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What I do not understand about the truly wealthy: How much money do they really need? Surely Musk and Bezos have enough.

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I don’t think that answer is a certain amount. It’s always about more, more, more. It is like a disease some billionaires get. They all are not afflicted. Look at Warren Buffet giving billions to Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation investing in the eradication of Malaria. Bloomberg’s endowment to Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. I read last night Taylor Swift has donated 100 million to charities and good causes. At some point, the taxes should be so great, forces charity, but also at some point nearly all of new gains should be taxed. This is how it was for much of our history until 1980.

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I think it's nice that the mega-rich do philanthropy. My question is why do they get to decide what's good for society? In a democracy, WE the People make those decisions. It's high time we eat the rich. They've been eating us for at least the last 40 years of the neoliberal order. Think about it...If a person made $100,000 and could keep every penny of it, they would have had to start BEFORE Homo Erectus had evolved to have as much as just Elon Musk. Worse yet, Musk is not even the richest person on Forbes list. Something is seriously wrong with a system that allows this to happen. We have both the ability and the moral duty to change that.

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A billionaire I once worked for - at the time, maybe only a hundreds of millions-aire - claimed to me that the environmental movement was all about control. I pushed back, I disagreed and said how would he know their motives? There's a lot of projection amongst the rich, with the objective of somehow self-justifying or concealing their own control of resources, including press.

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There is a show on Apple TV in which a super-rich family runs an investment firm specializing on charities (a minor subplot, but relevant to the nature of the character played by Sasha Cohen ). The family only does that to greenwash/human rights wash their family wealth of dubious origins. It feels pretty accurate to me.

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A good explanation. Thanks.

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There’s an essay by Brian Klass that explains what wrong with some billionaires and why there’s never enough more.

https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/billionaire-villains-and-the-evolution?r=44kjm&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=audio-player

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Bezos paid a pittance for the WaPo, compared to estates all around the Nation he barely lives in and a super yacht. It is not that they need any of this, it is the power of "oh, look, what I can do, never in my wildest dreams" that is addictive.

(His fiancés brother, a sleazy Hollywood manager of reality-tv personalities, has been a known Trumpist before Bezos started dating her.)

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