Jeff Bezos’s net worth is $232.7 billion. There are recorded to be a little over eight billion people on Earth. This means that Jeff Bezos has the ability to buy everyone on Earth a $20 meal, hundreds of thousands of which desperately need it, while still having an exponential amount of money left over.
This should really put into perspective how absolutely shocking the amount of money these billionaires possess, so much in fact that it becomes incomprehensible to most people. However, even after all of that, Bezos is still not even the richest person on Earth.
Statistically the richest person in the world is Elon Musk, with a net worth well over double that of Bezos, at 488.3 billion dollars. It could be argued that both have made donations and contributions, in turn making them ethical. However, how ethical is it to donate to relief funds and to organizations to combat situations that one has caused?
In Musk’s case, he donated 30 million dollars to a Texas town in which one of his SpaceX rockets exploded during ground testing, and in the case of Bezos, he made a 10 billion dollar commitment to climate change relief. Might I add that this is a commitment, so the 10 billion dollar donation has not been fully made yet, and secondly carbon emissions for Amazon reached a new peak in 2021, which is coincidentally the year Bezos stepped down as Amazon’s CEO.
On the contrary, one example of an individual with a large sum of money who is ethical would be Dolly Parton. Parton could potentially be a billionaire from her extensive music catalog, large ownership in the Dollywood company, and work in films. However, Dolly Parton has made generous contributions to underprivileged communities in Tennessee, disaster relief, education, and scholarships. This further proves that there is no such thing as an ethical billionaire, as all that money could easily go to more beneficial causes.
Instead of making substantial donations in relation to their wealth, or making any sort of donations at all, billionaires continue to concentrate their wealth and invest in themselves and their companies, usually not adjusting employee incomes and wages to the company’s growing wealth.
With money comes power. Giving these people more influence in affairs such as the government. Funnily enough, the richest person in the world comes up again as a recent example. Musk became a special government employee directly following Trump’s election, a campaign he donated 239 million dollars. Musk gave money to Trump, and Trump gave a government position to Musk, proving that money buys power.
Scarily enough, this is one of the publicized instances of money gaining power. There are most likely more instances of these types of matters going on behind closed doors, with even more sinister payments and results. For example, if one were to have a quick glance at the list of richest people in the world, most names would be unrecognizable. That is of course only scratching the surface, as many unnamed billionaires come from generationally wealthy families that have been around for centuries and have their claws deep in international politics and government.
One billion dollars is an incomprehensible amount of money for most people in the world. There are very few who will even see a collective of one billion dollars in their entire lifespan. This exponential sum of money could easily go towards other more ethical causes and there would still be enough left over to last a lifetime. There can be no ethical billionaire, because the accumulation of all that money could not be obtained when generous donations and diversion to more ethical causes are taken into consideration.