Blue Origin rocket explosion: watch $150 million go boom

[Shadow1980]

There's so many apologists for billionaires out in the world today. Maybe some of them read Ayn Rand and took her seriously, acting like the Titans of Industry were all self-made men of great genius and that the plebs should be lucky to be given a paid job in the first place, like the secular, capitalist version of the "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" sermon, where if a worker is struggling it's all their fault because they're a vile, loathsome sinner lazy welfare moocher.

Sure, it's technically true that Jeff Bezos wasn't born rich. He didn't come from old money like Bush or Musk or Trump. But by time he was grown he was already living a respectable upper middle-class life. He had family members who were well off, including his maternal grandfather and his stepfather, enough to where in 1995 he was given a loan of $245,573, well over half a million in today's money. Seems like every billionaire is either born into wealth, or is at least well-off enough to have the connections and go to good schools and get big loans from family. How many billionaires lived their entire youths in trailer parks or Section 8 housing with a family bringing in poverty wages and their only job opportunities when they came of age were fast food, retail, or the military, but through sheer pluck and determination went from a relatively low five-figure income to an income literally six to eight orders of magnitude higher? Can't imagine it's many.

The fact is nobody makes their money alone. Legal systems, public infrastructure and services, and, if you're a business owner, the work of employees were all necessary for that payday to roll in. People that have an absolute shitload of money aren't the people who put in 40 hours plus overtime of hard, back-breaking labor. I've known countless people who worked hard their whole lives and are still living paycheck to paycheck. I've known people who did everything right and sacrificed and worked their way up the ladder to earn a somewhat better life only to get the axe due to layoffs. Like I said, vanishingly few of the people at the top started from the bottom.

The people that have a shitload of money have their fortunes because they own means of production. And the people who own the means of production, the capitalist class, often times took a lot of shortcuts and did a lot of exploitation to make or enhance their fortunes, making bank on the suffering of others, frequently getting a big leg up from the state in the form of bailouts, subsidies, tax breaks, deregulation, and the occasional CIA-backed coup of a non-compliant foreign government ("socialism for me, but not for thee" might as well be the motto of Corporate America). In the 19th & early 20th centuries it was the banana republics, abusive company towns, horrifically unsafe working conditions, and literal murder of employees for daring to go on strike. Today it's fossil fuel companies ignoring the negative externalities of their products or tech giants unleashing and forcing upon everyone possibly one of the most existentially dangerous technologies since the invention of the atom bomb. The amount of misery inflicted by the insatiable avarice of wealthy business owners is incalculable. There just seems to be something about becoming ultra-wealthy that turns people into sociopaths. They seem to view the rest of humanity as disposable, expendable cogs in a big money-printing machine, and now they're trying to find ways of making those cogs unnecessary in the first place by automating as much as possible. They've always viewed every employee as a drain on the bottom line, and if they could find a way to not have any employees, they'd do it, damn the consequences to society and its future, because there's profit to be made this fiscal year.

EDIT: Now, there are people that have become wealthy because of some rare talent, like being able to act or play sports at a high level. There's arguments to be had about whether an actor or musician or athlete deserves to get paid orders of magnitude more than people doing more important work "because that's what the market is willing to pay them," but at least they're doing actual work. I'll give them that much. Now the ones who moved on into business ventures and became even more wealthy by becoming capitalists, well, there's going to be capitalist bullshit involved in making money that way. That entertainer-turned-business owner almost certainly screwed someone over in the process of making their fortunes by owning things rather than through labor.

Last edited by Shadow1980 - 2 hours ago