$1 billion is hard to wrap your head around. Casually dropped into conversation, we recognise it as a lot of money, but the actual size of $1 billion is astounding. To put it into context, if you were to spend $10,000 a day, it would take you 274 years to spend $1 billion. Someone on an $80,000 a year salary would need 12,500 years to become a billionaire. It's a staggering amount of money, and Elon Musk, recently declared the richest man in the world, has a net worth of almost $200 billion [1]. In 2017, Oxfam conducted a report which concluded that just eight men hold the same wealth as half of the world [2]. Three years later and a report by Swiss bank UBS found that during the height of the Coronavirus pandemic (April 2020 - July 2020), the billionaires of the world increased their collective fortune by 27.5% to an estimated £7.8 trillion [3]. These gains are not the result of fair work, but of the exploitation of an underpaid and overlaboured workforce, who rarely see the fruits of that labour returned to them. Simply put, there is no way for someone to become a billionaire without someone losing out. Jeff Bezos has built his Amazon empire off the backs of notoriously overworked warehouse teams [4], Elon Musk has done the same [5]. Even Bill Gates, a man who many see as a saint-like philanthropist, has been criticised for using his wealth to lobby state and federal governments to pour public money into ineffective education research [6]. That's not to mention Microsoft's reported involvement in using forced Uyghur labor in the production of their products [7]. With global poverty set to rise in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic [8], for the few at the top have their wealth increase is unjustifiable, unethical, and the sign of a broken system. REFERENCES [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/elon-musk-net-worth-2021-b1784459.html [2] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/just-8-men-own-same-wealth-half-world [3] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/oct/07/covid-19-crisis-boosts-the-fortunes-of-worlds-billionaires [4] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/05/amazon-workers-protest-unsafe-grueling-conditions-warehouse [5] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/18/tesla-workers-factory-conditions-elon-musk [6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/04/16/um-who-are-melinda-bill-gates-trying-kid/ [7] https://www.aspi.org.au/report/uyghurs-sale [8] https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/overview

Having a net worth meeting or exceeding a billion dollars does not necessarily make someone moral or immoral. The claim that, “simply put, there is no way for someone to become a billionaire without someone losing out.” is a generalization premised on the assumption that, similar to matter/energy, national/global wealth is a static entity that cannot be produced or increased (i.e. that economies are stagnant and do not grow). For instance, if the national or global wealth “pie” is a fixed size, no one can possibly get rich without making someone else poor – without taking someone else’s share of the pie, along with their own. Yet this is simply not the way economies – on a national or a global scale – operate. Noah Yuval Harari, Israel historian and author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, relates that, since the enlightenment, the scientific revolution, and the ensuing industrial revolution, human progress has been “built on the notion that if we admit our ignorance and invest resources into research, things can improve” [1]. Thus, technological inventions, organizational developments, new goods, new services, and new products can all “increase the sum total of human production, trade, and wealth,” effectively growing the total wealth pie available to humans [1]. Indeed, although “economic prosperity and lasting economic growth [have been a] very recent achievement for humanity” [2], a glance at any graph of worldwide GDP (which adjusts for simple population-proportional growth by measuring the average income earned per person in a given area in a specified year) from, lets say, 1870 to 2016 [3] will very clearly let you know that global economies have been growing like hormone-soused teenagers. Modern economies are not stagnant; instead, they are growing (mathematically) exponentially, perhaps even uncontrollably. This allows for some members of society to get rich without impovershing others; a kind of “I can be wealthy without your becoming poor; I can be obese wihout your dying of hunger. The entire global pie can grow” [1]. Thus, someone can become a millionaire, a billionaire, even a trillionaire, without, as you say, “someone losing out.” Entrepreneurs and business owners create value for society by adding to a country’s net production or capacity to supply services, and by investing in increased means of production as the company grows (taking on new workers, investing in new tech, investing in the growth of new/other companies). “In [economist Adam] Smith’s story, people become rich not by despoiling their neighbors, but by increasing the overall size of the pie. And when the pie grows, everyone benefits” [1]. For someone to get rich in a free market, they must create their net worth’s amount of productivity in a society; they must mechanically make the wealth pie larger. In a free market, individuals, as agents of free will, determine where they want to spend their money. It follows that someone who has accumulated wealth has done so with the consumer consent that is implicit in willful transactions. If, hypothetically, a tycoon has built his or her fortune through illegal methods and/or without consumer consent, they are immoral (and often criminal) because of reprehensible actions that broke the free markets mechanisms of consent, not because they simply possess an enormous amount of wealth. Adding on, the claim that “[Billionaires’] gains are not the result of fair work, but of the exploitation of an underpaid and over labored workforce, who rarely see the fruits of that labor returned to them” rests on the deduction that employees are often entitled to higher-than-now-withstanding compensation for the productivity they produce. Yet, an employee’s wage is deferent to not only the law of supply and demand, but also to their threshold for economic risk-taking. A box packer at one of Amazon’s warehouses, for example, receives at least an hourly wage of $15. The packer competes for his job/wage with everyone else in the national pool of unskilled laborers who too are willing to work for an hourly wage of $15. An excess of people willing to work at Amazon warehouses paired with a limited number of available employment slots means that those who are willing to work for less have a greater chance of being hired than those demanding higher wages. In the marketplace of employees, there is a balance between taking a job for a certain wage and securing an employment, or rejecting the existing terms of employment and looking elsewhere. This is a story we have all heard before. Still yet, employees are able to affect wages determined by supply and demand by invoking collective bargaining. Unionizing allows for a system of mutual consent between employees and employers, wherein acceptable yet sustainable wages can be worked out. Additionally, wage is determined by the economic risk that certain actors within the market are willing to incur. Founding a company, for instance, requires a novel idea that addresses a specific problem or fills a specific niche, orders an immense allocation of (often unpaid) time, and demands a commitment of personal capital. Moreover, should the venture “go under,” the founder(s) is/are personally responsible for shouldering the cost of bankruptcy. The disparity of the economic risk-reward calculus between the employer and his or her employees is evident; if the company fails, the owner incurs the financial loss, while the employees simply lose their wage. Incurring entrepreneurial risk has the potential to make someone tremendously wealthy if the venture is successful, while simultaneously threatening economic ruin if the venture fails. Wage or salary seekers, on the other hand, incur less financial risk and rely on safety nets (forms of employer reimbursement) to smooth their financial volatility; naturally, this translates into less potential for incredible financial success, while also minimizing the chance of financial ruin. Finally, we should perhaps consider that, at a certain point, consumer responsibility comes into question. It is irrational to both criticize those who have founded popular and useful companies – and to continue voluntarily feeding their snowballing wealth – while simultaneously lamenting the fact that they increase in value with our willful spending. Billionaires increase their wealth under the terms of our free market. If we, as individual consumers, are willing to buy their products or invest in their visions, we also must live with the fact that, at some level, we are personally responsible for increasing the wealth accumulation of the wealthy. References: [1] Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind, by Dr. Yuval Noah Harari, pages 310-312 [2] https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth [3] https://www.google.com/search?q=us+economic+growth+vs+world+economic+growth&sxsrf=ALeKk028lr3aOw5xbfFH7IVI66JuZh3eyA:1610833005684&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwigw9vItKHuAhVQVc0KHSJfDO0Q_AUoAnoECB4QBA&biw=1440&bih=698&safe=active&ssui=on#imgrc=TfaVDFG6YVTpFM

I'm not sure there's anything unethical about being a billionaire, unless we argue that having that kind of money when others are starving imposes a categorical ethical duty. But where do you draw the line? How much is it 'ethical' to own? The idea that all great fortunes come from great crimes (Balzac) is just not true. But I'm much less certain that the existence of billionaires isn't an ethical failing of society and its laws.

Every billionaire I can think of is unethical, and maybe being an ethical billionaire is even impossible. But the act of BEING a billionaire is not, in and of itself, unethical.

The presence of billionaires is only unethical when it coexists with other signs of inequality. That is, if the country has a strong middle class, little-to-no poverty and homelessness, and housing is reasonably affordable, then I don't personally have much of an objection. Especially if said billionaires use their wealth to fund major innovative projects that wouldn't be very motivated by the public sector. This is why I place Elon Musk at a higher standing than, say, Jeff Bezos. However, these billionaires do not exist in a vacuum. If one can accumulate billions while the majority life paycheck-to-paycheck and many can't afford housing at all, then the well-being of the masses should have priority over the insane wealth of the few. These things should come first. Billionaires don't help people out of a rut. In fact, they exploit people who are in a rut, as we see with minimum wage workers, Amazon workers, and Frito-Lay workers. Another difficulty is that, tax loopholes aside, it is still not as simple as looking at someone's net worth, since most of that value exists in the form of things like machines and factories, not actual cash. And to retrieve that capital as cash would require selling the assets themselves. That is, you might have a 500k house, which gives you a net worth of 500k. But that 500k isn't available to you unless you want to give up having a house.