World News

Artists are on a gift-based economy. They gain status by giving away works. If you are the best artist in the world but don't make an effort to share your works, you are irrelevant. The more they give away the more they are recognised. Even if they give them away via pirated works. See: movies, songs that everybody knows and resonates with. Status is their currency, not money.

The status then allows them to obtain more money than other people, incidentally.

CEOs are on a market-based economy, they sell goods and services for money. They don't sell their status. The goods and services they sell are not theirs, but created with the stolen sweat, blood and lives of the people that work for them, which get a minuscule share of the profit for the amount of life they put onto it.

In gift-based economies such as the ones of artists, open source developers, fashion, cultures without scarcities of the specific resource that makes the economy (such as small plentiful tropical tribes, communes, etc), the status is the currency.

Artists give. When they actually work. At their real jobs. Dubno if they deserve more than scientists or steel workers, but if it turns out we do actually need inequaluty and theres a lottery for which professions make you rich, i won't begrudge them a win.

Ceo's take, ruin, defile everything they touch. The meth addict who wanders around the city pissing on things is closer to a net positive than a ceo. The MBA and its various spawn was the final genocidal victory lap of the confederacy, and their purée must all soak the soil before the tree of freedom can grow.

Because an entertainer/athlete gets a paycheck for doing a job. They're not getting rich underpaying employees.

The debatable part comes in when you get more nuanced than that: The richest of them probably derive most of their wealth from investments once they've accumulated enough capital. Their industry requires the efforts of many underpaid people (even if they don't directly get a say in that). Anyone that keeps (not just earns) a billion wakes up every morning and decides not to solve homelessness in their city. Etc.

But a 20mm paycheck to put asses in seats is a paycheck, not exploitation.

The vast majority of CEOs don't become billionaires, most billionaires are born with a golden spoon in their mouth, and the rest got there by stepping on everyone else's backs. That's rewarding sociopathy.

Artists and athletes don't do either, they work to get good at their craft and, crucially, would be doing the same thing even if they were not as successful as they are. You can count them as petite bourgeois which of course come in good and bad but as artists and athletes are not, by trade, businesspeople they tend to very much fall on the good side. Like, you won't see Clooney undermining the actor's union -- on the contrary, he's advocated for raising his own union dues. And when they use their money to start a business you don't tend to get another Oracle or something but ARCH Motorcycles. Give me one reason why, in luxury space anarchism, the answer to Keanu Reeves saying "I want to build cool motorcycles, you in?" the answer of the collective wouldn't range from "hell yes" to "meh but you guys do you". He'd get all the resources he'd need: He entertained and uplifted billions, of course we'll chime in.

OTOH, of course, fuck J.K. Rowling. But unlike with the golden spoon billionaires she's the exception, not the norm.

My 2cents: Bezos money comes from other people's works, entertainers money comes from the perception that other people has of their work. Of course there are exceptions.