Opinion | Billionaires Aren’t Your Friend, They Never Have Been or Ever Will Be

The news cycle seems to have some new story ever ten minutes of a billionaire tech genius doing something crazy. Jeff Bezos and his recent trip into space, Elon Musk and his exploits with Tesla, among others. Something that, on a surface-level observation, seems to be a great advancement in technology for all mankind.

But none of this technological wonder is for YOU.

The very nature of capitalism is one of hoarding and exclusion. Someone has to lose in every situation under this system, and in this case that person is everyone except Musk or Bezos.

Even if this ego-flexing money burn amounts to anything worthwhile, virtually nobody will ever see the benefits of it because it wasn’t meant for you. This technology will be kept under patented lock and key, parceled out for extortionate prices when there’s no other choice.

The most galling aspect of all this is that they all universally claim that there’s nothing else to be done about the problems we all currently face, and that making big stupid expensive toys is the only reasonable use of their unfathomable wealth. Homelessness in the United States could be eliminated multiple times over with just a FRACTION of their net worth, but I guess a space toy is also something.

Climate change, underfunded schools, crumbling infrastructure, all of them are issues that can be solved by throwing money at the problem until it goes away. Additionally, the rate of income that these billionaire man-children see means that their net worth would be scarcely affected in the long-term. They literally would not be able to give enough away to notice the change, except maybe they would have to buy their mega-yacht next week instead of that week.

Elon Musk, apartheid era emerald mine fortune heir and phenomenal weirdo, doesn’t care about you. He never has, never will, and will happily squander our world’s resources if it means he gets to pretend to be a spaceman.