Why Billionaires Suck as People
How extreme wealth can have a corrupting influence on your personality
I’ll admit it. I used to worship billionaires, well not worship exactly. I mean I never put one up on an altar in flowing robes, while I kneeled prostrate on the ground in loving adoration of them. But, like most people in our money-obsessed culture, I admired them from afar, coveting their wealth, financial freedom, ability to go anywhere, do anything, and the enormous sphere of influence that they wield.
But that’s just the positive side of having such wealth. There is also a downside, that most people never think about. For example, people constantly ask you for money and you don’t know whether your friends actually like you or just want to use you.
Then there is the issue of romance. Unless you are with someone that loved you before you became wealthy, it’s difficult to know whether your partner loves you or is just a gold digger. There is also the fact that the wealthy tend to drink to excess more often than poor people do. These are some of the inherent downsides that come with being a billionaire.
While money is important and having some means there is a lot of good that you can do in the world. The privileges that go along with having extreme wealth can be corrupting and it is why billionaires sometimes suck as people.
They Epitomize Inequality
The richest 400 families in the United States own more financial assets than the bottom 60% of all American households combined. But as you go up the wealth ladder things get even more concentrated. According to a report from the Institute for Policy Studies, just 17 white men and three white women own more wealth (savings, stocks, real estate, etc.) than the entire bottom half of the American population or about 152 million people.
The list is also extremely white. The wealthiest 100 households in the United States have more assets than all black people in the country combined. While the report didn’t say that billionaires were the cause of racism, they certainly benefit from it.
The Dark Triad
We would all like to think that if we had a billion dollars that we wouldn’t change, that we would stay humble and kind, and while some people do, others exhibit personality traits that psychologists call the “dark triad.” These include Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy.
Machiavellianism
This refers to one’s willingness to manipulate and exploit other people or circumstances for personal gain. In a series of studies, psychologists found that this behavior is often found in those with more wealth.
One study from UC Berkeley used the make, model, and style of the car, as a proxy for a driver’s wealth. What they found was that only half of those driving the most expensive cars were willing to wait for pedestrians to cross at a busy intersection compared to those driving less expensive ones. The drivers of the more expensive cars were also four times more likely to ignore the right of way of other drivers.
In another study, half of the participants compared themselves to people of lower socioeconomic status. While the other half compared to those at the top. The researchers then gave both groups a jar of candy, that they said was to be given to children in the next room. However, the participants were allowed to take some if they wanted. What they found was that those who were primed for wealth took more candy from the jar.
Other studies have shown that the wealthy are more likely to cheat on their taxes and their romantic partners.
Not waiting for pedestrians, taking candy from kids, cheating on your taxes, and on your romantic partners, are rather mundane things that somebody from any socioeconomic class might do.
However, when you combine this willingness to manipulate others, with the influence and power that wealth brings you can see that the bad behavior billionaires exhibit can be quite damaging in the real world.
It’s this Machiavellianism that allowed financier Bernie Madoff to lie and manipulate his own family to pull off the biggest Ponzi scheme in the world, defrauding investors of an estimated $50 billion.
It’s what allowed Enron executives to manipulate the company’s stock price, causing their employees to lose their retirement savings when the company collapsed shortly after.
It’s what allowed Big Tobacco execs to mislead the public for decades about the harmful effects of smoking and Big Oil execs to lie about the relationship of fossil fuels to climate change and to continue to greenwash their sins away today.
Psychopathy
Psychopathy is a psychological condition that is characterized by a lack of empathy or remorse, antisocial behavior, excessive risk-taking, and superficiality combined with a craving for power, influence, and the desire to dominate others. In the general population between 1–4% are thought to be psychopaths. However, in the corporate world, about 21% or 1in 5 CEOs are psychopaths. This is the same proportion that you would find in a prison population.
According to Nathan Brooks a forensic psychologist from Bond University in Australia, a successful psychopath may be inclined to unethical or illegal practices, on their climb up the corporate ladder.
Psychopathy is what allowed the leading investment bank, Goldman Sachs, to continue to sell its clients billions of dollars of toxic assets, to purge them from its books during the Global Financial Crisis in 2008–2009.
It’s what allowed Purdue Pharma to continue to aggressively sell OxyContin for years after the company learned that it was addictive, contributing to hundreds of thousands of deaths and kicking off the opioid crisis that the United States is still dealing with.
Narcissism
This is a personality disorder in which a person has an over-inflated sense of their importance, coupled with a deep need for attention and admiration. Narcissists have a sense of self-entitlement that the world owes them something just for being alive. This condition usually leads to troubled relationships and a lack of empathy for others.
Once again using a series of tests psychologists found that individuals in a higher social class displayed higher levels of narcissism and entitlement than did their less wealthy counterparts.
For example, participants who rated themselves higher on a measure of socioeconomic status also scored higher on a scale designed to measure psychological entitlement; a sample item from that scale is “I honestly feel I’m just more deserving than others.”
In a survey study, researchers in Germany directly assessed a sample of very high net-worth individuals. They too found that this group scored higher on a measure of narcissism compared to a separate sample of people of lesser economic means.
It is this characteristic that allows Jeff Bezos to become the second-richest man in the world while running his employees so hard, that they are forced to pee in a bottle just to keep up with his insane performance standards. It’s what allows him to break up unions and incentivize his employees to leave after a few years, to keep employee costs down. It’s what allowed him to pay $500 million for a yacht that is so big that Rotterdam had to dismantle a historically important bridge, originally built in 1877, just so that it could pass.
They Have a Huge Carbon Footprint
It’s this sense of self-entitlement that allows billionaires to justify their ridiculously lavish high carbon-emitting lifestyles, even though the rest of the world is living through a climate crisis full of natural disasters, wildfires, droughts, and future food shortages.
It is difficult to estimate the carbon footprint of an average billionaire because they tend to be reclusive. However, a study of 20 famous billionaires revealed that their average footprint came in at a whopping 7020 tons per year, mostly because of their yachts and private planes. Compare that to the average American who emits 14.4 tons and the average world citizen who emits 4.2 tons.
But it’s not only their enormous ecological and carbon footprint that’s the problem, it’s the aspirations that the extremely wealthy generate in others. There are lots of people out there who want to emulate the consumption habits of the super-rich fueled by their extravagant displays of wealth.
They Don’t Pay Their Fair Share of Taxes
Despite taking so much from society, it turns out that the extremely wealthy return very little in the way of taxes. In 2021 an investigative report by ProPublica showed that billionaires pay little relative to their wealth and some pay nothing at all by using a series of loopholes, deferments, and tax havens that are available to them.
For example, in 2007 and 2011 Jeff Bezos, today the second richest man in the world worth an estimated $130 billion paid nothing in taxes. Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, worth an estimated $200 billion also paid nothing in taxes in 2018.
If you averaged the tax rates of Elon Musk, Michael Bloomberg, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffet for the years 2014 to 2018, they respectively paid 3.27%, 1.3%, .98%, and .10% per year.
Compare this to the marginal tax rates for Americans which ranges between 10–37%. So how do billionaires get away with it? One of the legal loopholes they use is taking out low-interest loans against their stock options. This way they don’t have to pay taxes on their income, because effectively they don’t have any.
While they may donate billions to charities, according to Anand Ghirhardas, author of Winners Take All, we would all be better off if they just paid their fair share of taxes which provides for our schools, infrastructure, courts, and public health.
A Return to the Golden Age of Capitalism
From 1932 and 1981 the top tax rate in the United States never fell below 63% and rose as high as 94%. It wasn’t until the election of Ronald Reagan that top tax rates dropped from 70%to 28%.
During this period, known as the “Golden Age of Capitalism” union memberships were high, which led to increased median wages, better worker rights, and increased worker productivity. More importantly, there was an overall increase in prosperity that was shared more equitably due largely to the high marginal tax rate on incomes above $200,000. To make capitalism sustainable and fairer, we need to see a return to high marginal tax rates on earners that are in the top 1%, comparable to what we saw during the Golden Age.
Although not everyone who is extremely wealthy displays the dark triad of psychological traits, these traits tend to show up more often in those who have a bigger bank balance. That’s a problem because their extraordinary wealth gives them tremendous influence over our laws, politicians, and the media, effectively giving them the ability to shape our society into what they want it to be. This means that these dark personality traits are often admired by those seeking great wealth.
As for me, I no longer see billionaires as being worthy of my adoration, I now see them as the flawed human beings they are. While I still aspire to have enough “Fuck You,” money to live my life without a boss overlooking my shoulder, if I do arrive in the ranks of the wealthy, I will make sure to pay my taxes and wait patiently for people crossing the street.
