Billionaires aren't people

Hear me out.

Photo by Shane on Unsplash

We’ve been thinking about it all wrong. The question of good billionaires versus bad billionaires refuses to die, from the Democratic party to debates across media and social media. Are there good billionaires, does such a thing exist? The answer is no, and it will always be no, but not because they’re bad people. It’s because, ultimately, billionaires shouldn’t be conceptualized as we conceive of other people.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg is a lizard behind his immobile face, or that I share no DNA with Jeff Bezos, as much as I’d love to be a different species than that man. Far from it. What I think is that we indulge these men too much when they deliberately try to pivot to being normal or being cool or being relatable. Their mannerisms and outfits and knowledge of pop culture just doesn’t matter when they have more money than small nations. When three guys have as much wealth as the poorer half of the United States we should ignore whether they’re nice and relatable or annoying assholes. All of that is secondary — we should understand billionaires as economic entities rather than ordinary people.

Trump, oddly enough, has helped muddy the waters here. We think of him as a politician, as a fascist, as a jackass, and all of that is true. But he’s also a billionaire. He’s led a life of exploitation and scamming, particularly ripping off his supporters over the last ten years. But really he’s not that different from his fellow uber-rich elites. When Trump declared that there would be massive tariffs on imports from around the world he wasn’t thinking of any of us. When he caved and walked back a lot of those tariffs he wasn’t not thinking about us. There will still be a 10% levy on almost all imports (plus 125% on goods from China), but none of that bothers him. He’s a billionaire, and none of this will affect him. But we, people across America, will see prices rise with nothing to show for it.

Billionaires will have something to show for it. A lot of them already do. The world’s richest people added $304 billion to their combined net worth after Trump pledged to pause tariffs for some countries. It was the largest one-day jump ever:

The president and his cadre aren’t hiding this. In fact, they’re gloating about it. Trump pointed at some of people gathered in the Oval Office for a press conference last night and made it plain, saying one had made $2.5 billion yesterday and another had made $900 million. Even if we sidestep the question of overt market manipulation here, the system itself is set up so that a few people profit massively while countless others worry about whether they’ll be able to retire or if they’ll have to work into their 70s. This is what it looks like for billionaires to live a fundamentally different existence than the rest of us.

And Trump’s cabinet, the richest in history, is full of people with more wealth than we can wrap our heads around. They parrot his talking points and meticulously dodge the fact that they’re getting richer and richer every day. One day they say manufacturing is coming back to America, the next day they say countries are cutting deals that will lead to free trade. It’s all bullshit. Trump’s big play hasn’t helped and won’t help anyone except those who make fortunes on the stock market. None of them care about the truth, or the working class. No matter what happens to us Trump will declare victory, as he always does over problems he creates. He’s a billionaire leading an administration of the super-rich, and it’s time for us to fundamentally distinguish them from the rest of the human race.

Photo by Darren Halstead on Unsplash

Elon Musk makes this all as clear as anyone. While a normal person can organize, protest, and vote, Musk dumps hundreds of millions into politics. He recently spent over $20 million in a losing bid to buy a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat, he spent over $290 million helping Trump win last year, and he converted his wealth into a position as co-president, for now. He’s used the power he bought to kill over 279,445 government jobs, so far. Each of these represents a life upended. Each job provided security and stability to a person, to a whole family in most cases.

But to Musk these jobs and lives are just spreadsheet numbers. All he sees is an opportunity to privatize federal services and profit off public goods, so he bought the chance to make that twisted vision a reality. These sorts of moves are completely inaccessible to normal people. We don’t have the capital to act as political and economic forces in this way. At a certain level of wealth people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump attain an utterly different relationship with society than the rest of us.

We can’t afford to muddle in uncertainty about this right now. Billionaires, from the White House to Wall Street, are playing with our lives. They treat the economy like a game of lines going up and down while neighborhoods flood, people are kidnapped and sent to prison in El Salvador, and millions die from inadequate healthcare. What we have to see is that for a rarified class this is just a game, life is about nothing more than who can be number one on the Forbes leaderboard, and the world lacks real stakes, real meaning. That’s the billionaire experience, and it's fundamentally different than how the rest of us live.

Billionaires wage class war because their lives lack purpose outside of greed. The ruling class has no impetus, nothing to struggle for, no vision for a better world or vision for a future. Trump says he’ll double prices on goods one day then rolls it back a week later. Those decisions could make food unaffordable for entire families, but for him they're just numbers on a screen. Musk's mass firings have made it so that people can’t afford to retire, kids can no longer go to college, and thousands of lives are now in chaos. But for him, it’s all just numbers on a screen. Human lives are merely 1s and 0s to these guys, they don’t understand the human experience and they don’t want to.

Photo by micheile henderson on Unsplash

We’re dealing with people who relate to this world as economic forces rather than as human beings. They are more akin to corporations than people. The time to see this clearly and to respond accordingly is now. People everywhere are feeling the pain of the collective delusion that we can simultaniously have unlimited wealth inequality and a functional society. We can’t. It’s not possible. Billionaires act not as other people but as a political and economic wrecking balls destroying the fabric of society. Their function is fundamentally different from that of normal people, and it’s incompatible with our existence.

More and more people are seeing this truth, and the pain that’s coming over the next months and years will drive the lesson home. It’s us or them. Billionaires should not exist, and unless we construct a society where the ability to hoard such wealth is eliminated, there soon won’t be a viable society left.