I guess even as a billionaire, the difference between your first 50 billion and your second 50 billion is that with your second you can make frivolous purchases of social media companies without going back to being poor.

It's still bullshit in the big picture of history.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Yeah, it's a continuous scale, which is something people miss sometimes. When you talk to people with millions of dollars they have a tendency to say they're not that rich, and point to some guy they know with tens of millions. They're not wrong per se even if they're dangerously out of touch; that extra digit changes a lot.

The bullshit is just that that scale goes way, way too high, as well as way too low. Human ability is normally distributed, and human worth is often held to be inalienably equal. Wealth follows a completely different distribution, for reasons.