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Elon's Folly
(lemmy.world)
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20134417
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this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2024
553 points (98.9% liked)
Enough Musk Spam
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If you want to understand billionaires, just go through this mental exercise.
You're handed a million dollars today. You have to spend it all in a day; you can't carry it forward. (And no charity donations for this mental exercise!) Easy, right? There's things you want. A fancy house. A fancy car. Pay down all your debts. Anybody could spend a million dollars in a day.
Tomorrow you get another million. You have to spend it all in a day. Still possible.
And the next day and the next day and the next day. Every day you have to spend a million dollars. You're beginning to run out of things to spend it on. Most people would run out of ideas after 30 days. You're doing stupid things now like buying an "ultra-rare" collectible that will just go into a vault with all your other "ultra-rare" collectibles never to see the light of day. You're just out of ideas.
But the money keeps coming in. Day after day. A million bucks. You have to spend it. For almost two years and nine months.
That's a billion dollars. Nearly three years of spending a million bucks daily. Spending a ludicrous amount of money daily, it still takes you almost three years to get through it all.
A billionaire is a person who thinks that isn't enough.
Does that give you some insight into what a billionaire is?
I could do it easy peasy
It's called supporting the arts. I'd just set up artist funds all over the country so that artists - visual artists, musical artists, theatrical artists, circus artists, writers, you name it - could learn, create, and share their work without struggling to get by.
But then, I'm a human and not a capitalist lizard masquerading as human, so art actually means something to me.
You're missing the point of the exercise. You're meant to spend that billion on you and you alone, one million dollars a day, to show just how ludicrously large a billion dollars is … and then realize that to billionaires it isn't enough.
Ok, I did actually miss that line about no charitable donations.
But I'm going to be annoying and argue that because of the gratification that funding artists would give me, it is actually a fully selfish endeavor and as such fulfills the requirements ;)
Its not annoying, its dodging the thought experiment entirely.
Take a joke, friend. I'm playing around.
The thought exercise says no charity donations. I guess spending part of your million a day on a suite of lawyers to argue that arts funding on that scale is not a "charitable donation" is a valid use of the money. But, that would cut into the charity funding eventually.
Someone who puts money over ~~customers~~ people