Thread by @polotek

If you had a business that made 10 million dollars every single year, and every single cent went to you without taxes or overhead. It would still take you 100 years to make a billion dollars. You would pass away before you "earned" it.

https://twitter.com/Mantia/status/1441076586158063620

I keep talking about how we are connected. One person can only make a billion dollars if millions of other people are not. You can only make that kind of money by siphoning it off the backs of 100s of millions of people. The number of possible billionaires is extremely finite.

You can't actually spend 10 million dollars a year on yourself. I promise you. You can ball out for a couple of years. Make a few really big extravagant purchases. Then you pretty much have everything you need.

After a certain amount of money, you have to *invent* things to spend it on. That's what my wife and I were talking about. I said "what could you possibly still want that you don't have?"

She said "Mars".

Let me come back to my critique here. Because people need me to keep spelling it out. I'm not saying Riri is a "bad person" for being a billionaire. I'm saying that Riri the human cannot actually fathom how much money that is.

https://twitter.com/polotek/status/1441061500899053572?s=20

She sits at the center of a machine that prints money regardless of what she does. All she has to do is stay popular and it will keep working. That doesn't mean she doesn't do work herself. I'm sure she does. It's just not what makes the machine produce that much cash.

And to the point about why people congratulate her. It's not because they're inspired. They might be inspired, but that's not the feeling. The feeling people have is this.

"You can stop now. You have enough money where you get to rest and breathe. That sounds amazing."

That's fantastic. We should all aspire to reach that place where we can stop scrambling. But I'm saying two things that are critical here.
1. You can do that with *far* less than a billion dollars.
2. Billionaires make it so *far* fewer people will actually be able to reach that.