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Yeah, I'm desperately curious as to the sorts of lifestyle accommodations one unlocks when they pass, at a guess, the $50 million net worth mark.
For me, yeah, I think if I could have a dedicated personal assistant, which I'd guess would cost $50k-70k/year for a decently competent one (just googled it, I was almost exactly right), I could cut out SO MUCH CRAP that wastes my time and focus on the highest leverage, most productive, or fun, stuff that I WANT to be doing.
But man, how do you get to the level of wealth quickly if you're merely climbing the corporate ladder? If I start pulling down $250k/yr then it might start to be justifiable (in my mind) to splurge on a dedicated assistant to handle this stuff. And have to try to avoid lifestyle inflation to some degree. But BECAUSE I currently complete many of those tasks myself, I'm somewhat stymied from doing the work that might speed up my progression to higher incomes.
There's got to be an efficient frontier on the curve that I'm not quite hitting. Hmmm.
Wait wait wait, I just realized, under idealized circumstances that approximately what a spouse can help achieve, if you marry well and have a good, cooperative, teammate relationship. That was probably the secret for middle class couples leveraging into higher income brackets.
And your realisation there is what annoys me about the commentary post Bezos divorce about MacKenzie getting all that money for nothing. Jeff was the guy who made the billions, she was just the wife, what did she do to deserve this money?
Well, let's see: first, she wasn't the one who blew up the marriage by hooking up with the thot next door. Second, back before Jeff was Mr. Mega-bucks, she was working a job too and contributing to the household income while he got Amazon off the ground. Third, all the support that faceh mentions that isn't explictly 'a paid job' - running the household, nurturing relationships (business as well as personal), raising the kids, being there for Jeff in the ways spouses are supposed to be there for each other. Being willing to be seen out in public with him when he was still a googly-eyed nerd before he buffed up and got work done to fix his googly eye.
But sure, none of that matters, she's just a parasite who got undeserved riches in the divorce settlement.
That really depends on what you think the goal of divorce law/alimony is.
Giving them $250 million should set them up for life and is almost certainly sufficient to pay for their 'services' during the marriage. Or if you want to assume the value of their services is inherently equal to his,(as partnerships go) then sure, start with that assumption.
Just understand you're creating an incentive for men to avoid marriage as a institution since it takes most of the control of their wealth away from them at the drop of a hat if they get married before they build their kingdom.
As usual, though, the point is less about billionaires and more about men who enter the marriage expecting to get some level of reliable partner, then realize that under the current legal regime the woman has no obligation to pull her weight, to act respectful towards him, or to even sleep with him, and yet is generally able to file for divorce regardless of how well-behaved he was during the marriage.
Its an inherent asymmetry.
Some of the comments about women and marriage on here are also creating incentives for women to avoid marriage. Even relatively tame, like "The thing is, that work doesn’t hugely differ whether you’re the wife of a coal miner or a self-made billionaire."
Yes, gentlemen, I hope all of you are telling the women in your lives (mothers, grandmothers, aunts, female cousins, sisters, daughters, wives) that you don't consider them equal partners, that you are the superior person in this relationship because you are the breadwinner and her little job (if she works outside the home) doesn't count. Working in the home only? Absolutely does not count for anything, she's replaceable by a coal-miner's wife because being the spouse and mother for an upper-middle class household doesn't involve any kind of extra work at all, and maybe even less work because you're rich enough to hire help. If you do decide to dump her, she deserves maybe ten bucks and a pat on the head, but certainly nothing more. Not one drop of your vast wealth (should you have vast wealth), even if that share does not, in fact, leave you penniless but you retain possession of the majority of the vast wealth.
Why, with such examples of how respected they are, why aren't women jumping at the notion of not getting an education and a career of their own and instead getting married as soon after high school as possible then producing a few kids as rapidly as possible? And if hubby gets tired of you after a while, well, you can probably find work somewhere scrubbing floors or something, automation and AI hasn't yet taken those jobs away!
Women - such ungrateful bitches, to turn down a wonderful offer like that!
I don't consider myself a misandrist, but some of you guys make it tough going, and more and more I am grateful to the Lord God Almighty for making me without the wiring to desire and need love and romance, because blow me down, I'd be fucked if I had to rely on a guy for anything from emotional validation on up.
I made the statement:
To be clear, I agree with none of these statements:
I think it would help for you to understand where I'm coming from:
[EDIT: PERSONAL DETAILS REDACTED]
Can you see why I'm a little dubious of the idea that if you marry someone, credit for your achievements should be always and automatically be spread equally?
Of course this is only an anecdote and I don't intend it to be applied to all relationships. I am sure that there are a lot of traditional couples who have a much more equitable relationship with a more even share of responsibility. I do note however that:
Like a typical feminist. U/hereandgone leaves the discussion once she has given her talking points. She has nothing once any counter arguments are made. She will spout the same talking points with perfect amnesia once the topic gets brought up again.
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That's a bit of a trick.
"Equal Partners" in the sense that both are contributing to the household. But how does one measure the value or even magnitude of each contribution when they're inherently different in their nature.
If the guy builds the house, builds all the furnishing in it, and does the actual maintenance work on it over the years, (i.e., it ONLY exists thanks to his own labor)...
It is REALLY fair that the woman would get the house in a divorce scenario?
Well, we acknowledge she was the one who was 'keeping house' and doing all the day-to-day work that makes it a pleasant place to live and keeps it from falling into neglect which leveraged the value the man already provided, creating something better than what the man alone could achieve.
So we've got 'unequal' contributions by each side, but each has contributed value to the whole.
The actual contributions are usually not accounted for in a literal ledger. So we often end up with a guy who thinks he's being shortchanged because he created all of the necessary preconditions for a happy, successful marriage, and pulled his weight, and yet gets screwed over for trusting that he would be 'repaid' by his partner with her love and esteem and, eventually, a kid, and yet he's still getting screwed over when it ends.
In short, how does one balance material contributions with, I guess, mostly emotional and intangible but still valuable contributions?
Since the material contributions are legible, those are the ones that end up getting parceled out by the court. So the wife gets a cut of the material contributions made by the husband, but the man doesn't get to take away any of the emotional, intangible elements contributed by her. So he loses both the material wealth AND the intangibles.
You can imagine that this feels unfair.
I mean, I've pointed it out before, women end up marrying a corporation (for all pursuits and purposes) and it turns out that is pretty much a dead end for their 'emotional validation.' Eventually the biological clock ticks over, and the corporation will never be able to provide her with kids and the actual long-term loyalty that a good husband would grant.
But men have to match up to the corporation's material benefits while seeking a partner, anyway, because those factors are intangible and rarely counted in the calculus.
Its always and forever a question of 'compared to what?'
I don't think women are doing the math on what they'll get if they stick with MegaCorp for 25 years, laboring dutifully under their manager's eye, then what they'll get if they stick with a Husband for that same period, laboring dutifully under 'his' roof.
It becomes a bit annoying to have to justify men's contributions to upholding the entire edifice of civilization.
On the flip side, women, by dint of bearing and raising children, are obviously and constantly glorified for their contribution. As well they should be.
So men, demanding a little bit more leverage and control of their wealth so they can actually achieve good outcomes for themselves in the world they built seems utterly fair to me.
My actual point is that Divorce laws should really, in actuality, be designed around encouraging marriage and family creation and maintenance of a long-term bond. And OBJECTIVELY they are simply not doing that.
Billionaires getting divorced and splitting 10-12 figure households are a symptom of this, and a particularly noticeable one.
And guys who notice "wait, even the billionaire couldn't keep his wife, what actual chance do I have" are a lot more common than billionaires.
The incentives are simply not aligned. A guy wants a partner, a homemaker, and someone to bear and raise children.
No-Fault Divorce penalizes the guy by forcing him to give up his accumulated wealth and support the wife regardless of how well she actually behaved during the marriage. Whether he got a kid out of it or not.
So he is pretty damn motivated to try to keep the marriage afloat to avoid said penalties.
Divorce penalizes a woman by... ?
What is a woman actually losing out on by initiating divorce?
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Unlikely, in that no significant number of women who haven't already made up their mind are reading them.
Anyway, "How dare you talk about this in a way that doesn't put all the onus on the man and put the woman on a pedestal?" is not going to be an effective tactic; it's so ubiquitous already that anyone still talking about the subject is obviously already inured to it.
It's not on a pedestal, it's "marriage is a partnership and the unpaid work of running a household is, indeed, work".
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The thing is, that work doesn’t hugely differ whether you’re the wife of a coal miner or a self-made billionaire. If anything, the latter has more professional assistance, although she’s also expected to be slightly more personable. (I don’t think Amazon was really that kind of business though.)
I don’t think many people think the wife should come away with nothing in such affairs, only that scaling it directly to the husband’s business success is pretty dubious.
The work of getting a business off the ground doesn't differ that much whether your business becomes a trillion dollar company or goes bust. The labor theory of value is wrong.
Mackenzie was also working at Amazon in the early days, doing accounts, packing orders, etc. So I find it entirely reasonable that this made her rich.
The labor theory of value is wrong, yes. I think you're missing a step or two between that and the Washington State Divorce Court being the proper way to assess that value. The correct question is 'What rate of pay would Jeff Bezos and his wife have agreed to in return for her assistance?' Which is unfortunately impossible to answer given that no such negotiation took place.
I suppose you could argue that he married her with the understanding that, should they divorce, their assets would be divvied up according to that process? That's technically valid, but it'd be just as valid if that process were anything else, provided those terms wouldn't have prevented their marriage; also impossible to say, I suppose. Still, I think this is the best supported position.
On the other side, one can consider what he'd have had to have paid someone else to fulfill those same responsibilities -- certainly far, far less than he ended up paying her, even if he'd had to take out a loan to do so. It's certainly possible she did something for Amazon no one else could have done, but neither accounts nor packing orders meets that bar. He likely wouldn't have taken out a loan to pay someone else to do those things (at least not very early on), but that's not actually relevant so long as the court would have forced him to pay her for her labor regardless of the success it engendered -- her compensation was guaranteed, so there should be no risk premium. But that's not what the court would do, and they both knew that at the time, so maybe a risk premium is fair.
No thanks, Software As A Servuce is bad enough, I'm not entertaining Marriage As A Service.
It's not about compensation and premiums, it's about ownership.
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