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All Billionaires Are Bastards
this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
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I like to think there may be, and could be... But I have never seen a great example.
Fill in the blanks:
A ______ billionaire is a good billionaire.
B
Good Billionaire is Thousander.
While, Brian Thompson may be the exception, after The-Man-Luigi-is-taking-a-fall-for was done with him of course.
A million seconds is 11.5 days. A billion seconds is 31.7 years.
Just a good way to ground an unimaginable number in something more familiar and drive home how ridiculous having a billion dollars is. I hear we're on track for our first batch of trillionaires this decade.
A trillion seconds is 31,688 years.
I hear we’re on track for our first batch of trillionaires this decade.
Unless we do something about the wealth, this is kinda expected eventually. Give it another decade after that and it would be wholly expected to have our first multi trillionaire, and honestly they wouldn't even need to do anything to make that happen, they'd just need to invest in a board market ETF.
I'm not saying this is good, but this was inevitable due to how the markets and inflation work.
Edit: Also it will probably happen sooner than anyone realizes when you take into account private unmeasurable wealth like Saudi royalty.
This is actually great! Welcoming your example to my now collection of two, alongside Wealth, shown to scale.
Yes there is Luigi showed us the way.
Brian Thompson was just a poor millionaire though. Perhaps one of the reasons why he was so easy to get.
Any individual that wants to horde so much money and wealth that could satisfy the lives of millions of people is not a good person.
It's like having a million sandwiches and thousands of hungry people around you .... but you'd rather keep all your sandwiches and screw everyone else, even though you will never be able to physically eat all the sandwiches you have in a lifetime.
Being a billionaire is not a sign of intelligence, it's a mental disorder and a person who lacks human empathy.
Not to be that person, but most people forget that the net worth oft these people is not liquid. They can not just wave a magic wand and give people money.
It's usually in shares of their very highly valued company which they can't give up because they wouldl give up control. Billionaires are not about money, they are about power.
What keeps you in power does not align with doing good. Thus the giving pledge exists, it allows giving away the money while you don't lose control in your lifetime.
Most billionaires do some kind of philanthropy. Gotta control where the money they would pay in taxes ends up. Even this is about power.
Their survival bias makes them believe that they know best what's good for the world. Taxing them would just increase their philanthropy, which is a good thing even though not perfect. Let's start somewhere.
If a company is set up right from the start, you could have voting shares that aren't stock based, and that can be a way to maintain control of your company without hoarding the wealth via stock, but if it's not like that from the start, it would be very hard to make that change after the fact.
It'd probably be better if that was more common, but I still don't think they'd give up their shares worth money on the market, and then I still think these types of shares would have off market value?
You do know that billionaires don't actually have billions of dollars in a vault in a Scrooge McDuck fashion, right?
Modern age dragons, sitting on their hoards while occasionally burning a peasant village to keep those dirty plebs in line.
Well, you know what to do with dragons
Sir/ma'am/other, you are on the internet. There are many responses to that.
Donkey_from_shrek.gif
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Hoarding is hoarding
If a little old lady hoards 20 cats we call her crazy .... a man hoards $400 billion dollars and we call them a genius
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General strike is the best and most effective means we have. If we wait for AI and robots to replace you, you loose your bargaining power.
Crash the fake economy. Your fucked either way might as well go down swinging and on your terms.
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Yup. Show me a billionaire who has paid their workers fairly from day one, followed every single law and regulation by the book, never spent a single dollar on lobbying Congress or contributing to political campaigns for quid pro quos, and never used underpaid contractors or foreign slave labor. You can’t, because there’s no such thing as a good billionaire.
The guy who founded Costco and was its CEO up until a few years ago is this, if not very close. A business lauded for both how it treated its workforce, and its customers. Basically no turnover unless someone retires.
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George Soros?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Soros
"As of October 2023, he had a net worth of US$6.7 billion,[9][10] having donated more than $32 billion to the Open Society Foundations,[11] of which $15 billion has already been distributed, representing 64% of his original fortune."
This is great, but he still tanked the UK economy to make his fortune, didn't he?
And although he regretted them, he promoted economic decisions to the Eastern Bloc, which lead to the rise of Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, etc.
From the Wiki, yeah:
"Soros is known as "The Man Who Broke the Bank of England" as a result of his short sale of US$10 billion worth of pounds sterling, which made him a profit of $1 billion, during the 1992 Black Wednesday UK currency crisis."
But who do you hate more? Billionaires or bankers? ;)
My proof that ethical billionaires don't exist is that there's a line (I usually like to set it at 10 million due to living in a very high CoL area) beyond this line you will never need more money in your life. Money will no longer improve your standard of living and your savings are enough to ride out life in comfort.
When you reach or approach this line you have two options:
-
Look at everyone you're working with and help them reach that line - if you've accomplished that then start lowering the costs of your business to customers to help your customers reach that line.
-
Squeeze harder so you get more money and everyone around you gets fucked.
If you chose #2 you are a fucking asshole. You cannot become a billionaire[1] except by choosing #2. You have actively chosen to push down those around you so you can watch number go up.
- The exception here is inheritance though someone with a sizable inheritance also has questions about using it to help those around them and, IMO, the estate tax should be near 100% and we should ensure that everyone has as equal a shot at life as we can. I loathe inheritance of wealth as a general concept though some things like having a family home are obviously pretty meaningful to a lot of people.
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There is no need for billionaires. They have more money than they know what to do with and could solve a lot of world issues and still have enough money left over to not know what to do with it. There's literally no reason in hoarding all that money if you're not going to spend it. It's a necessity for literally everyone else while they hold onto it to make themselves more powerful. If all the billionaires were hoarding all the food and we had to deal with the scrapes, people would be going absolutely crazy. Even though that's pretty much exactly what they are doing when people can't make enough money to buy food. Throw everything else like medical care and housing into the mix and what you end up with is a few people living a life of luxury while they are literally keeping your life away from you.
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