The more I read and learn about the making of Billionaires-- the more I am disgusted and saddened by them.
We tend to refer to millionaires and billionaires in one sentence, as if they are the same. The fact is that a millionaire is closer economically to a minimum wage worker than to a billionaire. If I make $100,000 a year, just ten times that makes me a millionaire. If I make a million dollars a year, a thousand times that makes me a billionaire.
This is what a billion is: If you earned $1 every second, you would reach $1 million after 11 and a half days. To get to a billion dollars, you would need 31.7 years. If you earned $100,000 a year, you would earn a million after 10 years of work. At the same rate, you would need to work 10,000 years to earn a billion. A million is a 1,000 thousands. A billion is a 1,000 millions. If you spent $1,000 a day, it would take you just 2.7 years to spend a million dollars. If you spent the same amount a day, it would take you 2,740 years to spend $1 billion.
That's what a billion is. That's what billionaires have, more money than they could every ethically make, more money than they quite literally could ever spend in a thousand lifetimes.
Across the world, 8 billionaires own the same wealth as 3.6 billion people, half the entire population of the planet. 8 people. In America, the top 1% of Americans hold more wealth than the bottom 90%.
Trump has an unprecedented 13 billionaires in his administration. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg own more wealth than the bottom half of America. More wealth than over 165 million of us.
In America, we are taught some sort of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" nonsense. Men are self-made. In America, we have a deeply curated and intentional story that billionaires are the natural result of extraordinary effort, inventive brilliance and brave risk-taking. This is B.S.
Elon Musk gets government subsidies, grants, taxbreaks and contracts to the tune of $9.2 billion. Jeff Bezos has received more than $15 billion in government subsidies and contracts.
Take the Waltons, who own Walmart. Walmart pays its more than 1.6 million American workers below a living wage, which means that roughly one in four Walmart employees relies on public assistance, costing the American taxpayers $6 billion a year. While we pick up the tab, the billionaire Walton family collects the profits generated by their poverty wages, meaning that our tax money is directly subsidizing the Walton family fortune, which is now at $430 billion. Taxpayers are effectively writing a check to the Walton family for roughly $3 billion every year, since they own half of Walmart, by subsidizing low wages through public benefits.
Billionaires are not bootstrappers who pulled themselves up. They are, in fact, an invention of specific policies that created them, specific laws that didn't exist until the 1980's that allow hoarded wealth to be limitless, while denying workers the fruits of their productivity.
A line from Ragimes goes: "How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few? The answer is being persuaded to identify with them. " We have been persuaded that billionaires are not unethical hoarders, but aspirational heroes, and that we too could be that wealthy if only we were clever enough and hardworking enough with a little luck.
The problem with idolizing billionaires is that we aspire to wealth we will never come close to touching.
In order to reach the low end of Bezos' wealth, the average worker would need to work for 4 million years. Elon Musk makes more in a single day than a teacher will earn in thousands of lifetimes.
The fortunes of the five richest men in the world more than doubled between 2020 and 2024, while billions of workers who make their success possible declined in wages and living standards. Here's what we need to understand. It's not that there isn't enough money and productivity. Productivity per worker has nearly doubled since the 1970's. It's just that anyone who isn't at the top is denied access to the fruits of their own productivity. In the 1970's, median wages tracked productivity fairly closely, but from 1980 to today, median wages have barely budged, even though productivity rose by as much as 80%. this means that workers create far more value than they are compensated for. That compensation is just captured by owners and executives. In 1970, a US worker produced $28 an hour of output and earned 419 an hour. IN 2024, a worker produces $50 an hour and earns $25. Since 2019, CEO compensation has increased 50% while worker pay rose by less than 1%.
Right now, over 60% of our fellow Americans live paycheck to paycheck, yet we have billionaires living amongst us.
It's gross. It's wrong. Billionaires are an abomination...and we must change our economic rules and values in our country to benefit more people. When is enough money enough? Why do greed and power get away with so much and break so many laws? I'm sick of it.
(I read much of this article from the We Can Do Hard Things podcast..and wanted to have it on my blog, since this is exactly how I feel and what I can't believe we have fallen for in this country.)
