this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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I'm not sure if being a billionaire necessarily means all of those things. I know some that are actually doing good stuff for the people, like Mark Cuban. Is he perfect? Probably not, but he's doing something about a real issue that was screwing a lot of people in the US.
There are no ethical billionaires. It is not possible to obtain that kind of economic power without consciously exploiting others.
No one becomes a billionaire working.
You become a billionaire by exploiting the worker class.
I don't know. I don't know how all billionaires in the world have acquired their capital. I do know that the most relevant ones, like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos have exploited workers, but I don't know if this can be generalized. Do you?
All of them have acquired their capital in the exact same way, by exploiting in the worker class. It's impossible to gather 1 billion dollars any other way.
Why is it impossible to get this rich without taking advantage of other people?
Many successful businesses don't exploit their employees.
You need to earn 2 million every month, not spend a penny and then work for 40 years to become a billionaire. No days off either.
This is not even close to true. Have you heard of compound interest? Investing 2 mil per month in even the worst performing index funds gets you 1bil in 16 years. 2 bil in 22 years, 4 bil in 30. your 40 year figure is more like 11 billion. Thats how and why rich people are rich, they don’t just have cash lying around they put it to work investing in other companies or more often their own. Without these investments many other companies especially startups simply wouldn’t exist. Billionaires employ either directly or indirectly a huge percentage of the population.
I'm not defending the billionaires we know are shit, I'm just saying accumulating capital that is placed in large companies that create jobs worldwide is not inherently evil.
Just prove the 5 guys in the submarine exploited people to get there. There's no logical connection between accumulating wealth and abusing workers.
You.. didn't read the post you replied to.
You only see what is convenient to you.
I don't see how earning large amounts of money makes someone evil. I don't think there is a logical connection between evil and wealth. That's why I ignored that number. As I said, the only thing you need to do is to prove they actually exploited workers. That's it.
They accumulated wealth because they invested in companies that grew to become multi-billion dollar companies. This happened because they had a clever idea or solved a real issue. These are companies located in many countries, how is 2M monthly too much for services/products used worldwide?
Do I like the fact billionaires exist? No. I'd prefer a world with a better wealth distribution. Do I think they are evil because the system allowed them to get to that point? No.
I did but you refused to see.
Does Jeff Bezos travel around the whole world distributing packages? He doesn't, the workers do.
Oh, so you're saying wealth should be equally distributed with workers. That argument is silly... Workers should get paid fairly for their skillset. The US is obviously exploiting people, $7/h is ridiculous... But a package delivery person demanding to become a millionaire because they work for a multi-billion dollar company? What's their skillset? Driving a car and walking with a box on their hands?
Workers should never be exploited, people should get paid a fair amount of money so they can have a good living. The Amazon workers are definetely not getting paid fairly and are physically and mentally abused. But Bezos didn't become a billionaire BECAUSE he exploits people, that's just him being an asshole in general. He would have still been a billionaire if he had paid fair wages and had had happy workers.
So you have package delivery teams, marketing, financial analysts, software developers, data analysists, lawyers.... Should all of them get paid equally?
Should a neurosurgeon working in a small hospital earn less money than a delivery person working in a multi-billion company? THAT seems unfair.
To me, the act of amassing all that wealth is a crime by itself. It is the accumulation of countless (small and big) transactions in which you could have shared the value more equally, and decided not to. You could have paid your employees more, and decided not to. You could have made your product/service more affordable (to more people) and you decided not to. After having accumulated a certain amount of wealth, I think such decisions are immoral.