Whenever I see people say: “I don’t get it, if I were <insert billionaire’s name here>, I’d immediately <do some selfless thing with my money>”.
Anybody who is the kind of person who would spend their money to fix societal problems isn’t going to wait until they’re a billionaire to do it. They’ll do it as soon as they think they have enough money to make a difference. That’s what will prevent them from ever becoming a billionaire. It’s a survivorship bias thing. Every billionaire you see is a person who could have fallen into the “trap” of helping other people with their absurd, vast wealth. But, they survived that temptation and instead kept accumulating wealth like a dragon in some fantasy story.
This is true and very well said. I don’t understand the accompanying graphic, however.
Brilliant — thanks. (:
But let’s not forget that ordinary people could use social media to coordinate and elect politicians that use the power of the state to solve all problems.
Billionaires are a symptom, not the cause.
I would disagree, billionaires are strong enough to do their best to make sure causative system stays in place which at this rate makes them a part of the cause too. Hard to imagine they would make way to a more fair system of living unless that is forced upon them. They will destroy the whole world before they accept to live as a normal human being. It is a mental disease, some sort of crossbreed between addiction, extreme narcissism and sociopathy.
And the social media is controlled by who?
Not to the extend that people can’t tell their direct followers to join a channel on Lemmy which could do the main lifting.
In short: works for people already breaking out of the mainstream bubble. Not for regular users.
In long: That’s not really how modern mainstream social network operate. There’s always a feed of recommendations based on the “interests” of the user. That’s how normal people navigate through the social network. That’s how the social media bubbles are created. If you control the feeds, you control what people are seeing. If you control what people are seeing you control what they believe.
That control mechanism does not work for everyone. For some it works partially or by transitive effects like parents or friends that influence the person.
The network effect is also an interesting topic. That prevents people from fluidly switching social media networks. Or messengers. It is uncomfortable if you have to use more than one platform to connect with your friends. So you switch to the platform that everyone around you uses. Look at discord right now. Almost everyone hates the current age verification plans an policy. Will discord loose some users? Sure. Will the platform die? Not in the next 3-4 years.
There is a reason that the world is like it is. The interesting part is that there is no physical barrier, no lack of resources or anything that prevents people from asking their social network, which would change their fate. It’s just momentum and inertia.
They’re narcissistic sociopaths.
That’s the two word version of that.
Incapable of self-validating, also, adept at manipulating people and systems to get that validation, addicted to it.
Morality? Empathy?
Theoretical concepts for these people, their brains don’t experience them they way others do. They can be skilled at pretending or performing them, but its fake, they’re totally amoral.
Destiny/SexPestiny.
‘Thor’/PirateSoftware.
Thats all these people, that’s the personality.
Can’t even turn off the compulsive lying, its instinctual.
Also because their parents were rich.
no, they are born with a silver spoon and have never actually worked a day in thier lives. plus all of them had been to epstein islands before too.
However, the enabling condition is anti-trust laws not being enforced.
…and the enabling condition for antitrust laws not being enforced is the existence of a capitalist class with enough wealth to direct politics.
They only managed it when they partnered with religious bigots. They were losing, the very existence of those antitrust laws is proof. Then they bought religion.
They weren’t losing. They were richer than ever before with leves of wealth inequality just recently matched. Then capitalism collapsed under the weight of that inequality into the Great Depression. Their winnings lead to collapse as they accumulated ever more resources that become unavailable to the people producing those resources. Then the cycle of accumulation and the power that comes with it started again. Antitrust got killed at one point. Unions were being killed before that. They used religion too but they were already beginning to win power again.
They have uncontrolled OCD that manifests as financial hoarding. If they were hoarding cats, or rusty old broken appliances, we’d get them help, and clean up their property. But Billionaires get lauded as wildly successful businesspeople, and are encouraged to abuse the financial system even more, and sometimes the government gives them lots more money, just for demanding it.
They won’t give money to people who need it, but if you’re a mentally ill pedophile, they’ll give you as much as you demand.
Eat the rich but the reasoning here isn’t compelling. What’s the evidence? Just a trust me bro?
A lot of people have lots of interaction with the rich, some even the filthy rich…
… and those interactions have led to opinions about seemingly universal traits that they share.
That’s evidence, but not the kind of evidence you’re looking for I think.
Who’s going to pay for this rigorous scientific testing? Womp womp
those interactions have led to opinions about seemingly universal traits that they share.
Are these “lots of people” in the room with us, right now?
Tired of people trying to medicalize the economy. You’re not a billionaire because you’re some kind of psychological anomaly. You’re a billionaire because you’re at the right place in the right time with the right friends.
Gates was born into the IBM dynasty just as the demand for GUIs took off. Bezos was a hedge fund manager for tech companies before he formed Amazon. George Soros and Warren Buffett happened to walk into an era of explosive economic growth just as they were handed billions in credit to gamble with. Elon and Thiel got into Silicon Valley just as Ben Bernake was turning on the unlimited money cheat for a select group of insiders.
Being in the right industry at the right age with the right group of friends seems to be the only common denominator.
You’re right that material conditions are the main contributing factor in the creation of billionaires, but why do you think it’s the only factor?
There were thousands of individuals who had the right connections, the right age, the right group of friends, etc. Only a small percentage become billionaires. Do you think this selection process is purely luck?
I think there is something that sets apart one class of obscenely-wealthy oligarchs from their slightly-less wealthy counterparts. Maybe it’s sociopathy, or adhd, or extreme greed. It definitely looks like mental illness.
Bill Gates frequently made his employees buy him lunch and he never reimbursed them.
at the same time being a sexpest, which he try to "reinvent in 2000s by being a philantropist to africans, who apparently made criticism about his vaccines.
Some level of greed is normal in humans.
Excessive greed, especially when it damages others, is a mental illness.
IMO it starts way before 1 billion too.
Like what kind of moron do you have to be to have 250.000.000 in your bank account and wake up every morning thinking you need to get more?
It truly is a mental illness, and for the no-empathy part, we have no treatment.
Starts before that even…there are way too many “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” out there who are absolutely wrecking potential class solidarity while the rich just take us all for everything we’re worth. Many of them are MAGA, which does help to explain both the mental illness and burned out empathy circuits.
Spot on.
Also, our culture worships money, so they become “virtuous” in the eyes of others based on their wealth
Billionaires are billionaires because of their personal net worth.
Spot on.
Dragons seem to have been created to represent these insatiable and very dangerous assholes… Minus all the wisdom and coolness.
Old time comic WC Fields was asked how to become wealthy.
He advised castration, followed by removal of taste buds, followed by making the person partially deaf and blind, so they couldn’t appreciate music or art. Take out a kidney so they couldn’t drink any liquor and they’d be the perfect money making machine, because that would be the only pleasure left.
Can we fill em with more holes? Asking for a friend
I don’t necessarily buy into this either i think power corrupts and that causes this appearance. Billionaires are just not special and got that way through a combination of things such as luck,actual smarts, inheritance, Racial and sex privilege and so on.
No it’s not corruption, it’s an inherent defect in character. There’s a certain amount of money that you don’t get accidentally or by any amount of honest personal effort.
You could get a “small loan of $1M” as a trust fund baby and grow it at twice the rate of the stock market (~14% apy) for 50 years and not even be halfway to $B. To get there you have to be committing fraud/hurting people/breaking laws.
And there’s also the fact that there’s no reason to make that much money. The diminishing returns are astounding once you get disgustingly wealthy. Before you hit $1B you could own a home in every major city in the world, own a mega yacht, buy a sports team, own private jets, etc. All without working a day for the rest of your life.
Billionaires are trading precious years of their life, the one resource that can’t be bought, to make their numbers bigger. The stress and effort are just not worth it, let alone the harm you have to inflict on others to get there. These people should be stopped for their own good.
I agree, power corrupts, and anyone who climbs high enough will become corrupt. Power is also addictive, they can’t give it up.
There are very few exceptions proving the rule in this case.
