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this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2024
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God I wish billionaires restricted themselves to "not helping anyone". It seems that our actual billionaires are actively trying to destroy everyone's lives through abuse of monopoly power, election influence, running interference against climate change laws, straight up regular crime, and so on.
If billionaires limited themselves to only being fabulously wealthy and living in exorbitant luxury, they'd never be billionaires
..because you only really need to have 100 million dollars or something like that at most for life-long disgusting levels of luxury, anything more is just showing off
In fact, I'd even argue that 10 million usd is more than enough for living a stress-free luxurious life without needing to work a single more day in your life
If I try to imagine my life where I had $100 million and the best thing I could find to do with my time— given that just about everything would be within my budget — was to work long hours and try to raise thar number… it just seems sad.
That’s the exact kind of go-getter a lot of society has told me is the person I should want to be too. Gross.
Your first mistake is thinking that you got the first $100mil by "working hard".
You don't get $100 mil by working hard. You get there by being born to the right family or by exploiting the labor of others. Usually both. Very, very rarely, it could be just pure dumb luck. But never just by working hard.
Yeah of course. I was imagining being the founder of a growing business or something like that. Most of that value was skimmed from the work of others, but that person could still be putting in long days of “work” to keep the thing growing.
And I’m sure there are plenty of people we’ve never heard about that sold the business and lived a wonderful quiet life with their family. We get to hear about the ones that are mentally ill to the point where they cannot stop, and must continue to acquire.
I suppose that would be the exception...somebody taking no more than a modest salary while building and growing a business, constantly re-investing into the business and their employees, then selling the business for hundreds of millions of dollars and bowing out of the rat-race forever.
That has to be exceedingly rare.
I'd like to say I would do that if I were in that position...but truth be told, I'd probably have everybody asking me to invest in their startup. And some might actually sound very promising and not very morally bankrupt.
But what's a couple million out of my hundreds to toss to an interesting startup. That's pocket change now. This is gambling for rich folk.
And that startup makes it big. Next thing you know, I'm a mogul.
100 mill is chump change anymore. USD might as well be pesos the way the tax and spend GOP handles things.
100 mil buys a very medicore doomsday bunker. 500 mil in 2024 is the new 100 mil from 2018.