When wealth becomes so immense and income becomes useless, how should society deal with the extravagant opulence?
A billion dollars would require the holder to spend over 27k every day over 100 years. Growing modestly in even a simple savings account, this is unspendable wealth – over 30 million annually.
27k — what many Americans scrape through an entire year on — is what a billionaire could burn through before dinner, daily, for a century, and still die rich
Once a person achieves this level of wealth, what else are they gaining besides more bloat to their ego?
Supporting perspective via Claude:
“Concentrated wealth occasionally backfills what functional public systems would have handled anyway — and gets credited as generosity for doing so.
• The NIH, DARPA, and NASA produced transformative innovations through distributed public funding, not concentrated private wealth
• The polio vaccine came from Jonas Salk, who refused to patent it
• Most Gates Foundation health work operates in areas governments abandoned, which is an indictment of policy failure, not proof that billionaires are necessary”
Does it provide any upsides that don’t leverage ulterior motives? Walk a mile in their shoes and will you see a new perspective or will it confirm the detachment from societal good and self aggrandizement?
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