Hey I’m no big supporter of billionaires but “that behavior in any other species we would classify it as some kind of divergent behavior” is extremely wrong. Altruism is extremely rare outside humans. Most animals would absolutely love to get every single piece of food in the forest all to themselves. They steal food from each other constantly. Whole species are based on the very concept of stealing as their main or sole life strategy. There are fish out there whose main food is the juveniles of the exact same fish species. Literal baby-eating as their main strategy.
We humans are supposed to be better than animals. Comparing someone to an animal is comparing them to something bad.
If you saw a single bear successfully hoarding 98% of the food supply of an entire forest, you’d have to be a fucking moron to fail to classify them as a detrimental anomaly.
if the other 98% of the bears gave their food supply to the 1 bear with 98% of the supply because the bear with the food supply gave them cheap Labubu’s you’d probably just say yeah that’s their culture
And tbh this discussion seems to come back to the American bear species almost all of the time
They don’t do that because they physically can’t. If they could they would. If you have two starving bears and throw them one carcass. Only one will eat because they will fight and scream away the weaker one.
The original point is that billionaires, as I interpret it, is that billionaires are worse than animals. Or at least that if we look at billionaires as if they were animals we would still diagnose them as ill. My point is that that’s not true. Animals can be just as psychotic. Most have absolutely no morals and a subset of them regularly do things that are way worse than what the billionaires are doing, hence my examples.
However animals are not humans. Billionaires are humans. If we say billionaires are like animals that’s already a really bad grade. We humans are supposed to be much better than that. I’m not defending billionaires at all. I’m saying one should compare them to something else. There are much better and more effective ways to criticize them than this.
When they are full they move on with their lives. Hoarding behavior, like with squirrels and nuts is rare and even when present is usually because they aren’t smart enough to remember their hiding spots.
That all being said, we are human the whole idea is that we can moderate behaviors and not only act on instinct.
People want cheap products in order to live affordable lives, companies owned by billionaires are the only ones capable of the scale required to achieve that so it’s not like people have a choice.
If someone wants some nice shoes or a doll why shouldn’t they be allowed to get one? There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, all consumption is apart of the same system.
It’s one thing for a working person to spend whatever income they don’t need to live at a baseline on others, it’s another for someone to hoard so much money they couldn’t necessarily physically spend it all if they tried, let alone spend it on things that would actually measurably increase their happiness.
You can argue regular people should donate more, and many actually do donate more than billionaires (as a % of assets/income) depending on which source you trust to give a good enough picture, (given a lot of donations are hard to track, both from large billionaire foundations and DAFs, to smaller donors with hard to classify spending) but there is a massive gap in how much a regular person can donate relative to a rich person, even just as a % of their income.
If you live paycheck to paycheck, but have, say, $20 left over at the end of the month in actual money to your name that hasn’t already gone to groceries, rent, etc, (and we assume you have no other assets), your net worth is $20.
If a billionaire donates $999,000,000 to charity, that would be the equivalent of that person donating $19.98.
Unlike that person though, the billionaire would have a million dollars in net worth, enough money to buy a house, while the regular person would have $0.02.
Even if these conditions aren’t perfect, and you assume maybe the person has some more net worth than $20, the point still stands. A billionaire can give up almost all of their net worth and still have enough money to comfortably live, or at least meet basic living standards for the average person. For most Americans, if they lose their job, have any surprise bill, or don’t make as much money as they expected to, they will instantly become homeless the next month rent is due, even if they give up none of their existing assets and just stop adding more money on top.
This is why “billionairism” (not a real term ofc) is such a damaging condition. It not only causes you to become obsessed with hoarding wealth that you don’t necessarily need, but it causes you to do so at the expense of others you could readily help without experiencing any material downside in your everyday life. There is no reason to hoard so much wealth.
Money is just a means to get or do things. If you are not spending that money, and you have more money than you’ll ever need to spend, that excess dollar value past your realistic spending for the rest of your life is just a valueless number to you. It’s a number that will never impact your life, but it can impact others. Hoarding it is stupid and immoral.
Because most people are working class and need the money they earn to keep themselves and their loved ones alive, if they can even afford that under capital’s starvation wages.
The Model Y is still the bestselling EV in the United States and the seventh bestselling vehicle overall, despite a 22 percent slide compared to 2024, according to Automotive News estimates
The people vote with their wallets, no ones opinion here matters really tbh when in real life people are more than happy to shove 10’s of millions of dollars at the richest man in the world every month
When you learn Jeff bezo’s net worth increases several thousand dollars every minute and it happens by exploiting people around the globe, even forcing his own workers to hold their piss for hours so they can meet insane quotas, you think to yourself “what an awesome genius”? Is that possible? You really somehow have made it far enough in life to post on this platform without seeing how absurd this is?
Even if we take the deeply sick and inhuman idea of money equating success, they already succeeded hard at 2-3 million dollars. Having a billion dollars is like winning a sports game 1000-1 and still being sad that you didn’t win by enough. These people could’ve easily retired at 5 million but they didn’t want that. They need more and more and more. They happily spend millions of dollars on buying politicians so they can get away with paying sub-living wages to their slaves and so they can pay very little in taxes. They display deeply uncharitable behaviors at best and deeply disturbing tendencies often (creating an island used for raping children).
I really wonder how you could possibly dismiss or ignore all of this. Explain yourself. And you owe it to the community if you’re going to come on here defending the class of people who have consistently ruined human lives throughout history. A billionaire is just a king who drinks from a golden chalice while their tax payers die in the streets. You are saying fuck those dead idiots, the king is great. What the fuck is that? Why would you do it? What could you possibly get out of this?
People become billionaires because they own capital which extracts massive amounts of value from production processes by paying workers less than the value their labour produces.
Mental disorder is very, very tricky to define, as something maladaptive in one context may work in another. One example is how in individualistic cultures, people hearing voices more often experience them as intrusive and malevolant, and we call it schizophrenia, while people on collectivist cultures may experience the voices as friendly and comforting. Is that a disease, then, if it benefits a person? Psychologists tend to go with a working definition based on how adaptive a condition is for the person and their society.
But in what context does it benefit a person to be unable to ever have “enough” of anything, never able to be satiated, compulsively adding to an enormous pile of wealth far, far beyond anything that they could ever use? Further, when the condition drives them to use the power attendant to that wealth to actively harm their society in myriad ways, how is that adaptive? It seems that they harbor a deep anxiety about the possibility that their accumulated wealth might be reduced, in a way completely imperceptible to them, and even being consciously aware that this is so, still suffer from a mania that compels them to hurt other people to keep that from happening.
Hardly sounds like what most of us would define as “successful in life.”
compulsively adding to an enormous pile of wealth far, far beyond anything that they could ever use
Meh. It’s just work, vision and lots of luck that leads to exponential growth. And when you start getting exponential growth to your investment, stopping the process of getting richer and richer would require active work to stop it from happening.
Only in fiction do people become rich by being compulsive about it.
Earning money from having money flies in the face of OC’s implication that being a billionaire is the result of virtuous effort. And, it sounds like a major flaw in the system all by itself.
But, even though they could passively rake in the income, so many billionaires actively try to increase their wealth, for no particular apparent purpose, and at the expense of harm to others, which does seem pathological.
An amassing of money is only one definition of success. Depending on how you define it, I am either the most or least successful person you have ever met. I am poor, but I do precisely what I want to do, and usually when I want to. It mostly relies on the help of others, but let’s be honest who doesn’t rely on others in some way or another to do their thing?
There’s only one, maybe two things that I want to do that are probably going to be forever outside of my reach. One is going to space (my body is too broken). The other is pooping on specific graves without getting arrested and I don’t think I can outrun security with my drawers down anymore.
Why? How? What did I even read?
Why would being successful in life be a mental disease?
Hoarding a resource (money) when other people are starving, homeless and dying of preventable diseases.
If we see that behavior in any other species we would classify it as some kind of divergent behavior.
Hey I’m no big supporter of billionaires but “that behavior in any other species we would classify it as some kind of divergent behavior” is extremely wrong. Altruism is extremely rare outside humans. Most animals would absolutely love to get every single piece of food in the forest all to themselves. They steal food from each other constantly. Whole species are based on the very concept of stealing as their main or sole life strategy. There are fish out there whose main food is the juveniles of the exact same fish species. Literal baby-eating as their main strategy.
We humans are supposed to be better than animals. Comparing someone to an animal is comparing them to something bad.
If you saw a single bear successfully hoarding 98% of the food supply of an entire forest, you’d have to be a fucking moron to fail to classify them as a detrimental anomaly.
if the other 98% of the bears gave their food supply to the 1 bear with 98% of the supply because the bear with the food supply gave them cheap Labubu’s you’d probably just say yeah that’s their culture
And tbh this discussion seems to come back to the American bear species almost all of the time
Again, you would have to be a fucking moron to fail to classify them as the shitstain anomaly they would be.
Just because you are so stupid as to dismiss such a thing as ‘culture’ does not mean I would.
Hello!
Please calm down, take a chill pill and we can discuss this more later
There’s no need to be so angry in a community chat forum
They don’t do that because they physically can’t. If they could they would. If you have two starving bears and throw them one carcass. Only one will eat because they will fight and scream away the weaker one.
Yet billionaires can. Interesting how you are willing to work so hard to completely miss the point. How stupid do you choose to be?
The original point is that billionaires, as I interpret it, is that billionaires are worse than animals. Or at least that if we look at billionaires as if they were animals we would still diagnose them as ill. My point is that that’s not true. Animals can be just as psychotic. Most have absolutely no morals and a subset of them regularly do things that are way worse than what the billionaires are doing, hence my examples.
However animals are not humans. Billionaires are humans. If we say billionaires are like animals that’s already a really bad grade. We humans are supposed to be much better than that. I’m not defending billionaires at all. I’m saying one should compare them to something else. There are much better and more effective ways to criticize them than this.
Well there’s always this more “humane” take:
Yes because they don’t have enough food.
When they are full they move on with their lives. Hoarding behavior, like with squirrels and nuts is rare and even when present is usually because they aren’t smart enough to remember their hiding spots.
That all being said, we are human the whole idea is that we can moderate behaviors and not only act on instinct.
Hermit crabs
Why do you talk like capitalism is feudalism?
people are WILLINGLY giving THEIR MONEY to BILLIONAIRES in exchange for GOODS AND/OR SERVICES
If you don’t want billionaires to get richer convince people to not use Amazon/Google/Microsoft/Apple etc
You’ll find very quickly that most people are not only ok with billionaires they love the services they are provided and don’t even think about it
People want cheap products in order to live affordable lives, companies owned by billionaires are the only ones capable of the scale required to achieve that so it’s not like people have a choice.
These are excuses people tell themselves to make themselves feel better while they order Nikes and Labubu’s off of Amazon
If someone wants some nice shoes or a doll why shouldn’t they be allowed to get one? There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, all consumption is apart of the same system.
Why aren’t you spending all your money and time on helping others then?
The money you earn would find around zilion uses in helping others.
It’s one thing for a working person to spend whatever income they don’t need to live at a baseline on others, it’s another for someone to hoard so much money they couldn’t necessarily physically spend it all if they tried, let alone spend it on things that would actually measurably increase their happiness.
You can argue regular people should donate more, and many actually do donate more than billionaires (as a % of assets/income) depending on which source you trust to give a good enough picture, (given a lot of donations are hard to track, both from large billionaire foundations and DAFs, to smaller donors with hard to classify spending) but there is a massive gap in how much a regular person can donate relative to a rich person, even just as a % of their income.
If you live paycheck to paycheck, but have, say, $20 left over at the end of the month in actual money to your name that hasn’t already gone to groceries, rent, etc, (and we assume you have no other assets), your net worth is $20.
If a billionaire donates $999,000,000 to charity, that would be the equivalent of that person donating $19.98.
Unlike that person though, the billionaire would have a million dollars in net worth, enough money to buy a house, while the regular person would have $0.02.
Even if these conditions aren’t perfect, and you assume maybe the person has some more net worth than $20, the point still stands. A billionaire can give up almost all of their net worth and still have enough money to comfortably live, or at least meet basic living standards for the average person. For most Americans, if they lose their job, have any surprise bill, or don’t make as much money as they expected to, they will instantly become homeless the next month rent is due, even if they give up none of their existing assets and just stop adding more money on top.
This is why “billionairism” (not a real term ofc) is such a damaging condition. It not only causes you to become obsessed with hoarding wealth that you don’t necessarily need, but it causes you to do so at the expense of others you could readily help without experiencing any material downside in your everyday life. There is no reason to hoard so much wealth.
Money is just a means to get or do things. If you are not spending that money, and you have more money than you’ll ever need to spend, that excess dollar value past your realistic spending for the rest of your life is just a valueless number to you. It’s a number that will never impact your life, but it can impact others. Hoarding it is stupid and immoral.
deleted by creator
Because most people are working class and need the money they earn to keep themselves and their loved ones alive, if they can even afford that under capital’s starvation wages.
Do you spend all your money on survival?
No
Once my needs are met, I am. And I’m disabled. Why aren’t you?
Because I’m selfish.
Contrary to your hero’s opinion, this is not a virtue. It is a vice.
Never thought I’d see the day someone actually propose Voodoo Economics seriously, ie. Thatcher’s and Reagan’s policies. Fuck that shit
If I had any, I wouldnt. Me and the type I keep in my company, would go broke giving it away. Thats why were not billionaires. Money isnt a god.
deleted by creator
You don’t understand the first thing about economics, yet want to shit on everyone. You are truly pathetic.
Hello!
I’m actually quite well aware of a lot of things about economics, however being told I’m an idiot or ‘truly pathetic’ does literally 0 for me
Please take a chill pill, eat some coco pops, then think about a response that’s deeper than ‘u r stupid, i r smrt’ and then we can discuss, thanks!
deleted by creator
I can’t believe you went to all that effort just to get blocked, how odd
Interesting how you continue to go through the effort to eat your foot in front of all of us. How pathetic.
Redefining a psychopathic trait as “being successful” is truly a boot to lick
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/g64540955/bestselling-evs-2025/
The people vote with their wallets, no ones opinion here matters really tbh when in real life people are more than happy to shove 10’s of millions of dollars at the richest man in the world every month
We have billionaire shills on lemmy now? Are we finally mainstream?
You’re either disingenuous, or stupid
There are no ethical billionaires. They get there by shitting on people and exploitation of the vulnerable
When you learn Jeff bezo’s net worth increases several thousand dollars every minute and it happens by exploiting people around the globe, even forcing his own workers to hold their piss for hours so they can meet insane quotas, you think to yourself “what an awesome genius”? Is that possible? You really somehow have made it far enough in life to post on this platform without seeing how absurd this is?
Even if we take the deeply sick and inhuman idea of money equating success, they already succeeded hard at 2-3 million dollars. Having a billion dollars is like winning a sports game 1000-1 and still being sad that you didn’t win by enough. These people could’ve easily retired at 5 million but they didn’t want that. They need more and more and more. They happily spend millions of dollars on buying politicians so they can get away with paying sub-living wages to their slaves and so they can pay very little in taxes. They display deeply uncharitable behaviors at best and deeply disturbing tendencies often (creating an island used for raping children).
I really wonder how you could possibly dismiss or ignore all of this. Explain yourself. And you owe it to the community if you’re going to come on here defending the class of people who have consistently ruined human lives throughout history. A billionaire is just a king who drinks from a golden chalice while their tax payers die in the streets. You are saying fuck those dead idiots, the king is great. What the fuck is that? Why would you do it? What could you possibly get out of this?
People become billionaires because they provide billions in value to the society.
People become billionaires because they own capital which extracts massive amounts of value from production processes by paying workers less than the value their labour produces.
Lol that’s your response? Pretty safe to say you’re a Nazi after that. Thanks for letting me know!!
You just not only said “life is fair” but that you don’t provide much value to society.
Ermm not sure about that bud maybe think about it a little more
Mental disorder is very, very tricky to define, as something maladaptive in one context may work in another. One example is how in individualistic cultures, people hearing voices more often experience them as intrusive and malevolant, and we call it schizophrenia, while people on collectivist cultures may experience the voices as friendly and comforting. Is that a disease, then, if it benefits a person? Psychologists tend to go with a working definition based on how adaptive a condition is for the person and their society.
But in what context does it benefit a person to be unable to ever have “enough” of anything, never able to be satiated, compulsively adding to an enormous pile of wealth far, far beyond anything that they could ever use? Further, when the condition drives them to use the power attendant to that wealth to actively harm their society in myriad ways, how is that adaptive? It seems that they harbor a deep anxiety about the possibility that their accumulated wealth might be reduced, in a way completely imperceptible to them, and even being consciously aware that this is so, still suffer from a mania that compels them to hurt other people to keep that from happening.
Hardly sounds like what most of us would define as “successful in life.”
Meh. It’s just work, vision and lots of luck that leads to exponential growth. And when you start getting exponential growth to your investment, stopping the process of getting richer and richer would require active work to stop it from happening.
Only in fiction do people become rich by being compulsive about it.
Earning money from having money flies in the face of OC’s implication that being a billionaire is the result of virtuous effort. And, it sounds like a major flaw in the system all by itself.
But, even though they could passively rake in the income, so many billionaires actively try to increase their wealth, for no particular apparent purpose, and at the expense of harm to others, which does seem pathological.
moneu does not equate to success.
Money does equate to value provided to the society, which in my opinion equates to success.
Only a moron would think that billionaires earned their money. Sorry to hear that about you.
An amassing of money is only one definition of success. Depending on how you define it, I am either the most or least successful person you have ever met. I am poor, but I do precisely what I want to do, and usually when I want to. It mostly relies on the help of others, but let’s be honest who doesn’t rely on others in some way or another to do their thing?
There’s only one, maybe two things that I want to do that are probably going to be forever outside of my reach. One is going to space (my body is too broken). The other is pooping on specific graves without getting arrested and I don’t think I can outrun security with my drawers down anymore.