Aral BalkanA billionaire does things for many reasons. None of those are in your interests unless you also happen to be a billionaire.
The sooner you learn this, the sooner we can start doing something about it.
Since a couple of you asked what’s the something we can start doing about billionaires, it’s simple:
Whatever you can to make them socially unacceptable. Make being a billionaire the equivalent of wearing fur.
Don’t feed them if you can help it (easier said than done). If you must feed them, make sure people know you’re not happy about it. If there are alternatives, fund, promote, and use them. But at the very least don’t praise and glorify them and stop giving them “the benefit of the doubt.”
sj_zerothere's an old quote, and I don't know where it came from: "It's possible to become a millionaire through hard work and honesty, but not a billionaire"
Virtually no billionaires on earth became so by providing good and services to people for fair compensation. Pretty much every one has links to overgrown states who have either directly paid them or created an uneven playing field that can only have one result.
Rail Barons got special monopolies granted by the state giving them unique powers to build through other people's land. Same with phone and power companies who got special access to people's yards to build their power lines. The Internet is one of the most government funded things in the history of the world. Banks get so much special legislation and government backing that it's absurd once you start looking into it. Elon Musk's entire fortune is entirely contingent on various US government programs.
It's actually already unfashionable to be super-rich, which is why fancy clothes and fast cars are no longer considered status symbols, and we get a proliferation of "luxury beliefs" where the rich and powerful express opinions that are as beautiful as diamonds and just as impractical. Such beliefs if acted upon by the poor would lead to destruction, but not if you're so rich it doesn't matter.
Virtually no billionaires on earth became so by providing good and services to people for fair compensation. Pretty much every one has links to overgrown states who have either directly paid them or created an uneven playing field that can only have one result.
Rail Barons got special monopolies granted by the state giving them unique powers to build through other people's land. Same with phone and power companies who got special access to people's yards to build their power lines. The Internet is one of the most government funded things in the history of the world. Banks get so much special legislation and government backing that it's absurd once you start looking into it. Elon Musk's entire fortune is entirely contingent on various US government programs.
It's actually already unfashionable to be super-rich, which is why fancy clothes and fast cars are no longer considered status symbols, and we get a proliferation of "luxury beliefs" where the rich and powerful express opinions that are as beautiful as diamonds and just as impractical. Such beliefs if acted upon by the poor would lead to destruction, but not if you're so rich it doesn't matter.