>> in order to make it to a billion dollars you need to consistently exploit people and absolutely refuse to use your power to help others in any significant way.

I would categorically disagree with your statement.

Jeff Bezos

Elon Musk

Bill Gates

Mark Zuckerberg

All billionaires. All have created one (or multiple in Musk's case) products that have greatly benefitted society in numerous ways. The Gates Foundation has donated billions to causes all over the world. Bezos has committed over $3B to various charitable causes.

Also, More than 70% of lottery winners will run through of the money they've won and be right back where they started before winning. Further proving my point the people who win the lottery are not visionaries and have no desire to create products that will change people's lives. They're just happy to have the money.

To be fair, I don't think jeff has proclaimed that their drivers need to pee in bottles. That's all mid level managers trying to show gains to their up-line reports.

Jeff (and the board) wonders if deliveries could be more efficient, and wants to find efficiencies to report to the board and the shareholders. However it's fucking dave, 6+ layers below jeff that is firing drivers for missing unreasonably tight delivery schedules because they had to stop to take a leak. So that dave can tell suan who can tell susan who can tell .... and finally jeff that deliveries are now 2.3% faster.

I do think that enough money and therefore a higher degree of control of your own life experiences does warp your perceptions of the world, however. I fail to understand why anyone with a billion fucking dollars in the bank just doesn't retire to a beach stocked with sex workers and cocaine and instead decides to continue torturing people through layers of unthinking bureaucracy though.

To get to where Jeff Bezos is, it's almost mandatory to have sociopathic traits and to be genuinely incapable of regarding other people as anything but means to an end. It's a simple selection effect.

Who knew dragons in real life could be so lame compared to fiction /s

This is the truth of the matter - everyone else got off the train at millions or a small billion; the only people who ride it all the way to trillions are the pathologies.

Quite often money is equated with intelligence and with time people want their opinion on everything under the sun - especially on things outside their area. With time so much smoke has been blown up their ass that they think they are better than everyone and can get away with mistreating people. Money does impact people.

You are actually kinda right. I do think that if you turn as a "really rich" person, you just don't know about anything to trust at a certain point.

Firstly, you will have the people who will praise your diamonds and everything and make you lose touch with reality.

But there would also be the more subtler ones whom you actually consider friends. there can be two things that you meet some people before hand and judge them or were already rich before having such friends, but even then the first group might just change knowing that you are now extremely rich and might want subtle favours and so act subtly different.

In a nutshell, I feel like extremely rich people might not know how people actually think of them because we have commoditized everything to money,opportunities and networks and in some sense, they are unable to trust their own real instincts too.

Also we are forgetting the fact that these people would change with so much external influences too and that some people would stop after a certain point so as to they will not reach the scale of billions but rather stop at millions.

All of these factors combined make for the most egotistical machines.

just a few thoughts on extremely rich people, South park creators seem to be one of the exceptions for me and it seems like those guys are just two friends who just like doing what they do and even said a massive fuck you to paramount even on television.