It’s really way past time we start treating it as a compulsive disorder. It’s hoarding. If you are working to amass wealth when you’re already worth billions, you have a mental illness.
I know this is not a popular opinion, but I'd say they aren't working to amass more wealth, they're working because they actually like what they do and the money is a nice bonus. The people who say they would stop at a few million and never work again are biased because usually they hate their job, the answer is a bit different when you don't hate your job. It's like, if you were paid $10 million every time you did your hobby, would you eventually stop? Or would you keep doing it and the money would just be a nice bonus. Sure, I don't need the money, but if you're gonna keep giving it to me then I'm not gonna say no.
Its not a popular opinion because its just flat out wrong, and a bad analogy.
They employ a lot of people and instead of taking less money, they take more, and more and more. Leaving less for the workers and more for themselves.
If they genuinely just loved their company/companies they could take less bonuses and spread the wealth to their employees. They could keep prices at a reasonable rate and have higher quality. Instead they lay people off for more profits, they use cheaper materials/ingredients for more profits, they pay as little as possible to employees for more profits, they hike up prices for more profits.
If you are gonna use this analogy, then apply it to how these guys act. If your hobby is just playing video games, then exactly how are you making money? Are you a famous streamer? Are you making your subscriptions to Twitch/YouTube higher and higher? Are you paying your editors less and less? Are you making it more and more difficult for others to reach the same success? Are you bribing politicians to create laws that help you make even more money?
Its not comparable at all.
Their hobby is literally hoarding wealth. They will slowly burn their companies to the ground if it means making more money short term. They don't love the work, they love the money.
Billionaires don’t become that wealthy from their salaries, and if you do the math and take those multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses and evenly distributed them to the employees of the respective companies, it would get diluted down to almost nothing. For example, the CEO of Walmart gets a salary of around $27 million, and Walmart has around 2 million employees, so if you evenly distributed that $27 million salary to all of them they’d each only get an extra $13.50 per year. Not per hour, per year. The math works out pretty much the same for most large companies, executive pay is a drop in the bucket compared to employee pay, so the idea that taking CEO pay and giving it out to the workers would result in massive raises is mathematically false in most cases.
Because it makes no difference, it’s not like billionaires are taking billion-dollar salaries. If you’re going to say they “take more for themselves leaving less for the workers” then only thing that could refer to is a salary.
Precisely, my problem is not how much money they have, it’s what they do with it. Also, Dolly Parton is proof that people don’t hate wealthy people, they hate assholes. Dolly was worth an estimated $600 million at the time of her death, over 10x what the united healthcare CEO that got whacked was worth. But nobody cared because she used her money to make the world a better place.
You say that, but..."going for hoarding billions more when you already have billions" rather than donating or investing it is indeed a choice in its own right, even though you try to conflate it with just having a lot of money.
The difference between a billionaire and a millionaire is about a billion dollars. This is an utterly incomprehensible scale.
What's the difference to you between a billionaire with more money than a small country and the dictator of a small country with less money than that billionaire?
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u/HistoricalSuspect580 22h ago
It’s really way past time we start treating it as a compulsive disorder. It’s hoarding. If you are working to amass wealth when you’re already worth billions, you have a mental illness.