The billionaires don’t pay the salaries of the interviewers to ask hard hitting questions.

As a fun thought experiment -- to get £1bn someone would have to give you £1 per second EVERY SECOND for 32 years.

No one needs that much money. And anyone who says they do, or anyone who defends someone who does, really needs to adjust their point of view.

I personally like "Do you have that dream where you keep trying and trying to wash your hands but the blood never comes off"

They compare themselves to other billionaires, so they'll never be happy

Bullshit like "the Forbes list" makes it worse because it publicly lists them in order.

Something as simple as only talking about how much they donate would make a huge change. They'll gonna compete over something, might as well give them something helpful to do

"It's not enough to simply succeed. Your success must also contribute to the active failure of everyone else."

Honestly, the question I'd like answered is at what age did they realize that they wanted to be a dragon.

"When the revolution comes, where will you hide?" will always be the classic.

The question doesn't make sense to them. To get that rich, they had to throw away their morals. They can't answer the question because they can't process it.

A millionaire and a billionaire? That's a huge difference. At this point, if someone is 55 and wants to retire at 68 and not be 70 and working at Walmart, they're going to need to be a "multi-"millionaire.

Idk, I'm much younger, and my retirement plan is the same as everyone else my age: walk into the woods when I'm ready or die in the water wars later when I'm not.

But I still feel bad for the elderly forced to work because a retirement home with medical support, i.e. assisted living, is too expensive and your kids can't help you because they're barely surviving too, and that's while working, and you can barely work, but assisted living is 4-12k/month, so you work and hope you die before you become a burden on your children and grandchildren.

Anyway. The difference between a millionaire and a billionaire is vast. One million seconds ago was last week.

One billion seconds ago was fucking 1991.

Upper middle class? I think most if not 90% of billionaires are born in firmly upper class?

I really do wonder why people like Warren Buffet are still working to make more money, for himself and others. What's the benefit for himself? Some numbers get bigger, ok. But in terms of things and services he can buy for himself and his loved ones, nothing changes, he already can buy anything he could ever want. If he stopped working this seconds and would start spending money like there is no tomorrow, he couldn't spend it all.

So why spend the last few years of your finite life increasing some numbers that don't affect you? I really don't get it.

20yrs ago, I made about a fifth of what I make today. I couldn’t buy all the things I wanted, but we were safe and paid our bills without a lot of stress. Today, I have a little more flexibility, but it doesn’t feel all that different.

I will assume that “lifestyle inflation” scales up, maybe it scales up a lot. But beyond some point, wealth becomes meaningless and the marginal dollar means nothing. Why keep hustling past that point? What drives people like that? Inertia? Lust for power? Competition with peers? Hard to say I guess but, something is driving them.

Watch Wolf of Wall Street - extremely NSFW btw - or if you cannot handle watching it, read the book.

For some, the money isn't even the point, it's the thrill of the con game.

For billionaires though, it's something on a whole other level. Like, look at pictures of them - Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos, etc. - there's something not right there at all. They are playing an entirely different kind of game when, e.g., they don't even allow their workers to take breaks to pee, even if they are pregnant. Ofc YOU would not do that, nor likely would anyone that you know, nor would even meet in your entire lifetime. Who would do such a thing!? (unless their boss mandates it ofc, so like they would get fired if they don't, I mean like if nobody was forcing you to do so and yet... you did it anyway, and then you also forced thousands of other ~~humans~~ people to do it too)

That's why they are a billionaire and you and I are not - b/c they are on a whole other level. It's true, money cannot buy happiness, but they are damn sure going to ~~watch~~ cause the world to burn while they try.

I literally cannot believe this post. These rich folks ACTUALLY need that money. How else will their great grandson hire a fleet of lawyers after he rapes someone at a frat party at the college where he's a legacy admission? He doesn't have the grades to get into that school, or the personality to pull that girl. He needs that money to fuel his rapey life of decadence.

Why is it that everyone thinks they're not using their money as power? That's kind of obviously what's been happening to me, it's just that mostly, they end up using their power to try and centralize more power. disney buying out marvel, buying out the muppets, microsoft now having openAI, EA buying every game studio just to end up fucking them all up severely, yadda yadda. Use the money to invest in companies and run those companies which are also seeking their own self-interest and power centralization, run all those companies with whatever goals you just kind of vaguely feel like at the time, even if it kills cool stuff in the crib, even if it ends up fucking over the end user. We are subject to the highly coordinated and elaborate whims of an idiotic set of dictators who are, as dictated by their position at the top of the hierarchy, they are incapable of making good decisions.

It's not about the money.

In a Capitalist system Money Is Power and under Neoliberal Capitalism (which is all about the State removing itself from Regulating money, or in other words removing the Power From The Vote via the mechanisms of the State, controlled by representatives chosen via said vote, exercising almost no power, which, if you think about it, is against Democracy) Money is the greatest Power there is by a wide margin (even Fascism puts the State above Money, whilst Neoliberal Capitalism does the very opposite).

So these people hoard money because they live in a system were it gives them immense Power.

To spend a billion dollars in the lifetime of the average human being (80 years) you'd have to spend $34,246 a day.

If you spent $1000 a day it would take you 2,740 years.

If you gained 1% interest on a billion dollars every YEAR (not monthly), that would net you a passive income of $10,000,000 per year.

A guy named Dennis Kozlowski (embezzled $62 million from tyco) spent $15000 on an umbrella stand in 2002. That thing would be worth over $25,000 in today's money.

I'm trying to illustrate a couple of points here. When you do accrue all that money (I'm not talking about ethics here because we have established that some ethical boundaries have to be crossed and most everyone agrees with that), that money, even just sitting still accrues more money. And spending it isn't as easy as people seem to think.

Neither is giving it away. McKenzie Bezos is a good example. She managed it and the complaint then became that she did so irresponsibly. And even when people who come into this type of wealth manage it, there's no pleasing some people. Because even Chuck Feeny still gets a whole lot of flak from the eat the rich people just for becoming a billionaire in the first place. (I'm not on the side of the rich people. So don't even start).

Giving it away irresponsibly compounds the problem and can cause catastrophic economic events for the poor and working class.

Can we actually educate ourselves on the difference between assets, cash, investments, and net worth? Because net worth doesn't mean ready cash.

There shouldn't be any billionaires. We got that, because the system has derailed. There were some lackluster failsaves against the in capitalism inherent push to centralisation but those failed due to human greed.

Btw, what happened with the measures against "too big to fail" in international banking?

They are hoarding money, not because they need it, or even because they just want more.

I am convinced by now that the reason they are hoarding wealth is to keep it away from you.

Billionaires don’t want you to have money because then you’ll be competition.

It’s just another example of boomers pulling the latter up with them.

You would never be hired to work for any of the media outlets that interview billionaires. Manufactured consent and aspirational capitalism is what media is for.

The fact that people perceive the billionaires to be the problem

and not the society, and in particular the government which allowed that to happen in the first place

is, in my view, not a good starting point to effect change.