Because it's not about money for them, they've already surpassed that concept, it a about power. Us peasants aren't quite evolved enough to understand that yet.
this post was submitted on 25 May 2025
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It's not just about power. For many, it's also a way to keep score, to feel better about themselves compared to others. (Not trying to justify; it's still a sickness.)
Look how much Bezos and Musk feuded over which one of them was the "richest" man in the world. Or, hell, just the fact that they're still running companies when they already have more money than most countries.
I mean Elon Musk once scoffed and told sponsors to go fuck themselves for daring to pull their advertising from Twitter. I don't think he understood that it was business and that some businesses run by running ads paid for by sponsors.
It's like he forgot what a business was...
Still begs the question why they need tax cuts then? It doesn't give them more power, it doesn't really give them much more money (in the grant scheme of things).
My theory is that when you get that first Billion with a B, something fundamental breaks in the human brain.
They don’t think like us normal folks anymore, even multimillionaires are “other” to them.
to create scarcity - making sure you stay exploitable.
Just like the president, who now has more executive powers than ever, still doesn't run things the way you think they do. They have an inner circle. It also could be thought of in a way like other countries inside of the empire don't really have sovereignty. Also, you could rethink the whole idea of a dictator. I mean if the capitalist class wants to defend themselves, they're going to obfuscate their involvement. Like, you need a fall guy and the fall guy is a gambler. And sometimes he comes out winning and sometimes he gets beaten up in the street.
If giving Charon just two coins gets you across the river Styx, imagine what paying him billions of dollars would get you.
The Gospel According to Luke
18 A certain ruler asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 19 Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. 20 You know the commandments: ‘You shall not commit adultery. You shall not murder. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness. Honor your father and mother.’ ” 21 He replied, “I have kept all these since my youth.” 22 When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “There is still one thing lacking. Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” 23 But when he heard this, he became sad, for he was very rich. 24 Jesus looked at him and said, “How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! 25 Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
The Gospel according to Capitalism
Greed is good
Here's my personal fave:
20 “Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, 21 but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property.
Exodus 21:20
Most Christians believe the old laws of Israel were abolished by Christ.
Some of us believe he was a philosopher, and verses like this are contradictory to his general philosophy, therefore obviously not part of it.
and verses like this are contradictory to his general philosophy, therefore obviously not part of it.
No, Jesus condoned slavery. Both explicitly by using slavery as a metaphor, and using it in his parables, and implicitly by never once simply saying, "hey guys, maybe humans shouldn't be seen as property."
Instead he said things like:
17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.
(Law that includes separate rules for treating your Hebrew vs Gentile slaves, and how to properly enslave the offspring of your current slaves)
Jesus never spoke of slaves in any way that would suggest he had any problem with the practice whatsoever. And he was certainly in a position to make a statement about it.
The New Testament is also full of pro-slavery sentiment by his followers in: 1 Peter, 1 Timothy, Colossians, Ephesians, and probably others.
Sounds like a pretty dogshit philosopher if he can't even say slavery is bad while literally surrounded by the practice.
This one in Matthew feels relevant here too:
19 “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust[a] destroy and where thieves break in and steal, 20 but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Billionaires are playing cookie clicker with our lives.
You joke, but that's close to how the rich see money. It's a score keeping device.
and why shouldn't people be allowed to play games they find fun?
For the same reason that kids shouldn't be allowed to play games dropping rocks on moving cars.
It's also worth noting that we could also use/abuse this tendency, for the greater good. Imagine if rich lists etc were done entirely via tax returns. If you don't pay taxes, you're considered poor. It provides the hyper rich with a new way of comparing themselves, via actualised wealth rather than paper/virtual money.
I'd love to say so, but I wasn't joking.
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Yes, the mentality behing it is flawed. But those are the people that make it to the top in the current economic system.
Being a billionaire should be listed in the DSM as a mental illness.
Not even as a joke. I oppose systems that create macro wealthy and powerful. Those systems create sociopaths.
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Trying to be the fattest camel when time comes to pass through the needle’s eye…
Although I am agnostic atheist, I do wish that heaven and hell are real so that the greedy are given due punishment in the afterlife.
What separates a person's last dying breath from a baby's first one?
Heaven and hell don't need to be real, neither does any other metaphysical concept. When we die, we owe it to the people after us to leave the world in a better place.
I agree with the sentiment though. Fuck billionaires.
It would be better if people stopped fucking billionaires. Really we don't need their spawn.
I feel like this is part of how wealth concentrates, but idk.
It honestly is a waste for a true capitalist. Like, if you have enough money to cover all your expenses, while also having 2-3x your fun money expense, why aren't you following the capitalist ideal and doing something with it?
Start a nonprofit that suits your interests, buy a company you believe it, spin up scholarships, blow it on a do nothing project, but for fucks sake do something with it!
In France, they're buying medias to bring about a fascist state and using islamophobia and the fear of the enemy from within to justify an increasingly violent police state.
I guess they are bored and need to ruin something else.
Please! It's islamphobia and "narcotraffic" (i.e. small-scale pot dealers, who have no future anyway because of racism, classism, prejudice, and Paris-centrism.)
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Amassing wealth is an obsession. These people get a dopamine rush anytime their line goes up. Which is how they got there in the first place. At some point, the value doesn't really matter anymore but the obsession remains.
Greetings, your most experienced armchair psychologist
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They just like sitting on a Dragons hoard.
At least in D&D no dragon hoards that much, and the chromatic dragons have a legitimate reason for it.
The wealthiest dragon you'll encounter in any fantasy setting, we aren't talking about Shadowrun or Cyberpunk where the real life billionaires are dragons, is an ancient red wyrm. They will have 1.5 million to 5 million gold pieces of treasure. 1 gold piece is ⅒ of an ounce of gold. Therefore the absolute wealthiest dragon in all of D&D and Pathfinder is only worth about $1,200,000,000, and that is only one of them. 99.99% of all other dragons would be worth less than a billion.
The chromatic dragons have to eat their hoard just before they die. If they don't have enough gold to pay Tiamat, then she eats their souls.
Also, gold is a nice soft bed according to every metallic dragon I have encountered.
I think once your net wealth hits 100mil, it should buffer overflow to NaN and you have to start over.
You're assuming they're saving at all.
A lot of billionaire wealth is tied up in assets that is only a "savings" if it's converted to cash, like stock options.
Amazon stock is $200 a share, Bezos has 908,804,311 shares. $181,760,862,200 in stock.
https://www.wallstreetzen.com/stocks/us/nasdaq/amzn/ownership
But that money doesn't go anywhere unless he sells it. Stock market is closed Monday for memorial day, but let's say he does nothing on Tuesday morning and decides to sleep in until 11:30 AM, shit, I WOULD. In that time the stock goes from $200 to $214.
Bezos "makes" $12,723,260,354 while sleeping.
When you have that many stock shares, the wealth is self perpetuating... but it's not "real" until you sell it.
What happens if he's sleeping and the price drops to $180 because of more stupid Trump shit. Now he's "lost" $18,176,086,220 overnight.
And selling could have important impacts on the company itself in certain situations
Maybe you should read "saving" as "hoarding". The skeet (tweet?) Is making a point about their odd motivation to continue to accrue unimaginable wealth far beyond the point where the costs of their wildest dreams are trivial. The whole while having the ability to literally end world hunger many times over after subtracting those costs.
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I’m poor now but one day soon I’ll be a billionaire and then those poors better watch out!
Maybe that's just it. They've accomplished something, but ultimately they know it's meaningless. So they try to find a context where it has meaning.
Some of them find that meaning in charity, helping large portions of humanity.
Others realize that the only circumstance where the distinction between a billion and a hundred million matters is if the world is absolutely going to shit.
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