I genuinely love your use of the word embarrassing here. We need to normalize treating insane personal/family wealth as an embarrassment instead of something to be respected. With very few exceptions you only become a billionaire through inheritance of wealth undoubtedly built on exploitation, or by exploiting others yourself. They should be embarrassed by that.
I don’t think there are any exceptions. A billion is such an unfathomably large amount that I’m pretty sure you MUST rely on exploitation to ever acquire that much.
I allowed for the possibility of a rare exception just in case. The two possibilities that come to mind are Notch (creator of Minecraft) and Taylor Swift. Both certainly depended on the work of others to become a billionaire, so there was likely some degree of exploitation (obviously in the Marxist sense there was) but maybe not at the scale of people like Bezos. I certainly haven’t heard of Taylor Swift’s employees pissing in jars on a warehouse floor.
Swift had very wealthy parents from the outset so while she wasn’t billionaire-rich to start, she enjoyed huge advantages that most musically -inclined kids never would have. She certainly seems to enjoy the obscene wealth she has now, what with her disregard of the environment while jet setting around the world. I say all of this as a legit fan of her music, even though I hate that she isn’t massively donating her wealth.
I’m less sure about Notch. It sounds like he’s a bit of an internet edgelord these days so I’m not super optimistic that he grew his wealth “fairly”.
That said, I fundamentally do agree with you and strongly believe that billionaires should be taxed until they’re no longer billionaires.
I genuinely love your use of the word embarrassing here. We need to normalize treating insane personal/family wealth as an embarrassment instead of something to be respected. With very few exceptions you only become a billionaire through inheritance of wealth undoubtedly built on exploitation, or by exploiting others yourself. They should be embarrassed by that.
I don’t think there are any exceptions. A billion is such an unfathomably large amount that I’m pretty sure you MUST rely on exploitation to ever acquire that much.
I allowed for the possibility of a rare exception just in case. The two possibilities that come to mind are Notch (creator of Minecraft) and Taylor Swift. Both certainly depended on the work of others to become a billionaire, so there was likely some degree of exploitation (obviously in the Marxist sense there was) but maybe not at the scale of people like Bezos. I certainly haven’t heard of Taylor Swift’s employees pissing in jars on a warehouse floor.
Swift had very wealthy parents from the outset so while she wasn’t billionaire-rich to start, she enjoyed huge advantages that most musically -inclined kids never would have. She certainly seems to enjoy the obscene wealth she has now, what with her disregard of the environment while jet setting around the world. I say all of this as a legit fan of her music, even though I hate that she isn’t massively donating her wealth.
I’m less sure about Notch. It sounds like he’s a bit of an internet edgelord these days so I’m not super optimistic that he grew his wealth “fairly”.
That said, I fundamentally do agree with you and strongly believe that billionaires should be taxed until they’re no longer billionaires.