Say, what? MILLIONaires, with an M, as the standard of wealth? Was this article written in 1960?
Within the next few years, maybe sooner, we will have our first trillionaire. Elon is about halfway there, and Larry Ellison actually passed him for a short time last week before falling back into second.
According to Forbes, the top ten richest people earned an average of $20 billion apiece in September alone! Elon made 75 billion last month. That’s more than a million dollars per minute, if you’re scoring at home.
To add some context:
Elon’s gain of $75 billion last month was greater than the monthly GDP of 43 of the 50 states, and 173 of the world’s countries.
There are about 100 countries where the value of all private wealth in the entire country is lower than Elon’s personal wealth. In about 65 of those countries the entire amount of private wealth is less than Elon made last month.
To once again cite the wisdom of the ever-wise Jeff Spicoli, “Righteous bucks!”
Money may not buy you happiness but it allows you to be miserable in much finer surroundings.
And, as I have noted, it attracts a far higher level of female companionship. You don’t see a lot of poor old guys with women like Salma Hayek.
Well, it really depends. I don’t know how it works in America… But I’ve seen men in many different places and countries who weren’t rich with very hot and attractive women. This is relatively common, although it’s probably not the majority. And as for happiness, that varies a lot too… I’ve met poorer people who were happier than rich people, and also rich people who were happier. And you don’t even need to speak from personal experience; just look at the number of Hollywood stars who died young because of drugs, suicide, etc.
Nah, it doesn’t depend. You’re just talking about math. Just supply and demand. There are more pretty girls than rich men, so not every one can land a rich guy. Some beautiful women have to end up with average Joes.
The real question is this: How many rich guys end up with plain wives? Almost none. There is only an occasional, rare exception. Once in a while you see a rich man who is still with his original, plain, pre-success wife, but that’s just not likely to happen because so many women are throwing themselves at him constantly, and those women can be persuasive.
Ahh yes, now I understand better what you meant and I agree. It’s like I said before, it’s really not the majority of cases; the trend is really what you mentioned. Some guys even on the red pill say this, and it’s true. Although this is a much more natural thing than some make it seem, many talk about it as if it were a bad thing about women, something evil and such, no… It’s just natural. Let’s face it, handsome and attractive men are much rarer than attractive women, so few attractive men end up with many women, that’s true. An ugly or average-looking man will either end up with an average woman for his standards or he will only end up with an attractive woman if he gets rich. He really has no other option but to become rich or famous in some way if he wants to be with a woman above his standards, lol. Because I guarantee you buddy, there are plenty of women out there wanting to have sex, the thing is that normally guys only want those who are minimally attractive obviously, and the vast majority of these guys won’t get these women and I don’t even blame the women for that, if I were a hot woman I would also only be with very attractive guys or would stay with rich guys, it’s the natural law. As you said, there are rare cases of attractive men and women who stay with others for reasons other than looks, wealth, etc. Although there are many people like that, when you compare them to the totality, they really are “rare.”
An anomaly that comes to mind, Lauren Sanchez, second wife of Jeff Bezos. While she’s not plain, her cosmetic surgeries make her less attractive than being plain. His first wife MacKenzie looks plain, and better, than Lauren.
This is one of those areas where men shouldn’t try to put themselves into women’s minds. Women do not make decisions on men in the same way men do with women. To men, sexual attractiveness in a woman is more important than money. That’s why men will spend money to be with a beautiful woman. Just watching women it’s clear that many do not value looks in a man over money. They will take the money or even potential for success of money over looks in a man.
A good looking women can just sit there silently and men will continue to try to pick her up. She doesn’t have to do anything but look good. If a similarly good looking guy just sits there, women won’t even find him interesting. If that guys talks to a woman, but says one wrong thing, she will be turned off. A man can never rely on looks, he must be able to impress the woman in some way. A man can even do it with his personality. If a man acts in an impressive way with confidence, he can pick up a very good looking woman even if he doesn’t posses great looks. A woman has no chance in hell of getting a man in the same way.
Aww, shucks. I wanna put myself in a woman’s mind upwards from their toes.
Larry Ellison is probably #1 on the list of why late-stage capitalism is a failure and becoming absurdly rich is much less about merit and much more about chance and the ability to exploit laws and M&A for personal gain. Oracle hasn’t done shit in the database world in years, except be the only game in town utilizing lawyers to protect “it’s” intellectual property with very aggressive interpretations enforcing its will on competitors to capitulate rather than the high cost of playing the legal game in a judicial system unqualified to understand it.
We’re all extremely lucky they lost the battle with Google over the use of APIs as intellectual property after appeal, as the backbone of the internet and an interface to read, write, update, and delete was nearly thrown into legal hell where anyone would have been able to get sued by any company for the use of nearly anything.
Whatever merit he brought to the database world with any direction based on the goods and services offered has long since been eclipsed by the casino culture to play the meta of the “business world” to exploit labor, consumers, and laws to his personal benefit. Not only that, but his son is the ultimate nepo baby, using the same M&A philosophy that destroyed innovative companies like Sun Microsystems, to purchase Paramount and potentially Time Warner now.
One thing is very clear from the Ellisons, once you pass the event horizon of being ultra rich, you’re essentially immune from not only not losing it, but inevitably increasing it exponentially through playing the meta of the corporate game of investment, M&A, legal threats, RIFs, and political lobbying.
Happily now retired, I will never forget a license renewal meeting with Oracle that was so hostile that I left the meeting vowing never to purchase, support, or recommend anything Oracle related, ever again. The license terms were *way* past ridiculous.10s of thousands, annually, for disabled processor cores (because they could, if hacked, be enabled). Annual audits that were so confrontational and invasive as to be insulting. Punitive fines for not calling support to let Oracle know, within 2 business days, if we upgraded any component (including storage cabling!) of a given licensed *middleware* server. And the demands went on, and on, and on. For dozens of pages. We had no choice, and ended up paying significantly more than necessary just to ensure we weren’t trapped by the penalties.
Fsck Oracle Forever. Larry Ellison is a cancer on technology, and (literally) one of the worst capitalists to have ever blighted modern business.
Isn’t Trump giving TikTok to Oracle? Granted, I may have a simplistic understanding of the shady deal, and I am not going to go read up on it now.
Couldn’t have said it better. All those enlightened libertarians out there that believe the meritocracy lie should probably take a look at tech history or work in that world as a sysadmin or engineer to get a ground level view at what goes on.
Most products and services were established by paradigms, archetypes, and standards long ago – mostly paid for by the taxpayer through public research through the military, Universities, or fortunate think tanks like Bell Labs or Xerox PARC that could exist without the expectation of profit that no longer exist.
Execs like Ellison have long since forgoes any knowledge or product or services and managing people, or even managing people who manage people, to play the capitalist casino meta through manipulation of laws to obtain more wealth. There’s no innovation or merit in what he does, the example of the license agreement you just mentioned (after locking in customers through monopolistic practices through manipulations) is just a small fraction of what happens to contort the system to his advantage.
There’s a reason international corporations incorporate in Ireland, domestic divisions in Delaware, their bank accounts through the Caaman Islands, their intellectual property lawsuits through a small district in Texas, and residence in Florida. It’s all about personal gain and system manipulation. And the average Joe is too ignorant or unintelligent to understand it, so we all sink to the bottom of the boiling water with them enabling people like Ellison or Musk as the anchor.
Upvotes to Indy, bob dobbs, & Dudeman in this thread.
Rand
This is one of the greatest paradoxes of modernity lol. Many women become weird after overdoing plastic surgery. Really, Bezos’ wife just became weird.
Rick, the technical term we use in English for Bezos’ wife is “beard”.
The fact that so many people don’t understand the VAST difference in wealth between millionaires and billionaires is an issue. The difference between a million and a billion… is about a billion. That old video where a grain of rice represents 100k is pretty good too.
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