alt Hacker NewsLikewise here. If I accidentally become a billionare I’d donate most of it to good causes after making sure family and close friends will be able to reach their own goals without becoming filthy rich. Creating a dinasty of wealth is cursing your own family.
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Is that not what MacKenzie Scott (formerly Bezos) did?
Its what a normal person does with excess wealth, as opposed to sociopaths and megalomaniacs.
There's really only so much money a person even needs anyways
What the heck would I do with billions?
The answer for these guys is "hire armies of financial advisors to make even more"
The answer for me would be closer to "hire a financial advisor to work out how much I likely need for the rest of my life, double it just in case, then give the rest away"
You can argue that I wouldn't actually be that way if I got that much money, and you might be right. You can also argue that maybe people like me don't have a hope of getting that money precisely because of my mentality and you might be right about that too.
Either way it seems to point to something deeply broken in these people, imo.
That's the thing, with this mindset you are very unlikely to become a billionaire, you either need to shed it completely, like most, or sublimate it in such a way where achieving extremely high levels of wealth accumulation becomes part of your "good cause".
For the latter I think about SBF, with "effective altruism" as his example, i.e. "earning to give". Essentially a mental free pass to get as much wealth as possible, to be able to "help" as much as possible. Theoretically a good idea, as it's broadly known that your influence over... everything rises in direct connection to your net worth. Where a normal person can donate a few dollars, work in a soup kitchen, and vote for someone who esposes your beliefs, you with your billions can just buy your politicians, or "lobby" them, if "buying" is a little too on the nose for you, and wield power of levels unimaginable even if you gather thousands, if not millions, of people from the first type. However, I have never seen this work. Largely because if you have 10 billion, you could either go all out for "the cause", or you could be a little more ruthless, commit some more fraud maybe, and earn 100 billion to go all out on the cause 10x more "effectively". Essentially the desire of infinite accumulation persists unabated. Additionally, you're always working against the clock of wealth taking it's toll on your morality. While it's easy to care about inequality, death, war, while you're not sheltered from it, and possibly even have friends who are affected by it, wealth has the ability to completely isolate you from any adverse effects, even from the most trivial annoyance a middle class person goes through. Instead you get "rich people problems", your company has trouble with regulations, your well-earned money gets taxed too high, people are calling you bourgeois, or they ask for money (so you stop associating with people of lower monetary status). If you put a moral person in a completely different environment, their morals will change, it's extremely hard to avoid that from happening. If you go into becoming a billionaire thinking you'll make the world a better place, by the end of it, what you thought of as a better world might be completely different. Maybe you'll start a little foundation that helps you with taxes and gives a few million dollars to some people here and there's. Not enough to make a change, or to use up even a small percentage of your total net worth, but maybe it helps a few people. That's probably the best outcome.