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Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

I've come to be convinced that having a huge amount of money causes some kind of mental breakage, a need to control other people that is unhealthy for everyone it touches. I don't mind everyone having or expressing an opinion, even opinions I disagree with, but when someone uses their disproportionate wealth and influence to spread misinformation and disrupt and dismantle democratic systems it crosses a line. It takes a lot of nerve to call spreading misinformation and funding recall campaigns based on lies speaking truth to power. And, to attack someone for reporting facts that correct that misinformation? Grotesque.

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I don't think having the money causes the problem, it's the journey to get to that point. People like MacKenzie Scott or lottery winners generally don't act like this. But aside from those rare instances, in order to make it to a billion dollars you need to consistently exploit people and absolutely refuse to use your power to help others in any significant way. You have to wake up every day with a hundred million dollars and think "the best thing I can do with this money is use it to make more money".

>> in order to make it to a billion dollars you need to consistently exploit people and absolutely refuse to use your power to help others in any significant way.

I would categorically disagree with your statement.

Jeff Bezos

Elon Musk

Bill Gates

Mark Zuckerberg

All billionaires. All have created one (or multiple in Musk's case) products that have greatly benefitted society in numerous ways. The Gates Foundation has donated billions to causes all over the world. Bezos has committed over $3B to various charitable causes.

Also, More than 70% of lottery winners will run through of the money they've won and be right back where they started before winning. Further proving my point the people who win the lottery are not visionaries and have no desire to create products that will change people's lives. They're just happy to have the money.

That reply is utterly baffling. We can set aside Bezos and Musk, but the exploitative actions of Zuckerberg and especially Gates are extremely well documented.

The claim was that they refuse to help others in any significant way. Clearly nonsense for Gates at least.

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/bill-gates-philant...

If you ever meet these people you're bound to have a "don't meet your heroes" moment.

All of these people have also significantly contributed to societal collapse. You can’t look at a stock going up $100 but ignore the drop of $92.

I would agree with you, I see people like Jeff Bezos who's unfathomably wealthy but also treats his workers so terribly that they have to pee in bottles and I wonder why? What compels someone to so obssesively seek wealth that they must treat people like that. I can only see it as some sort of mental illness. When someone compulsively hoards trinkets to the detriment of all around them, we call that a disease and I don't see why we should treat it differently when it's dollars they're collecting.

To get to where Jeff Bezos is, it's almost mandatory to have sociopathic traits and to be genuinely incapable of regarding other people as anything but means to an end. It's a simple selection effect.

He took a course on how to use your laugh as a domination tactic.

Who knew dragons in real life could be so lame compared to fiction /s

To be fair, I don't think jeff has proclaimed that their drivers need to pee in bottles. That's all mid level managers trying to show gains to their up-line reports.

Jeff (and the board) wonders if deliveries could be more efficient, and wants to find efficiencies to report to the board and the shareholders. However it's fucking dave, 6+ layers below jeff that is firing drivers for missing unreasonably tight delivery schedules because they had to stop to take a leak. So that dave can tell suan who can tell susan who can tell .... and finally jeff that deliveries are now 2.3% faster.

I do think that enough money and therefore a higher degree of control of your own life experiences does warp your perceptions of the world, however. I fail to understand why anyone with a billion fucking dollars in the bank just doesn't retire to a beach stocked with sex workers and cocaine and instead decides to continue torturing people through layers of unthinking bureaucracy though.

>Jeff (and the board) wonders if deliveries could be more efficient

And does not even care how or want to know how, just attain the goal at any cost. Of course, when word gets out that people are forced to pee in bottles, he suddenly wants to change things, not because he cares about the conditions that led to it, but because it damages his image.

The purpose of a system is what it does. If you're in control of a company, and that company is an "orphan crushing machine", it's your responsibility because ultimately someone must be responsible. You could argue the board shares responsibility, and certainly every high level manager endorses it.

You have to say "Deliveries should be as efficient as is consistent with basic decency, anyone delivering Amazon packages will have breaks and schedules that are reasonable and achievable", in the same way that he mandated APIs[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18916406

I'm not arguing that this isn't true. I'm arguing that the closer to the bottle pissing employees you are on the org chart the more guilty you are.

If it was only a small cluster of employees bottle pissing then this would make sense. When it's endemic across the company, that suggests it comes from incentives set at the top, and the low level managers can't individually do much about it.

Well at least at or near the top of the last mile group.

> When someone compulsively hoards trinkets to the detriment of all around them, we call that a disease and I don't see why we should treat it differently when it's dollars they're collecting

He doesn’t hold dollars, he mostly holds equity. Also it doesn’t seem like he’s directly involved in the day to day tasks assigned to delivery drivers so it’s weird to assign blame to him for that as well.

One could argue that if drivers were unhappy with the work, they could just quit. Another would argue that that’s a callous way to view the problem as a new job may not be easy to get.

I’d link these 2 issues and say my view is that if Bezos were to sell his stock to give to charity, Amazon’s own stock would plummet which would indirectly force the decision to leave Amazon onto their drivers. A depreciating stock price means their corporate RSU grants look less attractive, which I speculate would make working at Amazon less attractive, leading to worse talent and declining company performance. If a decline was to happen in this way there would probably be more demands on drivers, potentially decreasing demand for the job as the whole, and leaving the drivers who stay behind in worse conditions.

This is an insane comment/prediction.

> He doesn’t hold dollars, he mostly holds equity.

A distinction without a difference.

> Also it doesn’t seem like he’s directly involved in the day to day tasks assigned to delivery drivers so it’s weird to assign blame to him for that as well.

It’s weird to assign blame to the CEO for a long-standing practice of his company? You’ve got to be kidding? I don’t want to go full Godwin’s law here but Jesus…

> One could argue that if drivers were unhappy with the work, they could just quit. Another would argue that that’s a callous way to view the problem as a new job may not be easy to get.

Yes, “Another” would. Anyone who has existed in the world could tell you that. “Just get another job” is so incredibly tone deaf. It’s up there with “just sue your employer if they are stealing from you/harassing you/etc”.

> I’d link these 2 issues and say my view is that if Bezos were to sell his stock to give to charity, Amazon’s own stock would plummet

Literally a made up outcome with zero basis in reality. And a rather disgusting defense of his practices “no, no, you don’t understand, he has to be horrible or Amazon will falter and fail and then those people will lose their jobs!”.

> It’s weird to assign blame to the CEO for a long-standing practice of his company? You’ve got to be kidding? I don’t want to go full Godwin’s law here but Jesus…

Yes, especially since it would be considered a business minutiae in the grand scheme of things.

> Literally a made up outcome with zero basis in reality. And a rather disgusting defense of his practices “no, no, you don’t understand, he has to be horrible or Amazon will falter and fail and then those people will lose their jobs!”.

I'm curious as to what you think would happen? If schedules were loosened and drivers were paid more, what do you think would be the long-term impact? Tell me how the way you would change things would improve the world.

How much money do you think causes it? Additionally, perhaps it's the other way around. Being someone who's predisposed to those tendencies is better at gaining capital. I think some good evidence for this is that Ken Olsen, by most accounts, was a saint and he owned DEC. Him having a substantial amount of wealth didn't turn him evil, so perhaps either he didn't hit that threshold or got lucky enough to not need the unhealthy and controlling tendencies to make it big

>think some good evidence for this is that Ken Olsen, by most accounts, was a saint and he owned DEC

You're right that the money itself does not cause it but what mattered with people like Olsen was that he had a Scandinavian background and was born in the 1920s. 'Saint' is a telling description because people like him came out of a, not necessarily explicit but still functioning culturally Christian environment with virtues that tempered the influence money had on them, he often remarked that humility was most important to him.

Very different person from the current class of individuals who are completely unrestrained by the values people took for granted for a long time.

if the US of all places isn't a culturally christian environment I don't know what is

Has US Christianity always been like this or has it changed? It all feels very manipulative to me now and the morals / virtues seem to have fallen by the wayside.

It started episcopalian (more liberal anglicanism). The evangelical movement in the US really didn't start to so visibly change things until reagan

it isn't, not in his sense anyway. The moderate, central and northern European mainline Protestantism that fostered democracy, education, an egalitarian social contract and temperance you if at all find now only in small pockets.

It's a huge mistake to confuse that kind of deep cultural Christianity with what has been politically ascendant for a long time now in the US. That older, European set of values is still much more alive in say Sweden, which despite an even higher per capita rate of billionaires would not produce Garry Tan or Bezos or Musk.

You have it backwards. The person didn’t change, they were always like that, long before money. Our system selects for them and rewards them, and when they attain those rewards they use them to further express themselves as the person they always were.

This is the truth of the matter - everyone else got off the train at millions or a small billion; the only people who ride it all the way to trillions are the pathologies.

We used to say the pathologies were the ones who made it to a billion! Times change. :)

Quite often money is equated with intelligence and with time people want their opinion on everything under the sun - especially on things outside their area. With time so much smoke has been blown up their ass that they think they are better than everyone and can get away with mistreating people. Money does impact people.

This.

Directors of small companies are the same, they're just not wealthy enough that they could do any harm.

It's the same problem that afflicts celebrities. Once you're to a certain level of prominence, there are many people who will gladly sniff your farts and tell you your ideas are great, thus you "lose touch" with reality on the ground. Then when someone comes along that doesn't care for your ideas or worldview it's easy to assume they're either engaging in bad faith or are somehow biased because it flies in the face of your day-to-day experience. I don't envy these folks, they're surrounded by liars and grifters.

You are actually kinda right. I do think that if you turn as a "really rich" person, you just don't know about anything to trust at a certain point.

Firstly, you will have the people who will praise your diamonds and everything and make you lose touch with reality.

But there would also be the more subtler ones whom you actually consider friends. there can be two things that you meet some people before hand and judge them or were already rich before having such friends, but even then the first group might just change knowing that you are now extremely rich and might want subtle favours and so act subtly different.

In a nutshell, I feel like extremely rich people might not know how people actually think of them because we have commoditized everything to money,opportunities and networks and in some sense, they are unable to trust their own real instincts too.

Also we are forgetting the fact that these people would change with so much external influences too and that some people would stop after a certain point so as to they will not reach the scale of billions but rather stop at millions.

All of these factors combined make for the most egotistical machines.

just a few thoughts on extremely rich people, South park creators seem to be one of the exceptions for me and it seems like those guys are just two friends who just like doing what they do and even said a massive fuck you to paramount even on television.

Or like... getting money is a big filter and any normal person who hits it stops working and disappears from the corporate world.

Perhaps it's more accurate to say that people are used to getting what they want. When they don't, it violates their hedonic adaptation and provokes a negative reaction.

Mixing wealth into this situation increases the blast radius and makes it more public.

I read this and had a similar question of why do they all go so far down the right wing rabbit hole? Just noticed that one of the amplifiers was such which got me thinking. It seems like all these extremely wealthy people pick up such destructive and twisted worldviews that all somehow feed on this weird energy of stupidity. I’m just so baffled by it cuz they are surely smart people but so blinded. Sometimes I think it must be a marketing stunt but nope.

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