No, really like. The thing that was probably like. THE BIG radicalizing moment from "I don't like it at all but what are we gonna do, tell people how to spend their money, they worked for it", before I even realized that no one "works for" even a single billion, before all of that fell into place, the thing is that they're so fucking unhappy. Like. They're miserable! They're historically miserable, the ultra-rich! Even a lot of the comic-book fictional ones are miserable! They are not happy people and you'd think. You'd think that having more money than Jesus Christ's Vampire Sister could spend in her younger brother's lifetime would free you up to have hobbies. Shower theaters in grants to put on opulent productions tailored to your tastes. Singlehandedly set up fandom conventions for your personal interests. Go to a movie every night and eat at a different restaurant just because. Take up Warhammer without worrying about the cost of having THE BEST battle setup in your basement. Hell, indulge in my personal dream of having a fully 3D-modeled megadungeon and loot for your personal fantasy RPG campaign and provide all your players with lovingly detailed miniatures. Fund a season of Dimension20 laser-targeted at your interests. Find a fanfic author and say "for the next 3 years, make sure I have a stream of my special interest characters". Joyously indulge in your favorite activities. Learn to paint. Meet people into your kinks, I don't know, ANYTHING. I'm not even talking about "oh, fund 100,000 peoples' college tuition and buy up 300,000 more peoples' student debt per year just to cancel", this is just... personal happiness. They're completely joyless. Utterly miserable people.
Instead the only time I've seen a billionaire remotely happy, on a deep level, more than just a little "haha, ok" smile, is when Musk challenged Zuckerberg to a fistfight and Zuckerberg fuckin, he came to life, it was like someone lit a spark in him, for a brief moment it was "oh my god I'm not alone, someone cares" and just
how terrible is that? How awful, that you're on top of the world, and you cannot be happy? You have everything, you want for nothing, we are literally built for pleasure and you can't find it with everything at your disposal?
This isn't some pseudo-mystic connection to "oh, but suffering is important, suffering is what lets us be human, remove suffering and we are no longer human" or any bullshit like that; my mysticism has a place for suffering but not like that. This is just like.
Realizing that they can't even be happy it's like, where did your soul go? What is the point of your life? Why do you live like this? HOW can you live like this? I may struggle for brief moments of happiness but I have them, how can you have less happiness than I do when you have more of everything else? How have you mutilated your essential humanity like this, to the point where you're unrecognizable to me, where if I look into your eyes I don't know what I'd see looking back at me?
Yeah anyway that was one of the big radicalization moments for me, and the rest toppled from there.
Personal theory here, but I think this can also be tied to the infinite choice conundrum.
When these people can do everything they'd like with that much money, they find it difficult to actually find a way to spend the money and before they know it, it all dulls out. They start taking everything for granted and will have nothing to fight for. As much as I agree with everything in this post, (aka %100) I think having no purpose beyond having enough money for the rest of your life also plays a part in it all as well.
I think it's also why we see so many rich people (billionaire or not) get exposed for doing horrendous shit. They think that since they've already taken everything for granted, they now have the right to do all the inhumane garbage they please.
Power corrupts. Even a mere illusion of it can corrupt. These rich bastards are all an aftermath of it all.