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And mostly being born rich to begin with...

You were doing great until you went ableist

I spent the 1990s checking out how a series of rich individuals got their money. Every one I dug into was a scammer, monopolist or criminal. These included Mark Shapiro, Paul Mears, David Siegel and Congressman John Mica.

Useful and well crafted costs money. If the rubes are falling for the cheap and crude version why change?

The mongoose would at least bite 🐍…

No wonder why people are paying respects to the late Ted Turner (despite being indirectly responsible for a bunch of domino effects that lead to the hell we’re currently living in…)

These excerpts remind me strongly of Andreessen's bonkers "manifesto" which is one of the worst things I have ever read.

trying to decide if this is worse than musk fluffing himself through his mom’s x account

I don't want to get into it in public

They both only have to care about catering to an audience of one.

Weeeeell, if you consider the target demo...

The hit piece they wrote eulogizing the Left Coast the other day was equally bad. Just indistinguishable from a random far right blog circa 2008 these days.

In the U.S. alone they've been working on it since at least the 70s, arguably much earlier

Admittedly, I haven’t read a Wall Street Journal editorial in a long time, but I kind of think they were better than this?

but remember that something like half US Americans can’t even read above a fifth grade reading level so they don’t need to create better propaganda for them because most folks would not understand it anyway

Just nut up and say the slur if you're just going to mock the same people regardless. So many words for fuckwit and you're struggling with the semantic treadmill on the slowest speed.

changing "democracy dies in darkness" into a promise

I'm pretty familiar with corporatist agitprop and this is not good corporatist agitprop

Half the crap was written by Artificial Intelligence. I have no doubt. I’ve been a subscriber since 2009. It’s gotten so BAD in the last 2 years!

Perhaps it is more just about capturing the institution so it can no longer fulfill its intended purpose more than actually being good at it. I think Ellison knew Bari would fail at CBS, but that was the point. And gaining Trump’s favor.

Billionaires want most what they can never buy: respect

I guess it’s to repel the WaPo’s own now-former subscribers, like me.

They're just there to give the idiots new cut and pastes.

These idiots never read a book or experienced life outside their myopic view of their own shallow self interest. To truly believe you can EARN a billion dollars AND that by doing so you show the potential of human achievement is so completely divorced from the meaning of those words as to be 🫠

It’s pure luck.

Measuring human potential by your economic wealth is not only childish but sociopathic.

Or a Libertarian. But I repeat yourself.

Oh yeah, he’s a simpleton.

It’s really the exploited labor that’s left out. All the rest can and will be subsidized

They'd have a point if you assembled $1 billion in shoes yourself. But uh. Who made the shoes WaPo?

I wonder how Bezos became s rich? time.com/6978643/amaz...

"To say no one can earn a billion dollars is to lack the imagination for just how far we will let inflation hit the USD until we start printing $10Trillion bills like Zimbabwe"

If wealth rations applied to sport, the fastest marathon would be well under 1 second. Sad we've limited that possibility wealth ratios are clearly just about genuine human potential

I basically interpreted it as the journalistic equivalent of a film that has been directed by Alan Smithee at this point.

In the past, their response was: "You can't tax billionaires! They're the job creators! Threatening them with an 5% increase in taxes will put thousands of jobs at risk!" And that argument no longer holds water because of their aggressive push for AI.

amazing

But have you considered: "IF..."

They keep acting like people become billionaires off profit from goods and services sold, and not what actually happens which is insane speculation on the stock value.

GPT write me an article praising billionaires

This is a fantastic example for the author of the article to provide because billionaire shoesalesmen are so commonly found in the wild.

Europe over here catching 19th century stereotype strays.

it's taking us some time but we're getting there this is not sustainable

But then, we've never had a shoe salesman in the family, so maybe that's the secret sauce we've been missing to really make it to the big time.

Or AI.

AI? It'd fit the "work ethic" of billionaires and their servitors.

What the article should say is “if you have rich parents who lend you a few million, and you exploit a lot of people at every step of the way, and bribe the right politicians to give you grants and tax cuts, you might end up with a billion dollars”.

That's Adam O'Neal, Jeff Bezos' hand picked replacement to churn out hot takes to promote "personal liberties and free markets."

But have you considered that HYPOTHETICALLY we might undergo Weimarr or Hungarian style hyperinflation, and EVERYONE might legitimately earn a billion dollars? 🤓 Erm, checkmate!

absolutely, because no one becomes a billionaire just by selling shoes or any other product, you can only become a billionaire by massively exploiting other people

Wow, a billion dollars selling shoes? Like actually working as a salesperson? Seems unlikely!

Guys, we're gonna need a bigger '[citation needed]' sign

Jeff wrote it himself, so good eye.

Is there a billionaire who built their fortune on selling expensive shoes? If there is, its going to involve nor having Netflix, avocado toast, inheriting $500,000,000, and exploiting third-world labor.

Every market is fully calcified except making some dumb tech startup that gets in a magazine and is bought by people who actually have a billion dollars to spend. you're not selling shoes and making a billion dollars, unless they are a million dollars each pair.

Goose mode on: If European nobility is so rich, how come the top billionaires are from USA? Tell me! Honk!

And infuriating at the same time, because WTF??? Shoes?

* To say that it’s impossible to legitimately earn a billion dollars is to put an arbitrary limit on human GREED. There, fixed it.

Musk and Trump are basically hereditary nobility!

you can earn a billion dollars but can you pay enough money for someone who can actually write to do your apologia?

To the same degree that any billionaire has "earned" their money, Phil Knight (co-founder of Nike) could be counted as such. But, you know, his wealth comes from the exploitation of the labor of others.

This is what comes out of the belief that “accomplishment” is only defined by net worth. The prosperity gospel is the root cause of so many of our problems

Nobody "earns" a billion dollars. They steal it from the productivity of their workers. If Jeff Bezos was still selling books himself out of his garage, there is no possible way he would ever physically be able to earn a billion dollars, let alone a hundred billion...

it's like a bad children's book? Very surreal

He was born in the Midwest and spent his teens and early 20s in England, so I'm not quite sure what his accent is. I hear mostly whiskey in it. www.themarginalian.org/2013/07/23/r...

I sure AI was involved

Who reads the post anymore?

Put another way, you could house the entire population of global billionaires in your average Las Vegas casino auditorium - but just keep hustling!

I think people can't even think about numbers that big (a billion) or odds that small (approaching zero). Like 1 in 100 odds I can visualize, even 1 in 3000. And that's probably the odds of getting some terrible disease you really don't want, that also bankrupts you. But this nah. Inconceivable.

Who did Taylor Swift exploit? Other than the friends and exes that make up her source material I suppose... I think there are exploitive billionaires but there are certainly people who are rich because they made things that many people value...

Same outlet and billionaire actively destroying democracy - depreciating the ability for human beings to have any control or autonomy over their own lives - under the idea that maybe they can't handle it. Bezos and his Epstein class friends have no shame.

Imagine business where the profits are shared primarily with those who make the products. In America abusive groups where employees are treated as disposable & cruelty with low as possible pay are typical. Imagine the quality & customer service where all employees have positive, fulfilling lives.

Editorial board, so nobody could put their name to that article? And then we can ask them, why aren't you a billionaire then MF?

She did not say that!

WP desperation.

Nobody “earns” a billion dollars. No one is working a million times harder than anyone else. You deserve to be rewarded for clever business but 1. The rewards should not be so far above the effort involved 2. You are not worth a million other human’s efforts

AOC took a dumb stance — yet again — and WaPo is embarrassing for criticizing her?

Just came here to check for that 😂

Is my tongue far enough up Mr Bezos.

Love how nobody would nut up, own this, and begin their new career as a right wing grifter selling boner pills made from asbestos.

does this one fall under civil liberties or free markets? can’t read it anymore since I cancelled

I knew it was time to cancel my subscription a few years ago when I was often reading more accurate information in the comments section.

Is the WaPo editorial board really just Jeff Bezos and an LLM?

Shamwow

It always has been, it's a rag for the rich owner class.

Nobody 'earns' a billion dollars. GTFOHWTS.

I blame the calculator. That's what it spit out.

Is there any other way? 🤔 TL;DR - They're rich because they're better than us.

Don’t forget the “little people”…

This is a central tenet of Anglo-Saxon capitalism since the dawn of the industrial revolution. "If you're a failure, it's YOUR OWN FAULT, LOSER."

I get: 2,781 billionaires / 8,300,000,000 people = .000,000,33506%

Sometimes it's "human potential" with a lot of luck & government subsidies. Tesla would have folded without its half-billion dollar taxpayer loan from Obama in 2009. And Musk gets most of his billions from US government tax and regulatory credits. So we taxpayers are subsidizing most billionaires.

Who cares about human potential? I care about human “actual”. And billionaires are actually bad for society

Its not so hard! In Weimar Germans you used to be able to earn trillions of marks!

I’m constantly mad at myself for canceling my subscription in protest a few years ago because it means I’m unable to do it again every time they pull some fuck-shit like this

Yeah AOC doesn't have a 'low opinion of human potential', she's just numerate and understands math

WaPo's pre-2026 election setup--get into the minds of the public that those frightening Democrat[ic Socialists] Mamdani and Ocasio Cortez are to blame for whatever, especially your lack of "freedom."

on my journalist salary I should have it done by May of 102026

You can’t measure human potential in dollars.

Since none of these cowardly assholes ever signs their name to the garbage they write.

is that Paris the racist Hilton next to her????