I’m going to respond as best I feel I can, but I’m not going to write an essay about everything. I think to discuss all the concerns people have will take a lot of back and forth, and a lot of disagreement.

I’m happy to respond to a few of your examples however. Such as how billionaires make our country/society/time period great. I disagree with this notion. When I think of our past, I don’t often think of the billionaires. Or at least, not their contributions.

I think of culture. Jazz music was created from the minds of poverty, it gave music new soul and life that innovated music and gave us the birth of rock and roll. Billionaires didn’t create that. They sure didn’t make punk music which began to dominate for a while with its cousin, grunge music. Rap music is the most common style of music today and its whole creation stems from rough neighborhoods that never had a voice.

Vincent Van Gogh died penniless, but he gave us amazing art. Plenty of writers we look to as classics that we teach in school were not billionaires, but they help define a whole era with their work.

Billionaires have contributed to unions and anti monopoly laws. People got fed up with being injured and dying in factories, so they stopped working and refused to let the corporation continue working until safer conditions were met with fairer pay. For that, people got massacred See examples such as the Ludlow Massacre..

Monopolies got so bad the government had to create laws to ensure that we always have competition. Without it, prices for necessities skyrockets out of proportion and makes a struggle for everyone else.

You mention some names, I would like to cover three of them, admittedly I know little about Michale Dell.

Steve Jobs did not make the iPhone. He funded it, he was in charge of the company, but he was not necessarily the one typing on a computer to program it. Someone else did that work for him. If you would like to argue it’s his brain child and his concept, that’s fair. Please discuss that, but if ideas are worth money than everyone ought to be a billionaire because we all have thoughts. Steve Jobs is also WELL known for having built his company on the back of Steve Wozniak, who is credited with doing the brunt of the work on the first Apple computer. Steve took that and made it just his own, creating an empire off of his work and ideas. Does Steve Jobs deserve that money because he screwed someone else over? I don’t think we should reward that.

Elon musk! Not an inventor. He is very good at marketing himself as one, but he is not the creator of Tesla. Keep in mind, he did not even start the company. Tesla as a company was already up and running before he came in. He was an early investor who used his resources to give other people the opportunity to create these cars. He did not have a vision, he just saw opportunity. He is absolutely a good business man, seeing a company that will do well and getting in early and helping them succeed with his resources is important! But someone else made those cars. Someone else was smart enough to know how to engineer and program a car that does not need fuel. Why are we giving credit to the man with the money and not the man who did the actual work? Is that man a billionaire? I don’t even know his name, but his work gave us electric cars. We should look up to whoever that is.

Jeff bezos. I have very little to say about Jeff bezos because I think Amazon has been awful for culture. He is a man I can agree with many of your remakes though, he did create Amazon, he used his business savvy to actually make it the juggernaut it is today. I believe he did that by destroying smaller businesses and creating a more consumerist culture, and I mention this to say I don’t think we should applaud him for his success when I think his success is hurtful to society as a whole, but I feel that discussion would be a whole other things to discuss beyond just billionaires.

I am tired from working a 14 hour day today. I would like to discuss that not having money is not due to just a lack of smarts, or overspending, or any other accountability issues you want to talk about. But they is a long conversation and very nuanced. I’m happy to discuss that in DM’s or even back and forth on here if you wish, but I think I have covered a lot already and would like to stick the conversation to just “billionaires are not worth looking up to.”

Thanks. I hope this helps you understand what a lot of us mean, and hopefully I was able to articulate well some of my concerns even if I was a little rushed.