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Comment by latexr

1 hour ago

Every <unit of currency> not in your pocket is in someone else’s. Greedy narcissists can’t stand that, they need to have it all. They don’t need the extra 500 billion to spend it, they need it so the number goes up. They need to be number one. At everything. Remember when Musk lied about being one of the top players for some difficult video game, then it turned out he was paying someone else to play for him? It’s just an ego thing, which I agree is baffling.

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latexr

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_carbyau_  1 minute ago

I mean, yeah. But let's play with this.

Imagine you are a billionaire. As an individual, you can buy almost anything, go almost anywhere, do almost anything.

What do you do? There's a lot of answers here but largely it is about what is meaningful such that you'd bother to keep getting out of bed in the morning.

My point, it isn't easy being - inundated with - green. Queue cliché, wealth doesn't buy happiness.

Take care of your family and friendship circle? Once you've drawn a line around who that is(not easy but not a lifetime task), done!

Crazy things like sexworkers-and-cocaine-parties-every-day will get boring after a while. Maybe a few days, maybe a week, maybe a month, maybe a year, depending on who you are and how you do. Buy a new [shiny thing] (supercar) every day? That too will get boring pretty quickly... But if you do the above things for long enough, the requirement to escalate to keep it interesting leads to death or poor, or someone reigning you in. By definition, you are now not the billionaire anymore.

What about.... work in a soup kitchen to help the poor in person. Ok, that seems nice. But as you are working serving soup you realise that in minutes you've earned more wealth than everyone else in the place has in their life and so maybe to help humanity you could be doing something more big picture...

And so you end up CEOing something else. For that something else to not send you broke and to keep going it probably will make it's own money. You know how to make money, that's how you got here... set it up with some of your money and apply heuristics again along with the levers of your wealth.

At this level of wealth, people can find something meaningful without making money. It's not impossible. They don't draw much media coverage though - boring doesn't sell.

But given there are thousands of billionaires, some of them will feel a bit alien, even to us top 10% wealth holders.