I think this is it. They are empty inside.
Imagine you have more wealth than you will ever need to do anything you ever wanted, yet you have no passions. No hobbies. No interests. Nothing to wake up for. Nothing at all in your life that you would love to do, even if you didn’t get paid for it.
If they weren’t such a parasitic cancer on the planet, I’d maybe feel sad for their soulless, empty lives.
“All I want is the chance to prove that money won’t make me happy.”
I have the same fantasy as @Nightflyer . I rarely play the lottery (although I did win $20 once!). I’m amazed by the number of people who walk up and buy $20, $30, $50 worth of tickets at a time. Maybe there are more independently-wealthy folks out there than I think, but I suspect that’s not the case.
Early in my lottery-playing career, my wife and I found ourselves buying tickets multiple times a week. Money was tight, but we would still buy one or two, dreaming of what we could do with the jackpot. I eventually realized that what we were doing was “dream investing” - we had no investments and had no money to put into stocks, but that wouldn’t matter if we won the jackpot. In essence, we were “investing” by hoping for a lottery win. 
That realization was the shock I needed to break the habit; today, I’ll buy a ticket if the jackpot has grown large, but I do it for the excitement/entertainment rather than something I count on for the future.We’re not and will never be billionaires, but I have a reasonably happy life.
I get a lot of entertainment out of my $2 - whenever I buy a ticket.
Exactly. Throwing a couple million out of billions into longevity isn’t a serious attempt to make it happen, so I can only assume it’s somehow tied to making a profit, just like some rich folks do a small amount of altruism just for tax breaks. Likewise, Musk has no true passion projects, only grifts.
To be fair, is anyone in the book really that bad when you have Bezos there to compare against?
I’m kicking myself that I didn’t think of it first.
Chuck Feeney has entered the chat…
Chuck Feeney was the exception,1) and in more than one way at that. The actual goal was to give it all2) away for real, not avoiding taxes. Any net positive effects went back into project, not personal gain. He also didn’t make the usual “look what a huge philanthropist I am” production number out of it. Few people even knew that he was giving away lots of money, let alone that the idea was to give it all away.
And sometimes billionaires just self destruct:
1) And he gets credit for it in the video.
2) Except for a comparatively tiny sum calculated to last until his natural death, leading a modest middle class lifestyle. Which is perfectly alright per se and laudable considering.
This is a plot point in the 2003 remake (reimagining, really) of The Italian Job.
The heist team all ask each other what they’re going to buy with their share and Edward Norton’s character doesn’t really know. He later betrays them and ends up with the entire score, leaving them for dead. When they inevitably track him down for revenge, it turns out that he has bought all the dream possessions of the others and is entirely bored and unsatisfied.
It’s very much played as a moral weakness. I’m not sure it would be if the film was made today.
People think I’m biased against Jeff Bezos, but here’s Sartoria F. Caraceni, widely considered one of the best bespoke tailoring houses in the world, commenting on Bezos’s wedding suit.
“The most terrible, frightening, horrible tuxedo ever seen in my life. I’m really suffering”
Heck, there is the much simpler matter of his own employees. Bezos is tremendously cruel and exploitative of them in hopes of crushing out a little extra profit. To make the world a better place literally all he would have to do is stop. And yet even with more money than he knows how to spend, he still won’t.
File under: What if Gumby wore a tuxedo?
He ordered it from Amazon Tuxedo Prime.
Eh - maybe Temu.
Ordered it on Amazon, didn’t know it was drop shipped from Temu.
Her dress looks like Temu.
Except with Temu the photo would be cropped to leave out everything above her neck and below her thighs. (I had to use a browser with web ads on for a while and there were a lot of these.)
