It is a truth (almost) universally acknowledged that too many billionaires are bad for a country. But it is also true any billionaires at all is bad—for the billionaires.
I have not lived the billionaire life, of course; but I have had the opportunity to observe closely some people who, if not billionaires, were pretty privileged. The problems they encounter would not be solved by more money; if anything, they become worse the wealthier you get.
The most obvious reward for great wealth is materialistic—the mountains of complex and iconic luxuries that you can buy if you have lots and lots of money. The decisive question here comes from Aristotle: how many beds can you sleep in? It’s not that one comfortable bed is all you need; it’s that all the other beds you may own are of no use to you at all, because you can only sleep in one at a time. Your thirty-bedroom-mansion therefore contains 29 useless bedrooms. Your walk-in closets contain hundreds of unwearable shirts and shoes. No matter how many cars you have, you can only drive one at a time; the rest sit uselessly in your garage. Suppose you have 30 cars and drive them equally often—you can only drive each one once a month. If you concentrate on a few favorites, then you don’t drive the others at all. As to private jets, the faster they are the less time you will spend in them, and the more people will shudder at the pollution you cause.
Since such things are material, they tend to decay and have to be tended. How long does it take to make 30 beds? Wash a couple dozen cars? And what about the inevitable breakdowns? Unless you want to be the prisoner of your possessions 24/7, you’ll need to hire a bunch of people to tend them. And then you’ll have to ensure that they are the right people, honest and competent, because this is expensive stuff. You’ll move, in other words, from tending your possessions to tending those who tend your possessions—trading a mechanic’s job for an overseer’s.
A further problem is telling whether one product is of higher quality than another. I can taste the difference between bread and water, as a meal, and a nice plate of spaghetti; I enjoy yhe spaghetti much more. But I cannot taste the difference between grade A and Grade C Wagyu beef. Similarly, I know the difference between industrial plonk and a $20 bottle of Burgundy; but I couldn’t distinguish between a $40 St.-Emilion and the $1300 version, Chateau Figeac. Nor need I: the everyday clothing of a barista or doorman today is more comfortable than the raiment of a king a couple of centuries ago.
There is usually, moreover, a degree of scam at the top of the line. I may feed my cow only organic grass imported from the mountains of Tibet and then sell the milk to you for a premium price. The milk doesn’t taste any better, but if I am clever enough, maybe I can make you think it does. You will be deluded, but I will be better off.
Whatever added value a hyper-expensive possession provides its owner, then, it is not a greater sensory pleasure. So if mansions and jets and the rest of it don’t provide their owners with sensory satisfactions beyond what much more modest things can deliver, why do people want them?
The answer is that possessions are a way of relating, not merely to sensory reality, but also to other people. Human beings want to be admired by other human beings, and they think that expensive personal possessions bring admiration. That is why so many mansions have double-height entrance halls, often with magnificent staircases down which the owners can make impressive entrances. It is why expensive cars carry recognizable symbols, such as the Spirit of Ecstasy which adorns the hood on a Rolls Royce, or the three-pointed star which identifies a Mercedes. It may also explain, I guess, why private jets are so damn loud.
But what such possessions often bring is not admiration, but envy: the desire to have something owned by someone else who, in my opinion, doesn’t deserve it. Someone who admires me usually wants to be my friend; someone who envies me does not. And so being envied is unpleasant, while being admired is great fun indeed.
But seeking to look well to others, whether in envy or admiration, is, as Aristotle also said, misguided: honor depends as much on those who bestow it as on those who receive it. And those who bestow honor merely on the basis of money spent are usually not the sharpest knives in the drawer.
If you still want to be admired, there is a way: find something difficult to do and master it. Then people will admire you for your achievement, rather than your cash, and their admiration will be as durable as the memory of your mastery.
Nobody fakes envy but admiration, or even affection, is odten feigned. Very wealthy people inevitably encounter what I call the Flunky Problem: they think their flunkies are their friends. This is because the flunkies, who are paid by them or hope to be, work very hard to convince them of their admiration and affection. But don’t be fooled. The genial salesperson who sells you a $5000 suit, or a $500 sweater, is not doing it because they like you; their smiles are in anticipation of their commissions, and their jokes are ultimately on you. There is nothing particularly evil about this; it’s their job.
The only way to escape flunkies, then, is never to buy anything or employ anyone. Apart from this, there are two strategies for a billionaire to deal with the Flunky Problem. One is to deny it, and assume that the affection of the people around one is genuine. Sooner or later, this will bring heartbreak—unless one’s delusions are sustained for a lifetime, which can only happen by chance. The other strategy is universal suspicion: the billionaire suspects everybody around them of being out to get their money. To see if this is the case, they set traps for the people around them. But a trap can’t be sprung without being revealed, and when that happens the person being tested, be they friend or flunky, is offended, usually seriously. The life of the suspicious billionaire grows increasingly lonely.
So great wealth brings no additional material pleasures and endangers human relationships. There remains the possibility of influence: of using your money to change some course of events in the world to your liking. There are two ways to do this, one centered on people and the other on policies. Nether has much promise.
Using one’s money to influence the views of powerful people amounts to bribery of one sort or another, and to bribe someone is to make a flunky of them. As a flunky, the politician or judge whom I host on my yacht will turn against me if I don’t keep inviting him, no matter how many times we have toasted the sunset on my after deck —with my rare Scotch.
If I take the policy approach, endowing foundations and funding think tanks to pursue my preferred agendas, I merely make flunkies out of whole groups of people. Moreover, the political ideas of the very wealthy tend to be at best half-informed: their rich material circumstances, together with their tendency to be surrounded by flunkies, filter out all kinds of unpleasant truths, leaving them prey to crude ideologies. The stock market, for example, usually does better under Democrat presidents than under Republican ones. This is in part because Democrats are willing to spend government money to aid corporations, which benefit from highways, rail lines, power grids, and the like; Republicans are hostile to government spending on such things. National health care would shoulder the financial burden of providing health insurance to employees, relieving their employers of it; it too is opposed by Republicans. And yet the very wealthy tend to be Republicans, because they have accepted the naïve Republican version of individual responsibility. In fact, today’s problems—health care, pollution, racism—are increasingly systematic ones, and the solutions to them have to be collective. No think tank will tell you how to fix them with an ideology from the 18th Century.
If wealthy people tend to be naïve, flunkies do not. Their whole life is based on manipulating the wealthy, and they often get very good at it, which means they get increasingly devious. It is then no surprise that the money the billionaire devotes to furthering his agenda should instead further the agendas of the people and foundations he subsidizes. There are universities which employ lawyers who specialize in breaking the wills of donors, to divert the funds they have provided to ends they never envisaged.
And this naivité introduces yet another great danger of great wealth, which is that it tends to infantilize its possessor. The great learning experiences of life, the ones which teach us how things really are and make us grow up, are often extremely painful—they are the experiences we would spend any amount of money to avoid. And someone with a lot of money can often do that. They can avoid sexual rejection by buying a trophy spouse, who will never betray them as long as the checks keep coming. A few well-placed donations can circumvent the humiliation of academic failure. If nothing else works, a vast variety of anesthetics awaits, from exotic travel to grand cru cognac. The result is a childlike adult, one who cannot abide not having his wishes of the moment satisfied.
But there is one experience from which wealth will not free you: fear. Fear, to begin with, of losing your wealth. This can happen through bad luck or treacherous flunkies who siphon it off; but it can also be a matter of real violence. Your yacht can be boarded by pirates; your mansion invaded by thieves; your children kidnapped on their way to school. I once heard about a couple who were so frightened of someone kidnapping their children that they built the staircase to their children’s bedroom to end in their own on the floor below—with the result that in order to have more children, they had to couple in the barn. The only way out is to hire guards, who are flunkies themselves and so are not to be entirely trusted.
So let us look coldly at the life of the billionaire. He has a vast sum of material possessions which he cannot use, and whose higher qualities he cannot appreciate. He must suspect that his friends, and even his relatives, are really attracted, not by his personality or achievements, but by his wealth. He attempts to influence political and other affairs, but does so in naïve and counterproductive ways. He sees others, less financially-favored, mature into admirable persons, but himself remains oddly childlike. And through it all, wherever he turns, he feels fear.
Billionaires who are actually happy, and there do seem to be some of them, are happy in spite of their wealth, not because of it. Great wealth is not something to envy or to seek.
But people have known that for centuries. My account here of the wealthy life is largely drawn from Plato’s treatment, in Republic IX, of the life of the tyrant, along with the Speech of the Selfish Lover in the Phaedrus. In the entire corpus of Greek economics, there is not a single discussion of maximizing profit, the main question being: how much wealth do I really need in order to live well? And the answer is always: much less than you think. For wealth is, finally, inimical to freedom; a wealthy person must tend their wealth, fear for it in the face of kidnappers, thieves, and flunkies. And in recompense, all they get is the envy of their neighbors and the duplicity of those flunkies.
This used to be common knowledge; classical literature and philosophy are full of illustrations of it and arguments for it. Much contemporary culture, from Gatsby to “Succession,” instills the same messages; but they are largely absent from popular culture and the educational system, the former of which idolizes wealth and the latter of which increasingly claims to train people to acquire it. Why that should be the case is worthy of discussion’ but the life of the wealthy is not worth living. Which is indeed a truth that ought to be universally acknowledged.