There is something fundamentally wrong in their brain. Similar to a sociopath, or someone with autism. I believe there has to be a physical difference in the brain of someone who had that level of greed. Ask everyone you know personally what they would do if they woke up and had 500 million dollars in the bank. You hear a lot of interesting ideas and cool things to do. What I havent heard once is someone telling me a plan on how they would turn that 500 million dollars into a billion. That is because a normal brain doesnt think like that. A billionaire is fundamentally wrong, they are never happy with the amount of money they have. If they were, they would never reach a billion dollars.
Just a note, sociopaths aren’t physiologically different from other people by default, you’re thinking of psychopaths.
Sociopathy develops as a coping mechanism to extreme circumstances and trauma, (where someone’s brain determines the only way they’d be safe is to dampen empathetic responses) psychopathy develops as a result of a differently-wired brain where their brain out the gates struggles with a lot of what we consider to be foundational social and empathetic processes.
Trauma -does- change the structure of the brain, but if you’re trying to compare it to autism as an example of people born with different brains out the gates, it’s better to distinguish between sociopathy and psychopathy.
Agreed. It's like being a hoarder. They interweave their belongs, in this case their bank account, with their identity. Psychology tells us that once someone has internalised something and consider it an identity, it's very difficult to change their view.
My theory is that they've become so used to not having to struggle or worry about anything that life has become nothing more than a game to them, and the points are measured in money. All they care about is winning the game so having more money than anyone else means they're "winning".
Lmao, my autism means there’s something fundamentally wrong with me? Just throwing us in with sociopaths and soulless billionaires casually to make your point? Fuck you too.
They’d get rid of us if they could. I respect that you want to, but I wouldn’t worry about being the bigger person anymore, this administration in particular has been driving towards eradicating us even more. We need to vehemently push back on this shit at every opportunity.
It means there is a fundamental error in the brain, like anyone with neurodivergence. Like my ADHD, or my dad's OCD, or a sociopath, or a psychopath. They are all problems in the wiring of the brain. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with you, or anyone born with neurodivergence, but to pretend there is not something wrong in the brain is naive. My uncle remarried to a lady that had a son with severe autism. He could not talk or dress himself. If a doctor had a way to fix what was happening in his brain that caused this she would have done anything to make it happen. There was nothing fundamentally wrong with him as a person, but there absolutely was something fundamentally wrong with his brain that caused his symptoms.
Every single fucking time someone has some opinion on autism, they love to bring up their uncles dads cousins grandmas sisters lawn care guy’s half-brother’s nonverbal autistic child as the reason autism is “something wrong with us”. You are literally speaking to someone, right now, that is a fully functioning adult. What’s wrong with me then? What makes me lesser than you? Autism has its disadvantages, but we have plenty of advantages over you as well. As is the case with every type of human being. Neurotypical people hide behind passive aggressive half-truths, sugarcoat, disrespect personal space constantly, speak in metaphor and hints when they need something instead of being direct, I could go on and on, are far worse at pattern recognition-based skills, BUT that’s not every neurotypical person. You have your pros and cons. So do we. The only difference is, we spend our entire lives catering to neurotypicals and their illogical social constructs, being ostracized and shunned for not putting off subconscious body language signals and correct vocal tone, and you can’t put any more thought into understanding us than “lol there’s an autistic kid I know he can’t even talk”. And it’s not even like it’s that hard, we’re literal and direct, allistics just cannot bother to listen instead of going off what “vibes” they pick up when they misinterpret us. There’s plenty of allistics I know that are absolute fucking morons. Don’t speak on something you clearly do not understand. Y’all love speaking for us; I don’t want to be fixed. I want allistics to bother trying.
100% this. It's getting really old being lumped in with someone who had 0 support, which likely lead to MAJOR setbacks in their development.
BTW, to anyone reading this comment, a lot of times, the "nonverbal autistics" everyone seems to love to reference, are just people who didn't receive any support for their autistic traits as children.
I was nonverbal until I was 8 years old, but thankfully, I received the support I needed to develop. I now am a VERY well off adult who merely acts a bit different and obsesses about code and electronics. Don't speak for us, we learned to speak while y'all were making fun of us, and the things we've learned to speak about are usually on a whole different level of understanding than the average bear. We don't just research, we obcess and breathe it until we understand.
Right, it's "wrong" because it doesn't fit into what society wants. Cept, a LOT of the technology you have today wouldn't work without neurodivergent people maintaining it.
Not saying we're the ONLY ones, bit we're VERY over represented in technical fields.
Your language is extremely fast and loose and you frankly seem unqualified to discuss it with the confidence you are sharing here. Frankly this subject is developing as we speak at lightning speed, even people who went to school 10 years ago can be out of date. This is not opinion, this is developing from empirical data and I'm really not comfortable with your use of terms like "wrong" which is a cultural more not any sort of clinical term or description.
You are not qualified and you are causing harm here
Yes, but would they do it when it's actually time to hand over the money?
When you get accustomed to nice things it's hard to revert back. I think of it like gaining fat cells. You lose weight but without keeping an eye on it, your body trues to revert back to your largest size.
They find endless ways to "need" it.
Lots of things to maintain. Out of pocket healthcare. Supporting multiple generations of family and close trusted employees. They are basically the combo of a private resort (for privacy and family) and a corporation with multiple layers of staff.
You can get paranoid with people constantly hitting you up, accusing you of things, parasocial fans, etc.
And of course, being rich doesn't mean you know how to spend money, you can still go broke, become an addict, get very sick, and on.
So over time, it's easy to isolate and insulate from others and get to a point where you exist in a bubble with other people with money, who by and large will skew fiscally and mostly conservative.
I think you are on to something! Adding to your thoughts, I think these people have different phenotypes where the money and power they accrue is intoxicating. This literally physically changes their brains, similar to addicts. What if the phenotype expressed makes them more susceptible?
Christian Bale is a different breed, literally. He avoided the intoxication and uses his powers for good. We aught to continue to elevate these stories.
I generally agree with you, but I’d also say that it’s not only insanely ambitious people like Musk and Bezos who seem to have something wrong with him. Ordinary people who have had their “big break” seem to also break their brains once they reach a certain level of affluence. Notch and JK Rowling come to mind.
I imply nothing about how a billionaire distributes their wealth. What I described is a brain exercise to do with yourself and everyone you know to find out what you would do if you had 500 million dollars.
It's wild. At that level, their names could be plastered everywhere and heralded as the greatest men of our time. But nah.
i literally just posted this elsewhere 2 days ago:
elon musk could pay off the national debt of gambia with 0.10% of his wealth. imagine just rolling up to a country, paying off their debt, building roads, houses, hospitals, farms, schools.. and still having 800+ billion dollars to screw around with?
he could have 2.5 million people, generations of families, talking about "our saviour, elon musk".
he could literally be the most liked man on the fucking planet if he really wanted to. instead he's the king of a gaggle of teenage losers and bots he's paid to call him "based".
literally, what is the point of hoarding all of that money? does he have fucking smaug DNA?
Ideally, we wouldn't have a system where the profits produced by human labor get concentrated in the hands of 1% of the people, and then have to wish for those people to share the wealth they gained through gaming a rigged system. Like we could just create a system that actually works for everyone and doesn't concentrate wealth into the hands of the few. Wishing we had this exact same rigged system, but the rich were more benevolent with their stolen wealth, seems like a waste of a wish to me
Well up until the epstein emails, gates was one of the "good" ones. Your issue is that money doesn't really scale well when it comes to social causes. Christian probably had tk vet a significant amount of people before he could find the right staff for the community etc. And theres an entire wasteland of schools that were funded millions only to fail because it turns out you can't buy educational success.
Lots of people do settle for plain rich, they stop at 10 or 50 or 100 million, then they stop hoarding money and just live. The billionaires are the outliers. Actual psychopaths.
One aspect of it is that once you reach a certain level it's hard not to get richer. That's how the system is set up. And it's not like they're working just as hard as they did for their first million. They probably have nothing to do with it.
I'm not defending them. Just that some aspect is human nature and some aspect is the system they live in.
I genuinely believe they are addicts - like, literally addicted to drugs, sex, and gambling. You really see the gambling when they make risky investments and start businesses with unstable foundations. You really see the drug use degrade their brains over years, or when they buy a good businesses and then run it into the ground. And sex... its about power or lack of power over a person or even society as a social symbol, depending on their individual kinks and how validated they are in their lives. Genuinly, more money is NOT what these addicts need.
There is a difference between getting paid in cash, like Bale and getting paid in stock, like Bezos, Gates and Musk.
Bale can do whatever he wants with his cash. Bezo, Gates and Musk have to sell stock first. And selling too much will hurt the stock price and the company so in their executive contracts there are restrictions against them selling. And they often have to sell stock to just cover taxes on stock options converting limiting how much they can actually "earn."
Gates, Bezos and Musk, live off the corporation while CEO. Their travel is a company expense, etc. He life style you see is corporate subsidized.
"Net worth" is a made up theoretical number. If the stock market were to crash Musk especially would be billions in debt and wiped out.
Now, that being said Gates has donated over $100B in his lifetime and when he dies almost all of his net worth will be donated. This is structures so that many generations will benefit.
Jeff Bezos has donated $10B and his ex-wife around $25B.
No, they don't. They don't sell, they take loans against them. The loans with interest smaller than how much the stocks appreciate.
It's literally printing free money.
And they often have to sell stock to just cover taxes on stock options converting limiting how much they can actually "earn."
I'm sorry what lmao
Gates, Bezos and Musk, live off the corporation while CEO
You keep writing better and better shit. Live off the corporation? Like an entity? What?
They use loans, dum dum, it's been covered a billion times, its a known mechanism, it's embarassing you're so incredibly confident about it - I'm getting third degree burns here.
This is structures so that many generations will benefit.
Ohhhh so you're just a fucking shill. Thank God our billionaire overlords donate the money, so we can all benefit from the oh so mighty trickle down. It's almost time for the trickle down!
They do contribute positively (even though I don't like Gates and what he's doing). Bezos revolutionised distribution systems to get good shipped from around the world cheaply. Their tech contributions include infrastructure, AWS and robotics. Gates is the founder of Microsoft and has made the world a much more digital, productive place because of Windows OS. His charity also contributes to helping to eradicate fiseases such as malaria. And finally Musk has pioneered Tesla. Possibly the only reason we have EV is because of Tesla starting it. Of course there's SpaceX that has made undeniably more progress in the last several years than NASAs stagnation for the past few decades. SpaceX is pioneering a revival of space exploration and independence from unfriendly nations such as Russia to launch rockets into space.
Cmon, our world is better because of those guys even if they could be better human beings in one way or another. I know they didn't make the tech themselves, but they did help drive their respective companies to do great things that we take for granted nowadays.
Presuming that isn't a thought-terminating cliché, what is it you think the previous commenter cheers for, that you disregard their boos at your Great Man theory of history?
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u/ColdFix Apr 24 '26
I wish that instead of becoming super rich, more folks just settled for plain 'rich' and engaged in projects like this.
I really don't see the point in being Bezos/Gates/Musk rich.