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Comment by jacquesm

4 months ago

The list is getting longer and longer, but a good touchstone is simply net worth. You don't normally get to the top of a foodchain without being an apex predator.

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jacquesm

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toomuchtodo  4 months ago

Indeed. Empathy and the levels of wealth accumulation in scope are incompatible imho. They are the paperclip maximizers we were warned about.

  • sznio  4 months ago

    I thought about the same recently, in the context of the Epstein files.

    You don't become a billionaire by being moral. Each time you don't do something because it's wrong, you lost opportunity to make more money. You start with smaller things, then your standards slide more and more, until you are a billionaire, and you're so corrupt there isn't anything for you to do except make more money.

    Which makes me wonder, how many people went to Epstein's island not because they like diddling kids, but because they needed to network with Epstein to make more money. How many actively participated just to be in his in-group? Not because they enjoyed, they just were so corrupt that they would do anything for business.

    • savanaly  4 months ago

      Can't you also make money by making a good decision that benefits you and another party? I feel like I do this all the time, just on a relatively small scale.

      10 replies →

    • troosevelt  4 months ago

      Isn't this kind of Nietzsche's slave morality?

      I don't, for example, think Phil Knight is an immoral person who intentionally did wrong things, though his company certainly has. You don't just become a billionaire and become corrupt, you have a mindset that justifies what you're doing and you conveniently excuse yourself or are unaware because you're dealing with things outside of your scope because a single person can't handle that much authority without delegating to people who will inevitably do corrupt things. PK didn't start out wanting to be a billionaire, he just wanted to sell shoes and maybe become a millionaire.

      I suspect the vast majority of people who interacted with Epstein did it just to make connections and they made excuses, eg, Gates. I'm more likely to call someone immoral who interacted with him post-conviction than a billionaire, but generally labeling people moral/immoral instead of their actions misses why people do what they do. Very few people want to be considered immoral, but many people don't have an issue excusing immoral actions. Does that make sense?

      If you want to get people top stop doing things like this, you have to attack the actions, not the person, because when you say all billionaires are immoral, it gives them nowhere to retreat, it gives them more reason to dig in, because who are you but some seemingly envious person who's made just as many compromises, just at lower levels?

      7 replies →

    • jacquesm  4 months ago

      This the mindblowing thing about the whole Epstein saga: so many people knew about this. And yet, the mutually assured destruction of having been associated with Epstein was enough to effectively impose a code of silence on all of them.

      3 replies →

  • johndhi  4 months ago

    Where do you guys come up with these ideas?

    Simply having a lot of money makes someone evil? Why? They are obviously all quite competitive in business but the philanthropy they've done is pretty crazy. Gates for example is giving away hundreds of billions of dollars. What does it even matter if he's compassionate or not if he's doing that?

    • _DeadFred_  4 months ago

      My working class family members always gave 10% to charity (kind of the standard social contract in the US for giving) when that 10% made up a huge percentage of the money it takes for them to live a very basic life. Compare that to billionaires who have more money than they could ever spend and the percentage they have given:

      Zuckerberg 2.1%. Ballmer 3.7% Bezos 1.6% Sergey Brin 2.5% Michael Dell 2.6% Ken Griffin 5%

      https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeswealthteam/2025/02/03/ame...

    • triceratops  4 months ago

      > the philanthropy they've done is pretty crazy

      If philanthropy and normal living expenses (even assuming billionaire living standards) were the only things super-rich people spent money on that's fine. Unfortunately they use it to directly influence politics and society.

      Wealth, like celestial bodies, has a gravitational field.

    • Otterly99  4 months ago

      In general (not always, but it is mostly true) philantropy from billionaires and very profitable companies tend to be overshadowed by how much they profit from a system biased toward enriching them (see: The divide by Jason Hickel). A small metaphor to illustrate: are you a philantropist if you film yourself giving away 100$ to homeless people but make tens of thousands from posting the video?

    • toomuchtodo  4 months ago

      Because it's about power, control, and influence. The wealth is just the tool. Melinda French and MacKenzie Scott are true philanthropists, Gates and Bezos are just status chasers. "Look at me!" "Please clap." and so on. There are only ~3000 billionaires in the world, so I am not too concerned about broad support for them in a world with 8-10 billion people.

      "Fuck you" money is fine, we all strive for freedom during our lifetime as humans. "Fuck everyone" money is not a welcome target, imho. That's unelected power. Its easy to not be a billionaire of course: philanthropy. But do most billionaires? They do not. They hold tightly to their power.

      "Why does it even matter?" Because many of us do not want to be ruled or governed by these people, who by all indications, are not fond of other humans and see them as a resource to exploit and control. I assure you, I have no envy for these people and their wealth, I am allergic to what it would take to accumulate and maintain it (as a high empathy, high justice sensitivity human). I know what enough is. This is self preservation from a class of predator.

      > Where do you guys come up with these ideas?

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind

      https://medium.com/roaring-rivers/are-all-billionaires-socio... | https://archive.today/nX2Fh

      https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2025/bil... | https://archive.today/Gb2RF

      https://www.forbes.com/sites/ellamalmgren/2025/09/09/america... | https://archive.today/nLx78

      https://www.google.com/search?q=billionaires+sociopaths