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I've been having some thoughts recently about the billionaires among us, some opinions, some takes even. My politics on this has evolved over time; at one point they were admirable titans of industry, then they were capitalist parasitic ticks, then they were a necessary part of the incentive structure that drives to economy, and now they are a bloated level of inefficiency preventing the market from functioning efficiently.
But over all this time, I've kinda synthesized a superstructure that I don't think is gonna change, that I think is not on the left right axis, but on another mysterious plane: I'm jealous of china. I think we're gonna have to steven universe meme one of these guys. I don't even really care who, and I don't care who does it. It could be Il Duce Trump, it could be General Secretary Mamdani, it could be some boring centrist whose name we don't know.
Anyone who imposes consequences on or limits the behaviors of the managing class would win my instant approval. This could just be because of my space autism getting triggered unimaginably by space-x getting fucking shackled to a corpse right before IPO/ Artemis being a big fucking waste of time and money* / Boeing doing boeing stuff, it could be the long 2008 hangover, it could be a thousand things.
I guess I'm just kinda over us deciding that once you reach a certain net worth, you are some sort of luminous being. You can go to pedo island and it's fine, you can do drugs that normies go to prison for an it's fine, you can fuck up critical national infrastructure and it's fine, you have infinite money when it's time to do what you want but somehow you have no money (or negative money!) when it's time to contribute to the public good.
I recall Luigi, and I recall the polling: people old enough to have been adults when a the post FDR wealth redistribution program was still around were very unfavorable; people who came into consciousness as the program was being fully unwound in the late 80s and 90s were split 50/50, and people who never experienced that social milieu were yelling "BASED BASED BASED!"
I really think that unless the uniparty plays it's cards right, the next realignment is not gonna be pretty for anyone. We need another FDR type to head that shit off like it's vanguardist communism in the 1930s, and at this point I don't think I care if they are left or right, they just need to be for the bottom and middle and even most of the top, and against the peak.
*Yes I know about pork. Pork can at least do something! highways can get build, parks are nice, and if we need to build bombs somewhere to it might as well be in bumfuck nowhere to give the nowhereians something to do other than meth.
In my own life experience, I think I have a lot more distaste for the "mere millionaires" than the billionaires. Maybe it's because I've met a bunch of people in the 10 - 50 million dollar net worth range and only one billionaire.
Nonetheless, every single person I know who is worth more than $10 million reached that position through inheritance or marriage.
They don't work, and seem to flutter through life thinking they'll become an Expert at Something, but usually get bored before they actually get anywhere. The most dedicated of them might get another degree, but it seems to stop there.
Beyond that, they're insulated from consequences in a way that warps their minds. Most of them think they're quite brilliant investors, for example. Unlike me, they're able to afford big, risky bets that I can't take unless I want to stake my entire future on it. They'll then crow about their enormous unrealized gains on their portfolio, failing to note that every single investment they've made other than Nvidia is down 10 - 50%. They could have literally made more money investing in a basic-bitch whole market fund. It doesn't matter though, because they've staked enough of it as collateral for tax-free loans that they're set for life.
They frequently don't even realize what is realistic or not. I was talking about burnout once with one of them, and he gave me his sure-fire stress solution: just take a year off and go to Europe. I didn't have the heart to tell him that even if I could afford to take a whole year off work and start the job hunt when I got back, I still didn't have a family chalet that I could use rent free during my visit.
The one billionaire I have met, however, was sharp as hell. He clearly knew both his industry and finance inside and out, and simultaneously had the self-awareness to realize that he was not normal. He knew he had a lot of help getting to the point where his wealth could really snowball, and he recognized that luck was involved. Someone asked if he had advice on becoming a billionaire. The answer was long, but one of the most important things he said was that you can't do it without taking risks. He also made it clear that you aren't going to even be able to take those risks unless you're a multi millionaire first. It was a very different conversation compared to people who fell into money.
I guess I know a different crowd (American, here), but I know a few folks in that scale, all of whom are retired, married professionals (doctors, medium-tier business executives, engineers) that spent within their means and lived comparatively modestly and drive Toyotas. Maybe they inherited some of it, but it wasn't the majority of their income. But you also probably wouldn't know those details unless you were close to them: the millionaire-next-door types don't tend to talk much about money.
Also American. The people I know who meet that kind of millionaire next door criteria (eg: frugal, older) tend to not get into the eight figure range. It could be a regional thing: I'm in a pretty LCoL area. The people who I'm describing all ended up here because of the nearby college.
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I wonder how true this is. Looking at the richest men in America:
Musk: Started his first company in 1995 with about $60k of capital in 2026 dollars and seemed to just bootstrap his success from that. His dad famously owned an emerald mine, but there's conflicting reports about how much money that actually brought in and he was estranged from his dad.
Larry Ellison: mildly shitty childhood, raised by aunt and uncle, started his business with $11k starting capital in 2025 dollars, of which he personally invested about $6k. Not a multimillionaire and didn't come from money as far as I can tell.
Zucc: professional parents, high status schools, probably UMC or LUC. It's not clear how much starting capital Facebook requires from a cursory skim, but I can't imagine it was a lot considering its humble beginnings. He had a parental safety net, but certainly wasn't a multi millionaire.
Jeff Bezos: born to a teenage mother (high school student) and father (an alcoholic "Danish unicyclist"). Later adopted by a Cuban stepfather (petroleum engineer). I guess his mom's dad was a regional director of the atomic energy commission? Bezos had a successful professional career after college and started Amazon with $600k of capital in 2025 dollars from his parents.
Larry Page: college professor parents. High status summer schools. Got some seed funding for basic equipment and then managed to attract bigger investors with demos of the technology.
I don't really think that any of these people were only in a position to take risks from having millions already. Bezos is probably the closest thing to this given the size of the investment his parents put in (although it's a mystery to me where they got that money from in the first place). The most you can say for the rest of these is that their lives wouldn't have been over had their businesses not succeeded and they could have moved in with their parents or something - but that goes for a lot of people, not just multi millionaires.
I think he meant it more in the way that you can't swing for the fences on day one. You have to aim for millions before you get to billions.
Looks like that's not true, at least if you're doing it by founding a company -- Ellison, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Page all did it in one shot.
Bezos was already rich by normal-person standards after four years at DE Shaw, during which he was promoted unusually rapidly so was presumably a high performer. (Incidentally, I think this answers the question about where Bezos Sr got the $600k from - a lot of it was Jeff's own money but in the 1990's startup culture daddy was a better story).
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Maybe he was full of shit on that one, then. I'm not a billionaire, so it's hard to speak from experience.
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