Ask yourself how that billionaire was made first
The way every billionaire is made: ruthlessly exploiting the working class.
Not all of them. i wouldn’t call buying a concert ticket exploitation. Pricing them to astronomical heights, yeah. The only person responsible for parting with their moneys is the Self.
This comes up a lot. While Swift might not be able to control concert ticket prices as a whole, she certainly has the influence to make it better. She’s a literal billionaire with a very devout following.
If anyone could hold a concert at a non-ticketmaster venue, it’s her.
If anyone could pay her staff quintuple the going rate, it’s her.
If anyone could lobby cities that hold her concerts accountable for how they treat homeless people, it’s her.
I love Taylor Swift as much as the next person, but she has blood on her hands just like every billionaire. She may be one of the “good” ones but if anyone could afford to do better, it’s her.
And yet, you pay for her priviledge. Is your arm ever sore for the twisting of it?
And yet, you pay for her priviledge
??? dude who you talking to?
You, concert ticket buyer
Are you like a boomer that can’t understand you’re not talking to the same person with every comment? You know lemmy is the whole forum, not a user you’re replying to right?
Ruthless espolitation of the working class and then portected from said working class by armed guards (ploice) and their apparatchik (judical system) , paid for mostly by the working classes.
I would go so far as to say: they will never be a good billionaire, unless that means a median income in a poor country
I totally agree, but also the pop star billionaires are the least offensive type. If you’re targeting them before the other billionaires, you got played and are doing it wrong. The richest most politically powerful billionaires are the biggest threat to freedom.
See that picture of the homeless man on top? Bill Gates has literally saved hundreds of thousands of men like him through his charitable foundations. It depends on the person not the size of the bank account.
Agreed. Any downvotes you got/get are simple shills of the mindsets “rich people bad” and “Windows bad”, both of which are very prevalent here. Multiple people here (not all) throwing those downvotes around would be doing the same shit if they were billionaires, or worse.
Wish we could all be like Pepe.
You know what would help them?
A house.
That wouldn’t help, as they wouldn’t have the means to furnish it or maintain it or pay the taxes on it. What they need is medical care for the sizeable portion that have mental illness keeping them down. And all of them need an economic system that doesn’t let hard luck cases get thrown under the bus.
You wouldn’t believe how many of them have jobs and just need a house. It’s the majority actually.
strat is to target all billionaires equally
To me this is the silliest possible counter propaganda. They want to get people fired up about a super popular billionaire that actually works really hard and over pays her people. So then they can paint a picture of radicals who’d have everyone living in the slums no matter what they were able to do with their talents. They won’t even wait to see the real responses. They’ll put their own in, grab the screen cap and deride us all as anarchists.
Idk, when you move from normal wealth to exorbitant wealth AND you’re a international pop star who very clearly has THOUSANDS of workers supporting each show it seems kinda hard to ignore the people who’s work is providing your stage to excess.
They all are a symptom of the same disease, some of them are the disease as well.
^ This right here.
I’m so tired of “leftists” focusing on inoffensive targets in the middle of the spectrum when the real problem is far to the right of it.
Pop stars are just the pretty faces in front of the behemoths that are the music labels. These labels are absolutely very politically powerful. Do you think Taylor Swift for rich by paying her staff fair salaries? The cleaning people from the concert venues, the bartenders, the people taking your tickets, etc, they all earned little crumbs while Swift, the venue, and the label made the big bucks.
No one becomes a billionaire by paying fair wages.
Most of those people work for the venue though, the performer doesn’t control their wages.
Taylor Swift has the power to demand basically anything from the venue.
Expecting a performer to go to lengths like that just isn’t realistic, they’ve got their own job to do.
You can say the same about mega corp CEOs. Poor them, they are so busy with their own job.
Taylor Swift has the power to demand basically anything from the venue.
And the perfect counterpart is another rotund fuzzy tech guy, Steve Wozniak. The Woz, who isn’t a billionaire in part because when Steve Jobs decided to fuck over a bunch of Apple employees before the IPO Woz gave them some of his shares. Woz, who spends his time in part video chatting with elementary school classes and talking to them about technology.
Are you presenting him as an example of a good billionaire? Cause still, nah.
Guarantee we’re going to find out he’s a real dirt bag after everything is said and done he just keeps a tight circle.
To be a billionaire you need to be a dirt bag, it’s that simple.
I doubt it. It’s obvious from looking at Gabe that he hasn’t really changed who is he from before he made his money.
And his ethics at work with a flat hierarchy don’t scream over involved shitty boss.
Mind you by virtue of having all that money, he isn’t good, but I don’t think he is bad either.
Oh fuck off dude, the guy is a billionaire that means anyone who makes a purchase on Steam is paying more than the games are worth because there’s a fucking leech at the top who wants to buy a seventh yacht.
He’s greedy as fuck leech no argument.
But the dirt bag billionaires are the ones who it comes out allowed for a culture of fear, have sexual assault charges against them, power hungry manipulative fucks, etc. and I don’t see that coming out about Gabe.
They’re all dirtbags, the reason why people like you and me can barely afford to live comfortably is because of all the billionaires and multimillionaires. Just because they propose a nice product doesn’t mean they’re not responsible for much more harm than good.
paying more than the games are worth because there’s a fucking leech at the top
Where we at now…30% and probably climbing? Ugh.
They take their 30% cut, then the publisher takes another cut with another billionaire’s salary taken into consideration and then…
It’s obvious from looking at Gabe
imo nothing is obvious about gabe. very little is known about him. we see what he wants us to see, nothing more.
We see how he runs Valve and how he interacts with customers. Both are pretty different to every other company. How many billionaires can you email to get help with low level account issues?
It was not my intention, I edited my comment to make it clearer.
He owns 6 yachts! What a waste of money, resources, and imagination!
You can only be on and enjoy a yacht one at a time so the other 5 are just there while other human beings in the world suffer.
Pure greed
Look I love Gabe as much as anyone but nobody earns a billion dollars
Especially when steam could have a sliding scale for fees where developers with fewer sales could earn more profit from the sale which would greatly benefit the indie developers.
Instead it has the opposite structure where fees decrease as you sell many millions in revenue which has the opposite effect.
who the fuck is he and why does everyone know him by face?
i feel morally superior to all of yall who are star gazing all the time, fuck, why do you all know who he is
He is Gaben from steam. The picture is used a lot in article headers.
To be fair
He did get the steam deck made, so that was kinda cool.
But maybe owning 6 yachts is a little less cool.
Unless the sub and boats were like research vessels he funds, that would be cool
But they aren’t.
Why can’t billionaires dump their money into funding scientific research? It’s not like there aren’t scientists out there with plenty of research to be done.
Or even maybe wherever he lives, he could like, fund the entire county school districts for the rest of existence and no one would have to worry about taxes.
Or maybe regularly cancel the medical debt of Valve employees and their families.
Like how fucking hard is it to redistribute your own wealth?
Like fucking Christ, that’s the part I don’t understand. They complain about taxes and shit at the top, but they do absolutely fuck all to make things better for large swaths of people. Or if they do, it’s after they die and $200m gets donated to a university and it prevents next year’s tuition from increasing.
Yeah it’s like a sickness. They’re hoarders, but they hoard wealth. If I had over a billion dollars, I would literally not be able to give it away fast enough (I would leave myself with a cool $10 mil).
Which is one reason why I’ll never be one.
It is really hard to comprehend, seriously.
A guess I’ll venture is that the vast swaths of money are essential to retain influence, perhaps. The game stops being about money and starts being about power, and you lose your seat at the table unless you’re just hoarding stupid ridiculous amounts of money like the rest of the players.
I dunno, I used to think they do it because they’re terrified of slipping into having to actually work for a living instead of just making other people execute their maybe-good ideas. But that feels too simplistic for the uber rich, maybe it’s like that for the “petit-bourgoise” but not the mega-corp titans.
But yeah, they just couldn’t possibly spend themselves to a lower social class at this point, so there’s gotta be some weird motive at play. It boggles the rational mind. Like are Gaben’s 6 yahts “necessary” to wield influence at convenient locations and woo other industry titans? Dunno.
In any case, it’s stupid and wrong, I just wanna understand it.
I think part of it is the form that that wealth exists in. Not defending billionaires in any way, but they don’t have stacks of cash lying around. The way that they live is that their money is in various forms of equity that passively increase in value, like stocks and houses, which they take loans against in order to pay for things. Then, they take out more loans to pay off the previous and repeat until they die and the debt disappears due to legal loopholes.
Stuff like the yachts and all the other crazy expensive stuff is one thing, but to redistribute the wealth, it’s not as simple as handing out cash to everybody (and I think turning all their mansions into subsidized housing instead of selling them would be more beneficial anyway).
I think incentivizing them to do more useful things with that cash and disincentivize them from simply hoarding it in various forms would be a decent short-term solution to the issue without having to put in much effort on the government’s part, but I never expect to see that happen.
This is misinformation. It takes 2 years proof of income to buy a house a bank bets you can afford. Billionaires have more flexibility, access and leverage than this with finances.
If they can leverage banks, and do all sorts of shit with their money (and debt) to make more money, then they can find ways to use it to benefit others.
Incentivizing giving it away is what we do now by providing tax benefits. We have seen the limitations of that.
I mean incentivizing them to invest it into things like public works and other beneficial things, but I also expect that that would go about as well as the current tax incentives do. It would be the thing that requires the least effort possible from the government, though, which I think makes it the most likely to actually occur. Actually taxing them more is pretty much a pipe dream.
Empire is devaluing its currency so fast that we’ll all be billionaires soon.
Zimbabwe style
I know how to fix the economy!
After 1 million, you win at life so you can stop working and get a basic income with food included, housing, etc. You won, you don’t get to play anymore. No w2 forms or banking or anything. If you buy something, the government just makes the funny money to pay for that which then means more jobs for those still playing the games. Big projects and big companies all public owned and only players get to work there and decide. Anyone who reaches the 1 Million mark gets kicked out into permanent retirement. Once you reach this level you get a party and you can invite anyone you want.
One benefit of winning is that you can be completely naked the entire time. Because why not. At your party you can request everyone to be naked too.
You can be married to a winner but you must keep working until you reach the 1million mark.
That’s it!
What if I want to build a rocket or iPhone or supercomputer or cancer therapy and I need more than $1 million for parts and labor?
I wouldn’t call her a good billionaire, but I think she’s as benign as billionaires get. At least she does things like pay her employees a good wage and gets people involved in the political process.
And, as far as I know, she isn’t responsible for anyone’s deaths.
I’m sure she still stepped on a lot of necks up the pyramid, but compared to a shit ton of other billionaires out there…
Billionaires can’t be benign. It’s impossible to make a billion dollars in a lifetime without taking more than you deserve. Someone overpaid for the product or someone was underpaid for the work (probably both). Billionaires prey on that loss, and it’s not as if they are Robin Hood giving back to the poor. If that’s not malignant, I don’t know what is.
Critical Role may not be billionaires but they are proof you can make a fuck ton of money without being shitty. Yes it’s one example but your language was pretty absolute.
“As benign as billionaires get” and “benign” are not the same thing. See also the “I’m sure she still stepped on a lot of necks up the pyramid” part.
Why do you think I said benign and not what I actually said?
I wasn’t arguing with you. I was supporting you. Weird of you to assume the worst?
Weird of you to assume the worst?
Welcome to the internet. First time?
I’d settle for “less bad”. If Musk is a 10/10, she’s an easy 4/10, with the ranking based entirely on arbitrary numbers and few actual facts.
The thing with TS is that she is not supposed to be like other billionaires. Other billionaires, most of them, have a different motivation, this is, to make more money. They are supposed to be entrepreneurs but at that level they are more like gamblers. TS is supposed to be an artist and her motivation is supposed to provoke a reaction in people’s emotions through her craft, which is making songs. Hell, at this point she could be singing and composing for free and giving away money. She could just license her next album to some cause, like fighting against cancer, and just let them use the gainings to fight cancer. That’s why I don’t even give her words my attention, she demonstrated that her motivation seems to become richer and richer, as any other billionaire she has all the attention she wants and more, because in the end she is like any other billionaire, a hoarder forgetting about the importance of other people’s lives.
You are not talking to someone who thinks there is such a thing as a good billionaire.
No, I know. I guess, instead of replying I was using your comment to reflect on the idea of the billionaire-artist.
I don’t disagree.
I’m so so on this example specifically.
Most of Taylor’s wealth is in the value of the rights to her songs. The liquid value she gets from those rights she is generally pretty generous with, she pays her employees very well and donated quite a bit of it.
That said, the bar is on the floor, and even a good billionaire is still pretty bad. She has much to improve
I just think that at $1BN net worth or whatever, you start getting taxed on 99.99% of everything you earn or gain in worth after that.
This way people still get stupid rich, and if someone ever has $10bn you can easily just sound the alarm then and there and say nope, fuck this guy.
The tax curve just just be exponential and it should be basically vertical at $1bn.
10 million is fuck off money. We don’t need to go another 990 million dollars. Just set it to 10 million dollars.
I mean yes and no.
Yes, no one needs more than $10 million. But there are legitimate use cases for wealth far beyond that. Let’s imagine someone develops an immutable cryptocurrency tool that is used globally to track political spending and keep governments honest. Hypothetically, this tool revolutionizes transparency and unravels corruption on a massive scale. Shouldn’t the creator of something so transformative be allowed to enjoy significant wealth—enough to provide for their family, loved ones, and even those who helped them along the way?
That kind of lasting wealth—the kind that lets someone own $10 million estates worldwide, fully staffed, with taxes paid indefinitely—is realistically covered at $1 billion. It’s feasible at $100 million, but it’s not at $10 million. A $10 million cap is “personal freedom money,” but it’s not “dynasty money.” And while dynasty wealth can be problematic, it’s also worth acknowledging the good that such wealth has sometimes enabled.
I love it when athletes, for example, use their success to buy their parents a million-dollar home or fund life-changing initiatives. If we cap wealth at $10 million, it prevents figures like LeBron James, Cristiano Ronaldo (love or hate him), Serena Williams, David Beckham, or even Rob Dyrdek from reaching the level of wealth where they can fund truly transformative projects.
Allowing higher wealth ceilings enables people who do reinvest in society to make a broader impact. Sure, some of these incentives are tax-driven, but the outcome still benefits society.
I get that not everyone uses their wealth for good. But there’s a meaningful gap between a $10 million cap and a $1 billion cap where good things can and do happen.
Can we negotiate to $500 million as a compromise?
10 million is significant wealth that provides for family and loved ones. Unless maybe you’re the Duggar family.
The great thing about a 10 million dollar cap is it doesn’t prevent you from getting more money. You just have to shift money first. And if you can’t shift it fast enough then the IRS steps in to do it for you.
No compromise because you didn’t give any example where 10 million isn’t enough.
Can we negotiate to $500 million as a compromise?
As soon as all the homeless who want help get help then sure.
As soon as workers are paid fairly and not exploited.
As soon as people aren’t dying because they can’t afford life saving medicine.Look, the rich spend their excess money on stupid shit.
Like Gabe Newell owning 6 yachts.
Like that story of Kim Kardashian flying to Paris just for some cheesecake that she really likes.
Like Nic Cage spending millions on a T-Rex skeleton.All that money could have went to food banks or social programs.
So, rewarding inventors and company founders with excess wealth
doesn’t benefit society and it really doesn’t benefit them other than
their ego.Yeah I’m down with that concession.
Let me say fuck anyone really who can’t get here?
I’m allowing more than I am comfortable with on lyrical of argument.
500M is not only ridiculous but achievable given our agreement.
Along with some restriction to their wealth relating to where the money was earned, so they can’t just leave the country with it all.
Up until the 70s or 80s I think, in the United States, the top tax bracket was 90%.
And lo and behold, the greatest period of prosperity in American history. In the 80s, Ronald Reagan cranks it all the way down to 25%. One two skip a few, now we live in a corpo hellstate where no one can afford anything except the nobility who live in a state of extravagant grandeur many exponents removed from the common man. The correlations are obvious.
High percentage high tax brackets are not the single cure-all silver bullet for all of America’s woes, but it gets us pretty damn close.
CTRL + F thread for Rihanna = Phrase not found
No one has anything to say about Rihanna, or Jay-Z, or Paul McCartney?
Rihanna’s worth more than Taylor Swift
Everyone’s hyper-focused on Taylor Swift and Rihanna is in the same pic.
Paul McCartney catching strays out here… If anyone should be allowed to live a life of luxury, it’s the surviving members of the fucking Beatles…
Jokes aside, I do see a difference between people who became wealthy through art, than through straight capitalism. It’s still gross, it still shouldn’t exist, it is still a form of capitalism and exploitation, etc. etc., but there are levels to this.
If anyone should be allowed to live a life of luxury, it’s the surviving members of the fucking Beatles…
Any person could live a life of luxury with 50 million or 10 million. They don’t need 1,000 million or more.
As stated in another part of this thread, why the fuck does one person need 6 yachts?
The problem not really being understood is excess wealth. Human brains have difficulty fully grasping large numbers.
It’s like trying to understand the size of the universe.Every one of the billionaires could live amazing lives with 95% less than what they have.
I was being a bit facetious, I agree with everything you’re saying.
They both got rich and famous with pop music, but Rihanna started making BANK when she made makeup for women of color. Crazy idea right? She noticed a hole in the market and filled it. That’s not talked about as much as entertaining us musically, so Swift is normally brought up before Rihanna. Swift has been touring more recently as well.
“What about…?”
Weird, I feel like there’s a word for this. 🙄
Looks like your stats are a bit out of date, Swift is in first place again: https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2024/10/08/taylor-swift-becomes-worlds-richest-female-musician-heres-who-is-right-behind-her/
But you bring up a poignant point. Maybe some of it is because of the whole jet thing from some months ago, those discussions were really raging on here and so it’s probably echoing forward.
People have been hating Swift for decades now. They were hating her for writing too many relationship-related songs even before the American left revived.
She’s an easy target because her target demographic is teenage girls, and anything / anyone beloved by teenage girls MUST necessarily be gay and worthless.
See also: Justin Bieber, the Backstreet Boys, and the Jonas Brothers.
I highly suspect people joined the left and transferred their hatred from, “Taylor Swift the musician for stupid, hysterical girls, who I hate” to, “Taylor Swift, the billionaire,” without once examining the lens through which they first started hating her. And now she gets more “anti-billionaire” hate than Jeff Bezos?
It bothers me.
Misogyny is a tool of capitalism, and to quote Lorde: the tools of the master will never dismantle the master’s house. No one is destroying capitalism by weirdly fixating on Taylor Swift and her fans “because she’s a billionaire” while focusing on her above… basically all other billionaires.
I look forward to the day I see a leftist meme reminding me “you can’t love Bruce Springsteen (1.1b) or Jay-Z (2.5b) and still be a leftist.”
Until then, I’m not taking lectures on leftism from people who haven’t deconstructed their own feelings of hatred and superiority towards teenage girls.
I made a post about this a while ago! (edit: okay it’s not about this per se but relevant, inspired by Contrapoints’ video about JK Rowling.)
https://lemmy.cafe/post/3014506
remember who your memes give ammo to
PREACH
I’m glad you got a good upvote:downvote ratio for that post. It’s encouraging to know that people are at least willing to listen to a reasonable take on Taylor Swift.
thanks! i actually forgot how successful it was! to be fair, that was back when blahaj zone didn’t federate downvotes so the ratio must be taken with a grain of salt :)
What does Taylor spend money on? Since she’s still a billionaire I’m guessing she doesn’t give it all to charity.
Private jet rides for her friends.
If the entire human population was just 100 people stranded on an island in the Pacific, would we allow
1% (which in this case would just be 1 person ) to own 95% of all the resources? Hell No!It’s nice to say no, but across history there have been so so many societies that have allowed exactly that at similar scales.
Are we really putting Taylor Swift on the same level as some of these other fuckers? Obviously she’s not good, but if you compare her with Trump, musk, bezos, anyone from Walmart etc she’s way better
Swifties triggered.
Those billionaires are being propped by stupid people buying exorbitant ticket prices to see their idols dancing from a mile a way. I blame the populace for this. you can make them irrelevant without even spending a penny.
As someone in the entertainment business, those performers don’t like ticket master either. Or at least on the level I am at.
I guess that’s the difference between me and Taylor Swift.
TM decimates every show i am involved in
Basically the only way for a professional touring musician except those like her at the top to make money is to sell merchandise at this point. Either that or play small clubs which don’t use Ticketmaster and get a small take of the door. It’s ludicrous that so many very talented people can’t make a living as musicians anymore.
In the face of exploitative capital, blaming the consumer is on the same tier of nonsensical rhetoric as victim blaming.
It’s not the fault of people buying bottled water for Nestle’s human rights violations, nor is it the fans’ fault that Swift’s business model is exploitative and nonethical.
You are telling me you can’t live without going to a Taylor Swift concert. Capitalism is the origin of many pains, but this one isn’t one of them.
As an INTJ I also don’t like most people, because as you said people are stupid
This being said on the same platform that basically every third person believes voters aren’t responsible for their votes.
We can always assume people will be stupid, so I don’t think they’re gonna all stop wasting their money. Even if half of them did TS would still be a billionaire
If every single one of Taylor Swift’s concerts were free, past, present, and future, she’d still probably be a billionaire. Artists don’t really make that much on ticket sales, the ticket vendors and venues are the ones making all the money. Swift’s net worth mostly comes from the value of the rights to her songs, not ticket sales.
I think you would be right in a lot of cases but does that apply when you routinely sell out these extremely expensive shows like are being discussed here?
