Billionaires

I'm going to go way out on a limb here and claim that billionaires aren't all exactly the same.

At least, I'd be going out on a limb if I said that in some of the places I hang out. I like those places, it's nice to have found places where nearly everyone hates Elon Musk, but all the same, the frequent, unchallenged assertion that all billionaires are the same is getting to be a pain in the ass. 

 

It's possible that I might dislike every single billionaire, if I examined each one closely. But I haven't examined each and every single billionaire closely. Which is why I'm unable to say that they're all the same.

But there's more than that. Yes, even more. There are differences which anyone can see. Some billionaires are Republicans, some are Democrats. The they're-all-the-same yahoos will respond that they're just pretending to be different, while they pull the strings behind the scenes in our one-party system. Have we gotten to the 100 mark yet, 100 times of me mentioning, in this blog, that brilliant remark of Kurt Vonnegut's, that we are what we pretend to be?

Gotta be at least close to 100 by now. 

There are differences, though. When Warren Buffett says publicly that he should pay more taxes, that's different from Elon Musk publicly saying that he shouldn't have to pay ANY taxes, because he's already publicly benefited mankind so much. And whether Musk really means that, or can barely keep a straight face while he says it and is as amazed as, for instance, I am, that anyone believes he's a public benefactor (we are what we pretend to be!), both Buffett and Musk are decidedly different than most billionaires inasmuch as they've talked about taxes at all in any way except privately.

Musk and Trump and Cuban, and very few other billionaires, seem to live for the spotlight, for public attention. They can't get enough of it, it seems. Many other billionaires seem to live very strictly by the code: "Fools' names and fools' faces often appear in public places." So that we've very rarely, or perhaps never, even heard their names.

Which would make it even harder to tell if they really are all the same, and also exactly the same as the publicity-hungry type of billionaire. 

As with taxes, so also with philanthropy: some billionaires practice it openly, some by stealth, some hardly at all. Instead of "hardly at all," I was going to say "not at all," but it seems even Trump and Musk may have engaged in some charitable giving. Not as much as they would like people to believe, but a little, milked for as much publicity as possible, timed to divert from scandal.

Now, even in the cases of billionaires who give the great majority of their wealth to good causes, it could be argued that they are not making up for all of the damage they caused while accumulating that money. The Andrew Carnegie Syndrome. I'd be more than glad to debate that. On a case-by-case, billionaire-by-billionaire basis. I'm still not going to even debate the nature of all billionaires at once. 

Because, as Denzel Washington said in Philadelphia: "This is the essence of discrimination: formulating opinions about others not based on their individual merits, but rather on their membership in a group with assumed characteristics." Simple as that. I'm not having it.

But wait, there's EVEN MORE: I have come to believe that a great many of these people claiming that all billionaires are evil and all the same, are themselves millionaires who would much rather debate something else than whether and to what extent their own existence benefits society as a whole. The B-word gives them a very convenient way to change the subject. Might even work if the people they're talking to are also millionaires. Yeah, I bet in would work real well in those circumstances.

Perhaps it was just a coincidence that the first two people I heard spreading the billionaires-are-all trope were millionaires. Gore Vidal, and then Bernie Sanders. 

In fact, in retrospect, I've got to wonder whether Gore Vidal himself was a billionaire when he warned the public to keep both hands planted firmly over one's wallet whenever in the vicinity of a billionaire. Vidal was not merely a bestselling author when he said, he had written a great many very big bestsellers, besides some screenwriting and having been born the grandson of a US Senator and being the first cousin of Al Gore and a cousin by marriage of Jacqueline Kennedy, and living half the year in a villa in Ravello and the other half in the Beverly Hills Hotel. If he wasn't worth at least $100 million in the late 1980's, when he issued his dire warning about billionaires, then he must have given most of his wealth away, or followed terrible investment advice, or been a really amazingly big tipper, or something.

You know what, maybe Gore was a billionaire and knew it, and was ironically warning his more perceptive readers, those capable of reading between the lines just as he spoke between them, to watch out for him, and maybe go into business with less treacherous types. If so -- good one, Gore! and ain't I a dope.

My point was that when I read that article in Vanity Fair where Gore talked about the billionaires and the hands clamped on wallets just for safety's sake, it struck me as very odd that someone that rich was warning the public about the rich. 

And then in 2016, Bernie Sanders went on and on at such length about billionaires that he got a billionaire elected President. And I noticed that during 2016 he and his wife sold their second house for half a million. 

Their SECOND house. Making me very suspicious that the rest of their holdings might tally up to another half, making them the dreaded M-word, as are no doubt many if not most of Bernie's colleagues in the Senate and House. 

That was before 2019, when it became widely-known that Sanders' income in 2017 had been over $1 million, leading to his famous public gaff about how you, too, can become a millionaire if you write a bestselling book. 

Who knew it was so easy, right?

Seemed disingenuous to me, because Sanders seemed to be saying that only in 2017 had he become a millionaire. 

But again my point is: a rich person warning me about those evil, evil rich people like movie stars and the Clintons!

Also, I suspect that very many of the people around me these days repeating the all-billionaires-are-the-same trope, may have learned it directly from Bernie Sanders, thus adding to the reasons I dislike him.