this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2025
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I accept millionaires.
I've yet to see moral billionaires.
The difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is about a billion dollars. Although the millionaires have to stop clutching their pearls, step up and realize that they're a lot closer in class to the homeless than the billionaires.
Yep, I've seen friends reach the seven figure area through steady seven day weeks and some luck picking their trade and finding industrial clients over a period of fifteen to twenty years. I have seen how little they slept and how kids were basically only possible because they were pretty self reliant from age 12 or 13 and helped a lot around the house. I have no idea how a human could possibly create a thousand times that value in their lifetime.
They can't. Billionaires can only exist by taking value generated by others. Absolutely nothing Jeff Bezos could do within 60 seconds is worth continuously "earning" over 18.000$.
Well you sure as hell can't have generally high moral standards and earn a billion from scratch. You have to either screw the environment on a very large scale and/or screw lots and lots of people.
And if you are in a context where you inherit a billion and think there is no problem with an individual having billions, odds are you are also not in a great position moral-wise.
I think the main ethical pathway to billions is through intellectual property. Write a beloved book series where each installment sells over 10 million copies, gets adapted into a movie cinematic universe that grosses billions, sells a shitload of merchandise, etc., and taking a fair cut of all that economic activity might result in a billion dollars.
Yes, in a sense it's still rent seeking of being paid some kind of toll for someone else building on your work, but that foundation is still your own work.
On a smaller scale, you've got songwriters, filmmakers, other entertainers, who can do one thing that gets seen/appreciated by billions. Same with inventors or artists.
fair point, for creative stuff whether or not its worth is really billions is another discussion which might touch ethics but is not always an obv violation.
It can really be a grey zone though since some inventions could really improve humanity as a whole (such as those in medicine) but when capitalised becomes accessible only by a certain class and makes the inventor possibly a billionaire. Now if you categorize earning billions from this as non-ethical but earning billions from other creative processes as ethical this will likely create a loophole. So I am still in favor of putting these in the same bag.
Most millionaires probably don't even know it and certainly don't feel it. It's old people who've been living in the same house for 50 years, who still worry about the price of beans.