A few observations on wealth

Soon after SpaceX's recent IPO, Elon Musk became, just briefly, the world's first trillionaire.  (He quickly lost that status as the stock price fell; it is now below the initial offering price, meaning that those who bought have now lost money, on paper.)  This illustrates the fact that super-wealth largely takes the form of numbers in computerized ledgers, not concrete assets -- Musk never had an actual stash of currency and physical goods with an aggregate value of a trillion dollars.  Nevertheless, he did own assets on paper (or rather in some computer database) whose theoretical market value briefly reached that level.

What does that kind of wealth actually mean?  We throw around numbers ending in "-illion" with little sense of what they signify other than "very big number", but they are actually enormously different.  It is possible for a person at the upper income level of those who earn money by their work (rather than by exploiting others), such as a doctor or lawyer, to accumulate net assets of as much as a million dollars.  In some places like Manhattan you can have a net worth of a million and not even feel, or be, truly rich.  A billionaire is an entirely different matter.

The best way I've seen of grasping the difference between the two numbers is the observation that a million seconds is about twelve days, whereas a billion seconds is thirty-two years.  This gives you an idea of the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire.  (As for a trillionaire, one trillion seconds ago there were still living neanderthals on Earth.)  It is practically impossible to earn a billion dollars by working.  Pretty much everyone who holds that kind of wealth got it by maneuvering himself into a role such as a financier, politician, or high-level corporate executive, in which wealth produced by the work of others is diverted into his own coffers.  Such people may or may not also do some work of some actual value, but that value has no real connection to their income or their wealth.  Jeff Bezos probably does some work of some kind, but he does not work nearly as hard as the typical Amazon warehouse employee.  Nor is the "work" of a corporate executive thousands of times more skilled or valuable than that of an ordinary worker, as it would have to be to justify referring to such people's income as "earned".  I have worked at companies where the CEO or CFO position remained vacant for up to a year while candidates were being interviewed and vetted, with no apparent effect on the functioning of the company.  But if the receptionist quits, they get a temp in immediately, because that job actually does something.

(Politicians are a special case.  They do not exploit the labor of large workforces, but leverage their political power to receive large bribes from oligarchs in the form of donations, in-kind gifts, corporate sinecures after leaving politics, etc in exchange for their votes on legislation in which the oligarchs have an interest.  Some become multi-millionaires while in office despite relatively modest salaries.)

There is a tiny category of billionaires who do actually earn what they have -- the most successful artistic creatives.  A person like Taylor Swift or JK Rowling does employ a few people in various capacities, but the value of the work those people do does not contribute a substantial part of the creator's wealth.  (Indeed, on her recent tour, Swift paid every worker a bonus of $100,000 out of her own funds, thus actually compensating them at more than the value of their labor, rather than exploiting them by skimming off value as most employers do.)  Book royalties and concert ticket sales genuinely do represent direct payment by consumers for the value of what that one individual creates, rather than for goods or services provided by the labor of employees.  But of course such cases are very rare.  Few artistic creatives become rich at all.

The difference between such cases and the standard billionaire parasite class is also intuitively apparent from the very different human types they represent.  It is difficult to imagine a greater contrast than that between a novelist or artist and the kind of grey, soulless, narcissistic, emotionally-stunted obsessives who populate the upper reaches of the corporate and financial world, of whom people like Musk and Trump are extreme examples.  Can you imagine Bezos ever giving every Amazon driver and warehouse worker a $100,000 bonus out of his own money?

The great irony is that many billionaires, being exactly the kind of arrested-development types who never grow out of taking Ayn Rand seriously, believe themselves to be producers of wealth and imagine that society is dependent on them.  This ignores not only the fact that most of their wealth was produced by others whom they have positioned themselves to exploit, but also the more fundamental reality that such levels of wealth, the very concept of a billion dollars, can exist only in the context of a large, complex society with institutions like the rule of law, property rights, secure large-scale exchanges of value for value, and the belief systems and enforcement mechanisms that keep all those things running smoothly -- not to mention all the millions of workers who produce the yachts and mansions and private jets and miscellaneous giant trinkets on which they spend their money.  Galt's Gulch fantasies notwithstanding, if all of the billionaire oligarchs were separated from the rest of society and sent to live purely among themselves, isolated from the rest of us and what we produce, they would quickly find themselves sinking into poverty and squalor, even if they had brought their checkbooks and piles of paper cash with them.  (Indeed, a separate "society" made up entirely of histrionic narcissists like Musk and Trump and the kind of dead-soul control freaks and parasites who seem to populate most C-suites, would quickly make Lord of the Flies look like a sane and well-ordered utopia by comparison.)  There is no category of people more dependent on society to sustain its lifestyle than billionaires.  A man can live and thrive without a tapeworm, but the tapeworm quickly dies without the man.