$20M is 20,000x more than $1,000.
Someone living paycheck to paycheck to him is about the same jump as him to Musk.
What comparison are you making? $20M net worth to another 56 year old’s net worth of a $1000?
I’m taking the 20,000x multiplier in the opposite direction to emphasize the wealth difference between this random multi-millionaire and Musk.
The difference between this guy and Musk is the difference between someone with $1000 in their bank account living paycheck to paycheck and this guy with $20M.
The difference between $20M and $1000 = $19,999,000 and the difference between $20M and $1B = $980,000,000
there are also people on earth who dont have any food to eat or those who could buy a house with $1000 in their own country. this reasoning is fruitless and only allows extremities.
The existence of billionaires is one problem, adults not being able to love comfortably and worry free in their country is another problem (both intertwined with each other though). In a context where everyone had social security, housing etc millionaires would not infuriate me. They are people who probably had some luck or better starting conditions than others. Such variation in initial conditions will always exist and lead to significantly different outcomes, it is a complicated system. Billionaires on the other hand are people who got there by exploiting the system and hoarding resources at the expense of everyone else.
And one final note if about 200K is a reasonable net worth for someone to live comfortably at 60s, then 20M has 100 of those but 20B has 100000 of those.
There are a lot of 56 year olds in the US with negative net worth. I’m not sure what gotcha you think you’re making.
Nobody is saying the system is not broken elsewhere. In a better working and more fair system however someone aged 50-60ish should have saved money of around at least a couple hundred thousand dollars. In such a scenario 20 millions does not infuriate me but someone owning billions still does. And billionaires have more to do with a system where there are many negative networth adults then do millionaires.
disclaimer: I am no where near a millionaire
The way I always put it is the difference between $1 million and $1 billion is about $1 billion.
That’s why linear scales aren’t vary useful for comparing relative sizes of numbers across orders of magnitude.
The very fact that there’s an order of magnitude difference is the point of the comparison. There shouldn’t be five orders of magnitude between any two people’s wealth; it’s obscene. Maintaining a linear comparison shows the true nature of the wealth gap.
