The billionaires don’t pay the salaries of the interviewers to ask hard hitting questions.
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This is your reminder that Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post.
Take from that what you will.
He's not the only one either. Oligarchs own nearly all of our news media. There are only a couple exceptions, and those are independent groups that are reliant on platforms like youtube.
As a fun thought experiment -- to get £1bn someone would have to give you £1 per second EVERY SECOND for 32 years.
No one needs that much money. And anyone who says they do, or anyone who defends someone who does, really needs to adjust their point of view.
That didn't really hit me until I realized it's £3600 per hour. That's my monthly salary.
86400 per year.... i mean PER DAY
I personally like "Do you have that dream where you keep trying and trying to wash your hands but the blood never comes off"
They compare themselves to other billionaires, so they'll never be happy
Bullshit like "the Forbes list" makes it worse because it publicly lists them in order.
Something as simple as only talking about how much they donate would make a huge change. They'll gonna compete over something, might as well give them something helpful to do
This is a great thought. It would be nice if our society wasn’t so caught up in how much money someone makes and talk more about how much they donate. Or discuss the the good work they have done by giving it back to the industry they serve. Whether it be in bonuses to the employees or research and development. The Forbes list is BS!
Yep, or just listing companies by median salary.
This shit isn't complicated, it's just what happens when capitalists run everything instead of sociologists.
American culture is obsessed with making as much money as possible, and the last forty years of 40 years of go-go reaganites running the show haven't exactly worked out well for the average American.
The coke market has been doing well tho...
"It's not enough to simply succeed. Your success must also contribute to the active failure of everyone else."
Honestly, the question I'd like answered is at what age did they realize that they wanted to be a dragon.
"When the revolution comes, where will you hide?" will always be the classic.
Sadly, the answer is "in my well-stocked nuclear bunker where I can survive for years and defend myself against the hoards with armed drones" now.
The question doesn't make sense to them. To get that rich, they had to throw away their morals. They can't answer the question because they can't process it.
A millionaire and a billionaire? That's a huge difference. At this point, if someone is 55 and wants to retire at 68 and not be 70 and working at Walmart, they're going to need to be a "multi-"millionaire.
Idk, I'm much younger, and my retirement plan is the same as everyone else my age: walk into the woods when I'm ready or die in the water wars later when I'm not.
But I still feel bad for the elderly forced to work because a retirement home with medical support, i.e. assisted living, is too expensive and your kids can't help you because they're barely surviving too, and that's while working, and you can barely work, but assisted living is 4-12k/month, so you work and hope you die before you become a burden on your children and grandchildren.
Anyway. The difference between a millionaire and a billionaire is vast. One million seconds ago was last week.
One billion seconds ago was fucking 1991.
What's the difference between a million and a billion? About a billion.
Upper middle class? I think most if not 90% of billionaires are born in firmly upper class?
"Upper middle class" is just an abstraction from actual class dynamics anyways. It only exists as a believable goal for the working class to achieve and believe they've succeeded, even if they remain workers or at most petite bourgeoisie.
Fundamentally, there is no tying factor bringing this "upper middle class" together, no aligning of mutual interests, outside of tax brackets. As such, it isn't a real class, as the relation to the mode of production is wildly diverse from within this category.
I really do wonder why people like Warren Buffet are still working to make more money, for himself and others. What's the benefit for himself? Some numbers get bigger, ok. But in terms of things and services he can buy for himself and his loved ones, nothing changes, he already can buy anything he could ever want. If he stopped working this seconds and would start spending money like there is no tomorrow, he couldn't spend it all.
So why spend the last few years of your finite life increasing some numbers that don't affect you? I really don't get it.
Warren Buffett is not a good example. Dude just likes investing. Lives in the same house for 70 years. Eats McDonald's and drinks Coke every day. There's no way he can spend it all. That's why he's donating everything to charity.
Only really spends money on private travel and security. Maybe $20 to $40 million per year. That's nothing for a billionaire.
Watch Wolf of Wall Street - extremely NSFW btw - or if you cannot handle watching it, read the book.
For some, the money isn't even the point, it's the thrill of the con game.
For billionaires though, it's something on a whole other level. Like, look at pictures of them - Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos, etc. - there's something not right there at all. They are playing an entirely different kind of game when, e.g., they don't even allow their workers to take breaks to pee, even if they are pregnant. Ofc YOU would not do that, nor likely would anyone that you know, nor would even meet in your entire lifetime. Who would do such a thing!? (unless their boss mandates it ofc, so like they would get fired if they don't, I mean like if nobody was forcing you to do so and yet... you did it anyway, and then you also forced thousands of other ~~humans~~ people to do it too)
That's why they are a billionaire and you and I are not - b/c they are on a whole other level. It's true, money cannot buy happiness, but they are damn sure going to ~~watch~~ cause the world to burn while they try.
20yrs ago, I made about a fifth of what I make today. I couldn’t buy all the things I wanted, but we were safe and paid our bills without a lot of stress. Today, I have a little more flexibility, but it doesn’t feel all that different.
I will assume that “lifestyle inflation” scales up, maybe it scales up a lot. But beyond some point, wealth becomes meaningless and the marginal dollar means nothing. Why keep hustling past that point? What drives people like that? Inertia? Lust for power? Competition with peers? Hard to say I guess but, something is driving them.
I also realize I suffer from lifestyle inflation, but …… the reason I don’t feel well off compared to my previous self is I’m still just a few paychecks from losing it all. If I lost my job, I lose it. I’ll have to cut way back, struggle to keep house and car, and will be anxious until I get another job.
I’ve read that feeling well off is having enough savings so you don’t need to worry about keeping your lifestyle in case anything happens. I don’t
Warren Buffet is a great example for this question because he does live modestly for one of the richest people in the world. If he lost his job/company, he could still support his lifestyle and obligations well beyond his life expectancy. So yeah, what is his motivation?
I literally cannot believe this post. These rich folks ACTUALLY need that money. How else will their great grandson hire a fleet of lawyers after he rapes someone at a frat party at the college where he's a legacy admission? He doesn't have the grades to get into that school, or the personality to pull that girl. He needs that money to fuel his rapey life of decadence.
Why is it that everyone thinks they're not using their money as power? That's kind of obviously what's been happening to me, it's just that mostly, they end up using their power to try and centralize more power. disney buying out marvel, buying out the muppets, microsoft now having openAI, EA buying every game studio just to end up fucking them all up severely, yadda yadda. Use the money to invest in companies and run those companies which are also seeking their own self-interest and power centralization, run all those companies with whatever goals you just kind of vaguely feel like at the time, even if it kills cool stuff in the crib, even if it ends up fucking over the end user. We are subject to the highly coordinated and elaborate whims of an idiotic set of dictators who are, as dictated by their position at the top of the hierarchy, they are incapable of making good decisions.
It's not about the money.
In a Capitalist system Money Is Power and under Neoliberal Capitalism (which is all about the State removing itself from Regulating money, or in other words removing the Power From The Vote via the mechanisms of the State, controlled by representatives chosen via said vote, exercising almost no power, which, if you think about it, is against Democracy) Money is the greatest Power there is by a wide margin (even Fascism puts the State above Money, whilst Neoliberal Capitalism does the very opposite).
So these people hoard money because they live in a system were it gives them immense Power.
To spend a billion dollars in the lifetime of the average human being (80 years) you'd have to spend $34,246 a day.
If you spent $1000 a day it would take you 2,740 years.
If you gained 1% interest on a billion dollars every YEAR (not monthly), that would net you a passive income of $10,000,000 per year.
A guy named Dennis Kozlowski (embezzled $62 million from tyco) spent $15000 on an umbrella stand in 2002. That thing would be worth over $25,000 in today's money.
I'm trying to illustrate a couple of points here. When you do accrue all that money (I'm not talking about ethics here because we have established that some ethical boundaries have to be crossed and most everyone agrees with that), that money, even just sitting still accrues more money. And spending it isn't as easy as people seem to think.
Neither is giving it away. McKenzie Bezos is a good example. She managed it and the complaint then became that she did so irresponsibly. And even when people who come into this type of wealth manage it, there's no pleasing some people. Because even Chuck Feeny still gets a whole lot of flak from the eat the rich people just for becoming a billionaire in the first place. (I'm not on the side of the rich people. So don't even start).
Giving it away irresponsibly compounds the problem and can cause catastrophic economic events for the poor and working class.
Can we actually educate ourselves on the difference between assets, cash, investments, and net worth? Because net worth doesn't mean ready cash.
But so much of this money is being spent. Its being spent doing insane vanity projects, like Bezos's personal space program or Elon Musk's Twitter buyout. It goes towards massive ideological projects, such as the Koch Bros / Peter Thiel campaign to turn everyone into libertarians. Or towards ostentatious religious icons, like the Crystal Cathedral or the Joel Osteen Church.
It goes towards lobbying. Sooooo much lobbying. Hundreds of millions spent to influence government bureaucrats on everything from who can get an abortion to which country we're at war with today. Gates threwa big chunk of his fortune towards a project of education privatization and school voucherization during the Obama term, and the consequences are still echoing through my school district in the form of these obnoxious and pointless high stakes standardized tests.
We see these astronomical bank accounts turn towards reckless misuse of natural resources - Bitcoin mining consumed 110 Terrawatt Hours in 2022. Whole swaths of the airline industry exist to cater to this fraction of a fraction of mega-wealthy people who indulge in short-hop air travel. They sink fortunes on competitions to own the largest yacht or the most creepy sex island. Human trafficking as an enterprise is by and for the mega-rich, both for personal use and increased corporate profits.
You want to see a real act of billionaire (closer to trillionaire) hubris? Look at the Saudi's quixotic quest to build their supercity of Neom. How much money have we pissed away clinging to fossil fuels, so MBS can create a five mile long Mall of America?
The problem is not simply whether they can spend these enormous pots of wealth, but how they reshape the economy as a whole in the attempt. So much of the world exists to meet the whims of these plutocrats. We pay in our time, our health, and our political autonomy, so a handful of elites can have their every whim indulged.
There shouldn't be any billionaires. We got that, because the system has derailed. There were some lackluster failsaves against the in capitalism inherent push to centralisation but those failed due to human greed.
Btw, what happened with the measures against "too big to fail" in international banking?
They are hoarding money, not because they need it, or even because they just want more.
I am convinced by now that the reason they are hoarding wealth is to keep it away from you.
Billionaires don’t want you to have money because then you’ll be competition.
It’s just another example of boomers pulling the latter up with them.
You would never be hired to work for any of the media outlets that interview billionaires. Manufactured consent and aspirational capitalism is what media is for.
The fact that people perceive the billionaires to be the problem
and not the society, and in particular the government which allowed that to happen in the first place
is, in my view, not a good starting point to effect change.
The state is of, for, and by the bourgeoisie. The fact that a bourgeois state continued to allow the gross swelling of the bourgeoisie does not itself make the state the source of the problem. The state is a symptom of the disease.
The state isn't simply an instrument of evil by evil people. It's a tool. Since people act in their own interests, those who can abuse the system to gain outsized influence over it control the tools, and wield them in their own favor.
Well, it seems that dragons are real lol