So many of the .001% seem to have no visible interests other than running up the score. I mean, most of us, you get to $50 billion, hell, $50 million, and you’d probably quit and spend your days doing something you found personally rewarding, rather than continuing to chase further growth. It’s not like they’re still working until they can afford that Jet Ski, and then bailing for Ford Lauterdale.
I almost wonder if it’s meaningful to try to evaluate them as humans-- to consider whether they’re consciously evil-- since it seems like they act like the Paperclip Optimizer from bad sci-fi parables. I’ve seen more emotional depth from a Hewlett-Packard LaserJet.
You’d think that their spending habits would reveal some element of what little soul they might have-- personal quirks, tastes, foibles. This goes beyond the usual “they could afford to end hunger and disease with couch change” complaint. They aren’t doing anything interesting in ANY space! If they had any sort of interests or feelings, they have more than enough resources to make a dramatic statement with their money, and yet, they don’t.
Why aren’t they indulging their fancies in comical, over-the-top fashion? Instead of a box of Lionel electric trains, they could fund the T-1 Trust. If they wanted to collect coins, they could get a 1804 dollar and wear it to public events as a brooch. If they spent too much time playing Sid Meier’s Civilization, surely they could buy into the executive house of some third-world country with the GDP of a typical Quizno’s. Probably much better value for money than buying a flaky Mastodon-a-like to use as a Rube Goldberg machine to flip elections. At best, they strap a rocket under their ass and pay a couple plebs’ life earnings for 30 seconds release from those pesky Van Allen belts, but even that seems to be just “the generic thing billionaires do” rather than being the obvious conclusion of a rich lifetime interest in astronomy or flight.
Even in their personal estates, does anyone remember anything special about them? Or is it just infinity pools, granite countertops, and rapidly-obsolescing smart technology, the same as men a hundred times poorer, but on a slightly bigger scale? Who will be so bold as to build something that will at least be a cherished monument or celebrated folly in 500 years? What is our era’s Versailles or Neuschwanstein?
Hell, one of the few things we can measure from their behaviour is that they’re petty and selfish, so why don’t we see them systematically buying any company that ever hires their ex just so they can systematically sack them again and again? Or paying hundreds of actors so they can relive their senior year of high school, except this time, they’re Prom King. Again, an excellent way to toss around your excessive status and wealth while chasing down the demons that you won’t be able to smother in stock options.
At most, there might be some slant towards discernible tastes in where they splash their charitable cash, but even that plays second fiddle to collecting an efficient tax-management strategy. Maybe they toss a few bucks towards research for a disease that their sister happened to have, or to make school kids study the things you think are important, but it’s still just one on the list of cheques they write because their accountants tell them to.
We should demand better. It’s common to make fun of the gauche behaviour of the sudden nouveau riche-- the 19-year-old with the sportsball contract or $10 million lottery win who buys a safety orange Lamborghini and a gold necklace that Flavor Flav dismissed as too tacky, but at least they look like they are having fun with the money, like they had some idea of “let’s do something cool with it” rather than letting it moulder on a spreadsheet somewhere.
At least they could do a more entertaining job of gilding their public presence-- sponsoring statues of themselves in major cities to pretend they were an important general, walking around every day like they were refugees from a catwalk or the Met Gala, running infomercials disguised as glowing life-story documentaries on cheap late-night broadcast time. Hell, use their immense commercial wrath to demand that everyone around them use some invented cockamamie title they can strut around with. Surely they can assign themselves a higher rank than a chicken fryer!
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You don’t get to $50 million if the concept of “enough” exists for you. Most people with interests outside of profit, and having empathy for their fellow humans, will never amass anything close to a mega fortune. It happens occasionally, but as a rule, hobbies and empathy are anathema to building empires. So the sample size self-selects for boring people who only care about their status, their value, and their personal comfort.
Exactly this. Someone sane doesn’t get past a billion, you’d quit whatever you were doing and do whatever your real passion is. It’s the path Tom from MySpace took, and probably thousands of others that you never hear about because they’re just quietly enjoying an early retirement instead of getting involved in culture wars, influencing politicians into giving them even more money, etc.
These people are sick and should not be looked up to.
Sane people don’t get past 10 million unless they’ve just got a runaway income. (Some pop stars, inventors of foundational technologies, etc)
I can think of one example where that’s not true. Tom from MySpace. Use the wayback machine and look at his domain over the years before it became THE MySpace. He was messing around with a lot of different ideas, probably just having fun coding and creating new things. Then MySpace blew the fuck up overnight. He sold the company for $570 million and fucked off into the sunset. Last I heard he was into photography in Africa. He never pursued more. He got his lightning strike, and decided to live his best life. We need more rich people like Tom.
They have gold fever. There is no amount of money that will sate their thirst for more, whether they have to get it by screwing their employees, bribing politicians for tax relief and subsidies, or just plain fraud.
Being that rich should be a mental illness and once you reach a certain level you have to undergo treatment and not make any more money. Also, death taxes should be a thing that cuts off generational wealth.
Dragon’s sickness.
Thanks for the rant, loved reading through it.
It is an interesting thought to think that a poor person is given desire but those ultra rich seem to have converted all of theirs into “more, more, more”. Almost like a dragon hiding in their cave hoarding all their treasures.
To be fair, Elon Musk seems to be doing exactly what you’re talking about.
You don’t go to space or start building electric cars to get rich, that’s not even an expected outcome of such things. You get companies like that because you want to do those things and that’s the frame you see the world through.
His acquisition of Twitter is really the ultimate example. He picked up a shitty social media website, and I guarantee you that’s not something you do at that moment because you want to become rich, it’s something you do because it piqued his interest and he was the world’s richest man.
But Elon is a good example of why even if you’re the richest man on earth you don’t want to draw too much attention to yourself. As the Japanese say, the nail that sticks up gets hammered down. How much time and energy does he have to spend on court cases because of something he said or did or because people just don’t like him? It’s best to stick to the infinity pools rather than arouse the ire of those who are even more powerful than the world’s richest man.
You don’t go to space or start building electric cars to get rich, that’s not even an expected outcome of such things.
Bullshit. Both of those ventures were heavily subsidized for-profit businesses from the start.
What you said and what I said can be true at the same time.
They were for-profit and subsidized, but you still don’t get into these fields to get rich, and other than Tesla and SpaceX nobody has. Even so, based on business fundamentals Tesla shouldn’t have made Elon rich, he just happened to ride a broken stock market caused by state socialist market interventions in the wake of the Great Financial Crisis.
If Elon just wanted to get the highest numbers, especially at the time it seemed the best idea would be to head out and build a new Internet company. Given his showmanship there’s every reason to think he could have founded some new company with unlimited margins that sold bits and bytes to people. Instead, he went with companies that had to manufacture difficult to manufacture things, heading into industries where margins rely not just on efficiently transporting data from point A to point B, but in building complicated physical devices – an infinitely more complex, higher risk venture with much lower potential payoff in terms of profits.
You make some good points. Plus, he didn’t always seem as off the rails as he does now. Idk if that’s just because he managed his public image better, or if his success went to his head, but I acknowledge that he might have been a different person when he started those companies than he is now.
Something we all have to fight for is to keep our feet nailed to the floor when we’re experiencing success. When you’re the world’s richest man and there’s so many people calling you genius all the time and kissing your ass I suspect it’s really easy for your internal critical voices to get the volume turned way down and people actually need that part of themselves or they just start saying whatever pops into their heads.
Ever heard of Epstein’s Island? These people are doing shit you probably can’t even imagine.
Nothing good though…
Some people just love money and it’s as simple as that.
I imagine it’s pretty boring once you can buy the best everything you want without thinking about it, go everywhere you want to go, do anything you want to do.
I guess I’d make an agenda to hit certain places at certain times, you know, Carnival in Rio, the Tour de France every once in a while.
Eventually I’d buy businesses, try to make an economy for people to get wealthy with me. How make millionaires can I make?
I promise you that I would never get bored. Ever.
Even in their personal estates, does anyone remember anything special about them?
Bill Gates’ house was a technological marvel when it was built. He did some really amazing things that didn’t seem possible with the technology of the era. The floors are pressure sensitive and the security system measures each person’s gait. The system can tell who is in which room. When you show up as a guest they have you fill out a questionnaire about lighting preferences, music tastes, favorite art styles, etc… As you move from room to room the system will change the lighting, music, and artwork to fit your preferences. Bill overrides everyone else, so when he enters a room the system changes everything to his preference. Also, 2/3rds of the house is underground, and the portion that is above ground overlooks Lake Washington from the best spot on the entire lake. So, yeah, there’s one example of a billionaire doing something really special with his house. There’s also a huge garage on the premises, a helipad on the roof, a boat dock with a private yacht out front, basketball and tennis courts, and two different swimming pools. The house is literally 66x bigger than every house I’ve lived in before the one we have right now. 66,000 square feet. That’s insane!
I’m not trying to derail the other great points you make, but I wanted to directly answer that one question because I’ve always been fascinated with Bill’s house.
I’ve seen more emotional depth from a Hewlett-Packard LaserJet.
10/10
To be that impulsive with large amounts of money to do the actions that you’re describing, one would very much have to be a moron.
The super-rich aren’t morons. Even in cases where they lack the required intelligence they are surrounded by smart people who think for them and prevent them from being morons.
The examples I gave are probably achievable for 7 to low 8 figures. Perhaps a bit spendy in absolute numbers, but compared to a $100 billion estate, are they really bigger splashes than a mere mortal spending six months’ salary on a fully kitted home workshop, project car, or deluxe home theatre?
I’d like to think we’re all morons in our own little way. If there isn’t something you fall head-over-heels for and spend your money on in a stupid way, when given the chance, are you really human?
$100B estate never means you’re sitting on a pile of $100B worth of cash. It just means you own stuff that’s currently worth $100B on paper, most of which you can’t actually sell because either the regulators won’t allow it, or even the mere idea would reduce a lot of its value.
Even if you had that much petty cash to burn at a moment’s notice, such antics will only end up having unpredictable consequences. A lot of Billionaires’ wealth is tied up with their reputation. The value of the stock they hold can go up or down solely based on their image and personal behaviour. If their investors or promoters stop viewing them as reliable, their value will plummet.
I don’t spend my money in stupid ways, despite having a relatively high disposable income. Yet I am, in fact, really human.
It’s worth noting that there still exist some eccentric types of Billionaires who can and do end up doing stupid things. John McAfee, for example.
Ya bug yojy can sell off 1BN or 50M no sweat.