If there are any billionaires out there who are too alienated by their inability to wait in line at the airport: don’t worry, you can give me the money. It’ll be a burden but one I think I can handle it.

The airport was just an example. You simply can't do normal people things.

I might not like airport lines but I'd hate to be forbidden from going through that process. I also couldn't just walk down the street to get a pizza. Or go out dancing at night. Or to play board games. Or take a random walk or bike ride around the city. If I was rich and everyone knew it, I'd have to live in a bubble.

That's different from "comfortable rich" where you own your own home and a retirement fund and live mostly normally.

[delayed]

You reckon that if the Concorde was still in existence then all the tech billionaires would be avoiding it? I doubt it.

> I also couldn't just walk down the street to get a pizza.

Well, not necessarily. Jensen Huang was famous for going to random food stalls in Taiwan and eating street food.

It might be harder and riskier, and I get what you mean, but it's not like you actually can't do those things.

Also maybe it's not necessarily a billionaire thing, but more like a fame thing. Billionaires tend to get famous just due to being rich, but I'd imagine a random person wouldn't recognize 80+% of the people on the billionaire list if they saw the billionaire chomping down a pizza in the local pizza place.

I think he probably could do normal things outside of major tech hubs. He isn’t famous for his face, like an actor.

If asked he could say he works for a company that makes some computer part.

“Are they well known?”

“Kinda, but mostly datacenters buy them, you probably don’t own one.”

Keanu Reeves famously rides the subway. You don’t have to isolate yourself.

And this is part of why we need a billionaire tax - to help these bright, talented people hold on to their humanity.

With regards the "What really is the point of somebody hoarding this much wealth?" question, I've been thinking a lot about this recently, as the billionaires accrue more influence than ever before. And I think that's the keyword - 'influence'. After a point, wealth doesn't buy you more things, it buys you power, which is seductive. It goes far beyond making your family comfortable and doing right by your company, employees and shareholders; it becomes a means to lever the world. Yes, some of this drive is about being apart from the real world and possibly an element of personal sociopathy (corporations are famously sociopathic entities, too, which probably rubs off on the C-suite execs), but hedonistic adaptation (we're very good at getting used to things, even vast wealth) and wanting to change the world are (I imagine) very addictive. I imagine it even goes some way to assuaging the embarrassment of The Leader of the Free World calling you his AI Expert...sorry, 'SI' Expert.

And it really doesn't help that all these tech bro billionaires think Ayn Rand was a good writer with some fine ideas.

Related: the market cap of the stock market is basically a conversion factor between currency (for daily purchases) and power (being in charge of all the world's companies). When the market crashes after an election, we shouldn't think of it as "$3T of wealth wiped out", it should be "power gap between normal people and billionaires decreases" (it takes fewer normal people to buy a billionaire's position).

You’re making my heart bleed for the suffering alienated billionaire class.

yeah you can't pay your bills or afford a home, but that pales in comparison to how lonely billionaires are. makes you think

Why is reading comprehension so scarce nowadays?

The last paragraph of my comment basically calls these billionaires sociopaths because you have to be to enrich yourself off the backs of making millions of people poor. How is that a defense of billionaires?

My point is that the "prize" isn't even worth it. It doesn't make you happy. Actually there's one way it seems to make them happy: by enjoying the suffering of others and having the power to influence people and even governments. But to what end?

Reading comprehension is fine. It’s your writing comprehension.

>So I think this kind of isolation makes such wealthy and/or powerful people more susceptible to this kind of thing because, in a way, they're starved from a lot of human interaction and experiences in a way most of us can't understand (and wouldn't want).

You’re saying here that they’re “starved” of the human contact most of us take for granted (for example in standing around an airport and being squeezed into economy). This is thus a cause for heart-bleeding.

Ingvar Kamprad flew economy and drove and old Volvo. Being extremely wealthy doesn’t have to come with this kind of isolation. If Sergei Brin was flying economy, most of the plane wouldn’t realise who he was and the few who did would be like “oh look it’s Sergei Brin, weird.”

Does wealth do this to people or are people with these tendencies more likely to become wealthy?

>the point of somebody hoarding this much wealth? You kind of have to have sociopathic tendencies (IMHO) because such wealth simply cannot exist without the impoverishment of millions of people.

I don’t think there is anyway to justify that position.