Three of those billionaires made their fortunes by stealing other's work and exploiting other's labor. I might dislike Taylor Swift's music but it is her music and her work that made her a billionaire. When someone stole her work from under her, she re-recorded it from scratch and then put on the most profitable tour in history with each show being 3+ hours long.
I'm not a Swifty, but I also don't think she qualifies to join that evil as fuck trio.
Hey look everyone! This person's a billionaire apologist!
I'm (mostly) joking.
You are correct that she is not on the aame level as the others but as a billionaire and member of the ruling class T-Swizzle has an elevated responsibility to the rest of the world. Instead of helping she continues her massive destruction of the climate.
Until she is leveraging her wealth to make positive change she does not get a pass.
TBF Buc-ee's is one of the most employee and consumer friendly chains across the US. They publicly post their pay (this image is from last year) and it's far above what most gas stations (or even retail stores) will pay
Sigh... yeah, I know. For what it is, Buc-ees is pretty great: very tasty food, very nice restrooms, good policies as an employer, etc. The only problem is that "what it is" -- literally "the world's largest convenience store," a gigantic monument to car-dependency, fossil fuels, and lazy consumerism -- is fundamentally pretty terrible.
This conversation is making me crave a pastrami reuben and some beaver nuggets, and I'm kinda hating myself for it.
While I catch your meaning, cell phones aren't the best choice for that comparison, they don't use much electricity amazingly. Average phone may only take 4 kwh a year to charge. Where I live that would cost less than $1. While my electric bill is around $150, mostly do to air conditioning.
Mostly, the private jet. Idk if she has yachts or mansion(s) but those would also count. It's not that ordinary people don't pollute but the scale. The top 50 billionaires each on average pollute more every 1.5hours than an ordinary person does their entire life.
Approximately, 5840 peoples worth a year and they have the wealth to choose otherwise. People charge their phone largely because they have to to stay employed/connected nowadays.
When people have hoarded so much and actively make the world worse instead of better theres no option but to question their morality.
Okay but it's not a 1 woman show. She has likely hundreds of people employed she would not have succeeded without, yet she's about 1b richer than those combined
She is known for giving these people bonuses that surpass anything I've heard about outside corpo management, though. The occasion that made the press mention 100k USD for truckdrivers for one tour and while I dont know how much a truck driver makes a year, it'd sure make my life easier for a couple of years.
Not saying she isn't good at making money, but I'd say the jury is still out on the issue of hoarding all of it for herself.
Of all the things to be wealthy for, making music and brining people a little bit of joy ain't bad. Don't condone the jet or the lifestyle. But I don't think it's fair to lump her in with exon and zuk
Yeah I'm not a fan of her private jet shenanigans or her music, but the other 3 also use private jets like it's going out of style, and are nowhere close to her when it comes to societal impact. If you wanted a 4th you can use one of our own billionaires from the old continent like Bernard Arnault (who is allegedly pals with Musk)
Not close to as evil as the others for sure. But there's a lot of labor that goes into making music and into touring that she didn't do herself. Does all her talent make it right that she makes thousands of times more money per hour of labor as all those others?
It's people's money that made her a billionaire, if she became a billionaire it's because everyone who ever paid for something that brought her money was overpaying. It's the same for each and every billionaire, even the ones you appreciate, you're paying too much for shit so they can have more money than they can spend in a lifetime.
"I got my money's worth!" Well no buddy, you only think so because there's always a billionaire at the top inflating the price of everything, your money is worth a lot more if they all disappear.
I guess that all the people who downvoted think that it's perfectly ok for billionaires to exist...
This is also why all the people insisting “Proof that Valve/Steam are SCAMMING you” are hated and rightfully cast aside. People pay for Steam and enjoy what they get.
Everyone but the ultra rich get duped and scammed in this system, we don't have a choice but to pay the price we're being charged, but the price we're being charged is inflated to enrich the few without and benefits to the majority!