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".

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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