Are Billionaires Like Jeff Bezos Mentally Ill?
Are Billionaires Like Jeff Bezos Mentally Ill?
The desire for unlimited wealth accumulation is a sign of profound moral sickness
As we covered a few weeks ago, centabillionaire monopolist Jeff Bezos has recently invested in a new predator corporation whose stated mission is to enrich the rich by outbidding local families for houses in order to rent-trap them forever.
This got me thinking about all the other assets the Amazon founder has devoured over the years:
MGM
Whole Foods
The Washington Post
IMDB
Zappos
Souq
Blue Origin
Kiva Systems
Alexa
DPReview
Fabric.com
Woot
Goodreads
Twitch
Audible
Elemental
Quidsi
Annapurna Labels
Accept
Living Social
Twilio
HomeGrocer
Bill Me Later
eZiba
BankBazaar
Kozmo
Ionic
Songza
Wine.com
As we speak, Bezos is trying to acquire Roomba for $1.7 billion.
Plus he has venture capital stakes in:
Google
Airbnb
Twitter
Uber
Lookout
Juno
Grail
Workday
Vessel
Domo
Fundbox
Stack Overflow
Everfi
Remitly
Rethink Robotics
General Fusion
MakerBot
Unity Biotech
General Assembly
Business Insider
And that’s not including all the personal toys:
At least eight mansions
100,000+ acres of land
A bunch of penis-shaped rockets
A $500,000,000 hyper-yacht
And let’s not forget Amazon (the massive e-tailer monopoly) or its monstrous counterpart AWS, which literally runs half the Internet, including servers for Netflix, Medium, Twitch, Reddit, Twitter, Hulu, HBO Max, Shopify, Slack, GE, and the CIA.
If Jeff Bezos were an old granny and these assets were each contained in a box or two, we’d consider him a hoarder with a serious mental condition.
Seriously, how much does one man need?
The legitimate biological answer is:
Not much.
To stay alive, a homo sapien of Jeff’s size requires a few degrees of heat and around 2,000 calories a day.
Once basic needs are secured, it’s a quick climb up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
But there’s a limit to how much fulfillment one can derive from money.
We know for a fact that money can only deliver so much happiness, and after that point, it can deliver no more.
Thanks to the hedonic treadmill that makes people escalate their expenditures as income rises, people making $200,000 per year report no greater happiness than people making $95,000 per year.
There is a maximum level of comfort and control that one can achieve, and after that, it’s a low of diminishing returns or worse.
And surely, when one chooses to hoard wealth at Bezos scale, it leads to significant declines in happiness. Think about what happens when you have that much money:
You have huge amounts of temptation and opportunities for infidelity, which leads to marital breakdown as it has in Bezos’s case.
You have to hire security to protect you 24/7/365, which majorly impedes on your ability to enjoy privacy and solitude.
Your children become targets (the most famous cases being the Getty heir and the Lindbergh baby.)
You have a massive increase in difficulty building new friendships because you assume everyone is after your money.
You have a massive increase in the difficulty of finding a life partner because you assume they’re after your money.
You can’t even have a normal conversation with a stranger because you simply don’t know if you can trust them.
If you’re like Jeff Bezos and you’ve destroyed the economic lives of millions, you never know when someone might try to kill you. Bezos is essentially our generation’s Rockefeller, and by the time Rockefeller’s oil empire peaked, people were trying to blow him up constantly. Literally every day online, I see calls for Jeff Bezos to be guillotined. This is scary stuff.
But he’s not helping his case, is he?
Every day that he continues to devour more of the economy makes him more enemies and puts him in more danger of assassination.
It really does beg the question: Is Jeff Bezos suicidal?
Hoarding is considered a mental disorder like OCD, ADHD, and anxiety. But why do we give money-hoarding and asset-hoarding a pass? Clearly, if one continues to devour other companies after making a billion dollars, they’ve crossed the Rubicon into an obsessive-compulsive form of behavior. More money for more money’s sake is crazy-making behavior.
It’s especially crazy at Jeff Bezos’s level. Seriously, could acquiring a new company even give you a buzz at that level? If you have $137 billion, investing $2 million in a predator startup like Arrived Homes is like you or me investing three dollars.
What possible upside benefit can company-hoarding deliver that doesn’t outweigh the added responsibilities, worries, risks, and threats?
And can’t they see the harm they’re causing millions of others by monopolizing industries, undermining democracy, and destroying the planet?
The hard reality is that people like Jeff Bezos will not stop until they are stopped.
The voracious need to acquire without limit is surely a sign of a serious mental breakdown, moral meltdown, or both.
It’s time to stage an intervention for billionaires like Jeff Bezos. We need to stand in the gap and say “enough is enough.” Destroying more jobs and monopolizing more assets won’t make you happier, healthier, younger, safer, or feel more loved. At this point in your life, it will only do the opposite.”
What would that look like practically?
There are two options:
Option 1
The solution is frightfully simple. It’s a radical idea that will be common sense to future generations:
Individual private wealth must be limited.
That’s right: No more billionaires.
Every dollar over $1 billion in global net worth will be taxed at 100% and placed in a commons trust to automatically fund some universal basic income for the poorest people in the country, who will then spend it into the real economy to create jobs and tax dollars to improve services for all.
As one Redditor put it:
Once you reach $999,999,999 we give you a plaque that says, “congratulations, you won capitalism,” and we name a dog park after you.
A global Billionaire Ban will have wonderful implications for protecting democracy and making the economy more robust and fair. Obviously, democracy we can argue over the exact number for our new global limit — 10 million, 100 million, even 1 billion — so long as we agree on the underlying fundamental that private wealth must have an upper limit.
Older right-leaning unthinking white men will now scream “Communism! Socialism!” while failing to realize this article is not advocating central ownership or central control of the economy. That’s what billionaires are working on.
Option 2
The other option would be to implement an aggressive global net worth tax on billionaires.
This is an awesome idea.
Jeff Bezos is currently sitting on a Smaug-like pile worth $137 billion. Using this handy reverse interest calculator, if humanity had even a 20% annual global net worth tax, in 25 years Jeff Bezos would still have more than $1.4 billion (that’s $1,400,000,000.00+), not including ANY additional income or growth in the next two and a half decades.
And because tax-evading billionaires hold their wealth mostly in assets, a global annual net worth tax will force them to sell some of their stock, which cools prices toward true value while decentralizing and democratizing companies.
Plus it would raise a huge amount of cash for the workers who created 100% of that wealth in the first place. If we taxed all billionaires, it would raise more than $2 trillion per year for schools, hospitals, eldercare, housing the homeless, paying down the national debt, and creating millions of jobs as we transition to renewable power.
By saving billionaires, we save the planet and ourselves.
In conclusion
Maybe billionaires need cognitive behavioral therapy.
Maybe they all need a SPECT brain scan and a prescription for SSRIs.
Maybe they just need a hug and a best friend to tell them they are loved and beloved not for what they own, but for who they are. (Don’t we all need that?)
Whether we decide to put a $1 billion cap on unlimited wealth hoarding or implement an aggressive global annual net worth tax on billionaires, the fact remains that we have to do so. If not, unstable billionaires will literally possess the entire world’s resources within our lifetime.
And if we don’t, we will continue to let people with serious mental illness believe that amassing more possessions than ten million aging hoarders is simply not healthy or sane human behavior.
Or maybe money has made the whole nation go absolutely cash-crazy.