I think the deeper issue is a chronic misunderstanding of what wealth is. Most people engage with wealth in the form of usable goods and services. A banana is wealth. A house is wealth. A dollar in my bank account or a share I own is, at the margin, entirely fungible into things I can consume, so they aren't meaningfully different.

This is an illusion. A share has value because it represents the hypothetical future productivity of an abstract entity that may or may not even exist in the future.

At the margin, you can take an Amazon share and buy bananas with it. However you absolutely can't take the entirety of Amazon and exchange it for a trillion bananas. Those bananas don't exist.

More importantly, you can't take the entirety of Amazon and transform it into housing supply. I think people are often too careful about "missing the forest for the trees" and then conceive of problems as overly abstract. The affordability crisis is, first and foremost, a housing shortage.

Young people can't afford homes. Millennials are hitting 40 and realizing they may never afford one. Being secure in housing is pretty damn low on the Maslow hierarchy of needs. Sure maybe we need a more progressive tax policy, but this myopic focus on billionaires distracts from the real problem which is a housing shortage.

1T dollars allows you to corner the best contractors, maybe most of them, for your own projects while houses remain unbuilt.

1. You think Amazon has the market of contractors that build houses locked down?

2. A $1T market cap is not $1T of spendable cash. This is exactly the point I was making that people don't understand the difference.

1. The contractors move to where the money is. They will migrate to specialized work that will not benefit those who can’t afford “competitive” prices.

2. You can borrow 1T dollars in cash, effectively maxing out what the physical world will allow you to spend it on.

You can borrow 1T in cash? From whom?

If they’re not in it for the money, they’ll be happy to pay more tax

Taxes are money that they lose control of.

There is a reason Bill Gates didn't just write the IRS a check for $175B and created the Gates foundation instead.

That's kind of the opposite of your original claim then.

They're in it for the money as it allows them to exert control. That's still being in it for the money.

They are in it for manually appreciating their own assets, which has the intrinsic effect of generating wealth.

A better way to frame it that doesn't hinge on the colloquial vs literal meaning of "in it for the money".

Okay, so they are in it to grow their assets, so they can leverage them in their life in this world. And those assets probably get evaluated or assessed at some point, and get assigned some numerical value. And the unit of measurement used for that evaluation may be referencing something like a currency, that other people can understand for its use as a medium of exchange. I see that is very different than money.

One of the problems is that rather than billionaires being it for money, they’re in it for money. They don’t lack for money to live, sure, but they do want more money for the power it provides.

One thing I'm gathering from reading this thread is that the 'spending money' is different than the 'power money.' The 'power money' may not actually exist as it's tied up in valuations. If your company is the 'power money' generator, then of course you'll need to work more, since you're in it to be more powerful

I've known and spent time with quite a few billionaires personally.

I can assure you, with the utmost in direct observation, that they are extraordinarily obsessed with money. It is, in fact, the defining characteristic of their entire existence, literally by definition.

Any argument to the contrary is profoundly hilarious. Imagine if you came across someone that had over one billion model trains in his basement who was claiming that he wasn't super interested in model trains.

This is missing the forest for the trees on the level of "I have spent time around photographers, and let me tell you, they are obsessed with lenses to the point that it defines their existence".

From a billionaire POV, money is what you use to build valuable things (what the lenses are to photographers). Unlike photography, it also happens to be the thing that the market rewards you with for doing a good job (although a successful photographer could convert their profit to new/better lenses).

I would eat my hat if you could find a single billionaire (outside trust fundees / inheritance) that is grinding it out doing something they hate, selling a product(s) they think is shit, all so they can hit whatever number, cash out, retire to a private island or whatever and never work again.

I'm not sure if this is a straw man or what.

Let's phrase this a different way. Everyone has values that they live by.

Some people value family and community above all else. For example, even if their town has very little economic opportunity, they will stay there to support their grandparents, their parents, their cousins, and so on.

Some people might value artistic expression, and they will forsake money for the chance to be, let's say, a musician. They might become incredibly successful, or they might not, but they will always focus on playing music. That's the thing that they value whenever they have to make a choice. That one goes first.

Billionaires value money. I'm 100% certain of this. I've had a sort of interesting life and happen to have been quite close to and worked with at least twenty billionaires, some of whom I've known for decades and watched their progression. I'm telling you for certain that they value money incredibly highly.

This, of course, really should be obvious to even your average child or anyone who takes even a passing interest in the topic. A couple of million dollars here or there can be an oddball side effect of some luck or strange life choices. A billion dollars cannot, it is an absolutely staggering amount of money, and anyone who has achieved it has aggressively sought it out and has been given dozens, if not hundreds, of opportunities to focus on something else instead and settle for some large amount of money that is short of a billion dollars.

Again, this should not surprise anybody at all who has a functioning brain. Imagine Jane Goodall heads into the jungle to study a tribe of gorillas and discovers that most gorillas have a dozen or so bananas, but then discovers a gorilla with a pile of bananas several thousand feet tall.

How do you think she'd fare trying to make the argument that this gorilla was actually focused on other things besides bananas for most of their life and the pile just kind of happened as a side effect?

>then discovers a gorilla with a pile of bananas several thousand feet tall.

Then she didn't discover the billionaire gorilla, she discovered the lottery winner or the trust fund kid.

The billionaire gorilla has thousands of acres of banana trees, with enough bananas to reach the moon and back if all picked and stacked.

The billionaire gorilla is laser focused on generating bananas. A complex machine with fractal parts whose ultimate output is bananas.

Meanwhile the other gorillas are laser focused on the height of their banana stack (which is rotting and half aren't even aware). Telling themselves if they had a stack 1000ft high they would never work a day again.

I'm pretty sure you understand this, and part of me thinks we are saying the same thing.

> The billionaire gorilla is laser focused on generating bananas

Yeah exactly. And the billionaire is laser focused on generating dollars.

Not just more dollars in the world though. More dollars for themselves, specifically.

We can re-ground ourselves in your original comment that I am responding to though, which is this:

> I think the most chronic misunderstanding in the "billionaire" rhetoric is that billionaires are in it for money.

Nope. There's no misunderstanding. Billionaires are definitely in it for the money.

Perhaps it was my mistake to rely on the colloquial meaning of "in it for the money".

What could possibly be the non-colloquial meaning of the phrase? It's a colloquial expression.