Do you believe billionaires are inherently bad, why or why not?

I personally have no particular wealth but, through happenstance, have known a few billionaires over the years. One was probably more or less what you'd expect - went to prep school, liked to party, but was also nice enough to the majority of people he interacted with - minus one freshman who didn't enjoy his antics.

I knew another billionaire family who went to great pain to live a somewhat normal lifestyle. Their house was decent sized but no bigger than your average McMansion. All their kids have real careers. Their wealth is effectively control of their family business. However, I imagine this is the rare exception.

While I don't begrudge people being successful to make a billion dollars, I also don't believe it's healthy for people to be able to inherit that much. It seems too likely to lead towards a new form of feudalism.

That said, the comments suggesting that take the wealth of all billionaires would solve our problems are somewhat misguided. Typically, most of that wealth is tied up in investments in corporations. If all that capital suddenly moved out of corporations to individuals, the economy would collapse. In some ways, it's similar to what happened at the end of the society era - everyone was given stock but, due to the fact inflation was rampant and you can't eat stocks, ended up selling it to the eventual oligarchs. If that much wealth suddenly shifted in the U.S., I expect there would be similar inflation followed by consolidation of ownership, so we'd just end up with a different set of billionaires rather than actually getting rid of them.

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