- cross-posted to:
- brainworms@lemm.ee
- cross-posted to:
- brainworms@lemm.ee
From threatening cage matches to backing RFK Jr., billionaires prove too much money detaches a person from reality
From threatening cage matches to backing RFK Jr., billionaires prove too much money detaches a person from reality
In a way I commend the likes of Musk for galvanizing people against billionaires and advancing social movements. He’s so dislikable that it’s productive.
People don’t always grasp the amount of money a billionaire has. Let’s put it in perspective:
A billionaire looks at $200,000 the same way a person with a $100,000 salary looks at $20 (for reference, a 1-millionaire looks at $200 the same).
It’s also worth noting the power billionaires have relative to their country’s size. Looking at Number of billionaires per million people. You could probably take this and weigh it further against the median per-capita GDP to see how much clout one billionaire has versus the population. For example, while India has a low # of billionaires / million people, the power the ~169 billionaires there have an overwhelming share of the total wealth of that nation.
What’s funny to me is that many years ago Musk was viewed by a lot of the internet as this great engineering golden boy. Once cemented in the untouchable ranks of the gilded elite he opened his mouth more publically and fell flat on his face.
That’s the power of branding and a good PR team, at least until Musk got high on his own supply and fired his PR team. His rise and fall is a bit similar to Purdue Pharma’s Oxycontin marketing campaign; once the veneer of altruism was peeled off revealing an ant’s nest of lies and greed destroying people’s lives for profit, hype turned to horror.
A lot of his fans really thought he was some genius Tony Stark when in reality he just had loads of money to hire smart people to do the thinking for him. Something always rubbed me wrong with him even from the early days.
How much money do you think billionaires have?