Each year in May, my mother and I head up to Auckland to the Auckland Writers Festival (this year was our sixth visit). It is always a sensation overload with all the people and the fantastic choice of speakers.
This year we feasted on sessions called - Trump: The next 4 years, The Ranks of the Rich, A.C. Grayling - Making Peace in the Culture Wars and How Tyrants Fall: And How Nations Survive (amongst others).
One of the other sessions that we attended was called '2025 - The Billionaires Playground' - advertised with a photo of Elon Musk at the top. A fascinating panel of the philosopher A.C. Grayling, political scientist Marcel Dirsus (who is the author of How Tyrants Fall) and the US novelist Rumaan Alam who wrote the fiction book called 'Entitlement'.
The discussion was fascinating and I thought that there were some take outs worth sharing:
$1 million is the equivalent of 2 weeks, if you convert each $ into 1 second.
In comparison $1 billion is the equivalent of 32 years (not a typo). That is how much more $1 billion is. Imagine therefore how much wealthier Elon Musk is than a mere millionaire. At last count he was worth $421 billion ( or 13,472 years).
Us mere mortals without a 'billion' in the calculation of our wealth have little understanding of how different life is with that much money.
Being a billionaire enables you to live your life 'without friction'. All the little hassles are looked after by other people - even the other people in your life are looked after by other people.
For a great example of how different life is when you have that much money, check out the video below about Trump and Groceries.
So... that makes you think about how differently billionaire politicians and business leaders might see the world than us.
It is now well known that Elon Musk spent $250 million assisting President Trump getting elected. The scary thing is that that is only 0.06% of his wealth. In other words, if he only got a 1% return on his wealth each year - that would be $4,210,000,000 - so $250 million is a rounding error for him
But it isn't just Musk who is spending [albeit a rounding error] to influence politics.
In 1963, the wealthiest American families (the top 1%) had 36 times the wealth of families in the middle. By 2022, that had grown to 71 times.
Over the same time period (1963 - 2022) billionaire political spending had increased 160-fold over that time.
And... the wealthiest 400 US families paid an average federal income tax rate of just 8.2% between 2010 and 2018 - wonder if there is a correlation between political spending and lower tax bills (or better trade deals, or less regulation)... Hmmm wondering.
Just some food for thought.
