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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.
The billionaires don’t pay the salaries of the interviewers to ask hard hitting questions.
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.
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.
“It’s not enough to simply succeed. Your success must also contribute to the active failure of everyone else.”
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
humanspeople 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
watchcause the world to burn while they try.There was a twilight zone episode called “a nice place to visit” where this petty crook died and ended up in a place where he could have anything he wanted any time. Every time he’d gamble, he’d win. Every woman he talked to wanted him. Etc. But he couldn’t lose.
A billionaire can have anything, but without challenge nothing really means anything. It’s all fake, and they’re surrounded by people who just agree with them in order to get to their money. They have no friends. They can’t even go outside. They’re trapped in the mansions and sports cars and yachts, unable to live in or even experience the world they have so much influence over. They are trapped by their wealth, so they come up with impossible plans to escape… To Mars, to space… But there is no escape. They are trapped on a world they are killing, surrounded by people who they need who also hate them.
The crook in the twilight zone episode asked to lose or get turned down, wanted some kind of challenge. He didn’t want to be in heaven anymore… And he was informed that he was not in heaven. That was hell.
Of course they’re broken. They’re in a living hell that everyone imagines is heaven.
Both Bezos and Musk were also abused or neglected by their parents. They feel like they have to prove something, but there’s nothing to prove and the people they want to prove themselves to are dead.
