A billion dollars is a hard sum of money to wrap your head around. There is basically no ethical way to make a billion dollars. If you have a billion dollars it’s because you’ve stiffed a lot of people a lot of the value they created and kept it for yourself.
Forbes did the math once and determined that Smaug, a dragon embodied by greed and selfishness, is worth $62 billion. There are 17 people richer than him.
Smaug was shot in the heart and it was a morally good act.
I’d be willing to bet that Smaug caused less death and destruction than many (if not most) billionaires
Fyi that math was heavily contested, i agree with the sentiment but a literal mountain full of gold, assuming the market wouldnt crash, would make him the richest person on the planet.
We don’t actually know the size of the hoard, though. We know it’s big enough for him to sleep in it, and we know the Arkenstone was worth one share of it, but we don’t have specific numbers (at least, none I can see). Any valuation has to be an estimation, and any estimation will be contested.
Also, the value of gold today is 75 times that of what it was in the 1930s, which makes it even harder to put a price on Smaug’s hoard.
Regardless of the specific number, there is a certain level of wealth and greed that makes it morally good to shoot someone through the heart. Smaug is not the only one to have hit that threshold.
Bard the Bowman was to blame. He gave love a bad name.
Asking this on lemmy is like asking a pack of wolves if they enjoy the taste of lamb. You already know the answer you’re going to get…
Is ok to ask for an AMEN now and then.
Billionaires shouldn’t exist; no one needs that much money. They should be taxed until there are no more billionaires.
I’m hungry.
I think they’re bad for the economy. Money has to circulate. Every time a billionaire throws another million on the pile, they make things worse for everyone else.
This is a view we don’t see often enough. Everybody is into hating billionaires the way teenage girls hate the super-hot cheerleader. All they do is complain that it’s not “fair” for somebody to be so rich. There’s not enough discussion of the purely mechanical reasons extreme wealth is bad for the economy, not to mention the corruption opportunities it creates. The ultra-rich don’t spend their money, they just exchange it to trade big blocks of asset ownership back and forth. None of that money ever gets spent on a loaf of bread or a bus ticket, or a GI Joe with the kung fu grip. It essentially disappears from the economy. I don’t think most people even comprehend how that works - it involves more thought than reacting to memes.
They literally steal work out of the system like a parasite. As you say, we shouldn’t be envious, but fix the problem with the money leaking away.
Tax them.
I don’t support violence at all. But for every mentioned woodchipper, this scene from Tucker & Dale vs Evil is mandatory:
If you invest in the sp500, you’ll have something around 8% return per year. This is highly variable year by year, of course, but in the long run, that’s what you can expect to average out. You can do better than the sp500, but generally not without accepting higher risk.
With those returns, you will double your money every 9 years. Roughly. It’s going to vary by decade. 2000-2010 was flat, while 2010-2020 was unusually good.
If you max out a 401k, HSA, and IRA on this strategy from a young age, you should have millions for retirement. If you’re a millennial or younger, you’re going to need a million or two (at least) to have a reasonable retirement.
How do you turn that into a billion? Doubling every 9 years won’t do it in your lifetime. Not unless you started life as a millionaire and never withdrew a dime until you were 90. Starting with $1000 and doubling every year for 20 years, consistently, would do it.
How do you double your money consistently for 20 years? Either extreme luck or doing something extremely shady. Probably both.
In other words, they are not the genius captains of industry that right-libertarians want you to believe. They got lucky or are deeply unethical or both, and they do not deserve your respect. Most likely, they deserve your disdain. Every one of them.
It’s not so much the money, the wealth in itself, that bothers me about them, it’s the mind boggling absolutely insane amount of power having that much wealth is capable of.
They literally buy elections, they buy media outlets, by their actions they buy the direction entire countries take. They use their money to fund the actions of others that work on their behalf. They can create a literal army of individuals to work for them towards whatever end they wish to achieve. That’s entirely way too much power for an individual or a family to have. Just imagine living next to someone who has a 500,000 strong army of militants just hanging out. Maybe theyre good, maybe they want to turn your neighborhood into a warzone for kicks, either way you would have no means to stop them.
Just look at smoething like the “tea party” movement in the US. Grassroots? No, try Koch brothers funded with the intent to install Koch approved representatives into the government.
In the words of the next post on my feed: Boil ‘em, mash ‘em, stick ‘em in a stew
Bill-ion-aires!
Asking this question on lemmy is like going to a Linux comm and asking if it’s a good idea to switch from windows to Linux. You’re preaching (asking?) to the choir.
That said, eat the fucking rich.
Which Linux though?
They would serve a greater use to humanity as compost
Look at this visualization of how much money Jeff Bezos has, and then tell me that it is reasonable and justifiable.
Billionaires as individuals are just humans with all the good and the bad coming from that fact. Acting against them as individuals is pointless. We need to establish a system where becoming a billionaire is impossible in the first place.