Whenever I see people say: "I don't get it, if I were <insert billionaire's name here>, I'd immediately ".
Anybody who is the kind of person who would spend their money to fix societal problems isn't going to wait until they're a billionaire to do it. They'll do it as soon as they think they have enough money to make a difference. That's what will prevent them from ever becoming a billionaire. It's a survivorship bias thing. Every billionaire you see is a person who could have fallen into the "trap" of helping other people with their absurd, vast wealth. But, they survived that temptation and instead kept accumulating wealth like a dragon in some fantasy story.
It's extremely unlikely, for sure, but not necessarily impossible. You could release a piece of digital content, like a game or an album or program, that becomes wildly popular extremely quickly. Again, not likely, but strictly speaking possible.
That's not going to make you $1b. Maybe tens of millions, but not billions.
I guess you could sort-of argue that it's what happened with Minecraft, though that took more than 5 years from the alpha to the eventual acquisition. But, it's true that he went from typical middle class type wealth to a billionaire overnight when that deal closed.
But, in almost every other case someone's going to make far less than $1b on their first deal. And then they're going to be multi-millionaires who either start giving their money away, or try for $1b.
Starts before that even…there are way too many “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” out there who are absolutely wrecking potential class solidarity while the rich just take us all for everything we’re worth. Many of them are MAGA, which does help to explain both the mental illness and burned out empathy circuits.
I would only want to accumulate more so that I could do more to help people. When you're past a billion, you essentially print money on a near permanent basis on it just existing.
They only managed it when they partnered with religious bigots. They were losing, the very existence of those antitrust laws is proof. Then they bought religion.
They weren't losing. They were richer than ever before with leves of wealth inequality just recently matched. Then capitalism collapsed under the weight of that inequality into the Great Depression. Their winnings lead to collapse as they accumulated ever more resources that become unavailable to the people producing those resources. Then the cycle of accumulation and the power that comes with it started again. Antitrust got killed at one point. Unions were being killed before that. They used religion too but they were already beginning to win power again.
ROFL. That's an ahistoric narrative. The Great Depression was caused by a lack of liquidity caused by a failure to respond to mass withdrawal. FDR then made it worse with the New Deal, causing a double-dip that only resolved itself with the WWII wartime economy.
It was the lack of Federal Reserve banks and the failures of their predecessor organizations. Vaguely blaming "capitalism" is purely ignorance combined with intellectual laziness.
The modern problems can be laid at the feet of Reagan and Nixon, mostly. Bush Sr and Bush Jr contributed. But it's mostly Nixon and Reagan that helped corrupt the antitrust framework. The fallout breaking up Ma Bell and the Microsoft Antitrust case about Internet Explorer were both critical decisions instrumental to this deterioration.
Feel free to read Friedman's Economic History of the United States. His treatise is the most authoritative on the subject and has withstood decades of peer review.
There is quite literally no need to be making stuff up, like you're doing.
It's seriously a mental illness, a "rich mind virus" if you will, and we should design the rules of society accordingly.
Some of these people have an innate drive and even some skills that could contribute to society in a positive way. There should be a place for them just like any other disabled person. But that doesn't mean they should be able to run wild until they harm others.
We as a society need to get away from the tendency to categorize a person as good or bad based on one aspect of their life and generalizing that to everything else. Assuming that somebody is moral, ethical, honest, or a capable leader based on their net worth is definitely one of the more egregious examples right now.
Just like a crackhead or a heroin junkie can do whatever crazy shit a non-addict would never even think of, so do the rich billionaire money-addicts.
Just look at the difference between CEO's and mega-class actors. Lots of actors can be addicts, yeah, but not many of them are that addicted to money, and while they might buy things we consider ridiculous, they're not actively ruining society, just benefitting from capitalism.
Whereas people like Bezos are addicted to money and actively ruining the world. He could lose 99% of his wealth and still live the same, barely fucking notice a thing in his quality of life.
NYTimes sucks and I don't link them anymore but for thus exception as an opinion piece from Sam Polk.
Old time comic WC Fields was asked how to become wealthy.
He advised castration, followed by removal of taste buds, followed by making the person partially deaf and blind, so they couldn't appreciate music or art. Take out a kidney so they couldn't drink any liquor and they'd be the perfect money making machine, because that would be the only pleasure left.
Incapable of self-validating, also, adept at manipulating people and systems to get that validation, addicted to it.
Morality? Empathy?
Theoretical concepts for these people, their brains don't experience them they way others do. They can be skilled at pretending or performing them, but its fake, they're totally amoral.
Destiny/SexPestiny.
'Thor'/PirateSoftware.
Thats all these people, that's the personality.
Can't even turn off the compulsive lying, its instinctual.
They are that rich because monetary policy is frantically trying to force them to spend their money by dropping interest rates and doing QE; because the CPI excludes asset prices, substitutes goods for cheaper goods, and performs subjective deductions on goods to reduce their price in the basket even though they dont help the poor afford food and rent.
If the money supply grows at 7-8% and the stock market grows at 10% how can the poor possibly be made better off, when they are lucky to get a 2% cost of living adjustment and their minimum wage is actively being debased to push up stock values?
Truthfully, there isn't a self made billionaire. They have built upon the legacies and funds their families have at only the right time. Like Gates, he's a Harvard drop out not because he couldn't make it, because he had the right opportunities afforded to him at that time with familial connections to setup Microsoft in one of the cheapest places possible, the garage, so to save money not because they had to but wanted to. Even Warren is the success of his family lineage. Most if not all are just nepo babies.
Many of them are adherents to the idea of effective altruism which suggests that it's completely fine to become rich by any means possible so that you can save humanity with your wealth afterwards.
One minor flaw in the "philosophy" that they haven't grasped is that their means of wealth accumulation is largely what humanity needs to be saved from. 🫠
The percentage of sociopaths involved with defining a society should never be greater than zero.
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
I don't necessarily buy into this either i think power corrupts and that causes this appearance. Billionaires are just not special and got that way through a combination of things such as luck,actual smarts, inheritance, Racial and sex privilege and so on.
No it's not corruption, it's an inherent defect in character. There's a certain amount of money that you don't get accidentally or by any amount of honest personal effort.
You could get a "small loan of $1M" as a trust fund baby and grow it at twice the rate of the stock market (~14% apy) for 50 years and not even be halfway to $B. To get there you have to be committing fraud/hurting people/breaking laws.
And there's also the fact that there's no reason to make that much money. The diminishing returns are astounding once you get disgustingly wealthy. Before you hit $1B you could own a home in every major city in the world, own a mega yacht, buy a sports team, own private jets, etc. All without working a day for the rest of your life.
Billionaires are trading precious years of their life, the one resource that can't be bought, to make their numbers bigger. The stress and effort are just not worth it, let alone the harm you have to inflict on others to get there. These people should be stopped for their own good.
They have uncontrolled OCD that manifests as financial hoarding. If they were hoarding cats, or rusty old broken appliances, we'd get them help, and clean up their property. But Billionaires get lauded as wildly successful businesspeople, and are encouraged to abuse the financial system even more, and sometimes the government gives them lots more money, just for demanding it.
They won't give money to people who need it, but if you're a mentally ill pedophile, they'll give you as much as you demand.
But let's not forget that ordinary people could use social media to coordinate and elect politicians that use the power of the state to solve all problems.
I would disagree, billionaires are strong enough to do their best to make sure causative system stays in place which at this rate makes them a part of the cause too. Hard to imagine they would make way to a more fair system of living unless that is forced upon them. They will destroy the whole world before they accept to live as a normal human being. It is a mental disease, some sort of crossbreed between addiction, extreme narcissism and sociopathy.
In short: works for people already breaking out of the mainstream bubble. Not for regular users.
In long:
That's not really how modern mainstream social network operate. There's always a feed of recommendations based on the "interests" of the user. That's how normal people navigate through the social network. That's how the social media bubbles are created. If you control the feeds, you control what people are seeing. If you control what people are seeing you control what they believe.
That control mechanism does not work for everyone. For some it works partially or by transitive effects like parents or friends that influence the person.
The network effect is also an interesting topic. That prevents people from fluidly switching social media networks. Or messengers. It is uncomfortable if you have to use more than one platform to connect with your friends. So you switch to the platform that everyone around you uses. Look at discord right now. Almost everyone hates the current age verification plans an policy. Will discord loose some users? Sure. Will the platform die? Not in the next 3-4 years.
There is a reason that the world is like it is. The interesting part is that there is no physical barrier, no lack of resources or anything that prevents people from asking their social network, which would change their fate. It's just momentum and inertia.
Idk, I'm wondering if this is innate or not. If you "succeeded" at everything you tried because you were set up for success (right place, right time, with the right people around, etc), I think it could be quite easy to think of yourself as more than you are. Especially if you're surrounded by Yesmen.
those interactions have led to opinions about seemingly universal traits that they share.
Are these "lots of people" in the room with us, right now?
Tired of people trying to medicalize the economy. You're not a billionaire because you're some kind of psychological anomaly. You're a billionaire because you're at the right place in the right time with the right friends.
Gates was born into the IBM dynasty just as the demand for GUIs took off. Bezos was a hedge fund manager for tech companies before he formed Amazon. George Soros and Warren Buffett happened to walk into an era of explosive economic growth just as they were handed billions in credit to gamble with. Elon and Thiel got into Silicon Valley just as Ben Bernake was turning on the unlimited money cheat for a select group of insiders.
Being in the right industry at the right age with the right group of friends seems to be the only common denominator.
You're right that material conditions are the main contributing factor in the creation of billionaires, but why do you think it's the only factor?
There were thousands of individuals who had the right connections, the right age, the right group of friends, etc. Only a small percentage become billionaires. Do you think this selection process is purely luck?
I think there is something that sets apart one class of obscenely-wealthy oligarchs from their slightly-less wealthy counterparts. Maybe it's sociopathy, or adhd, or extreme greed. It definitely looks like mental illness.
"Material conditions" isn't a single factor, its a plethora of interlocking economic systems.
Meanwhile, there is no singular psychological profile that defines "billionaire". Elon Musk and Warren Buffet and Michael Bloomberg and Miriam Adelson and Donald Trump are all totally different people.
There were thousands of individuals who had the right connections, the right age, the right group of friends, etc.
Quite a few of them become mega-millionaires. It's not as though only having $500M makes you some kind of failure. Some people just get luckier than others. The folks that got rich on AOL and Yahoo never reached the heights of Google or Comcast, but it hardly matters. They're still stupid rich.
I think there is something that sets apart one class of obscenely-wealthy oligarchs from their slightly-less wealthy counterparts.
at the same time being a sexpest, which he try to "reinvent in 2000s by being a philantropist to africans, who apparently made criticism about his vaccines.
But heck they're derivative! Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates share one very high functioning trait. They all work on the most derivative product that has everyone-with-money's attention.
Elon learnt it young grokking a shitty version of space invaders.
Gates was riffing on other common software solutions from a young age.
Bezos was ploughing all in on the online book seller experience.
They all took the world by milquetoast innovations.
In reality running a company is a dog shit unrewarding chore. You need to build something really extraordinary to punch into mainstream and hope competition won't catch up
Under him Tesla built an electric car that didn't look like a soapbox on wheels. 10 years ago same people who hate him now, praised him like a deity for that. Under him starlink was built and works world wide.
Musk is the biggest case of falling out of grace after getting into politics
I think both can be true simultaneously, no? I don't think the point is that it's easy. I also doubt it's just hard work, elbow grease and a bit of luck to become so ridiculously rich. I think every single dollar billionaire has probably done, at the least, morally dubious things, and in most cases probably outright lied, stolen, and abused people in the pursuit of power.
A billion dollars is just such an egregious amount of money in a world where so many have so disappearingly little in comparison.
Just because it also requires the connections, power, and wealth along with some rather humble basic competencies doesn't mean that the reason they are able to out-compete and become billionaires among their peers isn't this.
Whenever I see people say: "I don't get it, if I were <insert billionaire's name here>, I'd immediately ".
Anybody who is the kind of person who would spend their money to fix societal problems isn't going to wait until they're a billionaire to do it. They'll do it as soon as they think they have enough money to make a difference. That's what will prevent them from ever becoming a billionaire. It's a survivorship bias thing. Every billionaire you see is a person who could have fallen into the "trap" of helping other people with their absurd, vast wealth. But, they survived that temptation and instead kept accumulating wealth like a dragon in some fantasy story.
This is true and very well said. I don't understand the accompanying graphic, however.
from here
Brilliant — thanks. (:
I could see becoming a billionaire from an idea too quickly to spend it, but 99.99% of the time this is correct.
I think you're dreaming if you think that's possible.
It's extremely unlikely, for sure, but not necessarily impossible. You could release a piece of digital content, like a game or an album or program, that becomes wildly popular extremely quickly. Again, not likely, but strictly speaking possible.
That's not going to make you $1b. Maybe tens of millions, but not billions.
I guess you could sort-of argue that it's what happened with Minecraft, though that took more than 5 years from the alpha to the eventual acquisition. But, it's true that he went from typical middle class type wealth to a billionaire overnight when that deal closed.
But, in almost every other case someone's going to make far less than $1b on their first deal. And then they're going to be multi-millionaires who either start giving their money away, or try for $1b.
The only possible way that could happen is through inheritance
Some level of greed is normal in humans.
Excessive greed, especially when it damages others, is a mental illness.
IMO it starts way before 1 billion too.
Like what kind of moron do you have to be to have 250.000.000 in your bank account and wake up every morning thinking you need to get more?
It truly is a mental illness, and for the no-empathy part, we have no treatment.
Starts before that even…there are way too many “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” out there who are absolutely wrecking potential class solidarity while the rich just take us all for everything we’re worth. Many of them are MAGA, which does help to explain both the mental illness and burned out empathy circuits.
I would only want to accumulate more so that I could do more to help people. When you're past a billion, you essentially print money on a near permanent basis on it just existing.
Spot on.
However, the enabling condition is anti-trust laws not being enforced.
They only managed it when they partnered with religious bigots. They were losing, the very existence of those antitrust laws is proof. Then they bought religion.
They weren't losing. They were richer than ever before with leves of wealth inequality just recently matched. Then capitalism collapsed under the weight of that inequality into the Great Depression. Their winnings lead to collapse as they accumulated ever more resources that become unavailable to the people producing those resources. Then the cycle of accumulation and the power that comes with it started again. Antitrust got killed at one point. Unions were being killed before that. They used religion too but they were already beginning to win power again.
ROFL. That's an ahistoric narrative. The Great Depression was caused by a lack of liquidity caused by a failure to respond to mass withdrawal. FDR then made it worse with the New Deal, causing a double-dip that only resolved itself with the WWII wartime economy.
It was the lack of Federal Reserve banks and the failures of their predecessor organizations. Vaguely blaming "capitalism" is purely ignorance combined with intellectual laziness.
The modern problems can be laid at the feet of Reagan and Nixon, mostly. Bush Sr and Bush Jr contributed. But it's mostly Nixon and Reagan that helped corrupt the antitrust framework. The fallout breaking up Ma Bell and the Microsoft Antitrust case about Internet Explorer were both critical decisions instrumental to this deterioration.
And what caused the mass withrawal?
Feel free to read Friedman's Economic History of the United States. His treatise is the most authoritative on the subject and has withstood decades of peer review.
There is quite literally no need to be making stuff up, like you're doing.
Yeah cause religion was all pure and good before it was "bought" in the mid-1900s. \s \s \s
For a time, American Christianity taught that rich people didn't go to heaven.
It was still a net harm on society, but it was no fan of the rich assholes and robber barons.
That then was warped into Prosperity Gospel.
It's seriously a mental illness, a "rich mind virus" if you will, and we should design the rules of society accordingly.
Some of these people have an innate drive and even some skills that could contribute to society in a positive way. There should be a place for them just like any other disabled person. But that doesn't mean they should be able to run wild until they harm others.
We as a society need to get away from the tendency to categorize a person as good or bad based on one aspect of their life and generalizing that to everything else. Assuming that somebody is moral, ethical, honest, or a capable leader based on their net worth is definitely one of the more egregious examples right now.
It's addiction.
Simple as that.
Just like a crackhead or a heroin junkie can do whatever crazy shit a non-addict would never even think of, so do the rich billionaire money-addicts.
Just look at the difference between CEO's and mega-class actors. Lots of actors can be addicts, yeah, but not many of them are that addicted to money, and while they might buy things we consider ridiculous, they're not actively ruining society, just benefitting from capitalism.
Whereas people like Bezos are addicted to money and actively ruining the world. He could lose 99% of his wealth and still live the same, barely fucking notice a thing in his quality of life.
NYTimes sucks and I don't link them anymore but for thus exception as an opinion piece from Sam Polk.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/opinion/sunday/for-the-love-of-money.html
He wrote a whole book about it
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27274419-for-the-love-of-money
Old time comic WC Fields was asked how to become wealthy.
He advised castration, followed by removal of taste buds, followed by making the person partially deaf and blind, so they couldn't appreciate music or art. Take out a kidney so they couldn't drink any liquor and they'd be the perfect money making machine, because that would be the only pleasure left.
Also, our culture worships money, so they become "virtuous" in the eyes of others based on their wealth
They're narcissistic sociopaths.
That's the two word version of that.
Incapable of self-validating, also, adept at manipulating people and systems to get that validation, addicted to it.
Morality? Empathy?
Theoretical concepts for these people, their brains don't experience them they way others do. They can be skilled at pretending or performing them, but its fake, they're totally amoral.
Destiny/SexPestiny.
'Thor'/PirateSoftware.
Thats all these people, that's the personality.
Can't even turn off the compulsive lying, its instinctual.
wealth corrupts and attracts the corrupt
They are that rich because monetary policy is frantically trying to force them to spend their money by dropping interest rates and doing QE; because the CPI excludes asset prices, substitutes goods for cheaper goods, and performs subjective deductions on goods to reduce their price in the basket even though they dont help the poor afford food and rent.
If the money supply grows at 7-8% and the stock market grows at 10% how can the poor possibly be made better off, when they are lucky to get a 2% cost of living adjustment and their minimum wage is actively being debased to push up stock values?
They gotta make it up in volume! /s
Also because their parents were rich.
Truthfully, there isn't a self made billionaire. They have built upon the legacies and funds their families have at only the right time. Like Gates, he's a Harvard drop out not because he couldn't make it, because he had the right opportunities afforded to him at that time with familial connections to setup Microsoft in one of the cheapest places possible, the garage, so to save money not because they had to but wanted to. Even Warren is the success of his family lineage. Most if not all are just nepo babies.
Intentionally interpreting the analogy literally prompts the question: what should an individual do with the 'unfillable' hole?
Nothing? It's like asking an alcoholic what they should do about alcohol. It's just something that this person would have to learn to live with.
Therapy.
Can't cure a total lack of empathy.
can to, it's called LSD
Interesting, any links or info about that?
Anything else
Many of them are adherents to the idea of effective altruism which suggests that it's completely fine to become rich by any means possible so that you can save humanity with your wealth afterwards.
One minor flaw in the "philosophy" that they haven't grasped is that their means of wealth accumulation is largely what humanity needs to be saved from. 🫠
The percentage of sociopaths involved with defining a society should never be greater than zero.
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
The agreeable solution is to fill their hole with lead.
High speed delivery for top notch customer service 😉
I collect stacks of papers that reach the ceiling and leave me with limited room, I'm a hoarder and need mental health.
I collect large sums of wealth and money with no intention to use it and it affects me mentally just managing, successful at business.
I don't necessarily buy into this either i think power corrupts and that causes this appearance. Billionaires are just not special and got that way through a combination of things such as luck,actual smarts, inheritance, Racial and sex privilege and so on.
No it's not corruption, it's an inherent defect in character. There's a certain amount of money that you don't get accidentally or by any amount of honest personal effort.
You could get a "small loan of $1M" as a trust fund baby and grow it at twice the rate of the stock market (~14% apy) for 50 years and not even be halfway to $B. To get there you have to be committing fraud/hurting people/breaking laws.
And there's also the fact that there's no reason to make that much money. The diminishing returns are astounding once you get disgustingly wealthy. Before you hit $1B you could own a home in every major city in the world, own a mega yacht, buy a sports team, own private jets, etc. All without working a day for the rest of your life.
Billionaires are trading precious years of their life, the one resource that can't be bought, to make their numbers bigger. The stress and effort are just not worth it, let alone the harm you have to inflict on others to get there. These people should be stopped for their own good.
I agree, power corrupts, and anyone who climbs high enough will become corrupt. Power is also addictive, they can't give it up.
There are very few exceptions proving the rule in this case.
They have uncontrolled OCD that manifests as financial hoarding. If they were hoarding cats, or rusty old broken appliances, we'd get them help, and clean up their property. But Billionaires get lauded as wildly successful businesspeople, and are encouraged to abuse the financial system even more, and sometimes the government gives them lots more money, just for demanding it.
They won't give money to people who need it, but if you're a mentally ill pedophile, they'll give you as much as you demand.
no, they are born with a silver spoon and have never actually worked a day in thier lives. plus all of them had been to epstein islands before too.
But let's not forget that ordinary people could use social media to coordinate and elect politicians that use the power of the state to solve all problems.
Billionaires are a symptom, not the cause.
I would disagree, billionaires are strong enough to do their best to make sure causative system stays in place which at this rate makes them a part of the cause too. Hard to imagine they would make way to a more fair system of living unless that is forced upon them. They will destroy the whole world before they accept to live as a normal human being. It is a mental disease, some sort of crossbreed between addiction, extreme narcissism and sociopathy.
The people could still vote differently. The billionaires have influence but we have to give up the idea of free will to let them be the cause.
And the social media is controlled by who?
Not to the extend that people can't tell their direct followers to join a channel on Lemmy which could do the main lifting.
In short: works for people already breaking out of the mainstream bubble. Not for regular users.
In long: That's not really how modern mainstream social network operate. There's always a feed of recommendations based on the "interests" of the user. That's how normal people navigate through the social network. That's how the social media bubbles are created. If you control the feeds, you control what people are seeing. If you control what people are seeing you control what they believe.
That control mechanism does not work for everyone. For some it works partially or by transitive effects like parents or friends that influence the person.
The network effect is also an interesting topic. That prevents people from fluidly switching social media networks. Or messengers. It is uncomfortable if you have to use more than one platform to connect with your friends. So you switch to the platform that everyone around you uses. Look at discord right now. Almost everyone hates the current age verification plans an policy. Will discord loose some users? Sure. Will the platform die? Not in the next 3-4 years.
There is a reason that the world is like it is. The interesting part is that there is no physical barrier, no lack of resources or anything that prevents people from asking their social network, which would change their fate. It's just momentum and inertia.
Can we fill em with more holes? Asking for a friend
Y'all act like these weren't at the right place at the right time. It's mostly luck and social circles that makes those people what they are.
and sociopathy.
Idk, I'm wondering if this is innate or not. If you "succeeded" at everything you tried because you were set up for success (right place, right time, with the right people around, etc), I think it could be quite easy to think of yourself as more than you are. Especially if you're surrounded by Yesmen.
Spot on.
Dragons seem to have been created to represent these insatiable and very dangerous assholes... Minus all the wisdom and coolness.
Gee, would've been a shame if all that money from them was redistributed to the poor. Seriously!
We so, so need to have just a hard limit on how much money/monetary goods one can own.
The three of them probably fucked children at some point
Two of them likely did. Elon couldn't get an invite to those parties, but he definitely tried.
So plug all of their holes, got it
Why does only Bezos look stoned in the photo?
Eat the rich but the reasoning here isn't compelling. What's the evidence? Just a trust me bro?
A lot of people have lots of interaction with the rich, some even the filthy rich...
... and those interactions have led to opinions about seemingly universal traits that they share.
That's evidence, but not the kind of evidence you're looking for I think.
Who's going to pay for this rigorous scientific testing? Womp womp
Are these "lots of people" in the room with us, right now?
Tired of people trying to medicalize the economy. You're not a billionaire because you're some kind of psychological anomaly. You're a billionaire because you're at the right place in the right time with the right friends.
Gates was born into the IBM dynasty just as the demand for GUIs took off. Bezos was a hedge fund manager for tech companies before he formed Amazon. George Soros and Warren Buffett happened to walk into an era of explosive economic growth just as they were handed billions in credit to gamble with. Elon and Thiel got into Silicon Valley just as Ben Bernake was turning on the unlimited money cheat for a select group of insiders.
Being in the right industry at the right age with the right group of friends seems to be the only common denominator.
You're right that material conditions are the main contributing factor in the creation of billionaires, but why do you think it's the only factor?
There were thousands of individuals who had the right connections, the right age, the right group of friends, etc. Only a small percentage become billionaires. Do you think this selection process is purely luck?
I think there is something that sets apart one class of obscenely-wealthy oligarchs from their slightly-less wealthy counterparts. Maybe it's sociopathy, or adhd, or extreme greed. It definitely looks like mental illness.
"Material conditions" isn't a single factor, its a plethora of interlocking economic systems.
Meanwhile, there is no singular psychological profile that defines "billionaire". Elon Musk and Warren Buffet and Michael Bloomberg and Miriam Adelson and Donald Trump are all totally different people.
Quite a few of them become mega-millionaires. It's not as though only having $500M makes you some kind of failure. Some people just get luckier than others. The folks that got rich on AOL and Yahoo never reached the heights of Google or Comcast, but it hardly matters. They're still stupid rich.
Sure. Dumb luck.
Are Gates, Bezos, Soros, Buffett, Elon, and Thiel in the room with you right now?
Anyway, there's a lot more to it, but I won't burst your bubble or anything. Your secret is safe with me
Well, yes, anecdotal evidence exists for literally any claim under the sun.
Bill Gates frequently made his employees buy him lunch and he never reimbursed them.
at the same time being a sexpest, which he try to "reinvent in 2000s by being a philantropist to africans, who apparently made criticism about his vaccines.
Just read the book bro
Billionaires are billionaires because of their personal net worth.
I was just thinking this exact same topic coming home from the vet!
"I'm also morally broken but all I got was this t-shirt" -- communists probably
whoosh
But heck they're derivative! Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates share one very high functioning trait. They all work on the most derivative product that has everyone-with-money's attention.
Elon learnt it young grokking a shitty version of space invaders.
Gates was riffing on other common software solutions from a young age.
Bezos was ploughing all in on the online book seller experience.
They all took the world by milquetoast innovations.
Jobs was different.
Technically yes, Jobs was different; he was much more aggressive, abrasive, and megalomaniacal.
Gates, Musk, Bezos? Narcissistic sociopaths.
If it's so easy why aren't you a billionaire?
In reality running a company is a dog shit unrewarding chore. You need to build something really extraordinary to punch into mainstream and hope competition won't catch up
Is that what Elon Musk did? Give me a fucking break.
Is that what all of these people did? https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/apr/03/all-billionaires-under-30-have-inherited-their-wealth-research-finds
Under him Tesla built an electric car that didn't look like a soapbox on wheels. 10 years ago same people who hate him now, praised him like a deity for that. Under him starlink was built and works world wide.
Musk is the biggest case of falling out of grace after getting into politics
Look, you can't even say he created Tesla. The man has never created anything worthwhile in his miserable life.
Nuance is foreign concept for this one. Building a car isn't a one person endeavor
No, I mean he literally had nothing to do with the creation of the company
Creation of company has nothing to do with building a good product. Before Musk they made Tesla Roadster - which was a commercial failure.
He has never created anything of value in his life.
The car designs were already done by the time he bought the company. His first pure Musk design was the Cybertruck, a soapbox on wheels.
He also called that recuse diver a pedophile out of no where. Everything before that could be explained by him trolling other rich people.
I think both can be true simultaneously, no? I don't think the point is that it's easy. I also doubt it's just hard work, elbow grease and a bit of luck to become so ridiculously rich. I think every single dollar billionaire has probably done, at the least, morally dubious things, and in most cases probably outright lied, stolen, and abused people in the pursuit of power. A billion dollars is just such an egregious amount of money in a world where so many have so disappearingly little in comparison.
I think it's the other way around. If you're successful beyond certain scale you get entangled into politics whether you want or not
Also, a lot of inherited wealth and getting lucky. For some reason, rich people that go bankrupt keep getting second chances.
Just because it also requires the connections, power, and wealth along with some rather humble basic competencies doesn't mean that the reason they are able to out-compete and become billionaires among their peers isn't this.