In a sandbox game like Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress, once I have met all the objectives built into the game, I can invent new and ridiculous objectives, such as "build a fortress entirely out of obsidian 200 z-levels high".
Once you're rich, and can no longer spend all your income on everything you can think to consume yourself, you can buy a megaproject.
Run a political campaign for PotUS. Build a working town, like Disney's Celebration, Florida. Develop a self-driving electric car. Build a city that floats on the ocean. Start a Mars colony. Build a single Dyson heliostat. Breed elephants down to the size of Great Dane dogs. Develop sono-videophones so that dolphins in zoos can talk to each other. Cure one or more types of cancer. Breed a horse that wins the triple crown. Found a religion that out-grosses Scientology and Mormons, combined. Repave all the highways in your state, and do a structural integrity assessment of all the bridges and overpasses, too. There are countless ways to spend a colossal pile of money.
How does one get control of so many resources with a finite and exhaustible amount of imagination?
As they say, "past performance is not indicative of future results".
If the ultra-rich do not spend enough, they might begin to undermine the foundations of the economy. Then, if enough people can trace the apparent cause of their suffering to the wealth inequalities, they will start killing and/or looting rich people, possibly without regard to their individual conduct.
So by all means, if you think you're strong enough, go ahead and hoard ever increasing amounts of wealth, without limit. There's a distinct likelihood that your estates will never be besieged by hordes of starving peasants, and that you or your heirs will never be kidnapped for ransom (or revenge) if you ever attempt to travel beyond your own holdings, and that you will never be shaken down by corrupt officials. The less people perceive the systems of civilization to be fair, the less apt they are to respect its rules of conduct. It only takes one pissed-off person to make your life Hell, and there are 7 billion candidates out there just waiting for you to give them a good reason.
We got from the beginning of the industrial age to now by burning coal and oil. But if we continue to do so now, it is likely to eventually make the surface of the entire planet uninhabitable, rather than just Beijing. Responsible people have therefore been shifting to more technically advanced sources--such as wind, solar, hydro, and fission--to meet their power needs. In the same way, people who have grown so rich that they could buy anything they might possibly want must alter their habits to avoid poisoning their own environment.
2) The unwashed masses will never rise up against their uhpressors;
3) Rich people don't have some magical collective which solves the collective action problem; they act in their own interests on an individual basis, just like everybody else;
4) In the current regime, wealth is not power;
5) "Less" money, "fewer" dollars; one is continuous, the other discrete;
6) Nuclear is way cool, but coal isn't going to kill the planet;
7) The rich didn't get rich by frivolously buying everything they could possibly want, they got rich by saving and investing the vast majority of dollars that ever passed through their possession.
2. History disagrees with you. Countries occasionally experience revolutions wherein the lower class murders a significant portion of the upper class (only to promote their own into the same social positions, whereupon they adopt similar behaviors). The unwashed masses may never exist long without a perfumed and shaved upper class, but they can certainly put a lot of bodies in the ground when they get the itch. For instance, look at the French Terror, or the Russian revolution, or the Khmer Rouge killing fields, or the Iranian revolution, or the Cuban revolution. Eating the rich tends to set back economic development by a decade or more, but that doesn't stop the lower classes from doing it.
3. Which is why there will be a lot of free riders on the coattails of those public figures that choose to pursue philanthropic projects. I'm sure that many of them lie about anonymously donating to charities.
4. Wealth and power are not equal, but they do have an exchange rate.
5. Thank you for the grammar reminder. Were you correcting someone upthread, or just mentioning it in case someone might get it wrong later?
6. Coal-burning won't kill the planet--it will just kill some of the humans on it, and maybe some unfortunate plants and animals that happen to live downwind or downstream from industrial zones. I still haven't forgotten the TVA Kingston ash slurry spill. I'm also inclined to believe that excessive burning of hydrocarbons for energy could trigger outgassing of polar methane clathrates, which would be an ecological disaster. It won't cause human extinction, but it will crater the global economy.
7. Is wealth a means to an end, or an end in itself? Of what use to the rest of humanity is the man who hoards without end, who fills warehouses to the brim and locks them away, never to be emptied? I don't care how the rich got rich. It doesn't matter to me whether they pulled themselves up out of the gutter by their own bootstraps, or whether they were lucky enough to be born rich. I only care about what you do with what you have.
I'm genuinely interested.
For example assume that a new billionaire is minted by a lottery with 100 million people buying a $10 dollar ticket. Long term it's neutral but in the short term it effectively removes $1B in near term consumption from the economy and spreads it out over 100+ years.
On the other side a million people will likely better invest and sound a thousand dollars than one person will invest one billion.
The effect is to concentrate economic activity in specific sectors where banks are willing to lend which means the economy is less flexible overall.
An economy with $1B of debt and $1B in savings spread over 10,000 people is going to be more diverse and resilient than 9,999 people who have $1B in debt and one person with $1B in savings invested in housing and car loans.
The best outcome would be if she invested in new equity in a company that created a positive ROI in excess of what the lottery ticket buyers would have produced. Anything else is a net negative.
This is fine so long as investments move. We have such a high degree of aggregation of capital now that it sort of doesn't. It's sort of ... pinned down in the light cast by the public markets.
Even mutual finds are just now coming of age, much less the things that were innovations on them.
If too much goes to salary than the investment stops making sense and the rich will hoard cash instead, but I don't think we're in that situation. Could that be why QE was pumping so much money into the economy with inflation staying low? I bet there are statistics about the amount of cash people and companies are hoarding now vs 50 years ago, but there's too many confounding variables for me to figure it out.
Which is why the growing wealth inequalities are bad for the overall economy. The rich can't spend their money with enough scale or velocity.