There is something very wrong with a society that allows anyone to accumulate a billion dollars or more while people live in desparate poverty.
This guy is a piece of garbage
There is something very wrong with a society that allows anyone to accumulate a billion dollars or more while people live in desparate poverty.
This guy is a piece of garbage
He sure seems to be taken with himself.
Such people have no good advice to offer
Agreed.Though every time I say this someone says I am a communist. WRONG! I'm a social democrat, but that is besides the point.People actually think it's a criminal not to allow someone to make a billion dollars. It just boggles the moral compass.
The New UncleB wrote:
There is something very wrong with a society that allows anyone to accumulate a billion dollars or more while people live in desparate poverty.
This guy is a piece of garbage
you get rich by doing good wrote:
A person who makes a lot of money by definition helps other people. People pay you because you are doing something that is good for them. If you've made a billion dollars, you've either done something a little bit beneficial for a whole lot of people or you've done something very beneficial for a few people.
you can't possibly believe that this is true.
kaitainen wrote:
you can't possibly believe that this is true.
Sure. People buy goods and services that benefit them. If people are buying goods or services from you, you are providing them with some benefit.
I want what you're smoking!Having known quite a few billionaires, or at least their kids at my college where they tended to send them en masse, and having dated at least one billionaire's daughter (talk about letting one get away!), you are mostly wrong. Exploitation is the usual formula. Sometimes the right timing is another (this happened to my girl's father who set up the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, of course the politics of the era helped). Sometimes a person produces something useful like Jobs or Gates, or introduces a new dimension to the economy, like oil and then monopolize crushing competition.The idea that a billion is the reward for utility or goodness is just not true.
you get rich by doing good wrote:
Aaaargh wrote:Too bad these people don;t channel their energy toward helping other people, improving their community, and being more charitable.
A person who makes a lot of money by definition helps other people. People pay you because you are doing something that is good for them. If you've made a billion dollars, you've either done something a little bit beneficial for a whole lot of people or you've done something very beneficial for a few people.
you get rich by doing good wrote:
kaitainen wrote:you can't possibly believe that this is true.
Sure. People buy goods and services that benefit them. If people are buying goods or services from you, you are providing them with some benefit.
I was sure you were being sarcastic or funny and got a bit of a chuckle from your post. That probably wouldn't have happened if I'd known you meant it. Thanks anyway.
haha YO wrote:
Cant answer this one wrote:"A lot of people tell me 'If I made 100 million dollars a year I'd retire and move to the beach'. And I tell them 'Well, that's why you'll never make 100 million dollars'".
Great quote.
True, but it just shows he might as well not be a billionaire if he's going to work himself to the grave like the rest of us
Yatha Sidrha wrote:
Exploitation is the usual formula. Sometimes the right timing is another (this happened to my girl's father who set up the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, of course the politics of the era helped). Sometimes a person produces something useful like Jobs or Gates, or introduces a new dimension to the economy, like oil and then monopolize crushing competition.
So are you saying that the Hong Kong Stock Exchange doesn't provide benefit to people? People use it despite the fact that they get no benefit out of doing so?
Flagpole wrote:
Good advice I guess if what you want is to be uber rich. I hear people say stuff like that too, but the problem is they always put a SUPER high limit on the amount of money it would take them to go do that. I don't understand that at all.
If you had $2 million dollars, you could retire and move to the beach, assuming you didn't have any debt and didn't need an extravagant lifestyle or lots of kids or wives to support.
Invest the money and take 4% of it annually. That's $80,000 per year. If the kids were gone, I no longer had a house payment and continued to be debt free otherwise, in today's world I could EASILY make it on $80,000 a year and live at the beach.
That's true flagpole, but you're still wrong. Someone like that works regardless of the money. He could have retired long ago, like you suggested. But he continued to build something special. These are the types of people that change and dictate the way the rest of the 99.99 percent views our world. They are the select few who have positioned themselves in a way to decide what gets to happen. To me, that is way better than wasting away on a beach or in some Arizona desert waiting to die.
Cant answer this one wrote:
"A lot of people tell me 'If I made 100 million dollars a year I'd retire and move to the beach'. And I tell them 'Well, that's why you'll never make 100 million dollars'".
There is probably a large proportion of people with 100million dollars that retired and live on the beach.
Isn't Bill Gates retired?
If I made 100 million dollars a year I would start the most outlandish businesses for no reason other than a joke. I'd take outrageous bets with other billionaires. It'd be crazy
-advice from a guy with negative net worth
Most of you guys have completely missed the point of the OP's message. As someone had earlier pointed out, he was saying that you cannot be complacent with the status quo (whatever that amount of money is). If you keep working than you can achieve whatever amount of wealth (or whatever "wealth" means to you) you desire. It's the American Dream-work hard and be rewarded for your efforts.
As to the economic benefits. Billionaires donate a lot of money to various charities. Have you ever been to a university? There is a reason its called the XXX school of business. As a professor once told me in a finance lecture, "you can't spend a billion dollars. You might as well give part of it away".
I'll let you google some specific examples but I hope you get my point.
To Flagpole: who would one just want to live off the interest when they are in a position to make 20x more? The only thing that does is create something of an annuity which will provide some financial security.
To close: Stop hating
ESS92 wrote:
Most of you guys have completely missed the point of the OP's message. As someone had earlier pointed out, he was saying that you cannot be complacent with the status quo (whatever that amount of money is).
Yes, you absolutely can. Especially when you have 100 million dollars. So there is no point.
wi|fredo wrote:
ESS92 wrote:Most of you guys have completely missed the point of the OP's message. As someone had earlier pointed out, he was saying that you cannot be complacent with the status quo (whatever that amount of money is).
Yes, you absolutely can. Especially when you have 100 million dollars. So there is no point.
The whole point I was making is that the guy was talking about an aspect of human nature. It's more about personality and mindset than money. Money, as someone earlier pointed out, is just a measuring stick of perceived success. Think of it as points total in a game. Cause, honestly, it really is a game to most of these people.
the used to be cancer guy wrote:
wi|fredo wrote:Yes, you absolutely can. Especially when you have 100 million dollars. So there is no point.
The whole point I was making is that the guy was talking about an aspect of human nature. It's more about personality and mindset than money. Money, as someone earlier pointed out, is just a measuring stick of perceived success. Think of it as points total in a game. Cause, honestly, it really is a game to most of these people.
But it's not actually true. There are plenty of ambitious multi-millionaires that retired as soon as they made their money.
wi|fredo wrote:
the used to be cancer guy wrote:The whole point I was making is that the guy was talking about an aspect of human nature. It's more about personality and mindset than money. Money, as someone earlier pointed out, is just a measuring stick of perceived success. Think of it as points total in a game. Cause, honestly, it really is a game to most of these people.
But it's not actually true. There are plenty of ambitious multi-millionaires that retired as soon as they made their money.
How many billionaires retire? This is like talking about a 14:45 guy versus a 13:10 guy. The 14:45 guy knows enough to know he will never be a 13:10 guy, so, he retires much faster than most, but, nowhere near the ranks of the 13:10 guy. When they talk to the rest of us, who, in financial terms, are mostly hobby joggers on their best day, we have no concept of what the degrees of difference are between a billionaire and a multi-millionaire, which, can be another way of saying someone who made two million dollars. I'm not trying to say I have this guy's entire perspective figured out, but, to me it's pretty straightforward. Guys like this never retire. It's in their blood and it usually takes something profound or catastrophic to change their outlook. For them there is no such thing as "enough". It goes back to the question, how much is enough? "Just a little bit more" is how John D. Rockefeller famously answered the question. I suspect if you asked most of the folks at the top of the heap, they would all reply with some variant of the same message no matter who you asked...the singular exclusion being those, as I noted, who had radical shifts in perspective.
the used to be cancer guy wrote:
[quote]wi|fredo wrote:
The whole point I was making is that the guy was talking about an aspect of human nature. It's more about personality and mindset than money. Money, as someone earlier pointed out, is just a measuring stick of perceived success. Think of it as points total in a game. Cause, honestly, it really is a game to most of these people.
If it's just a game then why do they care if everyone has to pay a little bit more taxes? I mean, as long as it wouldn't change their position relative to everyone else - it would be like chaning a 120 meter soccer field to a 100 meter one.
The difference between being a millionaire and a billionaire is mostly luck. People like Bill Gates got to be rich by having good ideas at the right time, not by their monumental work ethics or brilliance. Many people have those qualities. Few people have the good fortune to have the right kind of idea at the right time.