The real problem with billionaires

Lavish consumption and huge inheritances are hard to justify in a world with so many pressing needs.

Billionaires Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk attended President Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration. (Photo via the Associated Press)

A recent Pew survey revealed that despite an endless cavalcade of polyamory articles in the media, 90 percent of Americans say that married people having an affair is morally wrong. In fact, it was the only thing they tested that received strong condemnation across the board.

I was most interested, though, in the question about whether “being extremely rich (for example, having billions of dollars)” is immoral.

As stated, not that many people agree that it is. Indeed, the fact that only 29 percent of Democrats signed up for anti-billionaireism calls into question some recent populist political sloganeering.

But I was a little torn based on the wording of the question.

As I wrote late last year, in many ways I believe in practicing billionaire positivity. The most common ways to end up with a net worth of more than $1 billion are founding a very successful company and making some very successful investments.

It is certainly possible to make a lot of money investing through dumb luck¹ or by running a company that’s some kind of scam. But in the majority of cases these businesses are making a lot of money because they’re providing people with goods and services they find useful — this can generate very valuable stock portfolios that give you a net worth in the billions, though it typically does not mean billions of dollars in liquid cash.

But if your image of what it means to be a billionaire is Scrooge McDuck swimming in a vault of money, I can see why you’d view that as immoral.

More to the point, if you not only had a net worth of billions of dollars but also chose to liquidate those assets in order to engage in billions of dollars worth of personal consumption, that is certainly morally questionable. And if your plan is to hoard billions in financial assets as inheritance so your kids can enjoy lavish consumption, that’s also not morally great.

A recent New York Times article covered the right-wing billionaires organizing against the Giving Pledge specifically and charitable giving in general, and I think that is definitely immoral.