The Duel
Should we despise billionaires?
YES
I had the pleasure of interviewing Jeff Bezos before Amazon took off; of chirpily asking Steve Jobs whether Apple could survive if iTunes failed; and of quizzing Larry Page and Sergey Brin about their goals in life before anyone had mentioned Google staging an IPO. I found them approachable, rational human beings—and quite needy for facetime with a BBC journalist. But once you get to the other side—where you’re calculating your wealth in billions, and seeing your brain and body as the nexus of an enormous organisation, with your senses evolved into a radar system for threats and opportunities—something changes.
If, as Marx said, social being determines social consciousness, the act of becoming a billionaire has to have psychological consequences. If we were to compute all the potential needs of a tech tycoon, a billion dollars should be enough to cover them for life—from villas and yachts to, if they’re into it, cryogenic preservation afterwards.
But it never is. Because “accumulate” becomes, again to cite Marx, “Moses and the Prophets” for the billionaire. Even those who wish to give their wealth away, leaving photos of themselves at every rural African airport as they go, need first to monopolise it ruthlessly. Even those who started out as ardent tinkerers in the shed turn, on becoming a billionaire, into rentiers. It would be throwing money away not to monopolise, not to price gouge, not to crush upstart competitors out of existence.
So abolish multi-billionaires; the victims include the rich themselves, who can never lead a fully connected life. Even the straightest end up leading a less gangsterish version of the life Michael Corleone has to lead in The Godfather Part II. A flat tax of 90 per cent on all wealth accumulated by individuals above £1bn would be a start.