And I might add maybe not the happiest people either. They could have everything they want yet they don’t always seem all that happy. Elon Musk for example doesn’t seem much happier than the average person, maybe even less so (depends on who you’re comparing against of course).
Financial obesity is neurotoxic.
Think about it. He can never really know if someone likes him or is just sucking up because he’s rich and famous. Gotta be rough not having any friends. I think that’s why some rich people get caught with prostitutes. They KNOW where they stand.
Don’t mistake this as sympathy for him, just an explanation as to one of the reasons he may be unhappy.
I don’t think you can get THAT rich without ripping off someone. Like, if I started a business and it was raking in the cash in some actual not harmful way, I would pay myself a healthy salary but raise everyone’s pay, why would I need more than I need? Nobody needs a billion dollars. Nobody.
The guy who said he doesn’t fear the cops anymore, I don’t feel that. But I do agree money insulates you from a lot of stresses.
I still think it’s akin to hoarding. Billionaires are like those people in the houses they can’t move around in because they can’t stop accumulating.
i recently escaped the labor trap myself (that is what rich people call working btw), until that moment i had always been in survival mode…stressed about basic needs which all required $, something i didn’t have enough of. figured out how the stock market works, how it’s basically just one big casino a bunch of rich cunts with more $ than sense dump their ratfucked funds into…once you know how it works in incredibly easy to 10x your working capital (to a point, there’s scaling problems eventually…but by that point any normal person has more $ than they can spend)
first thing that happened after this was a mental breakdown as my mind apparently felt comfortable enough then to process a bunch childhood trauma i had mostly (consciously atleast) forgotten.
this trauma processing/breakdown eventually lead to my mom being concerned enough to reveal to me that i had been diagnosed with autism back as a kid when i was originally diagnosed with adhd, had kept it from me so i could “grow up normal” apparently…probably should have told me after highschool atleast…had these breakdowns atleast 2-3 times prior just not as bad.
after this i had the horrible realization of just how fucked our country/world is, that the reason nobody seemed to be doing anything about all this horrible shit (especially the blatant corruption of trump admin…) wasn’t that noone knew…it was that everyone knew, they’re just waiting for things to “return to normal”. they’ve all just either given up or don’t care to begin with because the system benefits them. the realization that now even with effectively infinite (personal) $, i’m still pretty much powerless to change/fix any of this…
I think it’s a structural effect. Let’s play moral relativism for a second and assume that everyone has their own definition of what is ethical and what isn’t, and that people generally choose not to do things they would consider unethical even if doing them would benefit themselves in some way. So, the people with the widest array of options for benefiting themselves are those with the least restrictive ethical framework. This doesn’t always mean that they will be successful or powerful, as humans are generally pretty bad at predicting what is good for them, and even worse at consistently acting on those beliefs, especially over the long term. However, the hoarding of wealth has a few characteristics that make it different from other forms of self-benefit:
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It’s easy to measure progress, and therefore easy to optimize for. This means that once you find a successful means of making money, you can fine-tune the process and reproduce it more easily than, say, a critically acclaimed novelist can write a critically acclaimed sequel. (n.b. I’m not saying that getting rich is easy. In fact I think a lot of rich people, especially those at the very top, do genuinely put a lot of hard work and long hours into being rich. I think they’re genuinely passionate about being rich. I think it’s a selfish and self-defeating and catastrophically harmful goal to pursue, but I think they enjoy it and pursue it with the same vigor that any world-class athlete has for their sport.)
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Money makes money. This one I think has been discussed enough, but it’s an established fact that they easiest way to make money is by having money, which means that people with the most money tend (assuming they don’t wildly fuck up, which does sometimes happen) to become even more insanely wealthy. You can even pay people to help your money make money more efficiently, which strikes me as very funny though I can’t really articulate why.
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Having money influences the behavior of everyone around you, whether you want it to or not. The very rich, especially (but by no means exclusively) the famously rich, have their relationships with other people skewed in a very systematic way. This is conjecture on my part, having never been famously rich, but I would imagine that this systematic alteration of relationships is very hard to account for, especially if you get famous before you have a chance to form deep adult relationships. And by account for, I think there are just things rich people do that they simply do not, or cannot, see. Relatedly, I think this is why dictators tend to overreact to political comedians, because that public discussion of their obvious foibles is really the only time they ever hear about it, and it’s intolerable because their tolerance for criticism is so low.
I think these traits mean that once you find a way to make enough money to become wealthy, you tend to stay wealthy as long as you can repeat the trick. And since there are tons of ways to make money in unethical ways, loosening or ignoring one’s moral compass can greatly increase the odds of finding a repeatable money-making tactic. And once you have a way to make money, the looser restrictions make it easier to grow your hoard faster. Which is why the richest person on earth is invariably some self-obsessed abusive criminal jackass.
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Morals are restrictions on behavior that impede efficacy and getting rich requires successfully getting away with breaking the rules, leaving the moral people poor and powerless.
No shit that’s why they’re rich.
Same as it ever was.
And you would be morally bankrupt were you rich. I forget the psychological term, but the idea is well documented. When people attain wealth and power, they don’t feel the rules apply to them. And it happens to all of us. “I would be better!”, you scream. Nah, probably not so much. No one is immune.
Saw a great case of this with Hillary Clinton, though I forget the particulars. She’s stumping for some law or policy that she blatantly violated and a journalist (we used to have those) called her on the hypocrisy. “But… that doesn’t apply to me.”
Not like she started out rich and powerful. Sure, she had some privilege, but not First Lady of the United Fucking States and Secretary of State kinda privilege.
The whole concept is kinda horrifying. When I hit the “middle-aged white-guy with a decent income” zone, I started not giving a fuck about breaking simple laws. Fuck they gonna do? I’m driving without a legal license ATM. When I was young and broke, jail. Now? They won’t pull me over in the first place, slap on the wrist, at worst. See how that psychology builds with real wealth and power?
Now think on that kinda thought process as one get’s truly rich and powerful. Morals, out the window. You still think you’re doing the right thing, but you’re badly misaligned with the lowly common people.
And *you* would be morally bankrupt were you rich
Which is why capitalism begins with the word “cap”. There needs to be a cap on the maximum wealth any one individual can accrue, because absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Keep on justifying parasites, maybe you’ll become one!
Many parasites require special conditions to grow. We can manage their populations by managing the environment.
I don’t need the problem described any more. I need ideas for fixing it.
You got to vote and be active in politics and encourage as many people to do likewise. If more people did that the sum of our power would be far greater than the power of billionaires. We can then have reforms like regulating campaign contributions and lobbying and passing more regulations that protect the people.
For some countries there are things working against us. For example in the US billionaires have a lot of power and contribute heavily to politics in part due to the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC which opened the floodgates for unlimited political spending and has really harmed our country. My solution to this is to encourage people to boycott companies that donate heavily to Republicans and most importantly encourage people to vote for people who will help stop all the corruption.
Another thing that gets me is how many people will say voting doesn’t matter when they maybe only vote on presidential elections.
Voting is not a 4 year thing, it’s an absolute grind and locally can affect more of your day to day life, as well as keep building its way. higher up. I live in a state that so many people showed up and voted for bills that went against the state legislature, but they actually voted less for the people… now of course the state is overthrowing the things voted in.
So yes, SO VERY MUCH vote and be active in politics.
Democracy is dying in the Untied States, it may be too late for voting to matter
right on brother
That’s kind of required to become that rich
Elon Musk has always lived in privilege of some variety, and generally sees his wealth as his due. Morals come from everyone’s pain I guess. I can’t be rich without other people being elevated too. I couldn’t do that to people in the same boat (or lack thereof) as me.
Some rich people get that. Like Bezos’s ex. She kinda hates the rich.
Yet a lot of people think wealth is a virtue
Edit: My bad, forgot rich == evil.
Ehhhhhh, some, sure.
But on the flip side, you have folks like Bill Gates who has more or less devoted his life to saving as many lives as possible.
Or Buffett who last I heard had donated some 50 or 60 billion to different foundations.
Even Musk, for all his recent evil got rich trying to reduce our dependence on gas cars. As much as I dislike the man, I imagine the electric car industry would be pretty far back in his absence.
Bill Gates is a pedo who spent a ton of time with Epstein, which is likely why his wife divorced him.
Musk didn’t create Tesla. He bought it, and is currently running it into the ground. Employees have compared him to a pidgeon who flies in, shits on everything, and then leaves again. If anything, Tesla’s relative success is in spite of Musk, not because of him. Tesla is already starting to lose value due to Musk’s antics and the fact that all other manufacturers are making electric cars now, too.
Warren Buffet may be one of the better billionaires, but that’s not saying much. He still invests in fossil fuel companies and could give away more of his wealth to charity. And then there’s the underlying problem with an economic system that steals living wages from employees to enrich investors like Buffet, but that’s a story for another time.
You mean the guy that suggested privatizing publicly invested vaccines? That guy is invested in saving as many lives as possible? … rofl!
Musk also bought Tesla. He did not invent it. He did not contribute anything except the fucking trashcan cybertruck. He is a blight on this world, and more people need to realize that.
yes, the cybertruck that only sold half of what he predicted and they had a shitload of cybertrucks left over because no one wanted them.
Bill Gates was ruthless during the 90s. Just as a random example he tried to make ACPI only work with Windows saying “It seems unfortunate if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works great without having to do the work” just as a random example.
Maybe he’s making up for it now but still it’s more complex than him just always being a good person.
Fuck ‘foundations’ they’re just methods of money laundering and trafficking funds.
They would have helped far more people by paying their fair share in taxes. Oh, Bill Gates paid billions to try and help people in Africa? Great plan asshole, those people died from climate change related conflict, or they’ll die in the upcoming ww3. Oh, and Americans are now essentially slaves in a fascist Dictatorship, but go on about your fucking mosquito nets.
95% tax rate on anything over $250 million for an individual. Period, regardless of source, and put a 5 million dollar surcharge on every private jet fight.
Bill Gates who has more or less devoted his life to saving as many lives as possible.
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Buffett who last I heard had donated some 50 or 60 billion to different foundations.
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Even Musk, for all his recent evil got rich trying to reduce our dependence on gas cars
Maybe they are happier than OP suspects - I’m not them so I can’t really comment on that. As far as your framing of their motives and achievements though… Hard disagree, especially Musk and Gates. All three fucked over tons of people to get their obscene wealth.
I’d go into great depth as to why I feel that way and how they are unworthy of any praise, but it usually ends in nothing being learned and a lot of my time wasted so I’ll just hard disagree and bow out.
Even Musk, for all his recent evil got rich trying to reduce our dependence on gas cars.
Everybody else already covered his role in Tesla, so let’s look at something else that demonstrates his concern for the environment and his fellow species:
He has a datacenter in Memphis running 35 “temporary” methane generators to power Grok, the self-described “Mecha Hitler” AI. All but a dozen of them are being used without permits for permanent generators, and none of them have air pollution filtration systems installed. Oh, and it’s near a low-income community that was already plagued by air pollution.
