So many of the .001% seem to have no visible interests other than running up the score. I mean, most of us, you get to $50 billion, hell, $50 million, and you’d probably quit and spend your days doing something you found personally rewarding, rather than continuing to chase further growth. It’s not like they’re still working until they can afford that Jet Ski, and then bailing for Ford Lauterdale.
I almost wonder if it’s meaningful to try to evaluate them as humans-- to consider whether they’re consciously evil-- since it seems like they act like the Paperclip Optimizer from bad sci-fi parables. I’ve seen more emotional depth from a Hewlett-Packard LaserJet.
You’d think that their spending habits would reveal some element of what little soul they might have-- personal quirks, tastes, foibles. This goes beyond the usual “they could afford to end hunger and disease with couch change” complaint. They aren’t doing anything interesting in ANY space! If they had any sort of interests or feelings, they have more than enough resources to make a dramatic statement with their money, and yet, they don’t.
Why aren’t they indulging their fancies in comical, over-the-top fashion? Instead of a box of Lionel electric trains, they could fund the T-1 Trust. If they wanted to collect coins, they could get a 1804 dollar and wear it to public events as a brooch. If they spent too much time playing Sid Meier’s Civilization, surely they could buy into the executive house of some third-world country with the GDP of a typical Quizno’s. Probably much better value for money than buying a flaky Mastodon-a-like to use as a Rube Goldberg machine to flip elections. At best, they strap a rocket under their ass and pay a couple plebs’ life earnings for 30 seconds release from those pesky Van Allen belts, but even that seems to be just “the generic thing billionaires do” rather than being the obvious conclusion of a rich lifetime interest in astronomy or flight.
Even in their personal estates, does anyone remember anything special about them? Or is it just infinity pools, granite countertops, and rapidly-obsolescing smart technology, the same as men a hundred times poorer, but on a slightly bigger scale? Who will be so bold as to build something that will at least be a cherished monument or celebrated folly in 500 years? What is our era’s Versailles or Neuschwanstein?
Hell, one of the few things we can measure from their behaviour is that they’re petty and selfish, so why don’t we see them systematically buying any company that ever hires their ex just so they can systematically sack them again and again? Or paying hundreds of actors so they can relive their senior year of high school, except this time, they’re Prom King. Again, an excellent way to toss around your excessive status and wealth while chasing down the demons that you won’t be able to smother in stock options.
At most, there might be some slant towards discernible tastes in where they splash their charitable cash, but even that plays second fiddle to collecting an efficient tax-management strategy. Maybe they toss a few bucks towards research for a disease that their sister happened to have, or to make school kids study the things you think are important, but it’s still just one on the list of cheques they write because their accountants tell them to.
We should demand better. It’s common to make fun of the gauche behaviour of the sudden nouveau riche-- the 19-year-old with the sportsball contract or $10 million lottery win who buys a safety orange Lamborghini and a gold necklace that Flavor Flav dismissed as too tacky, but at least they look like they are having fun with the money, like they had some idea of “let’s do something cool with it” rather than letting it moulder on a spreadsheet somewhere.
At least they could do a more entertaining job of gilding their public presence-- sponsoring statues of themselves in major cities to pretend they were an important general, walking around every day like they were refugees from a catwalk or the Met Gala, running infomercials disguised as glowing life-story documentaries on cheap late-night broadcast time. Hell, use their immense commercial wrath to demand that everyone around them use some invented cockamamie title they can strut around with. Surely they can assign themselves a higher rank than a chicken fryer!
You don’t get to $50 million if the concept of “enough” exists for you. Most people with interests outside of profit, and having empathy for their fellow humans, will never amass anything close to a mega fortune. It happens occasionally, but as a rule, hobbies and empathy are anathema to building empires. So the sample size self-selects for boring people who only care about their status, their value, and their personal comfort.
Exactly this. Someone sane doesn’t get past a billion, you’d quit whatever you were doing and do whatever your real passion is. It’s the path Tom from MySpace took, and probably thousands of others that you never hear about because they’re just quietly enjoying an early retirement instead of getting involved in culture wars, influencing politicians into giving them even more money, etc.
These people are sick and should not be looked up to.
I can think of one example where that’s not true. Tom from MySpace. Use the wayback machine and look at his domain over the years before it became THE MySpace. He was messing around with a lot of different ideas, probably just having fun coding and creating new things. Then MySpace blew the fuck up overnight. He sold the company for $570 million and fucked off into the sunset. Last I heard he was into photography in Africa. He never pursued more. He got his lightning strike, and decided to live his best life. We need more rich people like Tom.
They have gold fever. There is no amount of money that will sate their thirst for more, whether they have to get it by screwing their employees, bribing politicians for tax relief and subsidies, or just plain fraud.
Being that rich should be a mental illness and once you reach a certain level you have to undergo treatment and not make any more money. Also, death taxes should be a thing that cuts off generational wealth.
Thanks for the rant, loved reading through it.
It is an interesting thought to think that a poor person is given desire but those ultra rich seem to have converted all of theirs into “more, more, more”. Almost like a dragon hiding in their cave hoarding all their treasures.
If nothing else, let’s glamorize people based on how much money they’ve spent instead of how much money they have.
But even then it’s gonna be dull. See the old Lewis Black bit about Enron and their ilk. “Three people took a billion dollars.” “They bought things. How many things can you buy? How much shit do you need?”
To be fair, Elon Musk seems to be doing exactly what you’re talking about.
You don’t go to space or start building electric cars to get rich, that’s not even an expected outcome of such things. You get companies like that because you want to do those things and that’s the frame you see the world through.
His acquisition of Twitter is really the ultimate example. He picked up a shitty social media website, and I guarantee you that’s not something you do at that moment because you want to become rich, it’s something you do because it piqued his interest and he was the world’s richest man.
But Elon is a good example of why even if you’re the richest man on earth you don’t want to draw too much attention to yourself. As the Japanese say, the nail that sticks up gets hammered down. How much time and energy does he have to spend on court cases because of something he said or did or because people just don’t like him? It’s best to stick to the infinity pools rather than arouse the ire of those who are even more powerful than the world’s richest man.
You don’t go to space or start building electric cars to get rich, that’s not even an expected outcome of such things.
Bullshit. Both of those ventures were heavily subsidized for-profit businesses from the start.
What you said and what I said can be true at the same time.
They were for-profit and subsidized, but you still don’t get into these fields to get rich, and other than Tesla and SpaceX nobody has. Even so, based on business fundamentals Tesla shouldn’t have made Elon rich, he just happened to ride a broken stock market caused by state socialist market interventions in the wake of the Great Financial Crisis.
If Elon just wanted to get the highest numbers, especially at the time it seemed the best idea would be to head out and build a new Internet company. Given his showmanship there’s every reason to think he could have founded some new company with unlimited margins that sold bits and bytes to people. Instead, he went with companies that had to manufacture difficult to manufacture things, heading into industries where margins rely not just on efficiently transporting data from point A to point B, but in building complicated physical devices – an infinitely more complex, higher risk venture with much lower potential payoff in terms of profits.
You make some good points. Plus, he didn’t always seem as off the rails as he does now. Idk if that’s just because he managed his public image better, or if his success went to his head, but I acknowledge that he might have been a different person when he started those companies than he is now.
