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by adventured 3188 days ago
> Such hideously wasteful extravagance

You're moralizing the issue, which points to the fact that most of what you said is nothing more than a personal subjective judgement. For someone with that wealth, it's not usually going to be a wasteful extravagance at all.

Billionaires are like large corporations unto themselves. Their business interests are of the scale of small companies in the S&P 500.

Take Patterson Companies, an S&P 500 company, among the smallest with a $3.4 billion market cap. $3.4 billion in wealth isn't enough to get you onto the Bloomberg global richest 500 list.

By contrast, Henry Kravis of KKR fame, is worth $5.x billion (merely #345 on the billionaire list). It makes perfect sense for someone with his large business interests to utilize a personal jet for optimization of time. It's about as wasteful as an average person in the developed world owning a car. Oh those average people in the developed world, living that luxurious extravagant life in which they own a car (or a home, gasp!).

1 comments

> most of what you said is nothing more than a personal subjective judgement

Indeed it was, I was offering my own considered opinion, not some absolute universal truth.

No surprise such opinions don't go down favourably on HN though. Amidst all the interesting technical and scientific discussion, there are disappointing overtones of wealth worship, and a weird cult-like following of billionaire entrepreneurs.