Stop Comparing Yourself To Billionaires Because You Made A Million
You’re financially closer to a homeless person on the street
It’s slowly becoming apparent to me why people defend billionaires, and see nothing immoral in the way they operate. It’s not just that they too aspire to be billionaires. It’s that they genuinely think they have something in common with them.
When journalists criticise billionaires, and point out how immoral it is to hoard that much money in a world where they could be solving collective problems, the people who defend them are not poor people. They are affluent people. Some of them are millionaires.
Becoming a ‘self-made’ millionaire is not easy. But it’s also not that hard, if you come from a reasonably affluent family, that provides you with an excellent education, an inheritance or two, a leg-up when it comes to getting on the property ladder, and plenty of good advice on how to manage your finances.
There are almost 22,000,000 millionaires in the USA, but only 614 billionaires.
Yet the millionaires have this crazy notion that they are the same as the billionaires. That they somehow have something in common with them. That when billionaires are criticised, they should take it personally, because they too have money.
They really shouldn’t.
A millionaire has a net worth of $1,000,000. A billionaire has a net worth of $1,000,000,000. An ordinary billionaire (not a multi-billionaire like Bezos or Musk) has a thousand times more wealth than a millionaire. This means that a millionaire is not only closer to a homeless guy on the street (financially speaking) than he is to a billionaire. He is literally a thousand times closer to the guy on the street than he is to a billionaire.
Being a multi-billionaire is often seen as immoral, because of the amount of suffering in the world that could be rectified with enough money. It’s been estimated that we (as a planet) need around $330 billion to end world hunger, so a handful of the richest multi-billionaires could club together and do that quite easily, if they so chose.
It’s hard to see how it is ethical to hold that amount, while ignoring the issue of human suffering. And yes, it is, of course, more complicated than that. Billionaires don’t sit, Smaug-like, on a big pile of gold waiting to feed the hungry children of the world. Their wealth is tied up in all kinds of not-particularly-liquid assets. So ending world hunger is more complicated than it seems, but so is the tax code, and we know they find work-arounds for that, all the time.
As Julia Horvath put it in this article:
“Imagine a monkey that hoards more bananas he could ever eat while other monkeys around him starve. Scientists would study that monkey. They’d want to understand what’s wrong with him — and conclude he’s a mentally ill monkey.”
There’s nothing inherently immoral about being a millionaire. Not really. A million dollars isn’t enough to solve world hunger. It’s not enough to solve any major, world-wide social problem. It’s enough to make a difference in your community, for sure, and maybe on a wider scale, if you choose to support the right charities with some of your disposable income (as most millionaires do).
As a millionaire you’re likely paying a lot of tax (more, both proportionately and in absolute terms, than some billionaires). You’re taking care of your family, and probably using spare time and money to give back to society in some way. You’re good. Probably. You’re not necessarily immoral, unethical, or selfish.
But make no mistake. If you are a millionaire, you are not in the same class as a billionaire. There is no need to bristle with indignation when Bezos, Buffet, Zuckerberg or Musk are criticised. It would make far more sense to react that way when that homeless guy who lives on the street is criticised. You’re (several) thousand times closer to being him than you are to being a multi-billionaire.
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