The effects of wealth on personality

[Donal]

There is no data and there is no need to look at polling. People in the wealth range do not answer polls. This would be a field of study of psychologists. You would need to track a person for many years.

tranq them and staple a radio tag to them

 

[Tero]

The people I am calling wealthy are the top quintile.

The Distribution of Household Income, 2019

At a Glance The Congressional Budget Office regularly analyzes the distribution of income in the United States and how it has changed over time. This report presents the distributions of household income, means-tested transfers, and federal taxes between 1979 and 2019 (the most recent year for...

www.cbo.gov

We do not have a hppiness graph for them.

 

[Myriad]

Perhaps some of those rich dudes should take a lesson from days of yore. Once upon a time, at least in literature and legend, a king would have an appointed fool or a jester, one of whose functions was to get away with saying what his minions would never dare. Of course one of the requirements for this is that the king not be the greater fool, so I guess that's out nowadays.

This is one of those cases where I have to give some credence to the possibility of "ancient wisdom" that modern society has lost hold of. The human mind evolved to solve problems and overcome obstacles (resistance to its will from the external world). In the absence of any such resistance, it can be expected to function about as well as a ship's main propulsion engine in dry dock or a battery whose terminals are shorted together.

Many of us suffer from smaller-scale versions of this "compliant environment" problem. We can almost always choose our favorite foods so some of us get fat and unhealthy, and we probably don't enjoy those favorites as much as we did when they were rare. Video on demand makes for endless choices and makes following a running television series effortless but few of the available shows stand out. We can talk to anyone instead of waiting for letters but it's surprisingly easy to unintentionally "fall out of touch" with friends when there's no pressure to answer a letter. There's been a lot of interesting discussion here about how preference-learning algorithms tend to create online echo chambers and generate distorted world views. We spend a lot of effort trying not only to achieve but also guarantee comfort. And for themes part we're right to do so. The thrill of the hunt probably isn't worth going hungry half the time when the game gets away. But don't we feel a little more alive when there's a snowstorm or a power outage or something that sets plans awry, not to a fatal degree but enough to require adaptation and problem-solving? Maybe not, for any who have become so entitled to comfort and convenience that they lose their ◊◊◊◊ instead. But for a lot of people. We saw a lot of both reactions during the Covid lockdowns.

But these are just hints from mostly-normal life. It takes some pretty extreme power, lots of technology and/or lots of highly capable minions, to create complete detachment. WIth the rare ancient instances in self-absorbed kings and emperors, a court jester or fool or an occasional Lord of Misrule could serve as a last-ditch sanity check, and yeah, some public figures in the present day badly suffer from their absence. Losing touch with reality means a lot more than just believing a lot of wrong things. It removes any distinction between good and bad ideas, between effective and ineffective actions, even between sanity and insanity. Cognition without meaningful feedback between the objective world will eventually lose coherence, like evolution without selection.

Consider the question of whether Musk actually enjoys playing the online games rigged up in his favor by others. The answer could be yes or no, but there's not much point speculating or debating which, because the most likely answer is that Musk wouldn't be able to understand the question. He apparently enjoys the attention it garners, but the game play itself is just something he does to get the attention, more like the compulsive self-grooming of a mouse in late stage Mousetopia than a challenge that one might find frustrating or rewarding depending in part on the results. Or like the gambler in the Twilight Zone episode who dies and goes to an afterlife casino where he can never lose. It takes that guy a while to figure out it ain't heaven. Musk, in an analogous but much more complex situation, might never figure it out.

 

[wasapi]

My family shaped my thoughts. My #yr older sister's first word was , "MINE!" And so it went. It was said that "money burned a hole in her pocket. When she married, our step-dad gave them about $5 hundred and 50 thousand to start their business. I was to get half of that. Nope. 29 thousand and she cut me off.
After years of not speaking, and never an offer to help out, we have become closer the past couple of years.ed in to our last time on earth, and we are family history now.
The strange thing is these are good people in that they donate to Vietnam vets and ant-war advocates.
I believe this is inheritent traits. Based on personality at birth.

 

[novaphile]

Hmm...

It's a very small sample, but I've known people from an 'old money' background, and people who have amassed a fortune on their own.

The latter were really nasty, cut-throat types.

I've been really surprised how nice, to me, old money people have been.

Going out of their way to do nice things for me, or to improve my day, for no reason whatsoever.

This is not how things are generally presented in movies etc. with 'old money' being depicted as spoiled, arrogant pigs.

(I'm not sure how much that is the standard though, exceptions spring to mind, i.e. 'Carter' in the TV series 'ER', or the character 'Richie Rich').

I'm guessing that people who have had to rise up, running businesses, in a really competitive environment, may have to be ruthless to succeed, and that tends to intrude into their personal lives.

 

[Thermal]

Hmm...

It's a very small sample, but I've known people from an 'old money' background, and people who have amassed a fortune on their own.

The latter were really nasty, cut-throat types.

I've been really surprised how nice, to me, old money people have been.

Going out of their way to do nice things for me, or to improve my day, for no reason whatsoever.

This is not how things are generally presented in movies etc. with 'old money' being depicted as spoiled, arrogant pigs.

(I'm not sure how much that is the standard though, exceptions spring to mind, i.e. 'Carter' in the TV series 'ER', or the character 'Richie Rich').

I'm guessing that people who have had to rise up, running businesses, in a really competitive environment, may have to be ruthless to succeed, and that tends to intrude into their personal lives.

Opposite experience, here. Old money tends to let you know they are better than you (with tasteful subtlety) at every opportunity. Self made relate to working people, although some definitely do outright call anyone who makes less than them a 'loser'.

 

[TragicMonkey]

Opposite experience, here. Old money tends to let you know they are better than you (with tasteful subtlety) at every opportunity. Self made relate to working people, although some definitely do outright call anyone who makes less than them a 'loser'.

I've had both experiences with both: nice old money people, terrible old money people, nice new money people, terrible new money people. Oh, and both nice and terrible people with no money at all. The only conclusions I'm willing to draw are that too much money can be a hazard to one's character unless one can overcome it, and also I myself am utterly immune to the corruptive influence of vast wealth. I am absolutely willing to test the latter empirically. Please send money in enormous quantities and I'll keep you all updated on how it goes.

 

[Myriad]

I figured out a more succinct way to explain the significance of the Path of Exile 2 episode. It shows how Musk is living in his own personal wish-fulfilling Krell Machine.

Trump is his Monster from the Id.

 

[The Great Zaganza]

I think it is impossible to become this rich if there was a way for your personality type to be happy - at all. Billionaires seem to live on a hedonic treadmill on maximum speed, constantly puzzled how other people can find satisfaction in life.
so what they are left with is copying the behavior of seemingly happy and successful people, and making the lives of others hell, just to think they are ahead in comparison.

What Musk and co. need is a subcutaneous dopamine pump.

 

[Vixen]

It's a little like food. If you don't have enough, say in famine conditions, when it becomes available you stock it up and hoard it like crazy, even becoming grossly obese, like many people who survived the Holocaust, for example, but in reality, once you've reached satiation level to provide fuel for your body's every day needs all that surplus food becomes...well...superfluous. Likewise, money, when you have all the money you need for a fabulous house, jets, cars, holidays, servants, it is just sitting there, tied up in assets, like a load of useless tins of food in storage, 'just in case' of a nuclear war. A person can have all of the money in the world yet not find anyone to share it with in a meaningful way; forever surrounded by panhandlers and obsequious sycophants desperate for a piece of your wealth, and even plotting against you to deprive you of some of it, even one's own spouse. Is he or she a gold-digger only there because your money is there?

Enter Maslow and his hierarchy of needs. wherein the highest echelon of one's life is not the accumulation of wealth but self-fulfillment, or self-actualization. In other words, living your best life, reaching your highest goals; and this is psychological, not anything so physical as food or money.

 

[Suddenly]

There is also that a hording disorder is a hording disorder. Whether someone is hording wealth or empty soda cans they are going to be a bummer to be around, just that the one hording soda cans has less impact on public life or ability to claim their damaging obsession makes them the hero of the story.

 

[Tero]

Musk, whose wealth has lately hovered well over $400 billion, has enough money that he could, should he desire, end world hunger and still have billions to spare. If Jeff Bezos had a mind to, he could eliminate homelessness in America and still be one of the richest people in the world. Yet of the half-dozen tech billionaires Trump displayed like trophies at his inauguration, most seem less concerned with the fate of the common American than they do with a sci-fi fantasy future that involves transhumanism, superhuman AI, and the survival of humanity as an interplanetary species (starting, perhaps, with launching Katy Perry into space). Which, truth be told, seems like more than just a moral failing. It seems … unhinged? Deranged? ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊?
At the very least, current circumstances might lead one to wonder: How the heck does someone get this way? And what does it mean for the rest of us?

How the Brains of the Wealthy Are Hardwired Differently​

In 2011, a Berkeley grad student named Paul Piff conducted an experiment that has since become famous in the world of social psychology. Over the course of several weekends, Piff and his research team crouched behind bushes at the intersection of Interstate 80 and Lincoln Highway in Berkeley, California. When a vehicle passed, they would catalog it — “five” for a brand-new BMW, for instance; “one” for a beat-up Honda. Then the researchers would observe the behavior of the car’s driver.

What Piff and his team found at that intersection is profound — and profoundly satisfying — in that it offers hard data to back up what intuition and millennia of wisdom (from Aristotle to Edith Wharton) would have us believe: Wealth tends to make people act like ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊, and the more wealth they have, the more of a jerk they tend to be.

When it came to determining the mechanism behind this antisocial shift, researchers hypothesize that socialization itself is key. Wealthy people tend to have more space, literally and figuratively. They spread themselves out into bigger homes, they send their children to less crowded schools, they interact less with the hoi polloi and even, research has shown, with members of their own social class. And they have less need to: Wealthy people are insulated from relying on the types of pro-social engagement that the rest of us need to survive and thrive in an interconnected world. For them, it does not take a village; it takes a staff.
....a psychotherapist who caters to ultra-high-net-worth individuals, tells me he thinks of great wealth as subtractive: It doesn’t really add to one’s happiness, but it does take away struggles that can make someone unhappy. Yet it’s subtractive in a different sense, too — contributing to isolation, paranoia, grandiosity, and risk-taking behavior, as well as a pronounced lack of empathy. “As your wealth increases, your empathy decreases. Your ability to relate to other people who are not like you decreases.… It can be very toxic.”

For someone with mega billions, this type of self-delusion could become mega pronounced. “These guys think they’re Superman, that they’re genetically endowed with superior characteristics, and that their genes should populate the Earth,” says Dartmouth sociology professor Brooke Harrington, who studies the ultra-rich and has helped popularize the term “broligarchy.”

What You've Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us

Why Elon Musk and other tech billionaires have a different perspective

www.rollingstone.com

 

[Gulliver Foyle]

What You've Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us

Why Elon Musk and other tech billionaires have a different perspective

www.rollingstone.com

To be expected, they grew up in wealth and privilege and every day were told how they were better than everyody and should expect to be treated preferentially.

There should be an absolute limit on the amount of money passed on from generation to generation, with everything else reverting back to the state.

 

[Darat]

To be expected, they grew up in wealth and privilege and every day were told how they were better than everyody and should expect to be treated preferentially.

There should be an absolute limit on the amount of money passed on from generation to generation, with everything else reverting back to the state.

Dead people can't own anything and being a pragmatic capitalist I of course think inheritance should be limited to non-valued items, so such things as family photos and so on. If you want people including your own kin to have any of your capital that should be dispersed before you die and of course anyone receiving such "forward inheritance" should have to pay income tax and capital gains tax on such capital transfers.

 

[The Great Zaganza]

If you believe in Meritocracy, a 100% inheritance tax for offspring is the only logical thing to do

 

[Trausti]

What Piff and his team found at that intersection is profound — and profoundly satisfying — in that it offers hard data to back up what intuition and millennia of wisdom (from Aristotle to Edith Wharton) would have us believe: Wealth tends to make people act like ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊, and the more wealth they have, the more of a jerk they tend to be.

This is incredibly dumb. Wealth probably has no bearing on whether a person is a jerk. Plenty of jerks at all income levels. This looks just like another instance where folks try to mask their envy as morality.

 

[3point14]

This is incredibly dumb. Wealth probably has no bearing on whether a person is a jerk. Plenty of jerks at all income levels. This looks just like another instance where folks try to mask their envy as morality.

Why then, do the vast majority of the unnecessarily wealthy folks seem to be utter turnips at best and evil at worse?

Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Radcliffe, Branson, Ellison, Epstein, Trump (sr).

Of those in the 'very, very rich club', very few seem to be reasonable, compassionate human beings. My belief is that you can't get that rtich without being a ◊◊◊◊.

 

[Trausti]

Why then, do the vast majority of the unnecessarily wealthy folks seem to be utter turnips at best and evil at worse?

Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Radcliffe, Branson, Ellison, Epstein, Trump (sr).

Of those in the 'very, very rich club', very few seem to be reasonable, compassionate human beings. My belief is that you can't get that rtich without being a ◊◊◊◊.

"Unnecessarily wealthy." Good grief. More malicious envy. Most wealthy folks are probably good. You just think some wealthy people are evil because you disagree with them politically. That's a pretty lousy yardstick to judge someone.

 

[Darat]

"Unnecessarily wealthy." Good grief. More malicious envy. Most wealthy folks are probably good. You just think some wealthy people are evil because y
ou disagree with them politically. That's a pretty lousy yardstick to judge someone.

You are assuming these folks have different politics to 3.14?

 

[Trausti]

You are assuming these folks have different politics to 3.14?

Ah, yes. π's posting shows an apparently dislike for Trump.

 

[Darat]

Ah, yes. π's posting shows an apparently dislike for Trump.

And Trump defines billionaires? ?

 

[Thermal]

Gates, Annenberg, and Buffet seem pretty chill. Mark Cuban is pretty ok too.

 

[3point14]

"Unnecessarily wealthy." Good grief. More malicious envy. Most wealthy folks are probably good. You just think some wealthy people are evil because you disagree with them politically. That's a pretty lousy yardstick to judge someone.

1 - Nice mind reading. You should take that on tour.

2 - Are you trying to tell me that the list of very rich people I provided is full of moral, upstanding, nice people?


See, this is the problem with trying to discuss wealth inequality. Someone will inevitably come along with the tired ad hominem "You're just jealous" and try to shut down any debate with that, like it's some sort of trump card and not a defined logical falacy. Please try to address the argument, not the arguer, eh?

 

[Gulliver Foyle]

Dead people can't own anything and being a pragmatic capitalist I of course think inheritance should be limited to non-valued items, so such things as family photos and so on. If you want people including your own kin to have any of your capital that should be dispersed before you die and of course anyone receiving such "forward inheritance" should have to pay income tax and capital gains tax on such capital transfers.

I would allow a certain monetary amount of assets to be inherited, along with the family home. I would put this anount at rougly the lifetime for parent to child gift/inheritance tax exemption allowance in Ireland which is c. €400,000 (per child).

 

[Axxman300]

Growing up in Carmel, CA, on the Monterey Peninsula I've been surrounded by super-wealthy folks for 60 years. Here are a few observations:

If a good person earns a billion dollars they become a good person who's a billionaire. If an a-hole earns a billion they become a bigger a-hole. What is absent from this thread is context, specifically the changes in society over the past 40 years. When I was a kid the people running things in Washington, London, Paris, etc, had all lived through the great depression, and WWII, and it's aftermath. They were practical and pragmatic about wealth, often choosing to spread it around instead of sucking it all up. Flashing your wealth was frowned upon, granted mostly out of self preservation as those without wealth might be inclined to find a way to strip you of it. But mostly because they learned, and were taught that most people have barely enough to get by, and running around in expensive clothes, jewelry, and cars was seen as rubbing the poor's faces in it.

The Firestones, or Firestone Tires, went to my church. They were nice people. Mrs. Firestone was a fixture in the kitchen at every pot-luck dinner. She drove a VW Beetle. If someone in the church fell on hard times, the Firestones were among the many rich folks in the congregation to quietly get out their checkbook.

Don't get me wrong, we were hardly equals with the rich, but they kept it low key. Sure, they'd fly up to Lake Tahoe, or Colorado, or Utah for a spur-of-the-moment ski trip, or hit the beach in Cabo San Lucas, or Waikiki. But they had the good taste not to drone on about it in after-church socializing. There was a line they never wanted to cross. And most of their kids had stipulations about graduating from college before they could access their trust funds. Our SPCA is well funded, as are a number of local charities.

The change came in the early 2000s as money became a means to an end. This was against the background of the post-Depression era folks retiring and being replaced by Gen-X, who had graduated more MBAs in the 1980s than in all the years prior. Our generation regarded the Greatest Generation as fools for not grabbing everything that wasn't nailed down. As in The Tragedy of the Commons, by 2010 there was nothing off limits, and everything has an inflated price-tag to help cook the books. And our children have doubled down on this behavior, selling their soul for bling. Money = Status. Ethics, empathy, and morals are for losers. We had Gordon Gekko, but today Elon Musk and his ilk have captured the imaginations of a branch of society. A century ago the wealthy east coast elite was appalled by the sweat-shops, and dismal living conditions of the big city slums. They set out to change things for the better, putting their money into every level of society, and putting progressive politicians in the city, state, and federal houses. They elected Teddy Roosevelt. We elected Donald Trump.

Society created the current batch of billionaires directly. If you shopped on Amazon you directly MADE Jeff Bezos. Seriously, you gave him your money. Who's fault is that? While I'm not a fan boy, the idea that I shopped on Amazon for over a decade, and then turn around to condemn Bezos is kind of silly. The game is the game. Get that start-up money from a venture capital group, develop your thing, market the crap out of it, make money, pay-off your investors, go public, and sell to a bigger company for way more than its worth. Success is 40/60.

Thing is, how much of that wealth is liquid?

Seriously, how much does Musk or Bezos et al have if they get a margin call right now? How much of their holding value is inflated directly, or indirectly? State and local governments shy away from investigating these things because their tax-bases are built around those numbers. In California, coastal real estate is over-valued by over 60% in key markets because both private owners, and banks inflate the values with the local city/county's help. And this creates these numbers that get the OP worked up. So many instead of hating billionaires maybe we should be asking better questions about the cost of living, and how certain values are justified.

 

[arthwollipot]

This is incredibly dumb. Wealth probably has no bearing on whether a person is a jerk. Plenty of jerks at all income levels. This looks just like another instance where folks try to mask their envy as morality.

Wealthy jerks can get away with it.

 

[ahhell]

Wealthy jerks can get away with it.

That and they tend to be more famous. Nobody knows who I am, so nobody knows how big a jerk I am.

That being said, this sort of research always seems a bit full of confirmation bias to me.

 

[bruto]

Of course anyone can be a jerk, and many are (of course not I, no no). But the extent of your wealth does have a bearing on how much jerkiness you release into the world. And one might, if so inclined, consider the possibility that this in its turn has a bearing on one's obligation not to be such a jerk. In some moral universes, scale has a place. Kant might argue the point, but for some of us a little white lie to save a friend from embarrassment is not the same thing as a great big howler to deceive a nation. Of course this brings up the collateral issue of intelligence, and to expect the ultra-rich to exercise this, on top of all the other burdens accompanying fame, wealth and power, is asking an awful lot.

 

[Roger Ramjets]

Seriously, how much does Musk or Bezos et al have if they get a margin call right now?

I don't know about Bezos, but Musk hasn't received any income from Tesla in 7 years, so his 'worth' is almost entirely dependent on the trading value of his shares. If he sells too many shares he loses control of his business, which is much more important to him than the money. After his little adventure with Trump, increased competition in the EV market, and the general downturn in the econiomy, Tesla needs careful management to avoid suffering the fate many other auto makers are facing right now. But Musk is betting the farm on autonomous vehicles and robots, risky ventures that are going to need all the capital they can get.

Musk may be rich on paper, but in practice he's living on a knife-edge just like he was in 2008. A lot of people are hoping he will go bankrupt, for various reasons (he's an a'hole, he's rich and they aren't, they confidently predicted he would fail and he didn't, he holds some conservative views and supported Trump etc. - but mostly because the news media are telling them he's an a'hole) and there's a good chance they will get their wish. Of course this doen't make them a'holes - the rich are fair game!

Which brings me to the point so many are missing about being 'rich' - stress. In business the more you have, the more you risk losing. A company can be worth billions one day, and a millstone around your neck the next. The amount of money needed to keep a business like Telsa or SpaceX going is enormous. When it's your own business and you care about where it's going, that's an enormous stresser. To be effective you have to get people motivated, which alone will make you an a'hole in some people's eyes. But stress can easily turn you into an actual a'hole.

Someone suggested that 'new' money makes a'holes, but 'old' money doesn't. In my experiance that's true - and stress is a big part of it. people with 'old' money aren't stressed because they have no financial worries. They can afford to be kind and generous. But people who are making their own fortune often have a lot of stress. In a growing business you may have to work way outside your 'comfort zone'. To be successful big risks must be taken. Make one mistake and you could lose it all. Even unpredictable events that you have no contol over can sink the businness. You become more assertive and less tolerant of mediocrity. That alone will make you an a'hole in many people's books, but that's not all. It changes your personality.

When the pressure comes on, many people react badly. They become more self-centered, demanding, manipulative and even dishonest. If they have a borderline autistic personality (like Musk does) it may seem worse. Musk became a visible a'hole in 2020, when Covid hit just as Tesla was trying to ramp up production of the Model Y. This car was critical, if it wasn't a success then investors would lose confidence and Tesla would go down with massive debt. So Musk bucked Covid lockdowns, saying that the virus would probably disappear in a few weeks. Musk isn't stupid. He knew this was a lie, but he needed to keep the factory running. He wasn't the only one either. Around the world millions of people were acting similarly - because stress turns people into a'holes.

 

[TragicMonkey]

I don't know about Bezos, but Musk hasn't received any income from Tesla in 7 years, so his 'worth' is almost entirely dependent on the trading value of his shares. If he sells too many shares he loses control of his business, which is much more important to him than the money. After his little adventure with Trump, increased competition in the EV market, and the general downturn in the econiomy, Tesla needs careful management to avoid suffering the fate many other auto makers are facing right now. But Musk is betting the farm on autonomous vehicles and robots, risky ventures that are going to need all the capital they can get.

Musk may be rich on paper, but in practice he's living on a knife-edge just like he was in 2008. A lot of people are hoping he will go bankrupt, for various reasons (he's an a'hole, he's rich and they aren't, they confidently predicted he would fail and he didn't, he holds some conservative views and supported Trump etc. - but mostly because the news media are telling them he's an a'hole) and there's a good chance they will get their wish. Of course this doen't make them a'holes - the rich are fair game!

Which brings me to the point so many are missing about being 'rich' - stress. In business the more you have, the more you risk losing. A company can be worth billions one day, and a millstone around your neck the next. The amount of money needed to keep a business like Telsa or SpaceX going is enormous. When it's your own business and you care about where it's going, that's an enormous stresser. To be effective you have to get people motivated, which alone will make you an a'hole in some people's eyes. But stress can easily turn you into an actual a'hole.

Someone suggested that 'new' money makes a'holes, but 'old' money doesn't. In my experiance that's true - and stress is a big part of it. people with 'old' money aren't stressed because they have no financial worries. They can afford to be kind and generous. But people who are making their own fortune often have a lot of stress. In a growing business you may have to work way outside your 'comfort zone'. To be successful big risks must be taken. Make one mistake and you could lose it all. Even unpredictable events that you have no contol over can sink the businness. You become more assertive and less tolerant of mediocrity. That alone will make you an a'hole in many people's books, but that's not all. It changes your personality.

When the pressure comes on, many people react badly. They become more self-centered, demanding, manipulative and even dishonest. If they have a borderline autistic personality (like Musk does) it may seem worse. Musk became a visible a'hole in 2020, when Covid hit just as Tesla was trying to ramp up production of the Model Y. This car was critical, if it wasn't a success then investors would lose confidence and Tesla would go down with massive debt. So Musk bucked Covid lockdowns, saying that the virus would probably disappear in a few weeks. Musk isn't stupid. He knew this was a lie, but he needed to keep the factory running. He wasn't the only one either. Around the world millions of people were acting similarly - because stress turns people into a'holes.

Cry me a river. All Musk had to do was take a measely $100 million, stick it in an index fund, and he'd still be able to live in splendor for the rest of his life even if he were a Time Lord, no matter what happened to the companies he's wrecking. People who can't restrain their greed enough to take basic sensible precautions with money don't deserve to have money at all. "Keep thy wealth and it will keep thee" is an ancient maxim, and it would do Musk a world of good if that were carved backwards onto his forehead so he could read it in mirrors.

 

[The Great Zaganza]

The supposed poverty in real life assets of the billionaires is a myth.
The super rich have long ago figured out to borrow huge sums against their portfolio for next to nothing, and bought stuff that, in theory, a Bank could repossess in a default but defacto can't for all kinds of legal shenanigans.
They are insanely, immorally, obscenely rich, and would be so still after loosing 99.9% of their assets.

 

[Thermal]

Cry me a river. All Musk had to do was take a measely $100 million, stick it in an index fund, and he'd still be able to live in splendor for the rest of his life even if he were a Time Lord, no matter what happened to the companies he's wrecking. People who can't restrain their greed enough to take basic sensible precautions with money don't deserve to have money at all. "Keep thy wealth and it will keep thee" is an ancient maxim, and it would do Musk a world of good if that were carved backwards onto his forehead so he could read it in mirrors.

Meh... sort of. He didn't have a 'measly' $100 million till he was already in full tilt money making mode. And some of the stuff he is doing is beneficial to the country and planet- building American made electric vehicles, SpaceX, all that. It's not like his money pounding wasn't creating jobs, products, and tech that we all reap some benefit from.

He has figured out how to take a little money and turn it into a lot, then take a lot and turn it into an industry. I don't entirely fault him for that. My SIL bought a Tesla (long before all the seig heiling) and it was a reasonably priced, environmentally conscious domestic product. Musk having the cash and business savvy got Tesla chargers all over the place.

On net, he might be demonized more than he should be. His personality should be weighed heavily against how much Tesla workers' standard of living and whether NASA feels like they are advancing space tech from his efforts.

 

[dann]

Does anybody here even know a billionaire? I worked in commercial real estate finance and knew some very wealthy individuals, but I don't think I ever met anybody with a ten-figure financial (Nope, never met Trump). I have met a lot of high net-worth people and they are pretty much like everybody else; mostly okay but some are real dicks. IOW a person's net worth tells you little about the person.

That explains a lot.