besides spend it on frivolous shit like yachts and planes and stuff, there's no way it's all liquid. do they just park all their billions in a bunch of investment vehicles and wait for it to propagate itself? don't they get bored of just waiting and watching line go up?
Think of how so many gamers don’t ever get tired of grinding it out to stay at the top of the leaderboards, for literally no reward.
Now imagine being the top of the leaderboard got you literally every creature comfort known to man.
do they just park all their billions in a bunch of investment vehicles and wait for it to propagate itself?
Yep
don’t they get bored of just waiting and watching line go up?
Nope
Doing fun shit is expensive, but once you've got five or six million dollars to play with you can do a lot of fun shit and not have to worry about running out of money.
if they're so smart why haven't they found a way to make epstein shit cheaper
It's true. CIA/FBI and Mossad 100% knew and had to keep the info away from hostile intelligence. I'd imagine Putin would love that info too
I generally assume that all Oligarchs are in the same club when it comes to sex crimes, and that there's some kind of tacit agreement not to use each other's sex crimes behavior against each other. Putin and Bill Clinton are only enemies in a very esoteric sense where the cliques of oligarchs they represent sometimes have competing business interests. Putting each other's sex crimes out in the open doesn't advance their interests.
Eh, international oligarchs do have diverging interests though. The Russian Bourgeoisie has Imperial aspirations and those are being thwarted by the American Imperialist machine. In their home country they have near absolute power but on the international stage they are the underdog that hopes to someday become the big dog.
True, but i think there is some level of "Honor among thieves" regarding what weapons you wield and don't wield. The same way nation-states generally don't use assassination against other heads of state, because ultimately it'd be really easy for the all the presidents and premiers and whatever to just kill each other and once that djinni is out of the bottle it's hard to put back.
Though actually now that I say taht I have doubts because the US and it's allies are pretty cavalier about just assassinating whoever they can...
So you are telling me someone recieved full agent training ready for the field and was told to jerk off a football team owner as an assignment?
so the means of production of epstein shit cost prohibitive amounts of capital due to normative values and safety overhead... does this mean the wealthy are running the world into the ground just so they can save money on their kiddie porn?
Epstein was a psycho monster even by the standards of your average rich sex guy. Most rich dudes just have one mistress at a time, they're not industrializing the rape of teenage girls. Fuck, they might not even have a real mistress, they might just be banging the receptionist who draws a salary from their company, or someone who actually has their own income and gets a boost from their sugar daddy.
Naw man, most rich guys have a few consistent women at once. It's honestly not that expensive, I looked it up once. Most "sugar daddy" arrangements average something like $3k a month which is fucking nothing to someone with a net worth of $50+ million.
THEY REINVEST CAPITAL TO REPRODUCE AND ACCUMULATE MORE CAPITAL
FFS PEOPLE
rips own hair out
This. you invest your capital in things that return a profit, then you live off a portion of the profit while reinvesting the rest so your giant pile of wealth grows like some fetid necromantic mushroom from hell. It's the key difference between rich people and poor people. When people who have a 500,000$ a year salary lose their job they're fucked because they were living on a salary. They were never rich, once the money stops coming in it's gone. But if they invested a bunch of that shit and it's kicking back 25k a year in interest or profits or whatever the fuck, they're rich, even if they're living in a shitty apartment in Omaha because they're getting 25k a year simply because they own capital that's turning a profit. that's the difference between rich and poor. Not how much money you've got any given day, but where that money comes from. Rich is when your money makes money.
Most people who make $500k a year are probably saving at least $200k of that - realistically unless you're a total idiot you're probably saving $300-$350k of it. If you do that for 15 years you can retire with $5 million in the bank while you're still young/probably in your 50s. It's way easy to live off that for another 25 years - it's still $200k a year which would be more than you were living off of in the previous 15 years
They're hugely insecure. They have massive amounts of wealth, which they become used to having and they form their baseline of acceptable existence around it. But there are risks everywhere, and anything that could happen to reduce their wealth threatens the lifestyle they've adapted to as their normal, so they absolutely must increase their wealth at all costs to feel secure.
I don't think there's anything that could happen that would change their lifestyle (well, maybe one thing), but they're still insecure because deep down they know they don't deserve it
I know rich people. I would say a lot of them do genuinely feel they deserve it because they've "worked so hard for it". But what they don't realize is that there's tons of poor families out there busting there ass much harder who aren't rich.
The is the other segment who are just rich because daddy was rich, and they try everything they can to justify that they deserve it, including just outright lying about doing work they've never done.
Buy political power to oppress the poor and buy up more businesses to oppress the workers
Companies are democratically run on behalf of the shareholders. One share is one vote (you can buy and sell shares - see if you can spot the problem with this form of democracy!). The wealthiest people have most of their worth in shares, which is to say votes in what companies do. So that's what they do - vote on what a company's worth of labor gets used for. Directly using the company to enrich yourself is illegal (and it's a crime against other capitalists so it actually gets prosecuted), but directing entire divisions towards whatever vanity projects you like (life extension, self-driving cars, anything Elon Musk does) is allowed, as is generally enriching all share-holders including yourself (which is what Jeff Bezos does, because of course the wealthiest person is someone who enjoys wealth for its own sake).
so hellworld is just the natural state of things when altruism isn't profitable?
Well, what I just described is capitalism, so I wouldn't call it "natural" exactly. It's a socially constructed thing - no law of nature says people get to buy and sell votes on what people do with their labor, we just do it. And that puts the decision on what people do with their labor in the hands of people whose primary concern is the ability to get more money to buy more control over labor, which, yeah, doesn't line up with altruism very often.
Literally, they have no way they can spend it in such a way it outweighs interest accrued.
shouldn't they be tripping an inflection point for utility right around there
But hoarding as much wealth as possible serves to keep the value of wealth high and protects them from being usurped. A big, fat dragon stays big and fat by eating little dragons before they're able to attack.
interest is laughably shit these days, we have nearly negative rates at times. only billionaires could live off interest, and even then not with a ton of luxury
On savings and gov bonds, sure. But if they have a fraction of their wealth sitting in stocks, it is more than enough.
I mean, in the sense that rectangle != square, sure. But at the end of the day, money is gaining value each period regardless. Shame on me for using the two interchangably.
This. If the peasantry are kept at a level where they have just enough to live, but not enough to see their children starving, they're not likely to rebel. And being rich enough to endow a huge network of clients and lackeys and mercenaries gives you agency to act in the world of big scary monsters. Having shitloads of wealth both keeps the underclasses in control and protects you from other rich people, rich people being the primary predators of rich people.
It’s amazing how cool u feel sacrificing children to Moloch. Better than sex.
Most of them don't even sacrifice any children. The child sacrificing is all done somewhere else, they don't even know about it. They just know that they talk to their money management goon every week and the number in their bank account gets bigger. It's totally opaque, unless they're some weird fucking rich person who actually understands how capitalism works.
Nothing really at all. They reinvest it to accumulate more, as another poster pointed out. The majority of it is set up for their kids, grandkids and further family down the road to inherit all of it and live comfortable lifestyles.
In the old chapo sub someone who did construction work on rich peoples houses talked about how wasteful they are
like leaving the parkway heating on in winter even though it's like their second vacation house and wont be actually visiting. or renovating the whole giant bathroom and then changing their minds and renovating it again from scratch
