Having $270 billion dollars and spending the bulk of your time trying to make more money is like weighing 900 pounds and thinking "ooh, I bet I can get to 1000".
As long as we keep treating wealth like a scoreboard, this will continue. If we collectively demonized people with unreasonable wealth, ostracized them from society, and stopped glorifying it and treating them like celebrities because of it, we might be in a better spot.
Money at this scale is just points in a game. It is entirely divorced from value to them, it's just social status
The worst part is, they're not even happy either. Some people do enjoy playing capitalism... But the mental gymnastics you have to do to enjoy min-maxing your labor pool leaves you hollow as a person.
Everyone you meet is hoping to leech off you, a peer you are competing against in the stupidest game, or someone who doesn't care about money (and probably looks at you with disgust because your financial existence is literally destroying our species)
The only happy billionaires are the ones no one hears about - the people who are generationally free of the game and have accepted their ticket out from the start
Probably not. Since the point of money is to be able to buy more and better things, there will always be a desire to have more money, even if nobody else cares how much you have.
There's no real difference between $213 billion and $270 billion when it comes to buying power. Both are effectively unlimited. Both could buy small countries if they wanted to. But there sure is a difference when it comes to ego, because when we talk about it, we're always treating it like a great thing to be the richest person in the world, instead of sociopathy.
If we see a street lady collecting a hundred cats to horde, we call her crazy.
When we see someone hording so much wealth that they could never reasonably ever spend all that money in a lifetime ... we put them on the cover of a magazine.
In thousands of lifetimes. 1,000,000 per year is a stupid amount of money to live on. If you "only" spent $1,000,000 a year you could live on 250billion for 250,000 years. That isn't including any interest accrued.
People constantly underestimate how large a billion actually is.
But it doesn't work like that. Wealth is a status symbol, and status symbols are comparative. Millionaires compare themselves to slightly richer millionaires, and billionaires to slightly richer billionaires. Everyone else is irrelevant to them.
A lot of these guys in the comments lack basic economic understanding. People also make these comments while ignoring other investments these so-called "demons" make. The truth is there is no government in a capitalist society without the efforts of private bourgeois. We should instead advocate for higher taxes rather than whatever impractical and sensationalist solutions we may think of.
While that is true, at the moment in time they are worth that much, they easily have access to that same amount more or less simply by having better lending rates(after accounting shenanigans are all worked out)than any average person will ever have.
In comparison, our mortgages/loans are the equivalent of using paydayloan rates
I think these guys get addicted to the power. Sure Mark Zuckerberg could spend all his time learning to cook Thai food or surfing or traveling, and we all love to do those things. But very few of us know what it feels like for him to walk into a campus of thousands that he commands and make choices all day long about what to do with them all.
I’m not saying that anyone would do the same in their shoes. But certainly the kind of person who likes to build a giant company will like being at the helm of it too. It’s not about more billions.
I have a lot of entrepreneur and VC friends. One of them always says that it isn't about the money. He says "Some people have fun playing video games, board games or Dungeons and Dragons. This is my Dungeons and Dragons".
He says it a lot so shout out to whomever can guess who he is. Hint; he's Austin based.
Most people on this list have taken their foot off the gas in a major way, and do more of what they want.
Elon is currently blowing tens of billions of dollars running Twitter into the ground, designs impractical cars because he thinks they look cool, committing light treason, and campaigning for a president who would be detrimental to his business interests.
While the Zuck is still involved at Meta, he also picked up a ton of other hobbies. A lot of them are objectively cool. He also seems to spend a lot of time with his wife and kids.
Bezos seems to spend most of his time having sex with his age appropriate mistress on his $500 million yacht.
Because one of the few things he actually understands is he is not immortal, so he's trying to make a legacy. Hence, literally offering his sperm to anyone who wants it, and not caring about anything other than making sure his name is at the top of everything he is even mildly interested in.
I've heard there are people that do something similar to get on those reality shows about fat people's lives or the weight loss competitions. I guess some think it's easier to gain 100 more pounds and then get on the TV show to lose 400 pounds than it is just to lose 300 pounds themselves.
The same could be said of someone who earns a low income relative to a billionaire (e.g. $80-120k) depending on the country they reside in. Money doesn't buy happiness folks, life experiences do 🙂