Imagine being that rich and spending the limited time you have on Earth actively trying to make more money. It’s absolutely mental illness!
I don’t see why extreme wealth isn’t classified as a mental illness like hoarding.
If we see a street lady collecting a hundred cats to horde, we call her crazy.
When we see someone hording so much wealth that they could never reasonably ever spend all that money in a lifetime … we put them on the cover of a magazine.
spend all that money in a lifetime
In thousands of lifetimes. 1,000,000 per year is a stupid amount of money to live on. If you “only” spent $1,000,000 a year you could live on 250billion for 250,000 years. That isn’t including any interest accrued.
People constantly underestimate how large a billion actually is.
The difference between a million and a billion dollars is approximately 1 billion dollars
A million heartbeats is 10 days. A billion is 27 years
That’s going to change a lot from person to person
Edit. Lol downvoting facts. Feels like reddit here. Congratulations!
Maybe billionaires just have faster heart rates
it may be more than someone can reasonably spend, but someone can unreasonably spend it with some effort
It’s more like narcissism, psychopathy, etc. The constant need to be better than others and worshipped for it.
Nobody gets that much wealth without Psychopathy.
As long as we keep treating wealth like a scoreboard, this will continue. If we collectively demonized people with unreasonable wealth, ostracized them from society, and stopped glorifying it and treating them like celebrities because of it, we might be in a better spot.
I love seeing someone else get this.
Money at this scale is just points in a game. It is entirely divorced from value to them, it’s just social status
The worst part is, they’re not even happy either. Some people do enjoy playing capitalism… But the mental gymnastics you have to do to enjoy min-maxing your labor pool leaves you hollow as a person.
Everyone you meet is hoping to leech off you, a peer you are competing against in the stupidest game, or someone who doesn’t care about money (and probably looks at you with disgust because your financial existence is literally destroying our species)
The only happy billionaires are the ones no one hears about - the people who are generationally free of the game and have accepted their ticket out from the start
Too bad they own everything that could stop this
I heard about this new French invention.
Anyway, I’m hungry, when do we eat?
Probably not. Since the point of money is to be able to buy more and better things, there will always be a desire to have more money, even if nobody else cares how much you have.
There’s no real difference between $213 billion and $270 billion when it comes to buying power. Both are effectively unlimited. Both could buy small countries if they wanted to. But there sure is a difference when it comes to ego, because when we talk about it, we’re always treating it like a great thing to be the richest person in the world, instead of sociopathy.
tfw you realize it’s not about the money, it’s about the power the money affords you, the ability to destroy entire democracies
If it were anything other than money, it would be considered a hoarding problem in need of treatment.
I put on a bit of weight a few years back and got up to 99kg. I joked with my partner that if I ate 1kg of cheese, I’d be 1% cheese.
So like, I’m not saying it’s right, but I understand where they’re coming from with the “more, more, more” mentality.
I think these guys get addicted to the power. Sure Mark Zuckerberg could spend all his time learning to cook Thai food or surfing or traveling, and we all love to do those things. But very few of us know what it feels like for him to walk into a campus of thousands that he commands and make choices all day long about what to do with them all.
I’m not saying that anyone would do the same in their shoes. But certainly the kind of person who likes to build a giant company will like being at the helm of it too. It’s not about more billions.
But it doesn’t work like that. Wealth is a status symbol, and status symbols are comparative. Millionaires compare themselves to slightly richer millionaires, and billionaires to slightly richer billionaires. Everyone else is irrelevant to them.
like athletes but different measurements
Most people on this list have taken their foot off the gas in a major way, and do more of what they want.
Elon is currently blowing tens of billions of dollars running Twitter into the ground, designs impractical cars because he thinks they look cool, committing light treason, and campaigning for a president who would be detrimental to his business interests.
While the Zuck is still involved at Meta, he also picked up a ton of other hobbies. A lot of them are objectively cool. He also seems to spend a lot of time with his wife and kids.
Bezos seems to spend most of his time having sex with his age appropriate mistress on his $500 million yacht.
I’ve heard there are people that do something similar to get on those reality shows about fat people’s lives or the weight loss competitions. I guess some think it’s easier to gain 100 more pounds and then get on the TV show to lose 400 pounds than it is just to lose 300 pounds themselves.
at that point it’s not really about the money
everyone needs a purpose. if you take away that purpose, people will start deteriorating.
“journey not the destination”. once you’ve reached something like $50M any more money doesn’t make any real difference in your daily life.
I have a lot of entrepreneur and VC friends. One of them always says that it isn’t about the money. He says “Some people have fun playing video games, board games or Dungeons and Dragons. This is my Dungeons and Dragons”.
He says it a lot so shout out to whomever can guess who he is. Hint; he’s Austin based.
Exactly this. This is their life’s work. It’s what they are good at and what they love. And often tbe only thing. They would not know what else to do.
The same could be said of someone who earns a low income relative to a billionaire (e.g. $80-120k) depending on the country they reside in. Money doesn’t buy happiness folks, life experiences do 🙂
He doesn’t have $270 billion dollars. He has $270 billion dollars worth of assets.
A lot of these guys in the comments lack basic economic understanding. People also make these comments while ignoring other investments these so-called “demons” make. The truth is there is no government in a capitalist society without the efforts of private bourgeois. We should instead advocate for higher taxes rather than whatever impractical and sensationalist solutions we may think of.
1, yes you are correct
2, you are wrong, because it isn’t about “I have 270 billion dollars “. It is closer to look at all the toys I have
… sure I put up satellites, but can we put astronauts to the ISS? Cool now can we get to the moon? Mars? … etc
Because one of the few things he actually understands is he is not immortal, so he’s trying to make a legacy. Hence, literally offering his sperm to anyone who wants it, and not caring about anything other than making sure his name is at the top of everything he is even mildly interested in.
So I guess showerthoughts is going to be the new platform .ml users will use to complain about capitalism? OP is a brand new account and this was their first and only post.
Yes, I will keep calling this out.
No one should think anything beyond the current hegemony in the shower!
And a platform for you to complain about people who complain about capitalism
When sockpuppet accounts are posting to unrelated communities, no shit I’ll complain. “Rich people are bad” is not a showerthought and you know it, but I guess let’s just spam the platform with this nonsense and keep making new accounts to boost these posts. What’s wrong with that?
We need more valiant soldiers like you fighting these clowns🫡
Yes, I will keep calling this out.
Thank you. Really. I start losing my faith when enough times passes since I last time saw someone event attempt to make sense on Lemmy.
Billionares are the Lemmy circle jerk. I’m tired of the antiwork Lemmy mentality. We have people here who want to make big bucks doing nothing.
It feels like you are missing the point on purpose. I don’t know why, this feels like laziness.
Criticizing the existence of billionaires and being antiwork are two different things. And being antiwork is different than wanting to do nothing. No one wants to do nothing, except in cases of major depressions.
A lot of antiwork post can lack depth but there are really interesting criticism to be made about work as it’s organized these days. I suggest you dig the subject.
It will stay an echo chamber until mods step up and start removing low-effort posts. Also, people are downvoting me in favor of a fake account with one post lmao. That’s how bad it is.
Only if the mods didn’t share the same sentiments. Low-effort political posts in non-political communities have been and always will be a staple in lemmy. You have to understand that it is the same people who left Reddit with these sentiments and similar behaviour that are now here doing the same. Quite an unfortunate reality really
Honestly I shouldn’t be surprised as Lemmy isn’t exactly mainstream media. If you are on Odysee you see people saying how the holocaust was a hoax and that Jews are evil. Here is isn’t quite as bad but you still see the extreme minority.
