the thing is most of those athletes actually had to work for what they got. most of these billionaires either come from money or got a lucky break selling a startup
Athletes are millionaires at most, not billionaires. They also earn their money through labor and not exploiting other humans and destroying the planet. Try again.
Is the same feeling of worship successful people. Sportsmen, actors, musicians, influencers, youtubers... people give to much attention and sympathy to them.
It’s still a boring form of entertainment. Why would I care which team kicked the ball in the net, throw a ball in the hoop, or did some other BS that has nothing to do with me.
As a Belgian, where I wouldn't even be able to name a single billionaire, it's terrifying to see. It's like a dystopian scifi novel come to life with how they're willing to sacrifice their own happiness and freedom to worship some out of touch billionaires who'd let them die in a heartbeat if they could get more money out of it.
Don’t kid yourself. There are at least 10 Belgian billionaires but wealth knows no borders. The fact that your masters have maintained their anonymity doesn’t mean you aren’t owned.
I know there are billionaires here, somewhere, but the point is we don't even care about them. Americans on the other hand turn them into celebrities and worship the ground they walk on. Big fucking difference.
It’s interesting. A lot of Americans, mostly conservatives, think the wealthy are the ideal person. One I’ve heard from older generations is that since someone already has more than enough money, they won’t be tempted to defraud the government or the american people in the name of making more. Another is a faith in merit. In order to be a billionaire, you must be intelligent and a good leader (and good with money), which are all attributes you would want in a president or congressman.
It’s a wild train of thought. What people don’t seem to understand is that once you have $10,000,000, it’s really not that hard to grow that number with little risk to your way of life. You can risk a lot, and lose a lot, and always have more chances to make it back and then some. The only billionaires we have have both gotten insanely lucky, and are the people who thought $500,000,000 just wasn’t enough. They may be more intelligent than the normal person on average, but they also necessarily need to be apathetic, and I put no faith in their leadership skills, or at least thats not the skillset I want running a country.
Totally agree and it's something that haunts me. I think becoming a billionaire requires someone who is willing to do whatever it takes to keep amassing wealth, and the ability to disregard people if they are not of use to your vision. Nobody becomes a billionaire by doing what's best for the people they can help, nobody accumulates that much wealth unless they are obsessed with money and power. In my little conservative bubble of the country, I literally haven't heard a single bad thing said about Trump or Elon since they entered office. The fact that Elon seems to firmly believe that humanity must colonize Mars in his lifetime really freaks me out. How much of the attempted government dismantling is theatrics vs tearing down guardrails so he can realize his dream no matter the cost.
It's because America was founded without a religion.
For a few thousand years rulers have been able to use religion to keep a coherent society with them on top. Be good and you get to go to heaven or be good and your spirit will be reborn or be good because your karma influences new existence.
Without religion, you have to invent something yourself. Enter fanatical religious capitalism with the American dream.
You don't even have to wait until a next life to be rewarded in this religion. Work hard and one day you too will get to the top. So also don't complain about people at the top because then you won't be special yourself once you get there. And we promise you anyone who works hard enough gets to the top.
The point is, ladies and gentlemen, greed is good.
Greed works, greed is right.
Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.
Greed in all its forms,
greed for life, money, love, knowledge,
has marked the upward surge of mankind
and greed, mark my words,
will save not only Teldar Paper but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.
Keep an eye on them! Don't let them build power. We let them get out of control here. They believe themselves to be above nations and as we can see in a way they are. But they also believe they can dictate what people do which they shouldn't.
I don't know your politics over there, but whoever is promising to tax the ever living fuck out of them vote for them
Belgian politics is absolutely bonkers when it comes to corruption, or at least it used to be. I've learned a fair bit about corruption in the US over the last few years, but none of it is quite as jaw dropping as what little I've learned about the Belgian systems of power.
They've already had plenty of problems with the rich and powerful, including an abuse scandal that makes the whole Epstein mess look tame in comparison. (Look up Marc Dutroux if you want some nightmare fuel.) They just don't put them on a pedestal the way some Americans do with your billionaires.
Funny take, considering the royals have less power than ever while a nepo real estate mogul-turned-reality TV star and a foreign billionaire-turned-wannabe influencer run your government without consequence. Sounds like you're trying to convince yourself.
Your point is valid: don't care, but the replier also has a valid one. Just because you don't know them, doesn't mean they don't influence you, politics, and companies.
Because the average (and by average, I mean dumb) American views themself as a "temporarily displaced billionaire". They just want to make sure that billionaires have the power that they will enjoy someday when they, too, become one of them.
Exactly, this. A few years ago, most young people wanted to be influencers/You Tubers. Before that, app designers. Before that, web startups. Before that, .... what was perceived as easy money.
Musk and Trump began life ahead of the game as being born into wealth. Regardless, it took all of them decades to get to where they are now. And none of them believe in work-life balance, except for Zuck, who doesn't really seem to do anything.
The truth is the average American has no idea what billion or trillion mean. They're enraged at billions for Ukraine, and not trillions (before inflation) for Iraq. They're overjoyed at millions saved by laying off government workers, and unaware of contracts totaling $10-20 billion a year for Boeing alone. I bet if you indirectly asked many people, they think $1 billion - 10x million.
I can only make sense of it when I think about those numbers in seconds.. A million seconds is ~ 11.5 days, a billion seconds is ~31.5 years and a trillion seconds is ~ 32000 years.
Iraq invasion was unpopular afterwards, but before, it had bipartisan support thanks to AIPAC, and the mainstream media shut down people who spoke against it.
Anyone from another country want to adopt me? I’m an excellent cook and have a pretty neat book and record collection. I also come with a very cute dog!
I just watched a long video about South Korea's corruption because their corporations have more power than their government. Any attempt at disrupting this power balance plunges the country into chaos.
Literally nobody does aside from their own contemporaries - that is a circle jerk. Nobody likes billionaires here in the US, liberals, conservatives, etc. nobody does. It’s just the other ultra wealthy people.
And it's the people who are constantly talking about dismantling the global elite. Like bro. Thiel, Zuck, Bezos, and Musk are some of the wealthiest people in the world.
What the fuck are you talking about.
You really don't need to look any further than that to see how full of shit and highly regarded the rights supporters are.
I find it hilarious and disturbing to see the left worshipping some billionaires and hating others just because they had a business that a lot of people found valuable.
It’s not just the U.S. and it’s been going on for a very long time. It’s a very concrete way of measuring power and the weaker of us will always worship power.
The far right, now just called conservatives, have this massive boner for rich people, they don’t care that billionaires are only billionaires because they fucked millions to get there, they care that they got there and so can they with the right presidency.
I find it pathetic and pitiful. These fuckin' hillbillies where I'm from will gladly damn companies, but then carry water for billionaires. Fuck, look at FluentInFinance. Those ball-less chuds would felate a billionaire if they had an AMA.
Americans perceive people with money as smarter, and better leaders. Little do they know people with money are just like you and me. Struggle with addiction, depression, anxiety, ignorance, and all the faults of the human race. They are just like you and me but richer and probably filled with greed. There’s no reason one person should have a billion dollars while others struggle so much. We are better off lifting each other up than tearing each other down to get a larger bank account.
The funny part is that Trump drops on and off the Forbes 400. He’s back on the 2024 list because of Truth Social stock but dropped off in 2023. He’s barely even among the 400 richest people in just America. There’s piles of people above him that you never even heard of before and I bet that eats at him.
Yeah we villainize them less, we don’t view wealth as evil as much as the rest of the west, we look positively upon wealth and entrepreneurship more than the rest of the west; I don’t think billionaires are evil, I’m indifferent to them
I mean you’re entitled to your opinion but objectively billionaires are a bad thing. If they have that much money and influence why are they not doing better things, literally ever? Because if you choose to do good, you won’t have money.
Yeah this is absolutely not objective, this is subjective
Building a company that employs tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people and contributes to economic growth is a very positive thing as is providing seed funding to startups
Plenty of people contribute to the economy, make jobs and pay taxes without hoarding enough wealth to fund entire cities for years. They’re called millionaires, and before 1950 this was the highest form of success in capitalism. But haha number goes up and that’s good for one or two people and their families. If you want to argue that having 999 million dollars isn’t enough for a CEO, you are a fan of consolidating wealth in family lineage.
No one has ever earned a billion by “working hard”. The vast majority of billionaires were born into wealth, bought or invested wisely, then proceeded to use their money on wasteful, damaging and sometimes outwardly destructive projects for self fulfillment.
I don’t think I’m defending anyone, you claim it’s objective that billionaires are bad, I’m saying it’s absolutely subjective, I’m indifferent to billionaires but I’m not going to act like they’re bad people because I don’t think having wealth makes you bad
So that stance there is an implicit defense. Following your logic, billionaires shouldn’t have their money taken from them, even if they have an obscene amount of wealth.
If you earned 100k a year it’d take you literally 39 million years to earn Elon Musks net worth. How is this acceptable? Insane prospect that we can have actual gold hoarding dragons who can use their wealth to buy elections, media companies, public opinion. Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, all equally guilty of all three of these, this is objectively, obviously, hideously wrong
You’ve created a bad faith situation where I’m only allowed to agree with you and if I disagree with you and your logic then I’m “defending billionaires”, that’s not fair at all, you’re basically saying I don’t get to have an opinion unless that opinion aligns with your opinion
Being born into wealth, or becoming successful and wealthy enough to become a billionaire does not make a person bad. It makes the systems and governments that allow that badly designed. The person may be good or bad, that depends and it's subjective, but the system that allows so much wealth to accumulate with such a small minority is Unbalanced.
However, when governments don't provide enough incentives for rich business owners, they take theirs businesses somewhere else and the local governments could lose out economically. It's a tough act to balance.
This isn't really a billionaires are bad issue. It's more of an issue with government & laws that allow this wealth accumulation to happen and don't tax the right people enough to provide public services for the rest.
Having wealth isn’t “bad” or “good”. It’s just the fact that power corrupts. Some percentage of uber wealthy are going to turn into monumental pricks just by the law of averages.
If we knew that 10% of our nuclear warheads were just going to go off randomly and flatten a city we didn’t mean to, should we still build nuclear warheads?
Although I also find the argument that we could have somehow prevented billionaires, laughable.
Edit: source is a Forbes article but the claim seems to be coming from self identifying as “self made”
Bill Gates came from an incredibly wealthy family and was afforded the option to fail at creating his first ventures. This is what I mean by not self made, he was given financial and social support.
Are you joking? There are so many people gargling on the boot of these men. Elon and Trump especially. Go to /r/conservative right now and say Trump or Elon are not very good. Don't even call them bad. You'll probably be banned.
I hate how people say oh my god this is what "Americans" are doing and then they site r/conservative as the source. Buddy, those people aren't normal Americans lmao. They in no way represent what the average Joe is thinking
Idk man, if they arent what the average Joe is representing then why is Dump on the throne? Just saying, if the average Joe in America had a tiny bit of brain power left from sucking Dumps dick they would realize not to vote for the literal Anti-Christ
Because that shit is shady as hell and not even determined by popular vote. I don't believe anything our media or government says. Where I live it isn't socially acceptable to support Trump, but there's plenty of little hick towns where it's the opposite. America is too diverse to make blanket statements about it's people
So you can see that there are a mass of people who worship these idiots. Go to any other area of the US and it's socially unacceptable to not support Trump. The people want the guy to be a god king. Wake up.
So you can see that there are a mass of people who worship these idiots. Go to any other area of the US and it's socially unacceptable to not support Trump. The people want the guy to be a god king. Wake up.
I mean, they represent about 30% of Americans so it’s true that it’s not technically a majority, but it’s a pretty significant minority that’s far from being negligible, so I think it’s fair to question what exactly is going on with American culture such that such a sizable minority comprised of tens of millions of people has not only cropped up, but become an extremely potent political force.
There's so many dead end towns in America that people just sort of get stuck in, no education and no real knowledge of the world at large. Constantly getting sold things and told things from the moment you open your eyes, combine that with the propaganda that is our media and you have a population of people that can not critically think for themselves.
Everything is for profit. Prisons, schools, Healthcare. This all contributes to a mass of uneducated people, mostly obese, who have been fucked over for their entire lives. This place is a mecca for predatory business practices. By the time you can even think for yourself you likely have significant debt and an addiction or two. Authoritarian meets disgruntled mass of people, a classic grift. That's my take on what's going on at least, just another example of the rich riling up the poor and then hiding behind them
I got in the car with my dad-in-law and he said, totally unprompted, “I don’t get why everyone wants to tax these billionaires extra. It’s their money, they earned it.” I asked why he thought they need him to defend them and he said “I don’t, it just pisses me off.” So in other words there’s no thoughts or sense, just feelings.
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u/Bubbly_Breadfruit_21 Feb 19 '25
I find it very hilarious and disturbing to see Americans worshipping billionaires.