Why do people feel they are entitled to the money of others?

i was a **** well before I was successful.

The wealth these people have accrued is actually incomprehensible for our brains to understand in the abstract due to the gap between what we all have and what they have being so massively vast.

Here's a great visual aid showing how obscene the likes of Bezos and Musks wealth actually is.

https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/

If you make your way the whole way through it and can still say their level of wealth is reasonable considering the absolute paltry amounts of tax they pay vs the amount of people in poverty or without a way to afford basic medial help and thats just in the states alone I really question your humanity.

“I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.”

Thomas Sowell.

One thing that’s not fully appreciated by some is the power of money to generate more money, simply by virtue of having it. Once you’ve covered all your expenses - however lavish or simple - what’s left can be invested and will inevitably grow unless it’s invested really badly. It requires no work or skill, it can be entirely passive on the part of the one with the money.

Take someone who earns €50,000 a year. Now compare him or her to someone who makes €5,000,000 a year. There are absolutely no circumstances under which you could say the second person has ever worked 100x as hard as the first person. They can have in-demand skills, of course, but that doesn’t account for most of the difference.

So, can we please drop this fallacy that the super-rich have somehow earned all their riches? Those riches came from distortions and failures of the free market, not through merit.

or alternatively why do we laud these grotesquely greedy people ,why does society not regard them as pariahs ,gluttonly elsewhere is scorned why not when is comes to the accumulation of wealth.I can never understand how the church reconciles christian values with wealth,Theres the old chestnut trotted out about the camel and the eye of the needle but thats just ould pavlaver to keep the flock in check.The characters name checked by the OP are cartoon versions of people we meet everyday who think they deserve way more from life than other people because of circumstance.If you want a system that rewards entrepreneurial spirit why cant the reward be double or treble the norm ,why does it have to be unlimited.

They are the biggest winners, in a game designed to create winners and losers!

Whenever one of these guys gets to this lofty position in life, where they have so much wealth that their life essentially just becomes a bit meaningless, you invariably get an army of plebs in society trying to paint them as some demonic comic book style villain. Hell bent on world domination and subjugation of the masses in some giant half baked conspiracy theory.

Bezos, Gates, Musk, Soros etc etc. It's just a lazy caricature at this point.

Don't create an economic system, and then lose your sh!t when a bunch of clever feckers become really good at playing the game.

If you don't like the system, change it. Design a better system.

I agree nobody NEEDS $200 billion. And it would be better if wealth and resources were more evenly spread across society. But that's not the fault of Jeff Bezos. He played the game and came out a big winner!

Now he's 57, obscenely wealthy, probably incredibly bored too by the looks of it. So he builds a space program, like a bored kid might build a tree house or go-cart etc. Mid life crisis billionaire style! lol

Good luck to him. I don't envy famous or rich people, they're still human beings. They are subject to human emotions and human problems / weaknesses like everyone else. Depression, addictions etc. Being rich and famous looks like a bit of a curse to me - a lonely place, where you are surrounded by the worst type sycophants and leaches.

Plus, I genuinely enjoying working hard to achieve modest improvements in my life. I don't know that I would really gain much gratification from having so much money, that I had no reason to even get out of bed in the morning. Creating a space program just to alleviate my boredom. No thanks!

What does Jeff do to "earn" his money these days? His money is actually earned for him by other people now. Jeff's "work" in Amazon amounts to about a few hours each year.

We're not talking about Joe and Josephine Soap here, who go to a job each morning and graft through something they hate in order to feed a family and put an extortionately priced roof over their heads. We're talking about a billionaire who's cash flows to him from other people's labour.

And I wouldn't be that hard on Bezos. He was just lucky in the grand scheme of things, that's all. Amazon could easily have gone the way that a lot of online book selling sites (that's what it started as) went. I.E. tits up. But just like Google, it ended up simply being the right place, right time. Or actually, it just eneded being a catchy name that people would remember and recognise.

These huge corporations do not exist in a vacuum. They can exist because of the legal and social framework that allows them to exist and make money. That legal and social framework costs money to create and maintain. They should contribute to that.

They also have more talent and ability than 99% of the taxpaying population.

Which is a big part of the reason why they're more successful than 99% of the population.

Like them or not, their businesses drive economies. Most people could not build or run amazon, they would be hopelessly under skilled to pull it off.

If you don't like Bezos or Musk, then don't engage with their products. You are the consumer, you built their wealth by making their products successful.

When people pay 1,000+ euro for a new iPhone, you are saying "thank you Mr Apple corporation for making my life so much better with this barely indistinguishable upgrade from the last iPhone".

Most consumers are idiots. Idiots deserve to be parted with their money. People like Bezos and Musk are experts at giving these greedy idiots what they think they want / need. It's a game and they play it very well.

When the capitalist system is taken to this ridiculous level, everyone is greedy. The only difference, is some people are greedy and smart. While others are greedy and stupid.

The 'if you don't like X then don't use X' is a foolish argument.

When a company such as Amazon has such a dominant position in a market they limit people's options. The suggestion that they can't or shouldn't be criticised is interesting. It raises them up to another level, giving them church like qualities. Let's be clear, Bezos might be more clever than 99% of the population but that does not entitle him to be wealthier than 99.99999999 of people. This is especially true since he has leveraged his place in the market to give himself an advantage.

I take my hat off to anyone who starts with nothing and builds up a successful business

the massive hours the mind and body damaging stress levels at times how relationships and family suffer due to them not being there

the tax paying carry on of the monstrous size companies does annoy me though

Why can't he put his money towards not charging people who have cancelled amazon prime?

It's not as simple as giving everyone 50k,supply and demand would drive up the cost of everything and the purchasing power of your 50k would level out to what you had before.Not to mention you will have people who will save the 50k and it will just be on a balance sheet or people who will blow the money on something trivial/unnecessary. Personally I think if someone's earned their money then it's theirs and it's not up to them to look after people who lack motivation or work ethic

At what cost though? What is the cost to the employees who are squeezed to provide this level of service, not getting the basic dignity of decent toilet breaks? What is the cost to the environment of having multiple van deliveries coming to your door for small items?

There's a cost behind each of your purchase decisions, even if you're not paying it directly.

....so maybe musk shouldnt have been given that 400 mil of taxpayers money to start up!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm most definitely not 'far left'. It's a classic fallacy to dismiss an argument based on who is making it (or worse, who you assume is making it).

There are two glaring points here:

1. Money is power, and handing unchecked power to people does not usually end well.
2. They can only make money based on the society that supports them to do so. They need to contribute to that society in fair measure. Amazon or Apple wouild not have gotten very far without patent law, postal services, roads, literate workers/customers etc. etc.

It is possible to admire Bezos's business acumen and still think he should pay more taxes. He is a member of society and relies on that society for his business and should therefore contribute to it, and no paying **** wages doesn't count.

I'm always amused when people decry scroungers living off social welfare but then praise billionaires who pay minimal tax and take advantage of government subsidies.

Wealth shaming? Gimme a fúcking break

Even if you or someone else started with nothing and accrued significant wealth totally through your own efforts this scenario is very much the exception to the rule, if you are born in an Indian slum chances are you you will die poor and the same is true if you are born into wealth and privilege chances are you will die in healthy financial state, totally the luck of the draw and society does little to even up the odds.

There's nothing that "smart" about Jeff. He just took up an idea that was already floating about. Amazon started off as an internet site that you could buy books from. It certainly wasn't the first to do that. There was nothing "smart" about it.

What there was, however, an instantly recognisable name. But there was nothing "smart" about that either. Just like Google became the search engine of choice, based solely on its easily remembered named, Amazon became the place to buy your books and later CDs from.

Bezo's got lucky with Amazon and it was the consumers bovine adherence to easily remembered monikers that did more for Amazon getting big than anything else.

There's no 4D chess going on here.

...and clobbered competitors out of the market