Consider the poor billionaire

Who, if offered a billion, would turn it down? Very few if any of us, I’d wager. That kind of money would certainly solve the financial restrictions we face and leave plenty to spare. What to do with that spare though? How much money is considered “spare” to our needs anyway? Even if we paid off all our bills today and for the future – lived debt free – there would still be pocket money aplenty from a billion bucks. That sort of money becomes it’s own kind of problem, with its own unique demands. If you or I had a few extra quid in savings we’d get a couple of percent on interest (if we’re lucky). A billion in savings would make tens of millions every year in interest! Most of us, even with some extravagance, would find it a full time job to spend a yearly salary of millions. So even the freedom you gain from poverty and wage-slavery by enormous wealth can vanish under the demands of handling that huge burden, enslaving you once again, but in a different way.

So how do they deal with it? Probably in as many ways are there are billionaires – and there are more billionaires today than ever. They, like anyone, are subject to their own character, attitudes, beliefs, strengths, and weaknesses when approaching life circumstances. One thing is common among them all – they can’t take it with them when they die. They are only mortal like the rest of us. The clock is ticking before Death the Great Leveller ends their ability to use wealth. Many billionaires leave a lot to their children. The Forbes Billionaires List tells us that inheritance accounts for about a third of male billionaires and about three quarters of female billionaires.

Some will direct money toward cultural preservation, collecting and curating works of art, such as Alice Walton and Bernard Arnault. A private collection made public, or donated to the nation, can be a generous legacy to the world. Some billionaires’ philanthropism takes a more direct approach, such as establishing or donating to charitable agencies, funding educational facilities & university scholarships, research foundations & grants. All seemingly a benevolent way of giving something back, or giving a chance to the disadvantaged. Several notable billionaires have established organizations to manage and utilize their wealth, such as the Chan-Zuckerberg Institute, the Gates Foundation, and the Soros Open Society Foundation.

But philanthropism can be become corrupted, or simply used as a tool to disguise something else. We’ve heard the phrase “philanthrocapitalism” enter the modern lexicon. The thinking behind it is you can do good with money, but why not make more money while you’re doing it?

You see another fact highlighted by the Forbes List is that many billionaires have self-made fortunes. Entrepreneurs account of over two thirds of the richest men in the world. The kind of person - who hasn’t inherited their wealth, who has had to work that hard and is smart enough to make a fortune - does not stop being that person once they’ve acquired some wealth.

Entrepreneurs who have problem-solved, influenced, disrupted, hacked, and engineered their way to amass wealth can use it to do so again, but this time in different spheres than the ones in which they made their fortune.

Exhibit A held up today by most people is Elon Musk. A man who started his fortune as co-founder of the PayPal online payments system. Now, with SpaceX, he is vaporizing millions of bucks in rocket-form. To be fair, he’s graduated from smashing those rockets into the Texas dirt to blowing them up in civil aviation airspace instead, which is progress I suppose. And all with the aim of reaching Mars - a move he claims as essential to save humanity. His brain never seems to stop, racing from one identified problem domain to another. Most recently this has led him to direct efforts in the social media and even political sphere. Unsurprisingly this attracts a lot of negative attention, as a previous notorious saviour of humanity can attest – they nailed Him to a tree for his salvational endeavours. One wonders what Jesus would think of how Musk uses his vast fortune and talents. Would caring for the weakest and poorest in society, or blasting a few souls towards Mars, be the best use of all that wealth?

But Musk is not as maligned as some. Take Bill Gates, the erstwhile computer nerd with poor social skills, who has elevated to the point where he meets privately with world leaders and has become the source of conspiracy theories about depopulating the planet. And no, he doesn’t plan to send the surplus to Mars. Like some comic book villain, or an end-of-level boss in a Microsoft video game, perhaps he wishes he could just halve the population, Thanos-like, with a mere snap of his fingers.

To be fair to them, the suspicions and pressure of expectation on a billionaire must be hard to bear. If you are a world famous over-achiever who made a fortune young, today you are expected to be fixing poverty, or solving climate change, or helping mankind escape its home planet.

What’s a billionaire to do when they retire from making money? When Jeff Bezos left Amazon what did he do? Indulge in a little rocket envy between Blue Origin and SpaceX? Did his co-workers chip-in to present him with a carriage clock? What do you get the worlds richest man as a retirement gift anyway, a man who has everything - even his own escape rocket? Or maybe an Amazon voucher would have been more appropriate! He could buy something with it for his business to cryogenically freeze himself, joining with the efforts of many billionaires attempting to cheat the Great Leveller!

Philanthropism, albeit dressed in good intentions, can become malanthropism. These elites can mean well, but still create more problems than they solve. The billionaires club has few members, and who outside it could understand them? Fact is, these big tech leaders see themselves as being in their own class, separate and above the rest of us, a meritocracy where their abilities that brought them where they are therefore somehow make them superior to us. Many take to writing books, to explain to us their superior manifesto for humanity, recruiting believers to the cause (and curiously, as a side-effect, making yet more money climbing the bestsellers list.) Bill Gates new book outlines his solutions to “our” problems, which is ironic, because there comes a point when even the worlds wealthiest problem-solvers come face to face with the simple fact that the problem they’re trying to solve – the insoluble problem – is all of us. So they feel the need to change us. To right our wrongs. Just to listen to Bill Gates or Klaus Schwab (a mere millionaire) talk on the rostrum, they use phrases like ‘we need to’, ‘we don’t want’. With the royal “we” they take it upon themselves to speak for all of us. They would put their elite opinions, their wishes, into our mouths. These are anti-democratic people, even when they need democracy. They need to influence our democratic voice in order to realize their ideologies.

Some don’t write books about it, or advertise their plans at all (thereby avoiding inconvenient attention and resistance to unpopular ideologies). George Soros, for example, quietly got on engineering society to his own vision through his Open Society Foundation. Having divested himself of two thirds of his billions doing so, old age has forced even him to hand the baton of his unmet vision to his own son.

You see the one thing that all billionaires have in common, and have in common with all of us, is that they are only human. And like all humans, they have their frailties. All the money in the world can not buy someone infallibility, but it can, however, vastly magnify the reach and harm caused by that one person’s innate human fallibility. On the days when we worry about how to pay the bills, we can console ourselves with the knowledge that at least our problems and our harms are limited. Our frailties don’t get magnified and exacerbated by the agency and power of wealth that can wreak massive damage to society and to lives.

So consider the plight of the poor billionaire.