what are you saving up for

The Gospel According to Luke

18 A certain ruler asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 19 Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. 20 You know the commandments: ‘You shall not commit adultery. You shall not murder. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness. Honor your father and mother.’ ” 21 He replied, “I have kept all these since my youth.” 22 When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “There is still one thing lacking. Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” 23 But when he heard this, he became sad, for he was very rich. 24 Jesus looked at him and said, “How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! 25 Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

Here's my personal fave:
20 “Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, 21 but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property.
Exodus 21:20
The Gospel according to Capitalism
Greed is good
This one in Matthew feels relevant here too:
19 “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust[a] destroy and where thieves break in and steal, 20 but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Billionaires are playing cookie clicker with our lives.

You joke, but that's close to how the rich see money. It's a score keeping device.
- I'd love to say so, but I wasn't joking.
- The goal is power, and one way to attain it, is to render everyone else powerless
- and why shouldn't people be allowed to play games they find fun?

Yes, the mentality behing it is flawed. But those are the people that make it to the top in the current economic system.

Being a billionaire should be listed in the DSM as a mental illness.
- Not even as a joke. I oppose systems that create macro wealthy and powerful. Those systems create sociopaths.
- Hypothetical situation, you are a normal person you've likely struggled all your life with bills and debts and then one day you randomly find yourself a billionaire. Perhaps you inherited it, or won the lotto. What would you suggest a person in that situation do? This is would be a once in a lifetime opportunity, , you could finally not have to stress about money, but in order to save your soul should you give it all away to charity and go back to your normal life as though nothing had happened?
  Edit: I was legitimately curious what the ethical solution would be if one were to find themselves in that exceedingly rare situation that I described. But okay looks like I ruffled a few feathers by asking.

Although I am agnostic atheist, I do wish that heaven and hell are real so that the greedy are given due punishment in the afterlife.
- What separates a person's last dying breath from a baby's first one?
  Heaven and hell don't need to be real, neither does any other metaphysical concept. When we die, we owe it to the people after us to leave the world in a better place.
  I agree with the sentiment though. Fuck billionaires.

It honestly is a waste for a true capitalist. Like, if you have enough money to cover all your expenses, while also having 2-3x your fun money expense, why aren't you following the capitalist ideal and doing something with it?

Start a nonprofit that suits your interests, buy a company you believe it, spin up scholarships, blow it on a do nothing project, but for fucks sake do something with it!

In France, they're buying medias to bring about a fascist state and using islamophobia and the fear of the enemy from within to justify an increasingly violent police state.
I guess they are bored and need to ruin something else.
- Please! It's islamphobia and "narcotraffic" (i.e. small-scale pot dealers, who have no future anyway because of racism, classism, prejudice, and Paris-centrism.)
In their eyes, they sort of are. “Investing” your money into stocks gives you the feeling you’re giving back to the world with it, while also giving you the feeling it’s secure, still belongs to you, and is earning you more.
Meanwhile, the people actually living this ideal create trusts for philanthropic efforts. They wave goodbye to the money completely, asking for no return but worldly benefit. There’s not nearly enough people like that in the world though.

Amassing wealth is an obsession. These people get a dopamine rush anytime their line goes up. Which is how they got there in the first place. At some point, the value doesn't really matter anymore but the obsession remains.

Greetings, your most experienced armchair psychologist

At a certain point, money is not about wealth or what you can buy with it but rather about power. And in life's twists, those who amass a decent amount of wealth and power come to believe they are "chosen" because of how society treats them. The poors worship the rich. if we were living in a sane society, these amounts of wealth would be looked at disgustingly by society. Shit is beyond fucked and I don't think anything can unfuck modern society.
if these people were any kind of Christian they would be worried about the end of their mortal lives. Instead they are speedrunning everything Christ taught us NOT to be.

Because it's not about money for them, they've already surpassed that concept, it a about power. Us peasants aren't quite evolved enough to understand that yet.

It's not just about power. For many, it's also a way to keep score, to feel better about themselves compared to others. (Not trying to justify; it's still a sickness.)
I mean Elon Musk once scoffed and told sponsors to go fuck themselves for daring to pull their advertising from Twitter. I don't think he understood that it was business and that some businesses run by running ads paid for by sponsors.
It's like he forgot what a business was...
Still begs the question why they need tax cuts then? It doesn't give them more power, it doesn't really give them much more money (in the grant scheme of things).

They just like sitting on a Dragons hoard.

At least in D&D no dragon hoards that much, and the chromatic dragons have a legitimate reason for it.
The wealthiest dragon you'll encounter in any fantasy setting, we aren't talking about Shadowrun or Cyberpunk where the real life billionaires are dragons, is an ancient red wyrm. They will have 1.5 million to 5 million gold pieces of treasure. 1 gold piece is ⅒ of an ounce of gold. Therefore the absolute wealthiest dragon in all of D&D and Pathfinder is only worth about $1,200,000,000, and that is only one of them. 99.99% of all other dragons would be worth less than a billion.
The chromatic dragons have to eat their hoard just before they die. If they don't have enough gold to pay Tiamat, then she eats their souls.
Also, gold is a nice soft bed according to every metallic dragon I have encountered.
- I think once your net wealth hits 100mil, it should buffer overflow to NaN and you have to start over.

I’m poor now but one day soon I’ll be a billionaire and then those poors better watch out!

You're assuming they're saving at all.

A lot of billionaire wealth is tied up in assets that is only a "savings" if it's converted to cash, like stock options.

Amazon stock is $200 a share, Bezos has 908,804,311 shares. $181,760,862,200 in stock.

https://www.wallstreetzen.com/stocks/us/nasdaq/amzn/ownership

But that money doesn't go anywhere unless he sells it. Stock market is closed Monday for memorial day, but let's say he does nothing on Tuesday morning and decides to sleep in until 11:30 AM, shit, I WOULD. In that time the stock goes from $200 to $214.

Bezos "makes" $12,723,260,354 while sleeping.

When you have that many stock shares, the wealth is self perpetuating... but it's not "real" until you sell it.

What happens if he's sleeping and the price drops to $180 because of more stupid Trump shit. Now he's "lost" $18,176,086,220 overnight.

Maybe you should read "saving" as "hoarding". The skeet (tweet?) Is making a point about their odd motivation to continue to accrue unimaginable wealth far beyond the point where the costs of their wildest dreams are trivial. The whole while having the ability to literally end world hunger many times over after subtracting those costs.
- Well, that's what I'm saying, beyond a certain point, the wealth accumulates itself with no active intervention on his part besides making sure the stock price doesn't tank.
  But that's the whole point about "world hunger" too. It's not like he can liquidate 900 million shares of Amazon at $200 a share.
  Estimates are it would take $40 billion a year, EVERY year, to solve world hunger.
  https://www.wfpusa.org/articles/how-much-would-it-cost-to-end-world-hunger/
  So to solve world hunger for 1 year, Bezos would have to sell 200 million of his 900 million Amazon shares at $200 a pop.
  Nobody has the money to buy 200 million Amazon shares at that price.
  As soon as he sold a fraction of that, it would flood the market and the stock price would crater.
  When it became clear Bezos was the one flooding the market, everyone else who had Amazon would panic sell, tanking the price even harder.
Thank you - well explained.
It's also interesting to think of the stocks that the various oligarchs and politicians control or own as a backdoor for institutional capture. You want Trump on your side and his administration making decisions that benefit you and your companies? Easy - just buy some of his BS stock and use it as leverage. You won't even have to push it - he'll do what you want because that's how his underdeveloped brain perceives existence - as a series of quid pro quo agreements.
Of course, it's not just stocks. He's created so many other avenues to bribe him. It's bonkers.
I've always wondered - Who would he sell the stocks to? Is it a peer-to-peer system or is there a kind of centralised bank involved that pays out and assumes ownership of the shares? Is the price definite or do they have to auction it off, meaning the value is more of a guideline?
- there are stock liquidators who specialize in the process, you'd outsource it to distributed buyers
And selling could have important impacts on the company itself in certain situations

My theory is that when you get that first Billion with a B, something fundamental breaks in the human brain.

They don’t think like us normal folks anymore, even multimillionaires are “other” to them.

Maybe that's just it. They've accomplished something, but ultimately they know it's meaningless. So they try to find a context where it has meaning.

Some of them find that meaning in charity, helping large portions of humanity.

Others realize that the only circumstance where the distinction between a billion and a hundred million matters is if the world is absolutely going to shit.

In a way.

This world IS hell and them gaining larger and larger parts of it for their own benefit...

Capitalists are demons. Or might as well be, outcome's the same in the end.

It's their version of setting the high score in the game of life

they think that if for one brief moment they have the most billions, they will exist forever.

I mean they will in a way. If we have reliable history books in the future they will surely teach about the oligarchs of the early 21st century, just like I learned about the Robber-Barons of US history.

The shroud has no pockets

Not that it makes it any better, but the billions they have are mostly imaginary. It's not cash or even concrete numbers on a bank account. It's just a speculative valuation of what they own and most of the value comes from stocks on a company. Stocks that only have value as long as they are desirable for someone else and there is no surplus of them on the market. They could never cash out that value and even trying to cash out a significant portion would crash the stock price and their wealth. But as long as they possess this assumed wealth, they are granted almost unlimited credit to cover any purchase.

“ they are granted almost unlimited credit to cover any purchase.”
This is where I feel tax policy should step in, if it hasn’t already. I get that unrealized or non liquid wealth is theoretical based on valuation. But as soon as it’s used as collateral there’s an income aspect that should be taxed. Basically, once you start using that wealth to secure loans, it’s not really “unrealized” anymore and should be taxed.
- Might not be a bad idea, anything beyond a single HELOC gets taxed 25% off the top, or something else that someone smarter about economics than I would certainly be able to come up with.

Just like the president, who now has more executive powers than ever, still doesn't run things the way you think they do. They have an inner circle. It also could be thought of in a way like other countries inside of the empire don't really have sovereignty. Also, you could rethink the whole idea of a dictator. I mean if the capitalist class wants to defend themselves, they're going to obfuscate their involvement. Like, you need a fall guy and the fall guy is a gambler. And sometimes he comes out winning and sometimes he gets beaten up in the street.

If giving Charon just two coins gets you across the river Styx, imagine what paying him billions of dollars would get you.

to create scarcity - making sure you stay exploitable.