Queen Elizabeth II
this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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If they were genuinely good people they wouldn't be in the 1%.
Being 1% is not just rich, not just disgustingly rich, you needed to have exploited BILLIONS of people for DECADES and had no moral qualms about it. If you did, you would have stopped long before you reached that high.
It's like asking if any 1st degree murderers did it by accident.
Seems like everyone is getting the 1% confused with billionaires. The average 1%er is something like a doctor or a plumber that owns his own business, not the assholes floating around on superyachts.
That doesn’t sound like the 1%. There are 3.6 million 1%ers in the US alone, by definition. Being in the 1% might you very comfortable but it won’t necessarily make you an evil overlord. For that I suspect you need to be in the 0.001% (meaning there’s 3600ish in the US, a more manageable group of absolute bastard. There aren’t 3.6 million disgustingly rich people in the US.
Putting some numbers (for the US) here, from a recent Forbes article
Joining the top 1% requires a net worth of $11.6 million to $13.7 million
it's not a moral problem per se. it doesn't matter if members of the so called 1% are personally good or bad. if they reached those positions then they are performing roles that are prejudicial for the society.
politics is less about people's morality or intentions. it's about what they effectively do.
If you have enough money to be in the 1% and choose to keep it to remain in the 1% instead of using it to right the many many wrongs in the world, you can't be a good person.
Just having that much money, and not using it is a moral failing.
Scott Galloway has consistently advocated for younger generations and criticized the accumulation of wealth in the boomer generation and 1%. Check out his TED talk https://youtu.be/qEJ4hkpQW8E
Mackenzie Scott.
Bezos' ex wife has already done more good for humanity than he could ever hope to achieve
Wow! She is awesome!
She’s o.k. 🙄
That you Jeffrey?
If she were cool she’d buy a whole strip of land that goes from Canada to Mexico lobby to privatise US airspace then place SAMs on that land and blow up private jets.
Being that powerful and wealthy doesn’t happen without doing horrible things. Then, once a person achieves that status, the pressures change and they just become worse.
There is always a club where you are not invited, because you aren't rich enough.
Bourgeois class traitors are a rare breed, and bourgeois class traitors in powerful positions are a pipe dream. The capitalist class—which owns the means of production and gets its wealth by expropriating surplus value from the working class’ wages or by rent-seeking—are not going to save us.
It’s not possible. They’ve Hoover’d up money and direct where it’s used.
At any point they could give emough back to the people to become less then billionaires. But they don’t.
You might have 100k, invest, make it 1m in 10 year you'd have more to give back than 100k + 10yrs interest
I have a benefit of the doubt thing here, not that any billionaire I've heard of deserves it. If I suddenly had a billion dollars, would I donate to an existing charity with an administration I don't know and trust or would I think "hmm I can better choose what happens with this money" and start my own charitable enterprise? Like a bill/Miranda Gates situation.
I know if I had a billion dollars worth of shares of a company I wouldn't necessarily liquidate it all for philanthropy either. Do I hold onto control of these stocks while attempting to guide the company in a more ethical way? Idk. It's an interesting thought
I like Mark Cuban for the whole https://www.costplusdrugs.com/ thing he's doing. I have no idea whether or not he's a decent guy, but this is a decent thing to do, so I give him the benefit of the doubt.
Mark Cuban is the closest I can think of. Most of his wealth came from stocks he received when he sold his dot com business to Yahoo. He's invested a bunch after that. Now he does some decent things like his at cost prescriptions. He definitely seems personable and understands that he is extremely lucky.
Closest I can think of is GabeN and like all of us he's certainly not perfect
Being a billionaire is like staying alive long enough to be a villain. They were great at something but nothing justifies holding that much power for so long.
Kim Jung Un
🇰🇵🇰🇵🇰🇵🇰🇵🇰🇵
Nelson Mandela
Jeff Atwood (stack overflow and discourse cofounder) seems pretty cool for someone who made a shitton of money in tech. Everyone I know who's met him says he's a nice and normal human being, and he's currently funding a UBI program as well as giving copiously to high-quality charities.
Jay Pritzker (governor of Illinois) seems like an okay dude.