I’m not being hyperbolic here, in my experience with the super rich there area few common things:

1. They don’t have to do anything they don’t want to so generally have a relative lack of empathy

2. just a few notches above average intelligence but are rarely “genius”

3. They live in mental/emotional bubbles and almost never spend time with “regular” people doing things like shopping, cooking, sitting in traffic or using the infrastructure that unwashed use

That means they can think far enough in the future about “macro“ trends (which don’t really exist), while also fucking over everybody in the process because they don’t have to even experience any of the “externalities” that their actions take.

They see themselves as kings and better educated, more traveled, more cosmopolitan etc… so it’s purely ego

People like that see other people as NPCs, not as people.

> He was already obscenely rich, to the level where gaining additional resources must have been useless to him.

You could have said the same thing when he was worth $50 million instead of a billionaire. For people like that, the mindset is endless growth at all costs...that's why they still turn up to work despite having money to live like kings for multiple lifetimes.

$50 million is enough for you and maybe a few descendants to live comfortably for the rest of your lives, but certainly not an amount of money where you'll be able to do anything you want for perpetuity.

You probably won't even be able to buy a superyacht comfortably, and a megayacht is absolutely out of your reach. For that you need to be a billionaire

Imagine you walking alone in a beach eating chips. You wouldn't just throw the empty bag into the beach, would you? Even though nobody sees you, the sea is vast, and the chance that throwing it or not would make any difference to any living human is close to zero. It's a matter of principle.

I believe it's the same to people like Moroun. They didn't get rich by passing up opportunities to invest, and the very thought of leaving an asset to slide away, when it could still generate more profit, is offensive to people like them. Whether they actually need the profit is beside the point. It's a matter of principle.