this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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Nobody earns a billion dollars. Imagine it's October 12, 1492. One of your ancestors is so excited about Columbus landing in America, that he starts putting aside the equivalent of 5000 dollars every single day. And through good fortune, every heir continues to do the same. 5000 dollars added to a pile every single day for over 530 years. 5000 dollars is more than most people make in a month and it accrues every. single. day. There is no interest on the money, but at the same time there are no taxes and nobody spends it on frivolous stuff like food or shelter or education or healthcare. And now, after more than 531 years you inherit it all and realize you're not a billionaire. I know it's an unrealistic thought experiment, but to me it shows that no billionaire ever earned their money.
You’re really close to $1B. I’m not actually sure what is thought provoking about this.
I also don’t know why it doesn’t show that a billionaire hasn’t earned their money. If Taylor Swift gets 10 million people to pay her $150 to go to her concerts in her life time, and her expenses are $50 per show, is she not a billionaire that earned $1B?
10 million tickets is only 400 shows if she’s filling 25k seat arenas.
None of this is actual math, but it’s not insane to me that someone could earn a billion dollars.
What is insane is that someone would sit on a billion dollars like a dragon on their pile of gold.
Yeah, I think if we had hyperinflation, you'd see the scaling back of the "there are no ethical billionaires" umbrella shorthand that sort of simultaneously gestures towards and obfuscates the rent-seeking behavior and owning of capital that's really being lambasted in that statement. Regardless of whether or not the speaker knows it, the speaker might just be spouting shit. We'd probably see "there are no ethical hundred-billionaires" or something instead, anyways. It's just a kind of oversimplification, common to like every stupid slogan in which we are condemned to do all political discourse, compounded by people taking everything hyper-literally and uncritically reading everything as though their own set of definitions is the absolute merriam webster set.
I dunno, I wonder if that's just the kind of horribly stupid strategy that social media has foisted upon everyone, with character limits and short-form content. And then character limits means that everyone can browse through a much broader pool of stupidity at once, absorbing all of it, understanding none of it, and then regurgitating it into whatever new form will reach as many people as possible by the same token.