[scottLobster]

Benign malice is still malice. Billionaires do well in countries of hard-working, educated people the same way parasites do well in a healthier host. They often aren't contributing to said health, merely profiting from it by chance.

Don't get me wrong some Billionaires are legitimately moving the ball forward, or at least trying to, but for every Elon Musk (despite the man's many flaws he's at least snapped the space launch and EV markets out of decades of stagnation) there's a few Sacklers who seemingly exist solely to abuse the populace for their own benefit, and are only shaped by how much effective resistance they are met with, resistance they will obsessively attempt to overcome/circumvent until they die.

People at that level tend to care about themselves and only about themselves, or at least that's what many of their actions would suggest. They're predators, and even if the wolf can't control what it is you generally want to keep it away from the flock.

That said I have nothing actionable to offer. Short of mass collective action it's hard to see how we deal with them, and mass collective action requires lots of mass collective pain for enough people to be motivated in a single direction. I'd imagine most of the billionaires are well aware of this and are betting that the breaking point will occur after their death, or they arrogantly think that they can be insulated from it somehow. Seems they get away with blatant malfeasance time and again.

Frankly I'm surprised the Sacklers haven't been shot at yet. If I was a broke West Virginian who's family had been torn apart by opioids and I had nothing to lose, I'd be saving my pennies for a bus ticket and take my hunting rifle to their next public appearance.

[anothernewdude]

Elon Musk does not come out positive.

[scottLobster]

Depends on your priorities I guess. I'd say making reusable rockets a reality, creating a serious market for EVs where none existed previously, and from all appearances about to provide the first real competition to terrestrial internet/cable providers has made the world an objectively better place on a scale most individuals can only dream of.

Does that excuse sexual harassment, union-busting, defamation, stock manipulation, and other crimes? Of course not, and he should be punished for all of the above. But the scale of his positive works far outsizes the scale of his negative works IMO, at least so far.

Capitalism and Democracy are fundamentally based on (imperfectly) burning assholes for fuel. They're fundamentally cynical systems, that's part of why they're so stable. We give the assholes a relatively safe outlet for their mental conditions while in exchange demanding they provide some good or service for the rest of us. So don't be surprised when the people who do the most good also have some skeletons in their closets, that's how the system works. The people without skeletons tend to be naturally filtered out of the power hierarchy by refusing to compromise their principles past a certain point.

Put more bluntly: The obsessive, selfish, narcissistic careerist who puts 80 hours a week into his career, has no real friends and neglects his family and sexually harasses potential partners will generally rise higher in terms of power/wealth than the honest, stable, principled family man who intentionally clocks out after 40 hours so he has time to spend with his kids when he gets home. There are lucky exceptions of course, heirs to fortunes and so on (where likely their mother/father/grandparent was the maladjusted careerist). But the percentages speak for themselves IMO.

[helloworld11]

Before jumping on the sexual harassment bandwagon. Is there actually any concrete evidence of this? And what was the exact context? These accusations and actual cases exist in degrees, not absolutes of evil male pig or perfect feminist male. Believe it or not, it's very, very easy to accuse a famous man of sexual harassment for all sorts of frivolous reasons and have it stick to their reputation like shit.