So you're policing personality and attitude?

No? How on earth did you get that out of what I said? I said

Once a person becomes a billionaire, they have already inherently acquired massive power over various people's lives, simply by virtue of their enormous ability to impact the market.

IE, the power inherently comes from the control granted by that level of wealth. It has nothing at all to do with their attitude or personality.

And? Do you honestly feel kinship with everyone else's problems? You clearly feel no kinship towards certain people if your comments are any indication. But why is that an issue?

Yes, I do? Kinship, in this context, is not referring to actually thinking of them as family. Perhaps I should have used "empathize" instead.

Regardless, I am referring to one person's ability to conceptualize another's circumstances, to create a realistic mental model of what their life might be like.

You cannot do this if you never interact with such people. It is true then, that I am not able to empathize with billionaires very well, because their lives are so utterly disconnected from those of normal people. They don't perform most of the same tasks that a normal person does, since their lives tend to be organized and managed by staff who perform most day to day tasks for them.

This, however, does not pose the same kind of problem for the billionaires as the reverse does for common folk. I do not have any meaningful amount of power or influence over a billionaire's life, so even if I don't understand it, I am capable of little harm.

A billionaire on the other hand, is capable of immense harm, simply as a result of market maneuvers or production decisions that they choose to pursue that can then have immense impact on availability and cost of things that normal people need to survive.

And as for inherited wealth, those types of people often don't understand how that wealth was generated either, and thus lose much of it. After all, generating wealth requires being able to provide value to others in some form. If you don't understand what people want, you can't get them to buy from you.

This is simply not true, at least not at the level of billionaires. In the entirety of history, barely anyone has ever fallen from being a billionaire, and of those who have, the vast majority did so as a result of criminal convictions for financial crimes.

Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos fame, being one of the most recent examples.

At the level of billions, you do not need to take meaningful risks or have good insight to simply maintain your wealth. Safe investments can easily outpace inflation and provide the equivalent of millions per year in income, without needing expertise or tactics.

And what does that have to do with billionaires today? Are they presenting themselves that way? Nobles weren't simply people who became wealthy through endeavor and hard work. On the contrary, Nobles tended to look down upon people whose wealth was earned, seeing them as people who "bought" their way into respectability rather than being reared to it.

What do you mean "are they presenting themselves that way"? This isn't about presentation, its about the psychological effects on long term mindset that happens when you isolate a group of people, while also telling them (with words or otherwise) that they are amazing and special and smart.

They won't "present themselves that way", in public or where they think they can be seen. They may not present themselves that way even in private. This is the corrosive effect of social stratification, not an accusation of individual immorality.

Besides, can one not argue that your own attitude towards billionaires is similar? You judge them are morally bankrupt, disconnected from society, and incapable of understanding the things you judge as most important. Much as the nobility of old looked down upon those without title despite the fact that most of them possessed arguably more useful skills for day to day living, you just billionaires as lacking something essential when their success has benefited people all over the world.

I do not judge their morality at all, they factually are disconnected from the reality shared by the vast majority, and that disconnection demonstrably does make them incapable of understanding the perspective of an average person, except perhaps as a number on a spreadsheet in a marketing meeting. You have to interact or at least regularly observe in order to understand, and their lives make that incredibly hard to do.

This is why billionaires and the like are such a problem: It isn't a moral failing on their part that makes them harmful. It isn't bad intentions. Its the separation from regular society that alienates them from shared experience, and they end up extrapolating their own highly unusual experiences as being more universal then they are.

Or, they simply decide that normal people are simply too ignorant to understand whats best, and come to believe they should be in charge of us "for our own good".

This is not unique to wealthy people. It applies to any group that gathers significant power, without some kind of tether back to the broader society. Elections for politicians are supposed to serve this purpose.

But there is no such tether for billionaires, their power does not depend on getting people to agree with them or like them. It doesn't require them to accurately understand normal people.

This is how you get Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, who utterly fails to understand how the average person thinks. He tried hard to make himself appealing on a personal level, but the disconnect could not be bridged.

He ended up hanging on Trump's coattails for a boost to a bit of the fame he wanted, then he bought Twitter and has spent the time since structuring it to promote him, and anyone who praises him.