The Wealth-Depraved
August 22, 2021
A Manifesto About Real Estate and Sociopathic Wealth
In the weeks since the richest man on earth launched himself to space in a penis-shaped rocket, I’ve spent a lot of time contemplating wealth in terms of real estate. Since I live by the Jersey Shore, I like to walk around the nearby beach towns and admire the architecture. There are still a few modest-sized bungalows, cottages, and cape-cods scattered around Avalon and Stone Harbor, hold-outs among the supersized houses constructed during the past decades as the effects of Reagonomics kicked into high gear. The shore-town real estate is now dominated by these grand homes that exude a kind of beachy McMansion vibe, with an oversized scale and generically wealthy design features. Their look is what I consider arts-and-crafts architecture on steroids, with large windows, steeply pitched gabled roofs, and various open sundecks and covered verandas. It’s as if one mega-house was constructed by mashing together four charming cottages/bungalows side-by-side and on top of each other, then gutting the inside to create an open floor plan and a grand entryway, and tacking on one or two random Victorian-style turrets and cupolas for effect.
But even though the new beachy McMansions aren’t as warm and charming as the more appropriately scaled precursors on their lots—homes that exuded the warmth of generations of happy memories—they are pretty in their own way. If I won the lottery, I’d be probably be inclined to buy one for myself.
Lottery Fever
Before we get specifically into Bezos, let’s first indulge in some lottery/real estate fantasies. Imagine you were the sole winner of one of the huge Powerball or MegaMillion jackpots—a $500 million prize, so after shelling out about half in taxes, you were left with about $250 million. Let’s just say that you gave away $50 million off-the-bat to your close family and friends so they could be financially secure enough to enjoy your newfound wealthy lifestyle with you. And let’s imagine that you put away another $100 million in investments so that for the rest of your life, you could live off the millions of dollars in interest generated every year, so you could enjoy this lifestyle and never work again. That leaves you with about $100 million for the real estate that will enable you to have your dream life.
Since everyone’s lottery fantasies are different, I’ve scoured luxury real estate listings and come up with options for different lottery fantasy adventures to serve a range of tastes/geographic locations! For the sake of this exercise, choose your favorite four from the list below: (And, okay…I went a little crazy with the real estate listings…if you get bored, feel free to skip down to where I start to make a point.)
Aspen, Colorado: $14 million, 6-bedroom with views of Independence Pass and Aspen Mountain, only 2.5 miles from downtown Aspen. The 10-acre property includes a ranch-style main residence and guest quarters above the 3-car garage, as well as two streams, a pond, natural water features, and sculpted stone terraces. (I had originally selected Jackson Hole as my fantasy ski getaway, but in the weeks since I first started writing this post I learned that the owner of the Jackson Hole resort supports insurrectionists who are trying to destroy our democracy, so I’ve decided to take my imaginary wealth elsewhere. Hmmph! Take THAT!)
Avalon, New Jersey: $11 million, 10-bedroom bayfront arts-and-crafts-on-steroids with bayside swimming pool.
Barcelona, Spain: $8 million, 6-bedroom villa with views of the city and the sea, a gym, jacuzzi, and sauna, private pool and barbecue area, interior with marble floors, and an elevator serving all floors.
Belize: $1.5 million 8-bedroom luxury beachfront home with a large veranda, a hot tub, a covered tiki bar area, a pool, and a 320-foot-long pier.
Big Sky, Montana: $12 million, 7-bedroom log ski home that sits right on the ski trail, with multiple open spaces.
Boston, Massachusetts: $16 million six-floor, 8-bedroom single-family townhome with two large balconies, a media/playroom, home gym, an oversized deck off the kitchen, outdoor courtyard, and exceptional views of the City and the Charles River.
Busby, Big Horn County, Montana: $8 million property encompassing 7,073 acres on land that’s intersected by multiple fishing creeks. The property includes the main house with 5 bedrooms, a one-bedroom bunkhouse, the original 1942 house with 5 bedrooms (presumably for guests or staff) and a horse barn.
Capri, Italy: $5 million 8-bedroom villa located a 10-minute walk from the famous square of Capri, with amazing views and plenty of sun-bathed living spaces from beautiful outdoor terraces and gardens overlooking the Mediterranean Sea and rocky coastline, including a swimming pool and a beautiful stone outdoor patio with stone archway.
Chicago, Illinois: $10 million newly renovated 6-bedroom home with a beaux-arts style limestone façade with dramatically high ceilings, and incredible outdoor spaces including fully built-out roof deck with fireplace, plantings, a built-in grill, and views of Lincoln Park, a large rec room, a second kitchen and den opening up to the terraced roof for entertaining.
Clonmel, Munster, Ireland: $2 million ivy-covered 14-bedroom Georgian mansion, including views of the countryside, a riverfront position (good for kayaking), and a beautiful Orangery/conservatory with growing ferns, palms, and vines, as well as an original wine cellar.
Galveston, Texas: $3 million modern waterfront 5-bedroom home on a prime piece of land on Pirate’s Beach. Built on stilts, the home overlooks the water from every room, and includes plentiful deck space with hot tub.
Kauai, Hawaii: $10 million 6-bedroom private oceanfront estate located on Aliomanu Bay on the Northeast side of Kauai, including a 5-bed main house, as well as a detached garage/workshop with a second-story suite featuring a studio bedroom and bathroom. The property features unobstructed ocean views from all rooms.
Key West, Florida: $9 million, 6-bedroom oceanfront home, where you can spend your winters as a margarita-fueled snowbird. The property features a dramatic interior and grand spiral staircase, a private beach, a built-in rock pool with hot-tub and two-story slide, and an ample outdoor kitchen.
Killington, Vermont: $3 million ski-in/ski-out trailside home that blends mountain charm and modern amenities, and includes 5 bedrooms, 2 wet bars, internet movie theater, golf simulator, ski room, sauna, outdoor fire pit and hot tub.
Lake Charlevoix, Michigan: $13 million grand mansion with 7 bedrooms, a theater, ornate wooden bar imported from Malaysia, wine cellar, 400-foot pier on the lake, outdoor fireplace, and a stream with waterfalls running by the house.
Lake Tahoe, California: $13 million elegant 6-bedroom estate with multi-tiered verandas with firepits, barbecue bay, golf course and mountain views, spa, golf simulator room, media room with fireplace and pub, and waterfall leading to a hot tub.
Malibu, California: $15 million 6-bedroom beachfront residence (one of the largest residences available on Broad Beach), featuring a blend of light-filled gathering areas, private retreats and spacious oceanfront balconies, with direct access to the sand. The property has an elevator, and amenities include a gym/workout area. You can be neighbors with Hollywood celebrities!
Manuel Antonio, Costa Rica: $3 million 8-bedroom estate with multiple decks overlooking the Pacific, a swimming pool, and a location close to shops and restaurants.
Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts: $12 million 9-bedroom oceanfront property on the northern tip of the island, with traditional cedar-shake seaside architecture, incredible deck, balconies directly over the ocean, private beach, and plenty of entertaining space.
New Orleans, Louisiana: $3 million, 10-bedroom 1880 Italianate home in the heart of the Garden District with historical features, grand staircase, soaring ceilings, and updated kitchen and bathrooms. The property also includes a carriage house (guest house).
New York, New York: $13 million 6-bedroom penthouse in the heart of SoHo, with private deck, providing the charm of a loft with modern amenities.
Paris, France: $15 million 8-bedroom renovated early 17th Century renaissance property (built in 1610, but with all modern amenities!) in Paris’s 5th Arrondissement. The home is four floors with elevator, with a leafy terrace with views of Notre Dame, cathedral ceilings, and a vaulted basement with a swimming pool directly cut from the rock, a wine cellar, a sauna and a fitness room.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: $12 million 6-bedroom penthouse in Center City, featuring panoramic city views from the 46th floor. The property is a full-floor residence with direct elevator access, and includes a private gym/wellness area, sauna, wine room, wet bar, personal outdoor space, and gallery space for an art collection.
San Juan Islands, Washington: $23 million, 5-bedroom estate in Friday Harbor, with incredible views from orcas to Mt. Baker and Cascades. With elegant 1920s era décor—wood finishes, chandeliers, and dramatic staircase, the main house features a master suite and three guest bedroom suites, a theater, gym, sauna, billiards room, and wine room. There is also a banquet room/ballroom entertaining space that can open to the outside. The guest house, with master bedroom and loft, resembles a rustic villa. The property also includes a carriage & boat house (garage/storage/ space), outdoor spa pool and greenhouse.
Savannah, Georgia: $5 million: 6-bedroom freestanding 1831 building, prime location in the heart of the Landmark District, which includes an elevator, 9-car parking, large adjacent lot (largest lot in the city center!).
Sonoma, California: $15 million (including $5 million property and $10 million allowance to build your new dream home to your specifications), 40-acre parcel in California’s winery region, featuring a remodeled home suitable as a guest home or for property staff, horse stalls, pool and orchards, and with infrastructure ready for your architect to design your dream home. Instead of merely having a wine cellar, you can have your own winery!
St. Petersburg, Florida: $10 million luxury 7-bedroom villa on the Gulf of Mexico with an elegant entry foyer that opens to a stunning double-sided circular staircase, built-in saltwater aquarium, as well as a theater room and built-in office. The property includes a marble deck with luxurious outdoor kitchen/bar area, numerous sitting/lounging areas and gas fireplace, infinity pool with built-in Tiki pool bar, hot-tub, pergola, composite dock, and multi wide-watercraft boat lift & wet slip.
Tuscany, Italy: $3 million 6-bedroom restored 19th-century villa in the Leopoldina style on 9 hectares of land, and including a 15 x 7 swimming pool, blending modern comforts with old-world charm.
Villanova, Pennsylvania: $14 million, elegant 10-bedroom estate on 17 acres on Philadelphia’s Main Line—essentially your own private 21st century stone-clad village. The property includes a wine cellar, a four-bedroom guest house, a separate office building with clock tower, and a pool.
Waves (Outer Banks), North Carolina: $1.5 million semi-oceanfront 8-bedroom (5 of these are considered master suites) property on a landscaped, partially wooded lot, with a saltwater pool, hot tub, game room, wet bar, and (primary) master suite with jacuzzi.
The luxury life I would create for myself would include spending August through October in my primary residence in Avalon at the southern Jersey shore, where I could kayak and paddleboard and maybe keep a small boat to cruise around the bay. As the New Jersey weather started to get dreary, I would then pack up my human, feline and canine entourage and head to my estate in Costa Rica. (With my newfound wealth, I could charter a plane to all of my different residences, so my pets wouldn’t have to be overly traumatized!) I would then spend a few months enjoying views of the Pacific from the multiple decks and patios of my estate as capuchin monkeys scampered around. Then for the Christmas holidays and the ski season, I would jet off to Aspen, where I could spend my days trying to become an expert skier. And then from April through July my home base would be my fourth property in Paris, where I could immerse myself in the culture and become a local, while also setting off on mini-vacations around the European continent. By my calculations, I’ve “only” spent about $43 million of the $100 million I had allotted for real estate.
So, choosing four luxury properties for yourself, how much did you spend? The most expensive combination above “only” totals $68 million, so even if you tacked on an extra million dollars for two luxury cars to be parked at each location, and an extra $4 million total to renovate/upgrade/personalize these properties (which you actually don’t need to do), you still would’ve “only” spent $73 million, leaving you $27 million shy of your $100 million house-shopping budget.
So, what would you do with the extra money? Would you take up some expensive hobbies? Collect antique cars? Rare diamonds? Faberge eggs? Thoroughbred horses? You could upgrade to a bigger, more expensive house in some of these places—there are certainly more expensive real estate options in places like Aspen, Malibu, New York City and Washington State, but the lower-priced options in the list above are actually among the most expensive properties available in their locations. And, how many bedrooms do you need, really? Theoretically you could snap up more real estate—there are many great options on the list! But would you do that, knowing that you would already have four properties that would be vacant an average of more than 9 months out of the year?
But now let’s imagine that you had even MORE money than that…imagine you had a BILLION dollars—four times the $250 million you’d have to play with as a mega lottery winner. There are currently over 600 billionaires in the United States. What would you do? Assuming that you allocated $100 million to friends/family (you’re very generous!) and put away $500 million so you could live off the interest in the style to which you’re about to become accustomed, what do you do with the remaining $400 million, real-estate-wise?
At this point, there are certain places that are out of your budget—simply because there aren’t properties that are EXPENSIVE enough for you. As a billionaire, you’d need to have enough space so you’d never have to interact with neighbors, and you’d only ever deal with guests and servants. As much as I love Avalon/Stone Harbor, if I were a billionaire I’d probably have to go to the Hamptons to spend that much money on a waterfront estate with private beach space. For $65 million, I could spend my seashore months in a grand 6-bedroom beachfront property in East Hampton with swimming pool, game room, and tennis court.
For my winter ski haven, could upgrade my ski getaway to a massive $75 million recently built resort estate in Aspen with seven bedrooms, as well as its own theater, billiards room, and bowling alley.
Costa Rica would just be too far below my budget if I were a billionaire. To satisfy my need for tropical real estate, I’d probably need to buy my own private island. Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophile island in the Caribbean, Little St. James, is valued at approximately $60 million. Hopefully I could find something similar. (Or, if I had to purchase that particular cursed island, I’d have to budget in money to ship in a boatload of sage to burn before I moved in.)
My $15 million updated Renaissance home in Paris would no longer be expensive enough for me, so I could upgrade to a $38 million, 15-bedroom private mansion in the 16th Arrondissement built in 1907, designed in the ornate old-world rococo style.
But I’d probably spend even LESS time in my Parisian residence, because as a billionaire I’d need to buy MORE property, perhaps for a Mediterranean escape. The most expensive resort in Mallorca, Spain that fits my needs is a new $17 million, 8-bedroom, four-level modern villa nestled in the hills In the Montport region of Southwestern Mallorca, which includes a separate guest house, an indoor pool, and outdoor infinity pool, and a grand terrace with panoramic views over the port of Andratx.
And I suppose I’d need a yacht to cruise around the Mediterranean when I’m in Europe and the Atlantic when I’m at the Hamptons. For $50 million, I could travel the seas in luxury in a yacht with five bedrooms with ensuite bathrooms, multiple dining areas, a dance floor, and a hot tub. And since I would have even more properties to jet to, I might want to buy my own private jet for $25 million and retain my own pilot/flight crew instead of having to charter a flight every time I wanted to visit a different one of my estates.
On the one hand, this sounds amazing. But on the other hand, if this was you, wouldn’t you have already started to feel like a complete douche for spending THAT much on yourself? Including the yacht, you would have six luxury properties to jet (or cruise) between—which means you’d probably spend less than 2 months out of the year at any one. And, by my calculations, there is still $70 million left over from the original $400 million mansion/yacht budget. If your $250 million lifestyle seemed a bit MUCH for any one person, doesn’t this billion-dollar lifestyle seem a bit…obscene?
I guess any of us who achieved this obscene wealth through the fluke chance of a lottery ticket would never quite feel like we deserved it. But what if your luck wasn’t the lottery, but it was being born the grandchild of a successful capitalist titan who founded a business empire? What if your luck was that your granddaddy was a real-life Jed Clampett who struck gold on his Texas dirt farm?
Wealth Depravity and Addiction
The Forbes list of the wealthiest people in the U.S. includes a lot of billionaires keeping it in the family, demonstrating that extreme wealth is often less the result of hard work and more the result of being born extremely lucky. The Wal-Mart Waltons dominate the list, with Alice, Jim and Rob being worth over $61 billion each, and three other Waltons with a net worth between $7.2 billion and $15 billion. While some of the older Waltons may have actually done some work in the early years of the company as their father was building up his big-box empire, it’s likely they haven’t done any actual work in decades. How likely is it that the younger generation had any real work or responsibility to “earn” their obscene wealth? The Forbes list also includes numerous representatives of the Lauder family of Estee Lauder cosmetics—five members of the family are worth between $2.6 billion and $17 billion. Perhaps a few of these heirs may have dabbled in some work at the company that fit their interests, but how likely is it that any had real responsibility? How likely is it that any of them had to skip a luxury vacation because of a work deadline or a lack of available PTO days? The same goes for the Mars candy family, two of whom clock in with $29 billion each, and another four with $7.2 billion each.
Not everyone on the Forbes list may have been proverbially born on third base, but aside from Oprah Winfrey, there don’t seem to be many real rags-to-riches stories. Using the baseball analogy, at the lower end of the scale are those who were born on second with zero outs and the top of the lineup at bat. And on the higher end of the scale, there are those born onto tracks that were specifically constructed to whip them around the bases at high speed on an endless loop, allowing them to rack up thousands and thousands of points against an outfield that’s been blindfolded and hog-tied. And yet these people apparently feel entitled to multiple lifetimes worth of obscene wealth, despite in many cases having done little to nothing to earn it themselves.
Disney heiress Abigail Disney compared wealth to addiction in her op-ed in The Atlantic.
“As time has passed, I have realized that the dynamics of wealth are similar to the dynamics of addiction. The more you have, the more you need. Whereas once a single beer was enough to achieve a feeling of calm, now you find that you can’t stop at six. Likewise, if you move up from coach to business to first class, you won’t want to go back to coach. And once you’ve flown private, wild horses will never drag you through a public airport terminal again.
Comforts, once gained, become necessities. And if enough of those comforts become necessities, you eventually peel yourself away from any kind of common feeling with the rest of humanity.”
It’s an addiction—a depravity—that regular people can’t really fathom. Can you imagine having a more than you could ever spend on yourself on this planet in one lifetime, and thinking that you were somehow deserving of even MORE? Would you think to yourself, “Well this sucks! I can’t even afford my own penis-shaped rocket ship!”
To get even more obscenely rich, would you use your amassed wealth to gobble up vast tracts of real estate so that hundreds of thousands of working-class people in a given neighborhood would have no choice but to funnel money into your coffers just to have a roof over their heads? Would you gobble up a corner of the retail market, creating a monopoly that would put small shops out of business and stifle competitive wages—even if it meant that your employees had to rely on government hand-outs to survive? When you watched TV news reports of death and devastation from hurricanes and wildfires, would your first instinct be to pay politicians to fight tooth-and-nail against any laws that would compel your business to take even the most minor steps to reduce climate change, staunchly opposing anything that might restrict your wealth from continuing to increase at a turbo-charged rate? Would you use your wealth to fight for your “right” to make employees work long hours for low wages? You always deserve more, right? Another luxury tropical island! Another villa! A yacht made of gold!!! That’s taking a feeling of entitlement to a truly deranged level.
And yet…obscene wealth addiction—wealth depravity—is still respected, as if it’s a good thing—even by many of those being exploited by it. It seems to be part Stockholm Syndrome, and part just not being able to fathom just how much the wealth-depraved set is keeping from the rest of us. Instead of admiring depraved wealth addicts, we should look upon them with more visceral disgust and less sympathy than we would look upon a urine-soaked homeless person lying in the gutter next to piles of his own shit sucking the last dregs of alcohol from bottles fished from the dumpster outside the nearest dive bar. But for many people, it’s easier to give the wealth-depraved a free pass, and instead blame the country’s economic problems on the (black or brown) single mother on welfare who manages to finagle an extra slice of government cheese for her six-year-old. Blaming the people most victimized by the system doesn’t make any real sense, but the “unfairness” of someone supposedly cheating the system for a small amount seems to be easier for a lot of people to comprehend than a depraved level of wealth.
By one recent estimate, Jeff Bezos is now worth $193.3 billion. (Money at that extreme level becomes theoretical, so estimates vary.) Think back to the imaginary, luxurious life you would have if you were worth $1 billion—a life that you already probably thought was too much for any one person. Jeff Bezos has a net worth that’s nearly 200 times higher than that.
Others have tried to cut through just how mind-boggling of an amount it is that Bezos is hoarding, but it really is difficult to grasp. (This one using grains of rice is pretty powerful.) I recently saw a meme—which must’ve been created before Bezos’s recent Covid spike in wealth—that stated that if a person made $180,000 per day from the time Jesus was born, he/she STILL wouldn’t have as much money as Jeff Bezos. The math checks out: 180,000 x 365 days = $65,700,000 per year x 2021 years = $132,779,700,000. Except now that Bezos’s net worth has skyrocketed, the daily amount a person would’ve had to have earned since Jesus was born to come close to Jeff Bezos would be about $257,569 per day ($94,012,864 per year) for 2021 years.
bUt bILLiOnAIrEs CReaTe JoBs!!!
It’s true that people like Bezos and Zuckerberg ($130 billion net worth) have pioneered some technological advances that have greatly impacted how all of us live and communicate (for better or for worse). Being pioneers and the founders of influential and profitable companies, they should definitely be wealthy. But isn’t ONE BILLION DOLLARS wealthy enough? No? What about $2 billion, which is about twice as much as any of the rest of us can imagine spending on ourselves? $5 billion, enough for five lifetimes of luxury, including multiple private islands, private planes, private yachts? $10 billion? How much MORE wealth than anyone can reasonably be expected to use on earth should one person be justified in hoarding?
Since Bezos currently has enough money for nearly 200 lifetimes of opulence, I can’t help but to think that his money would’ve been better spent funding medical research to prolong life on earth rather than on technology to fly off to space in a giant penis. It’s a shame to have so many lifetimes of wealth, and only one lifetime in which to enjoy it, right? Perhaps he should try to fund medical research to make him not only the richest man on earth, but also the oldest—he could grow to be a real-life Montgomery Burns!*
Bezos and Zuckerberg created companies that have global impact. But, if Bezos had never been born, we’d all be shopping online at another e-commerce behemoth that effectively combined online sales and logistics, which maybe would’ve been rolled out 3 to 6 months later. The preliminary technology was there, just waiting for someone to harness it. Or, even better, maybe we’d be shopping online at various smaller companies that WOULDN’T have a monopoly that drives down wages. And yet Bezos has been compensated as if the entire commerce of the world emanates solely from his pores…as if without his benevolent presence, we’d all be exchanging goods by bartering and haggling on the streets like poor, famine-starved Medieval peasants.
If Zuckerberg had never been born, we’d still be sharing photos and having pointless political debates with relatives and former high-school classmates on a different platform that figured out the algorithms and features that would make it more addictive. The tools were already there, with MySpace and Friendster before that. Since Zuckerberg WAS the first one to effectively harness social media for that purpose, he definitely SHOULD be wealthy. But should he be able to hoard enough obscene wealth for over 130 lifetimes?
Whenever these obscene wealth-hoarders are criticized, the Pavlovian response of people under the spell of the country’s oligarchs is always, “bUt tHeY CReaTe JoBs!!!” And then someone else usually correctly points out that CONSUMERS are the ones who create jobs. The wealthy aren’t job “creators” as much as they are job “redistributors,” concentrating the workforce into (often low-paying) jobs that effectively funnel the profits from labor across the country into their own offshore bank accounts. Wal-Mart employs over 2 million people around the world. But it’s ridiculous to think those people would be jobless and begging on the streets if Wal-Mart didn’t exist. Those retail employees would either be working at the mom-and-pop stores that Walmart pushed out of business, or in the smaller department stores and regional chains that would’ve sprung up to fill the void and meet consumer demand.
The Wal-Mart Waltons have effectively gotten American taxpayers to subsidize their lavish lifestyles by paying workers so little that they often need government assistance. Numerous articles have been written documenting how Wal-Mart has negatively impacted American towns and American workers, including this one and this one and this one and this one. Their virtual monopoly also impacts the manufacturers and vendors who sell to them by forcing them to agree to lower profit margins in order to secure the account, which depresses the wages of their own employees.
My fear for my own future is that, despite decades of working in the corporate world and never having taken any kind of government assistance (not that there’s anything wrong with that), I may find myself needing to support myself in my 70s and 80s by taking a low-paying job at Walmart. I can imagine a desperate future in which—even if I worked more than 50 hours per week—I might need to rely on some form of government assistance like food stamps. Assuming Republicans wouldn’t have already ended all “entitlement” programs by then, I imagine that my one day off per week would be spent taking two or three buses to get to the site where I would need to submit to multiple drug and alcohol tests, as well as an anal probe (I’m sure by that time Republicans will have found some justification to add that humiliation to the process) in order to feed myself. Then, when I would use those food stamps to buy groceries (probably in Walmart, because I wouldn’t be able to afford anywhere else), the young mother in a red hat in line behind me would stage-whisper comments mocking my groceries for being at once too ghetto and not quite ghetto enough for what she thinks someone like me should deserve. I imagine she’ll be a person who is understandably frustrated that she can no longer afford the quality-of-life perks for her children that she enjoyed in her childhood, but who mistakenly directs her anger at me, while praising the billionaire Walton family as “job creators.”
People also use “jobs” to justify Jeff Bezos’s 10-minute joyride to space in a giant flying penis. It’s true, a lot of people must’ve worked on that project. But…are there a lot of unemployed rocket scientists? Just think of what those scientists could’ve done to benefit all humanity if they weren’t sidetracked on a billionaire’s phallic vanity project. We’ve been flying sub-orbital spacecraft for over 60 years now, so the Blue Origin technology itself wasn’t new. Imagine if, without Bezos hoarding so much un-taxed wealth, NASA was funded enough to employ those rocket scientists to develop technologies that, while less penis-y, would really advance science and space exploration and our understanding of the cosmos.
(And, speaking of sidetracked, can we just take a minute to talk about how there was someone wealthy enough to bid $28 million on a ticket on Blue Origin, and then back out due to “scheduling conflicts?” Like, someone that wealthy can’t postpone a meeting for a day? Or, if it was something like the birth of a child or his own wedding or the wedding of a family member, wouldn’t he have had an idea of that date when he placed the bid? I have a theory. A lifetime of watching movie and TV comedies that feature auction scenes leads me to the only reasonable conclusion—that Bezos himself placed the bid! My guess is that he sent a lackey to the auction to drive up the bidding price, but the hapless minion ended up getting so caught up in the bidding frenzy that he accidentally ended up the highest bidder. It’s obvious, right? But I digress…)
Yes, there are jobs that exist to fulfill the “needs” of the wealth-depraved. There are certainly people employed designing and building things like luxury yachts. But if there were fewer multi-multi billionaires, those mega-yacht-builders would be employed designing smaller boats or jet-skis, or maybe tricked-out RVs for the less nautically inclined middle-class customers who would have more disposable income and free time for travel. And maybe the luxury yacht industry wouldn’t really suffer after all—the difference might just be that instead of designing $50 - $100 million yachts for individuals, they would build the yachts for companies/cruise line divisions that would charter them to a bigger and richer class of multi-millionaires who might not have the wealth required to buy and maintain a mega-yacht themselves, but who might be willing and able to spend a few million indulging in the yacht experience for a few weeks every year. (If I won the mega-millions lottery, I’d be a potential customer!)
What Would Ce Easier Than Being a Wealthy CEO?
There’s a popular meme/twitter post that suggests the premise for a reality TV show: the CEO of a large company would be forced to survive on the measly wages of his lowest-paid employee for 30 days. The defenders of the wealth-depraved respond to this suggestion by fawningly crediting CEOs for doing more hard work than is humanly possible. I saw one commenter counter that there should be a reality TV show in which the lowly, presumably unskilled employee has to do ALL the work of the CEO. He made it sound like the CEO was working 14-hour days doing all the work of HR, Payroll, the R&D department, Legal, Marketing, etc., with the stress of all his employees’ woes hanging heavy on his shoulders. (For some reason it reminded me of the Seinfeld spoof of Schindlers List, when Judge Reinhold’s close-talking character laments how much MORE he could’ve done for people if only he had just made a few more sacrifices.)
If I had seen the comment in real-time, I might’ve replied that this second TV premise wouldn’t work because it would be too painfully boring. After all, it would just consist of someone merely signing off on the recommendations of highly paid, competent underlings. How difficult could it be? If you had to Quantum Leap into anyone else’s life, what would be easier than leaping into the life of a wealthy CEO? Retiring wealthy CEOs pass their companies down to their trust-fund failsons all the time, and even though the most stupid and narcissistic failsons might drag their companies through multiple bankruptcies, the companies nearly always remain intact. And, more importantly (for the wealthy CEOs), even if the companies falter, they themselves will still be rich, with the lower-level employees and the smaller companies who do business with them being the ones who take the losses. And, unlike the mythical, caring CEO conjured up by the commenter, real CEOs have proven time and time again that they just don’t care, as they float away on their golden parachutes to luxurious retirements while often leaving a trail of financial despair.
Wealth Depravity And Innovation
If we started to cut off the ability of billionaires to rig the system to funnel the wealth generated by American workers into their own offshore bank accounts, that doesn’t mean that everyone would have the SAME income and no one would be wealthy. There would still be a big gap between the richest and poorest, just not quite as astronomical as what we have now. I’d like to imagine a better society in which, using today’s dollars, the lowest-paid workers earned $50,000 per year, and most of those at the upper echelon hit a ceiling of about $500 million net worth, with possibly a handful of people managing to break that ceiling if their ideas and ingenuity really impacted everyone’s daily lives and changed the world for the better.
Some people seem to think that, by not allowing our wealth-depraved oligarchs to hoard billions, we’ll destroy people’s incentive to be entrepreneurs. But how likely is that, really? For a minimum-wage worker at a fast-food restaurant with a big idea for a business or an innovation, what is the bigger disincentive for him or her to pursue the dream: Working 60 exhausting hours a week to barely pay rent in a one-bedroom apartment and having no discretionary income to buy the laptop/computer programs/materials, etc. to move forward with the big idea? Or putting in 35 – 40 hours per week and having enough post-rent money to purchase needed business tools, but “only” being able to aspire to the $500 million level of wealth? Do you imagine that the fast-food worker would just decide to continue to flip burgers and live in a one-bedroom apartment because he or she can “only” aspire to a wealthy future that includes four or five luxury residences and one yacht? Would Jeff Bezos have decided NOT to start Amazon, and to have just continued to do whatever he was doing if a future in which flying a giant penis rocket into the upper atmosphere wasn’t on the table?
Empty Homes and Buildings
Conservatives tend to cite Bernie Sanders’ or Elizabeth Warren’s comfortable net worth as some kind of hypocrisy, as if either of them is trying to condemn and eliminate all wealth when they fight to curtail the wealth depravity that sucks the resources from the majority of American workers. That’s not the case. Again, not all wealth is inherently bad. I can concede that there might be an economic need for a wealthy investor class. I grew up watching “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” and I enjoy Zillow porn as much as anyone else, so I wouldn’t want to create an economy where people couldn’t be fabulously rich. I like to live vicariously through them too. I just happen to think $500 million—double the amount of the original lottery fantasy—is fabulously rich.
I don’t begrudge the people I see in the $2 - $6 million mega-cottages I pass on my beach and town walks in Avalon and Stone Harbor. I imagine many of those people earned their success—surgeons who saved lives, or doctors who built their own successful practices while reducing physical suffering; business-owners who founded a range of companies—wholesale/retail stores, bars/restaurants, contracting companies, plumbing companies, electricians, etc. Or maybe they inherited small family businesses and worked hard to build them up to be even more profitable. While the wealthiest lawyers and accountants are likely to have gotten that rich by feeding the addictions of the country’s wealth-depraved, most people in those professions earned their wealth serving less sleazy clientele, and they probably worked long hours and went through a lot of stress during the early decades of their careers. So seeing these people enjoying their seaside mansions is capitalism at its best and exemplifies the meritocracy we strive to be.
What bothers me is walking around Avalon/Stone Harbor at 9:00 on a Saturday night in the middle of the summer and seeing a good portion of these mega-homes showing no signs of life. True, some houses might just LOOK vacant if their occupants are still out at dinner, or having drinks, or taking kids to the Wildwood boardwalk. But I suspect that many of these mega-homes are vacant because they are owned by people wealthy enough to hoard real estate they’ll barely ever visit. I can’t help but to notice that most of the homes that appear lifeless are the largest and most expensive bayside and beachfront mansions. And every seaside mega-cottage that sits empty on a Saturday night in late July/early August is a tangible reminder of the other people who are being priced out of building decades of happy family memories there.
Working in Manhattan throughout the 20-aughts and 20-teens, I found it depressing to see new giant residential skyscrapers rising from the ground, knowing that the increase in available residential square footage counter-intuitively was bound to make all Manhattan real estate even MORE expensive, because these new units are built almost exclusively for the wealthy, and many units will remain vacant. As long as a billionaire oligarch can purchase the penthouse, it’s apparently not a big deal to developers if many of the units on the 50 floors below remain empty. A January 2020 piece in The Atlantic describes how luxury real estate in Manhattan is empty while the homeless shelters are overflowing.
Smaller retail businesses and restaurants in Manhattan are also being suffocated by the wealth imbalance, as wealthy landlords would prefer to leave storefronts vacant for months or years, holding out to attract a national chain that can afford to pay an astronomical rate, instead of reducing the rent to what should be fair market value so that a unique, up-and-coming business might be able to build a customer base in that location. Even before the pandemic, Manhattan was becoming a rich ghost town. Every empty unit represents a dream deferred for a potential entrepreneur, who might otherwise be able to set up shop if we didn’t allow the real estate market to be monopolized and artificially inflated by the oligarch class.
bUt rIcH PeOPLe DoNAtE to cHAriTY!!!!
Yes, many of the wealthy become philanthropists and give money to good causes. (Well, with the notable exception of one charity-cheating family whose idea of philanthropy is to collect other people’s money via a charitable foundation and use it to fund a political campaign and buy a tacky, self-aggrandizing portrait of the narcissistic family patriarch.)
To offset some of the negative feedback from his expensive jaunt into space in a giant flying penis, Jeff Bezos donated $200 million (possibly money he found underneath his sofa cushions) to worthy causes. In 2020, he made the single largest charitable donation-- $10 billion—to fight climate change. Going back to the original lottery/billionaire framework, that amounts to him giving away 10 lifetimes of opulence—multiple mansions, yachts, private jets. Which, depending on which wealth calculator you consult, leaves Bezos with “only” 170 to 190 lifetimes worth of obscene wealth. Even having given away more than $10 billion, he still has enough for his trust-fund spawn to enjoy billionaire indolence for centuries.
In his divorce, Bezos made his ex-wife MacKenzie Scott one of the world’s richest people, with a net worth of about $56 billion. Yet this huge amount—$56 billion is over 50 lifetimes worth of obscene wealth—didn’t put a dent in Bezos’s lifestyle, since he ALREADY had well achieved the most opulent lifestyle possible for one man to have on earth, many times over. And now MacKenzie Scott has stated that she’s giving away at last half of her wealth to charity, which is a good thing—but even that will still leave her with more than 20 lifetimes worth of obscene wealth at her disposal. Half of one’s wealth would be a prohibitive amount for most working people to give away—I would be left with virtually no tangible assets. But when one already has over 50 lifetimes of obscene wealth, is it really that difficult to cut back to 20 lifetimes?
I’m sure the grateful charities that will receive the largesse from Bezos and Scott will be able to do a lot of good with that money. But, if working people actually generate the country’s wealth, why is it up to a handful of billionaires to decide which charities are worthy? What if some wealth-depraved oligarchs decide to support charities that really aren’t that important to most of us? After all, my first choice for a charity wouldn’t be for a wealthy donor to fund the construction of a new building at an ivy league university as a legal way to bribe the school to accept his academically middling son Jared. And why do the wealth-depraved get the credit for donating the wealth that the rest of us generate? I’m sure a hospital would be grateful to receive a billionaire’s $20 million charitable donation, which is no more generous than most of us spending $5 on a raffle ticket at a charity fundraiser. For that negligible amount, the billionaire can achieve the kind of immortality of having his or her name slapped onto a new hospital building, instead of having the building named for the medical personnel who spent decades of their lives at the hospital performing important research or providing exceptional care. A system that allows a small group of people to be the arbiters of what charities are worthy, and continues to funnel vast resources to those who are well beyond needing it, is completely fucked up.
There are over 66,000 homeless people in Los Angeles County, who have been priced out of the current sky-high Los Angeles housing market. Bezos could buy each of them a $250,000 home, and it would “only” cost him 16.5 billion, still leaving him with about 170 –180 lifetimes worth of obscene wealth. Right now, there aren’t enough available homes in that price range, but if Bezos announced that he was giving away $16.5 billion worth of housing vouchers to 66,000 people, developers in Southern California would spring into action to meet this demand for family housing, creating good jobs in the process. Even if it cost Bezos $25 billion to single-handedly solve LA’s homeless crisis—including new facilities for those who have underlying mental/substance abuse issues—it still wouldn’t change his quality of life one bit. He still could easily afford to live in the most expensive property in Los Angeles, which he bought for a “mere” $165 million, as well as his other vast properties. With that much hoarded money, $25 billion is merely theoretical to him, even though it would have immense tangible, life-altering benefits in the hands of regular people.
But it’s not just Bezos who is hoarding the wealth. According to the Forbes list, the top 25 wealthiest in the U.S. (including Bezos) have a combined net worth of nearly $1.6 trillion. Even if they were cut back to a “mere” $5 billion each (enough for five lifetimes of wealth—mega-mansions across the globe, multiple private islands, a fleet of luxury yachts, multiple private planes, and staff to serve their every whim), the rest of their money—$1.48 trillion—could help millions of people. Since a single billion could buy $250,000 homes for 4,000 people, $1.48 trillion could buy $250,000 homes for close to 6 million people. If the remaining 375 billionaires on the Forbes list were also cut down to a “mere” $1 billion net worth each, the remaining $1.2 trillion could buy $250,000 homes for an additional 4.8 million people. That’s approximately 10.8 million people who could enjoy the financial security of home ownership, which would enable them to use their salaries to buy goods and services that would fuel the economy instead of throwing away most of their earnings on rent or mortgage interest.
But these aren’t 10.8 million people who should be given “charity” from billionaires. These are 10.8 million people who had the opportunity for home ownership taken from them by billionaires who milk a fucked-up system to hoard that wealth—wealth they don’t need—through (legal) tax evasion, monopolies, stagnating wages, and “investments” that effectively gobble up vast amounts of real estate, driving up the cost of housing and squeezing the last dime out of regular working people. These are 10.8 million Americans who are currently being robbed of the American dream of home ownership by 400+ sociopathically greedy, wealth-depraved people who should never have been allowed to take that amount from American workers in the first place.
We Don’t Yet Have Accurate Words to Describe the Depth of Depravity
I wish that we had a better way to describe how vile it is to hoard more than one lifetime’s worth of grotesque wealth. “Filthy rich” sounds too cheeky/cutesy. “Obscene” wealth is closer, but maybe better describes the level of wealth more on par with the $500 million - $1 billion range. For those whose wealth-depravity is in the multi-billion range, there should be another word. I wish there was a way to encapsulate the punchline of The Aristocrats joke, in which the comedian describes a talent act, ad-libbing the most shocking act they can imagine, with incest, violence, defecation, necrophilia, bestiality, rape, child sex abuse, and other taboos. Even though the punchline to “What do you call an act like that,” is “The Aristocrats!” somehow the word itself hasn’t taken on all the vulgar connotations of the comedy tradition and still sounds respectable. Although I’ve settled on “wealth depraved” for now, I think we need a word that captures just how wrong and vile it is to cause so much suffering and desperation by hoarding vast resources out of a pathological sense of entitlement. There needs to be a way to convey “rolling-in-shit-while-eating-shit-while-raping-your-three-year-old-daughter-and-strangling-puppies” rich. But I’m not sure how to get there more succinctly.
In writing the above paragraph, I know I’m in danger of sounding as unhinged as QAnon conspiracy theorists who use accusations of pedophilia and bathing in children’s blood to smear the (liberal, Jewish) people they don’t like. For the record, I don’t think that Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk, Buffet, or any others on the top of the wealth-depravity list ACTUALLY do any of those things.
How Depraved Can They Get?
But, while we’re on the subject of pedophilia, maybe we should explore how being wealth-depraved lends itself to other forms of depravity. Take, for example, Jeffrey Epstein. I’ve written about Trump’s bromantic description of Epstein before, but it bears repeating. As quoted by New York Magazine in 2002, Trump enthused, “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with It’s even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do and many of them are on the younger side.” Wink, wink. Trump seems to be oozing pride at being part of an elite group of men so wealthy that laws and decency standards against having sex with children didn’t apply to them. Even if Trump himself didn’t take part in Epstein’s pedophile sex parties, the fact that there were sex parties with children indicates that others did, and Trump was cool with that. It’s as if the lack of accountability that comes from having enough wealth for multiple opulent lifetimes turns middle-aged/old men into degenerates who get off on the subjugation of the helpless, and who enjoy turning that perversion into a group sport.
Obviously, not all wealthy are pedophiles, and pedophiles exist at all income levels. But twisted sort of pride about being pedophiles seems to be unique to the wealth-depraved class. In lower income circles, men might cover up for other men’s crimes if they deem that man to be valuable, whether it’s bishops in the Catholic church covering up for priests through the decades, or coaches/administrators at colleges like Penn State and Ohio State, which is bad enough, but it’s primarily the wealth-depraved set that makes rape a perk of membership in their elite club.
In addition to child rape, the depravity of mega-billions lends itself to killing. After all, if a person is wealthy enough to have long stopped considering other human beings as anything more than disposable pieces of machinery whose only purpose is to feed his/her wealth addiction, then there’s no moral impediment to murder. There are already many wealthy men who can only feel virile if they slaughter majestic and endangered animals. What happens when the most majestic animals are hunted to extinction, or if being wealthy enough to be allowed to slaughter endangered animals no longer gives bored wealth-depraved men the perverse turn-on that they believe is their birthright?
The plot of the 1924 short story, The Most Dangerous Game, by Richard Connell, revolves around a wealthy Russian big game hunter who is bored with hunting animals, and instead chooses to hunt men on his private island. (To be honest, I mostly remember the story from watching the TV adaptations of this plot on Gilligan’s Island and Fantasy Island.) Maybe it sounds far-fetched to imagine a wealth-depraved person feeling entitled enough to hunt human beings, but is it really? What if a multi-billionaire offered a future governor of Michigan a billion dollars to fix the water system in Flint in exchange for some of the state’s “worst” criminals (likely black men who had been convicted—either rightly or wrongly, it wouldn’t matter—of killing white people)? What if a multi-billionaire (perhaps someone whose wealth came from the private energy/utility sector that had failed Texas in the first place) offered the Texas governor a billion dollars to fix the power grid if the governor would hand over asylum-seekers (“illegals” in Fox-speak) apprehended at the border for him to hunt for “sport?”
I’ve never heard of Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, etc., having this murderous inclination, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the spawn of some of the other ruling oligarch families would be enthusiastic about such a “sport” (in which the hunted would most likely be handcuffed and blindfolded, because there’s no way it would be remotely fair). Wealth-depraved billionaire Betsy DeVos’s brother Erik Prince is famous for running a mercenary operation—basically a murder-for-hire company. The Sackler family earned billions through their callous disregard for human life, fueling and profiting from the opioid epidemic that destroyed countless lives, so would it be surprising if any of their spawn got to the point where they could only get off on hunting humans?
And who would stop them? A Supreme Court handpicked by the country’s oligarchs via the Federalist Society is likely to decide in their “originalist” interpretation of the Constitution that the Founding Fathers would have agreed that being hunted by a wealthy person wasn’t cruel and unusual punishment.
And a large segment of the population might consider this a win/win, and look upon the wealth-depraved psychopath as a savior. In relatively good economic times, MAGA rallies were filled with people clamoring for violence against “criminals” and “illegals.” How much meaner, and how much more like the crowds at the Roman Coliseum will they be if their economic prospects are made even worse by the continued hoarding of wealth by the top .1%?
It’s Time to Cut Off the Supply
The wealth-depraved might not be inherently evil, but their addiction makes them so. It’s time to stop enabling. No matter what religious/spirituality one adheres to, whether it’s Jesus (it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God) or a sense of karma, we all recognize in some way that being a shallow, greedy, parasitic human being is detrimental to the soul. As a society, we need to stop coddling the addictions of these wealth-depraved leeches and start treating them like the addicts they are. Cut off the supply. Cut off their entitlements. Stop letting them evade taxes/monopolize industries/hoard real estate/depress wages. Stop enabling them by letting them hoard enough wealth for multiple obscenely wealthy lifetimes, including dozens of empty houses with dozens of empty rooms. Stop allowing them to steal prosperity from others in order to give themselves so much wealth that it becomes theoretical and abstract—so much wealth that they literally cannot spend it all on themselves on earth.
Although Bezos landed safely back on earth after his decadent, wealth-depraved astronaut cosplay, I hope that this vulgar display of wealth becomes an Icarus moment in a different way. Perhaps by literally flying too close to the sun, and in the process reminding us all how absurd and obscene his wealth is, he’ll help bring about the rules and regulations that put limits on wealth depravity and let the rest of us enjoy more of the nation’s prosperity that is built on our hard work.
*Update: Since I first posted this entry, Bezos actually HAS decided to pursue immortal life.
