Aspiring to becoming and staying a billionaire requires a certain amount of psychopathy because it takes a certain mentality to want to own so much wealth that you’ll never be able to enjoy all of it in a lifetime while at the same time denying or taking away the wealth of others who might need it.
If I had a billion, I’d take a few million and live off the interest and give away the rest and not be bothered by anyone or anything ever again.
You need to be a horrible person to become a billionaire
And to STAY a billionaire. If you have immense power to do good, and every single morning you wake and choose not to, you are an evil ghoul driven by greed, period.
I love how so many of them demand love and acclaim for claiming they will give their money away… when they die.
You want me to sing your praises because you won’t use the money you made exploiting countless laborers and lobbying government to benefit yourself above society to anoint a handful of nepo babies to wield that power after you as some part of a new nepo dynasty? Gee thanks?
Its like a serial killer promising not to train his children in the family business. Its not doing good, just doing slightly less bad. Except billionaires cause damage on a far greater scale.
If he’s willing to trample all over people, exploit them, and have them die for his sake, then absolutely.
Billionaires don’t care about people. They don’t view others as human. To them workers are robots, a statistical means to an end. Who cares if someone dies in some factory/warehouse somewhere? There’ll be another to replace them before the end of the day.
A billionaire gladly takes the effort of others and claims it as their own. They go out of their way to do it.
That’s not to say that every evil person acting like this will automatically become a billionaire, but you need to be OK with doing these things in order to get there. A billion USD is such an insane sum you cannot legitimately accumulate that without hurting people in the process. Like there’s no logical way of actually earning that amount of money. That’s money you take.
Joke aside, apparently she has a hard time spending enough money to lower her net worth (currently at $40B). Which is an absolutely bonkers amount of money, no one ever should have that much.
She married him in 1993 way before Amazon happened, maybe he wasn’t a gigantic ass back then. I don’t know much about her, but she seems decent from what I can see, she has donated massive amounts of money to charitable causes.
As a former lifelong Windows user (from 2002 to 2019), I honestly don’t get why people continue using Windows in the future. It doesn’t make sense to me. They’re cracking down on liberties, increasing system requirements, and old software and games are gradually becoming less compatible. And people seem to be starting to realize that other options are becoming gradually more attractive, because Windows is now hovering below 70% while just ten years ago it was at over 90%. Meanwhile Mac has grown from 7% to 20%, and Linux is at an unprecedented 3%, and that’s not counting ChromeOS, which is slightly higher.
The mistakes Microsoft is doing can prove fatal. Because I think for most people, once they embrace Linux, even if Windows improves, they won’t wanna go back.
You’re right. And people continue to use Windows because all software is available for it. See… Adobe products, Notion, Windows games with just a double click, even the Whatsapp application, Full OneNote and do not even mention MS Office…
Yeah, I think the reason many don’t switch, is because of software availability.
Only reason I use windows is for work. All the software for industrial controls stuff is windows only. But luckily its so shit at being updated that I still have to keep a windows xp VM around for some stuff so hopefully I’ll be retired before I need to use windows 11+
I got my CNC router working via wine about 2 years ago. Was very happy when it not only worked but worked well. Thought I was going to need to setup a dedicated windows PC for it but I can just use my workshop/tinkering laptop.
I still might try and use Linux as a host for the windows VMS but I’d probably still need to keep a dual boot around can’t risk not having it in case of something that wouldn’t work with USB pass through.
Having recently replaced my laptop (with a used Lenovo T495) and set it up to dual boot Win11 and Endeavor…Windows 11 was by far the most difficult and time consuming to get from “boot off installation media” to “open functional web browser”. Would have been even easier had I asked Endeavor to just use up all of the partition I left free from installing Windows.
So when I got the T495, I went through the Win 11 OOBE to check it out. Turned it off until I got the Ram upgrade for it in the mail. That was my first problem, because “turn off” doesn’t mean what you think it does in Windows. If you want to get to the Lenovo system settings/boot order/diagnostics, turns out you have to “restart”. Go figure.
Then I did the switcheroo with NVMes in my old T470s and the 495. Took my 1TB out of the 470 into the 495, and took the 256 that came with the 495 and put it in the 470.
Then go to start the 470 and it boots fine to Win 11 but I can’t login with my PIN because my PIN is now expired. I’d enter a password but it never even let me do that. I tried to connect to my wifi and it wouldn’t connect.
Obviously this is because the host system changed and the TPM isn’t there anymore, but still frustrating to not be able to use the laptop offline just the same. I ended up just formatting and installing Endeavor on that, too. This was just where I finally realized that “reboot” means “give me the option to change boot order this time”, because I couldn’t get back into BIOS after it booted to windows.
It’s nice to appreciate people who do good things, but keep in mind that the only way people become billionaires is by exploiting people. So I would not want any of these people to be billionaires because it would mean they got that wealth not by doing good things, but by owning ridiculous amounts of capital and exploiting people.
I could see someone making something useful and selling it to billions of people at a fair price not being exploitative and also being a billionaire.
I think it’s rare to the point of maybe happening once ever, but I’m not super upset about the behavior of the guy currently bankrolling the signal foundation.
The problem is if you aren’t exploitative then you aren’t being as “efficient” (in a capitalist sense) so you’ll be out-competed. The system is designed to incentivize exploitation. It’s mis-aligned to do anything else.
Oh, the system is totally pushing everyone to try to be the worst person possible.
However, they might not actually be out competed if they’re not being as exploitative as possible. If they’re not charging as much as the market will tolerate they’re being inefficient but in the way costs profit but attracts consumers.
I literally only have one billionaire who might not be a problem, but that’s what they did. $1 for a year of access sold to a few billion people, with something like 50 employees.
It’s why the billionaires who shaft consumers and their workers are so gross. Reducing profit margins doesn’t impact efficiency, it only impacts money in their already overstuffed pockets.
Let’s reformulate. No single individual gets to a billion dollars of net worth without someone getting fucked over in the process. The very concept of any one individual having a net worth of hundreds of times the one of the next 99.9% is fucking absurd, regardless of what they did. Nobody “deserves” multiple lifetimes worth of wealth while half of the world’s population is living with dollars a day. It would take collectively for this world’s billlionaires, the equivalent of us foregoing buying a gaming PC (in relative terms) to get rid of world hunger, yet they choose not to. So, yes, they are actively fucking people over by having so much wealth in the first place.
Simply by having a billion dollars means they have decided to hoard that wealth. They could give away 90% of it, leaving them with $100 million, it wouldn’t impact their quality of life in any way, and still leave them with more wealth than 99.9% of the planet. Imagine the good that $900 million could do if it was put to good use rather than sitting in a bank account as a status symbol - having the capability to do that good with no impact on yourself or your family and choosing not to makes you an immoral person.
While I agree with your sentiment, the truth is, none of those billionaires have their billions sitting on their bank account, like I have my couple hundred dollars.
I doubt any billionaires have that much money “sitting in a bank”.
Most wealth is non-liquid. For example, if you found a company that becomes massive, and you maintain a controlling share, then you could be a billionaire on paper while having no real money to spend – the only way to turn that into “real” money would be to sell shares in the company, and thus lose control of it. If the company is doing good work, it could be better to retain control and act through the company, by ensuring that it pays employees good wages to do good work for the benefit of society. This is not completely incompatible with profit in theory, though in practice…yeah. I’m not sure if there are any such billionaires in the world today.
The real problem is more fundamental to the economy, in that it fairly consistently rewards bad behavior.
Larry Page basically became a billionaire overnight when Google went public. I don’t recall Page or Google doing anything especially evil or exploitative before that, though their success was certainly built in an unsustainable economic bubble.
If Amazon didn’t treat its employees like shit and poison the entire economy, then Bezos could probably still be a billionaire and I wouldn’t necessarily hold that against him.
McCartney and Swift ‘exploit’ tons of people as well. They might flagship their music artist operation themselves and kind of ‘be’ the product (or rather the brand), but there are lots and lots of people involved to make tours and shows possible, recording, production and especially distribution of music and merch involves labour as well.
In addition to that: I don’t think they store all that money on a nice little heap in their backyard. It usually gets invested into some sorts of corporations, be it through the stock market, where it will accrue revenue, that comes as the result of more exploitation.
That being said: the term ‘exploitation’ carries a much more negative connotation than would be beneficial for the conversation. It’s concept of marxist economics, and the term ‘Ausbeutung’ = exploitation was used by Marx himself to describe how capitalists benefit from the surplus that workers produce. I like the term ‘reaping the surplus’ better because it doesn’t carry as much of a negative connotation. The criticism of capitalism shouldn’t barely rely on the fact that surplus is being taken away from the workers, but from the consequences to society and the political system that inevitably follow when that wealth is concentrated in the hands of a minority.
Ok, so who did Taylor Swift exploit? She literally is just a singer and the whole thing is odd, but it’s more she’s a billionaire because the currency is worthless.
I choose to see this question as “If you could magically just make someone a billionaire, who deserves it,” or more specifically “who would actually do good things with the money if they had a billion dollars.”
As you said, the reason these people aren’t billionaires already is because they haven’t been exploiting others. That being said, there are likely a few people that would use the money to better support a lot of great causes, like the Free Software Foundation, medical research, or climate change action
Well said. Thinking billionaires are assholes because they’re naturally shitty is like thinking they got rich by being naturally hard working.
Take landlords for example. You can be the nicest person in the world. The kind of person who makes friends with the tenant. What do you think happens to you after you’ve evicted a few of your friends?
But of course, such based individuals will never be billionaires. Specifically because their basedness precludes them from being psychopathic enough to commit the kind of cutthroat, violent exploitation of tens of thousands of workers’ labor inherently necessary to amass such wealth.
I was thinking more along the lines of “if they had that much money, their projects could’ve received more impact.”
like if free software would become mainstream.
though now I realise that’s an idealistic view and with money, people will become corrupt.
If they received a lot of money from their work and they used it to increase the impact of their projects, they wouldn’t be billionaires. The money would have been spent on the projects. If Linus headed a non-profit that received 10B a year revenue and spent most of it, leaving Linus with 0.5M-1M yearly salary, he wouldn’t be a billionaire and the billions spent on the Linux project would have had a significant impact. If on the other hand he pocketed 1B a year, there would be 1B less for the Linux project. And Linus would have been/become a different person.
I’d strongly disagree there too. Y’know basically the entire internet runs on Linux right? Our global communication system containing the sum of all human knowledge is like 99% Linux servers. And the reason a whole bunch of companies sponsor the hell out of Linux now is because it’s just that good and just that important on a global scale.
Have downloaded 10k songs in the last week, at 160GB so far, 22,000 total. Synced all to my phone with media monkey. Ditching any subscription services.
That also helps linux. Tried watching something on someone else’s peacock account logged into Linux, and got an error. Checked Google to see if it was available. A free site had it, in better quality streaming too! We ended up using her computer, but I was kind of amazed.
It’s ancient, unsupported, and closed source. Nobody can create or distribute security updates. People would have been happy to keep using horses and buggies if there’d been an automatic horse shit shoveller.
How so? 7 is the last good version of Windows. It’s not surprising some people want to keep using it. It does have security issues but at least there are no ads in the Start menu and it doesn’t shill for OneDrive on startup.
That’s true, but their apathy or ignorance is a threat to any networked device. There’s definitely an argument for “my device,y software, my rules”, and technically you can run windows 7 as long as you want, but Valve shouldn’t be perpetually expected to support deprecated software either. In their case specifically, if would be hard to ensure their anti-cheating software isn’t being circumvented at the operating system level, meaning the experience of everyone on any OS would be lowered by continuing to support a 14 year old version of Windows.
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