I feel as though I’m one of the few people who doesn’t mind that billionaires exist. A very large amount of money is going to be used to influence society somehow: this will either be done by these wealthy individuals, or by the government. I don’t see that one group is currently doing a better job than the other honestly (although I wonder if Bill Gates’ efforts to eradicate disease around the world would have ever been done separately by a government if he hadn’t taken the initiative).

I also feel like the administrative overheard of government loses a huge amount of money in its inefficiencies. Sure, some billionaires waste money on fancy houses and cars but I think that tiny sum pales in comparison to all of the tax dollars that are wasted. Every time I walk around San Francisco I’m reminded of how inefficient the process of translating tax dollars into something useful for society is.

If an individual really wants to improve something negative in the world, becoming a billionaire is one of the very few ways to do it. Ostensibly, a government official should be representing the will of the people, so if you feel that a goal like curing cancer is much higher up the priority list than talking about gun control, it makes more sense to try to become a billionaire and just fund this research directly rather the misrepresenting the priorities of your voters.

To be clear, I am not advocating that billionaires should have more influence on society’s laws than the average person; however, if a handful of people in the world want to spend a large amount of money on AI research, curing disease, or developing solutions to climate change, that doesn’t bother me in the slightest.

instead of a "Billionaire" I think we should start saying "person experiencing great wealth" .. this may start to help them not associate their money with their identity ;/