advantage by betraying the community, then destroy the communities to empower themselves. They are an everpresent, ongoing and critical threat to any and all communities, including the concept of democracy itself.
They’re narcissistic sociopaths.
That’s the two word version of that.
Incapable of self-validating, also, adept at manipulating people and systems to get that validation, addicted to it.
Morality? Empathy?
Theoretical concepts for these people, their brains don’t experience them they way others do. They can be skilled at pretending or performing them, but its fake, they’re totally amoral.
Destiny/SexPestiny.
‘Thor’/PirateSoftware.
Thats all these people, that’s the personality.
Can’t even turn off the compulsive lying, its instinctual.
Also, our culture worships money, so they become “virtuous” in the eyes of others based on their wealth
Old time comic WC Fields was asked how to become wealthy.
He advised castration, followed by removal of taste buds, followed by making the person partially deaf and blind, so they couldn’t appreciate music or art. Take out a kidney so they couldn’t drink any liquor and they’d be the perfect money making machine, because that would be the only pleasure left.
Also because their parents were rich.
Truthfully, there isn’t a self made billionaire. They have built upon the legacies and funds their families have at only the right time. Like Gates, he’s a Harvard drop out not because he couldn’t make it, because he had the right opportunities afforded to him at that time with familial connections to setup Microsoft in one of the cheapest places possible, the garage, so to save money not because they had to but wanted to. Even Warren is the success of his family lineage. Most if not all are just nepo babies.
wealth corrupts and attracts the corrupt
I collect stacks of papers that reach the ceiling and leave me with limited room, I’m a hoarder and need mental health.
I collect large sums of wealth and money with no intention to use it and it affects me mentally just managing, successful at business.
Many of them are adherents to the idea of effective altruism which suggests that it’s completely fine to become rich by any means possible so that you can save humanity with your wealth afterwards.
One minor flaw in the “philosophy” that they haven’t grasped is that their means of wealth accumulation is largely what humanity needs to be saved from. 🫠
Intentionally interpreting the analogy literally prompts the question: what should an individual do with the ‘unfillable’ hole?
Nothing? It’s like asking an alcoholic what they should do about alcohol. It’s just something that this person would have to learn to live with.
Therapy.
Can’t cure a total lack of empathy.
can to, it’s called LSD
Interesting, any links or info about that?
Anything else
The three of them probably fucked children at some point
Two of them likely did. Elon couldn’t get an invite to those parties, but he definitely tried.
