I think these guys get addicted to the power. Sure Mark Zuckerberg could spend all his time learning to cook Thai food or surfing or traveling, and we all love to do those things. But very few of us know what it feels like for him to walk into a campus of thousands that he commands and make choices all day long about what to do with them all.

I’m not saying that anyone would do the same in their shoes. But certainly the kind of person who likes to build a giant company will like being at the helm of it too. It’s not about more billions.

The same could be said of someone who earns a low income relative to a billionaire (e.g. $80-120k) depending on the country they reside in. Money doesn't buy happiness folks, life experiences do 🙂

Most people on this list have taken their foot off the gas in a major way, and do more of what they want.

Elon is currently blowing tens of billions of dollars running Twitter into the ground, designs impractical cars because he thinks they look cool, committing light treason, and campaigning for a president who would be detrimental to his business interests.

While the Zuck is still involved at Meta, he also picked up a ton of other hobbies. A lot of them are objectively cool. He also seems to spend a lot of time with his wife and kids.

Bezos seems to spend most of his time having sex with his age appropriate mistress on his $500 million yacht.

I've heard there are people that do something similar to get on those reality shows about fat people's lives or the weight loss competitions. I guess some think it's easier to gain 100 more pounds and then get on the TV show to lose 400 pounds than it is just to lose 300 pounds themselves.

If it were anything other than money, it would be considered a hoarding problem in need of treatment.

I put on a bit of weight a few years back and got up to 99kg. I joked with my partner that if I ate 1kg of cheese, I’d be 1% cheese.

So like, I’m not saying it’s right, but I understand where they’re coming from with the “more, more, more” mentality.

I don’t see why extreme wealth isn’t classified as a mental illness like hoarding.

As long as we keep treating wealth like a scoreboard, this will continue. If we collectively demonized people with unreasonable wealth, ostracized them from society, and stopped glorifying it and treating them like celebrities because of it, we might be in a better spot.

But it doesn't work like that. Wealth is a status symbol, and status symbols are comparative. Millionaires compare themselves to slightly richer millionaires, and billionaires to slightly richer billionaires. Everyone else is irrelevant to them.

at that point it's not really about the money

everyone needs a purpose. if you take away that purpose, people will start deteriorating.

"journey not the destination". once you've reached something like $50M any more money doesn't make any real difference in your daily life.

I have a lot of entrepreneur and VC friends. One of them always says that it isn't about the money. He says "Some people have fun playing video games, board games or Dungeons and Dragons. This is my Dungeons and Dragons".

He says it a lot so shout out to whomever can guess who he is. Hint; he's Austin based.

He doesn't have $270 billion dollars. He has $270 billion dollars worth of assets.

Well generally excess weight is bad and excess money is good

So I guess showerthoughts is going to be the new platform .ml users will use to complain about capitalism? OP is a brand new account and this was their first and only post.

Yes, I will keep calling this out.

1, yes you are correct

2, you are wrong, because it isn’t about “I have 270 billion dollars “. It is closer to look at all the toys I have

… sure I put up satellites, but can we put astronauts to the ISS? Cool now can we get to the moon? Mars? … etc

Having a net worth of 270 billion dollars is not synonymous with 'having 270 billion dollars'

If you're a billionaire intent on becoming even wealthier, that usually implies that you really enjoy being a successful businessman. I don't see why business success for its own sake would be inherently less satisfying than other sorts of accomplishment.