This isn’t even satire…
The man kinda looks like those Rage Comics male faces.
People online who make 30k a year.
Gabe Newell fans
Swiftie fans
That’s part if it, but the wealthy are also overly concerned with their standing in their niche community, and whether investors will give them money. They’re fully invested in their endless growth model, and have all done horrible things… So their standing is no longer effected by what horrible things they’ve done by our standards. It’s just a question of whether they’re “growing” the money.
Infinite growth personified = a cancer on humanity.
It’s what I don’t understand about the ultra rich … a billionaire has enough money to live comfortably for one lifetime, and they would only use a fraction of their wealth to do it … yet they want to acquire even more wealth, as much as possible and it any wealth they do achieve is only accelerated because it means they can gain more faster.
It’s like finding a mountain of sugar, you eat it and it makes you feel great and you can eat as much of it as you like, you’ll never be able to eat all of it, even if you tried … but no matter what anyone says, you still want more sugar.
When you describe this scenario with money, its a normal conversation … if you said anyone wants a billion of something … like a billion collector cards, a billion cats, a billion motorcycles, a billion sandwiches, you’re considered nuts … but if you want a billion dollars, that’s perfectly normal
What’s even stupider is any billionaire doesn’t even have a billion in liquid capital, the vast majority of their networth is in shares from the companies they own and it’s in their interest to not dump a bunch of stock.
They’re not interested in money, that’s just a convenient tool, they’re interested in power, and money buys both hard and soft power. Hard power might involve sponsoring a ballroom, or paying for an inaugeration to get the ear of a politician, soft power is more about being known for having inexhaustable wealth and having “useful” people seek you out to do deals with.
Sorry, no. Sponsoring a ballroom or paying for an inauguration are examples of soft power. Hard power is when you use coercive means to achieve your goals, in a geopolitical sense (where the terms come from) hard power is military action or the threat thereof, or economic sanctions. Funding things, building things and paying for things are examples of soft power. A billionaires version of hard power would be blackmail or a hostile takeover.
Or just war. Billionaires control the government, they control the military.
They have influence over it, they don’t control it. Elon can’t threaten Sam Altman with a hellfire missile strike over their ongoing lawsuit.
As much as he may want, and thankfully.
Geopolitically, yes, you’re correct, but as you say in another comment, they influence the military rather than control it. That influence comes from economic control of the nominal controller. From an economic angle, that level of control is hard power, as removing it, or worse, putting behind an opponent, can be as damaging, and coersive, to the target as military means would be. Perhaps it’s a different scale to sending in the army, but economic warfare, even a billionaire against a politician, has damaging and coersive effects.
No, sorry.
From an economic angle, that level of control is hard power, as removing it, or worse, putting behind an opponent, can be as damaging, and coersive
That’s just objectively untrue. It only becomes hard power when they lean on that influence coercively. The implication that it could be taken away is the literal definition of soft power. A direct threat to take it away as leverage would be hard power.
When China builds a port in Djibouti, the implication is that if Djibouti doesn’t conform largely to China’s geopolitical goals in the region the port could be shut down or funding pulled. That’s soft power, even though it carries conditions, because of the ambiguous and uncertain nature of the consequences. China in this example wouldn’t be exercising “hard power” unless they actively threatened to pull all Chinese shipping to and from the port or change the parameters of the loan structure to get the country to fall in line.
It only becomes hard power when they lean on that influence coercively.
Yes, that is exactly what I am talking about. It was late when I posted before, and maybe I didn’t explain what I was saying clearly, but money, and the control of money, is absolutely used coersively. Whether it be “do as I say, or I stop funding you and fund your opponent instead”, or supporting vanity projects (where the funding is likely syphoned off to the politician, or used by them to buy favour with others) on the condition that the politician behaves in a specific way, the control is coersive and has clear detrimental consequences for the politician should they not do as they are told.
I very much doubt that there is any ambiguity in the threats, much like you’re illustration with China actively threatening to remove their shipping, as you would not want any risk of misunderstanding when those levels of money and power are on the table.
Also, a lot of them like to rape children, and that shit can get pretty expensive.
get the ear off of a politician
Ooh so close.
Two things that come to my mind:
- In our current society money equals power over others. If you’re not the richest your not the most powerful and if you are you need to fight to proetct your power from other who are getting richer. It’s not about money but about determining the fate of others and rulership over society.
- You don’t become obsecely rich by being a good person. Once you reach a billion dollars you most paobably already aquired a mindeset that leaves you no other choice than to look for another billion. Much like a hamster in a wheel which spins to fast to let it go off.
In the eyes of average humans (which I believe to be decent people, at least 80 % of the total population) this is insane… however the 10 - 20 % egoists are the ones we chose as our rulers.
That’s the other half of the problem I always see … it’s not just the insanity of a person or individual who is constantly chasing after even more astronomical amounts of money and wealth and power … it’s the 80% of everyone else including me and you who all just stand by and allow it all to happen and contribute to it and maintain it all
It’s like the whole Trump thing in America … sure Trump is an idiot … but there is an entire nation that either supports its, ignores it, maintains it or works for it, and all of them just accept it as normal
America was founded on greed and ignorance
Nothing changed.
We can’t discount the classic dick-measuring contest that’s bound to happen when rich people compare their net worths to each other. I’d be shocked if some people weren’t at least partly motivated by having a bigger “number” than their friends do.
I had a boss who had a net worth around $10 million (I knew because he had hired me to trade S&P500 futures for him and he gave me access to his brokerage accounts as part of this). He owned a house, nice cars, and a temp agency that gave him an income around $25,000 per month, in a southern city where the cost of living was very low. By any normal standard he was living in the lap of luxury, but his best friends were all west coast vulture capitalists who were worth hundreds of millions and my boss’ jealousy of them just absolutely ate him up inside (this was the whole reason he was getting into futures trading in the first place).
We didn’t choose them, they or their ancestors were just more ruthless and bloodthirsty than the rest of us, and they coerced us at the end of a spear to go along with it or die.
When you’ve never needed to think about money as a resource required to live, it stops being one. Among those who have never had to worry about money for survival, it’s no longer a resource, it’s a status symbol. It doesn’t matter how much money you need, it only matters how much money you can collect, and that number can always be bigger.
They don’t care that the trophies they’re collecting just to feel superior would drastically improve someone else’s wellbeing, because they don’t care about the wellbeing of anyone else, period. In wealthy society, the only thing that matters is how you stand compared to other wealthy people, and being empathetic only serves to lower your standing.
To be fair I don’t think people would comprehend how insane a billion of anything bigger than microscopic would be. For example 1 billion grams of sugar is enough to fill at least 3 3-bedroom apartments. 1 billion cats is probably more than there are household cats on the planet.
People are likely to underestimate how much a billion is so a billion of something that your life depends on probably doesn’t seem like much, because you need it anyway and you can spend it. Except you can’t. I imagine if the average person was given 1 billion dollars and they’d buy everything they could ever imagine most people would still have 950 million left. To spend 1 billion in 30 years you’d need to spend almost 100k daily. You’d have to spend more in a day than most people make in a year. It’s been normalized because it’s incomprehensible to begin with.
A million seconds is ~11.5 days. A billion seconds is ~31.5 years. The scaling is absurd.
in my mind these people are working with a mutually assured destruction model. they are all constantly fucking with each other financially, it’s impossible not to with how much they own to not buy things from each other occasionally at the expense of another.
so I’m a billionaire imagining me practivslly giving my assets away in an auction. there are now a team of billionaires who can do literally whatever they want to me and there is literally no where on earth that can protect me. for a penance they could have me executed without consequences and I’ve given them each motive.
I don’t remember who said it, but I’m pretty sure the wealthy admitted themselves that they are in competition with each other on how much their net worth is. It is purely just trying to one-up each other. I’m not saying I’m wealthy but I kinda get why they do it.
I really don’t care if people want to compete with each other … but when your activities start affecting the lives of millions of people, causing them death, early death, unstable lives, hunger, pain, misery, then it becomes a problem on insanity causing untold misery … you can have your competition with others as long as it doesn’t involve anyone else
Humans are still monkeys, specifically a member of the great apes family. Studies of our closest relatives the Chimpanzee have been quite… illuminating.
Like the one where given a cucumber they enjoy it, whereas when given a cucumber and then they see a chimp in a nearby cage be given a grape (relatively higher value gift, I guess sweeter), they throw the cucumber away in disgust.
Wealth != Wisdom.
“It’s like finding a mountain of sugar, you eat it and it makes you feel great and you can eat as much of it as you like, you’ll never be able to eat all of it, even if you tried … but no matter what anyone says, you still want more sugar.”
Holy shit, this is a damn good metaphor! Hats off to you, mate!
It’s a simile :)
It’s like finding a mountain of sugar, you eat it and it makes you feel great and you can eat as much of it as you like, you’ll never be able to eat all of it, even if you tried … but no matter what anyone says, you still want more sugar.
This is the weirdest analogy ever. Why sugar specifically? Why not just, you know… food?
Taxing: Wicked, Theiving, Irrational, Unconstitutional
Rent-Seeking: Beautific, Generous, Sane, Magna Carta-esque
Related but not really : I dont know what Musk is playing at getting involved in politics. Youve got enough money to take part in any activity you like, visit disneyland while on acid, ride the longest zipline, underwater hotels, world’s largest hamster-habitat, literally anything you like for as long as you live and still leave your children with more money than a lot of countries have, and he chooses to do work?
He’s a broken person on the inside. He’s like homelander in the boys. All this power, but he’s still a sad little boy no one likes.
Unlike Homelander, Musk is not impervious to conventional hazards.
You do realize how much Doge was able to dismantle specifically the parts of government that tax the rich, right?
But aside from that, people tend to conflate appearance for substance. He feels controlling the government makes him powerful because he appears powerful.
I dont realise how much at all, I imagine it worked out amazingly well for him, but still. It’s just more work.
And opens him up to future potential liabilities (maybe, if the world every course corrects) as well as an uptick in bullet risk.
The pearl necklace…
wish she had clutched it.
For fun: Count the fingers on each hand in each panel.
