They are a systemic threat to humanity and should be eliminated immediately by any means necessary... ALL OF THEM.

And they might not like it. People will not take this forever and rhe ultra rich are not immune from the consequences. History. It's a real thing.

The thing they don't control is people like Luigi Mangione. And they know it.

illionaires are more concerned than ever about the safety of themselves and their families.

Tensions spiked after the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December. Then came the January kidnapping of French cryptocurrency founder David Balland, who was held for ransom for two days while the assailants mutilated his hand, followed by an April arson attack on the home of billionaire Steve Sarowitz by a suspect who also made ransom and kidnapping threats, prosecutors say.

These assaults have come as resentment toward the rich and powerful increases amid wealth inequality, overseas wars and hyper-polarized politics. A recent Emerson survey, for instance, reported that 41% of voters aged 18 to 29 believe Luigi Mangione’s alleged murder of Thompson was “acceptable.” (Mangione has pleaded not guilty). Risk management company Nisos found that online threats against CEOs increased 41% as well in the six weeks following the shooting.

All of this has led the nation’s wealthiest people and the companies that employ them to seek out personal security at increased rates over the past few months, 13 firms tell Forbes. Five companies said the number of inquiries for their services was among the highest ever, while four said it was the highest. Allied Universal, the biggest provider of private security guards in the world, says it’s getting 1,500% more threat assessment requests than this time last year.

...

Hiring a somewhat reputable bodyguard on the cheap might cost as “little” as $120,000 per year. But that’s rarely what experts recommend to mitigate risk. In fact, most U.S. billionaires don’t have a full-time bodyguard. Among the more common services: A team that monitors the internet for threats and leaked personal information (typical cost at the most elite firms: $200,000 to $300,000 per year for sophisticated 24-7 coverage); personal drivers who also have security training ($250,000 to $500,000 for two drivers); residential security, including cameras and armed guards ($750,000 to over $1 million); and protection while traveling (costs vary based on location). A full executive protection team, which tends to involve all of the above, plus part-time bodyguards who have medical training and professionals who secure sites before a billionaire arrives, costs at least $2 million—and frequently much more—with team members often making $200,000 each, according to the experts polled by Forbes.

These costs are sometimes covered by companies as part of executives’ compensation packages. The U.S. tax code allows employees to write off that benefit as long as there’s a demonstrable cause for safety concerns. Last year, Snap paid $2.8 million for CEO and cofounder Evan Spiegel’s personal security. Alphabet paid $8.3 million for CEO Sundar Pichai. Meta paid $24.4 million to protect Mark Zuckerberg and his family.

Zuckerberg likely pays additional security fees out of pocket. He has among the biggest executive protection teams of any American billionaire—probably around 20 full-time people, two experts estimate. “He’s incredibly adventurous and does all these wild and crazy things because he can,” says Michael Julian, CEO of MPS Security. “That guy’s got a full team everywhere he goes, if he goes on a run or mountain biking. He’s got a team that does nothing but water sports, that’s trained and knows all the life-saving stuff.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/monicahunter-hart/2025/05/09/how-the-ultra-wealthy-are-protecting-themselves-against-arson-attacks-kidnapping-and-worse/

so it's not like it would have a huge impact on humanity. Just less super-yachts and 100,000 sq ft mansions.

has become batman or iron man or green arrow... such slackers.

Would do anything to help others is strictly the purview of comic books.

The Atlantic has some very interesting and thought provoking stuff — I’m also referring to the article on Kash Patel recently.

I don't think that people talk enough about this topic. Any discussions of the super rich just devolved into short memes, but it is really a complex topic that I don't think enough people really understand. I don't think the average person understands what drives the super rich, average people only think of things in terms of material comforts and not having to work. The super rich are all about power and legacy. They feel the need to exercise power over others and that drives them more than owning a super yacht. And a super yacht isn't even about having something that's all that useful, it's about a demonstration of power and status.

This as extremistan vs mediocristan or simply man-made systems versus organic/natural systems. A simple analogy, wealth versus body. In a normal sample of humans, their wealth can be many orders of magnitude different. But humans can at best maybe be an order or two different; you never expect to see a 25 ft tall person walking around but millionaires and billionaires are by comparison quite common.

Essentially, we’ve created a system that doesn’t have biological controls to keep from getting out of wack (until there’s a catastrophic system failure).

My guess is we’ve removed any possible mechanism of control by allowing big businesses to continue operating after they’ve caused huge systemic financial breakdowns, or too big to fail. Without real consequences for bad behavior, the same folks are propped back up to make the same mistakes again.

Karl Marx describe it's ending.

There is a breaking mechanism. It's called a crash. It will either wipe out the economy so that all the billions are worthless, much like in 1929.

Because that wealth is an illusion. It's numbers on a piece of paper that the filthy-rich are not taxed on, on which they borrow money with, using those numbers as collateral. They don't have that money sitting in a vault. It's borrowed money and when the agency calls in it's loan, then everyone starts selling and it crashes. It's happened many times before.

Or....The downtrodden abused people rise up and destroy the filthy-rich and permanently alter the distribution of wealth like the 1300s Peasant's Revolt, American Revolution and French revolution. Like what Hitler, Mao Zedong, Castro and the Bolsheviks tried to do. Like what FDR did do. It's happened many times before.

We've been waiting for his revolution for centuries. And planned economies don't work any better than those directed by billionaires.

More a fan of Schumpeter's creative destruction WITH safety nets. For better or worse capitalism can provide for our needs IF there is adequate competition and a basic set of rules. What we are really seeing today is people creating chaos, then profiting from it; one party sees all of the benefit instead of both the seller and the buyer (capital and labor) getting mutual benefits from their transactions.

I guess in a larger sense a lot of folks have lost their moral compasses (and the rest of us haven't held them accountable). We probably haven't done ourselves much good encouraging folks to "pursue their dreams" instead of identifying what they're good at and finding a way to scratch out a living. Saddling folks with massive debts to go to college or some type of expensive training isn't helpful. Also, not teaching folks about basic economics on a micro and macro scale hasn't helped either.

Sounds just like an economic crash in capitalism except on a small, local region or industry. It comes across more like just a general description of the destruction of capitalism.

He describes it as an essential fact about capitalism where revolutionary innovations render existing products, processes, or technologies obsolete.

Entrepreneurs drive the process by introducing new goods, production methods, or opening new markets, forcing old firms to adapt or perish. While disruptive to labor and causing industrial decline, it is considered the primary engine for increasing productivity and profit over the long term and wider region.

Do we really have to have this destruction before we can make progress? Why do we have to regulate it? Shouldn't we have an economic system that encourages compliance with basic human needs and goals?

And existing profitable corporations fight this progress and change tooth and nail. Just look at how we have failed miserably in implementing renewable energy. The oil corporation are preventing the US from going there. They use their wealth and influence to prevent progress and and keep us chained to obsolete systems. Not only is the process basically a bunch of destructive crashes, it also creates barriers to progress and causes stagnation. It's why feudalism was overturned as an economic system. It created more barriers to progress than it promoted.

Yeah, Karl Marx missed the mark in several areas but what he did better than anyone else was to describe capitalism and all it's faults and problems. It's something the filthy-rich don't want you to know about. Which is why the filthy-rich created concepts like "free" trade, libertarianism and trickle down.

was attempting to hitch his creative destruction theory to the larger boom and bust cycles that had been occurring in the 19th and 20th centuries. That would be largely tackled by Keynes, who advocated for the government to became the vehicle to restart economies after massive economic failures (the Great Depression was the worst of these cycles).

I think over doing government intervention has allowed the uber rich to never be removed from economic participation when they massively screw up. Without a natural removal process, bad actors just keep acting bad. Yea, I agree. There doesn't appear to be a moral compass within much of the business sector.

Everything changes. Without innovation (that's basically destroyed the printed media), we wouldn't be having this conversation. While I may miss someone like Mike Royko, if my paper carried his column, there are a lot more folks I can access via the internet that are just as thought provocative and engaging (and at a more frequent rate than once a week).

You build a company, you own it, you control it.
But if at some point you get so rich that it lets you buy 4 or 5 other companies, or 10 or 20…then what are you being rewarded for? If you built a nice car company or delivery company, and you get rewarded by being able to also buy a social media company or a newspaper, what did you do to deserve to have control over those institutions? Let alone control over the government?

The simplistic notions used to praise capitalism in our childhood upbringing become more and more absurd, when control over vast reaches of enterprise across many industries is in the hands of the same not-so-big club of people who coordinate their activities and their political spending.

One day we all wake up on a spaceship, being charged for the air we breathe.

Even Elon for instance is not driven at all by material possessions, he's driven by power over others and legacy.

Expecting people to bow and curtsey whenever they walk in the room.

(Hey King Farouk - I have a rotten tomato here,.. would you mind if I throw it at your head ?)

I thought the HBO series succession did a great job portraying billionaires. The series focused on the Roy family, whose patriarch, Logan Roy, controlled a large media company. They're a stand in for FOX News and Rupert Murdock.

You get a first hand look at extreme wealth. The children of Logan vie to control the company, but wealth and the comforts it brings are a backdrop, but not really discussed at all. They get flown around on private jets, have amazing meals in amazing places, and live in ridiculous penthouses and mansions in the country side. They never once remark how great the view is, or how delicious the meals are, or how amazing it is to fly in a private jet. All of that is just a given, they take no real joy from any of it. The children are all completely unremarkable, none of them are all that talented at anything, but they're all assured of their place in the billionaire class where if they completely fail, the worst case scenario is a life of vacation and being worth several $billion each.

Their father dies, it's a mad scramble for control, but all of them are too dumb to win, one of their spouses ends up getting control and he himself is also pretty unremarkable. These people are just rich, that's their only real qualification, they know how to be rich and how to deal with other rich people. Absent being rich, they are not competent, they are not talented, they have very few useful skills. And the entire sphere around them is geared to cater to their every whim, everyone is scared, everyone is meek.

And their privilege is sickening. No consequences for any misstep or crime. Sexual harassment and drug use that results in death of an innocent have 0 consequences. They all just want power because they're bored or they think it's their birthright. None of them earned a thing. And in the end, the big crescendo is disaster for one of the main characters and he gets out schemed for control over the media company and storms out of the office building and it looks like he might throw himself into the river, but his security is near by and that's the end, you realize it was all meaningless, he lost and is still a $billionaire and his life will never be anything other than opulence.

This is the class of people we have created, born into wealth, completely unremarkable other than that, and wielding the power of life and death over others on a whim.

... the general good of our society and strive to make our country better for the coming tomorrows. This is all beyond their comprehensions.

This is one of the main driving reasons and forces that The United States of America is proceeded backwards rather that forwards.

We must get it through our heads... there must be consequences for committing acts of treason. A slap on the wrist is way too far from being sufficient, their asses belong in prison - to set a no fooling a round with that bullshit - PRESIDENT. That point must be made loud and clear if we hope a functional DEMOCRACY.

These rich assholes think they're experts on everything because they inevitably get surrounded by yes men and sycophants. Mark Zuckerberg is an expert on a few things, it helped him build a social media empire. But that empire touches all parts of life now and he seems to think he's an expert on all things now. How to raise your children, how to deal with diseases and politics, how to apply AI to the world etc.etc.

We as a society worship these billionaires and assign them all sorts of wisdom that they simply don't have. So people are going to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to ask them their opinions on things they know absolutely nothing about. Things like elementary education, morality, and environment. And then we hang on every word, as if Elon Musk is going to tell us what works in a 4th grade classroom more accurately than literally hundreds of thousands of grade school teachers can. And I believe that all becomes intoxicating for them, they start to believe that, "yeah, maybe I am an expert on all things, maybe my opinion should carry weight on literally every issue."

And that's what got us Trump. A man WHO is sure he knows more about every single subject than actual experts. And an audience who thinks, "Well, he's a multi billionaire, so it's worth listening to him on any subject." And that's where we are, and entire nation slave to the whims of know nothing billionaires whose only qualifications to speak on 99% of the subjects they speak on is that they're rich.

I have seen, again and again, Trump's followers expressing the belief that he was born into a working family without wealth and worked hard and brilliantly to achieve great wealth for himself and his family. I read this false belief again this morning on Facebook.

When his dad died, he left Trump then about $500M in real estate. If Trump had left that alone and just let it run itself, he'd be worth $10B today. Instead he leveraged it, squandered much of it and needed a TV gig to make ends meet. He would have went completely broke without the Apprentice. Of course now he's grifting $billions from the government and will be worth $50B or more by the time he leaves office IMO, but his dad left him a massive real estate fortune.

This is where that leads.

See research in the post below, but essentially, humans evolved to share. Hoarding community resources -- which is basically what amassing great wealth is -- undermines basic parts of what it is to be a feeling, connected, being.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100221186304#post41

thing as a billionaire.
When they don’t even have to acknowledge the rights, or even the existence of others on this planet, they are not compelled to be a part of the human race.
Thus, the have the power and compunction to make whatever kind of society that furthers their own interests and existence which harms the rest of humanity in so many ways.

its easier for a camel to fit through an eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to go to heaven.

We evolved to share. Hoarding community resources -- which is basically what amassing great wealth is -- undermines basic parts of what it is to be a feeling, connected, being.

Am I the only one that gets a kick when science and religion come to essentially the same conclusion?

More on the research here:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100221186304#post41

I think that very accurately sums things up.
The comments on Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are absolutely correct.
We have a situation where money, power, and control have birthed monsters who are running wild across the planet as if it's their personal play thing.

It's mind-boggling to see working people worshipping an obvious con man like Cadet Bonespurs.

And I want to see that movie mentioned in the article.

Untouchable.

Wealth and power should carry with it ethics, empathy, and a desire to build a more sustainable future with equal rights and opportunity for all humanity.

Dangerously, the opposite is true. The level of wealth the article addresses turns these multi billionaires into sociopathic lords whose vision for the future is unfettered freedom for themselves and subservience or worse for everyone else.

Wealth -- not even extreme wealth -- reduces compassion and morality:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100221186304#post41

Until heads end up on pikes or in a basket in front of a guillotine. I’m not joking. The French masses discovered the other, much smaller estates couldn’t kill all of them, or even enough of them to matter, and then it was on. The French Revolution.

My response to the zillionaires is, we can do this easy. Or we can do this real easy. Their choice. That’s not hyperbole. It’s a warning.

However, the Revolution began in 1789, but there were various monarchs and emperors along the way until a permanent republic was finally established in 1870.

Billionaires can exist so long as they don’t have the power to make life immeasurably worse for regular Americans.

Without guardrails, all bets are off.

I suspect I will only be able to finish it with a couple more drinks at hand.

Death is the final equalizer.

is that almost everyone can't see this for themselves by observing those around us, those in the news and learning about human nature.

The rest of us must offer sacrifices to them in the hope they do not squash us as bugs.

Rec

If Elon Musk didn't earn another dollar and decided to spend $1 million per hour, 24 hours a day, 24/7, it would take him 91.3 years to go broke.

We somehow HAVE to tax these motherfuckers out of existence.

There are three classes in the world;
The Trillionaires,
The Billionaires,
and The Millionaires.
we don't belong.
We are ants, worker drones.
They will eliminate all the worker drone jobs.
Through robotics and Ai.

Last edited Mon Apr 20, 2026, 07:16 PM - Edit history (1)

there were receptionists in every office, secretaries for every boss, aides for the important workers …

Ushers in theaters, guys who pumped gas

so many jobs lost

I was important, respected, and opinion mattered.
I, who came up from nothing.

Thanks for the thread UpInArms

With that imagined worth (not monetary) comes a sense of lifting up on a pedestal. From that comes lack of accountability.

Insulation from accountability is a bad thing.

...if he meant only his own mortality could stop him.

May that please happen soon.

a blood clot

at the very least. So there’s been one plucky little blood clot that tried to save the world. Maybe more.

He says he’s gobbling down full-size aspirin every day so he can have “nice thin blood” coursing through his veins. Maybe we can get an uncontrollable bleed next. A nice triple A or something on the Circle of Willis.

That’d do.

That pretty much sums it up nicely I think. We are chess pieces. Scenery. Faceless extras on the set of their lives. Cattle.

I cannot help but think though that increasing wealth disparity across the world would allow corrupt politicians and tech companies to make a case for the type of exploitative and imvasive mapping of personal space and fueled by one’s own and other peoples’ “data as oil”- that too in the most cynical and meretricious contexts imaginable often I would be willing to wager. I really hope my govt here in India has better sense than to force this misguided rot as “development”.

It is just a creepy turning back of the clock on women’s rights and human rights.

And our brains’ relationship with information is changing as I just started understanding how in this Black Mirroresque way if your brain is prone to picking up nonsensical patterns that are perhaps notable for their absurdity, but that gets really old really fast.

I don’t know. I am not exactly anywhere near fringe in behavior and cheap shots aside though, I would have assumed most people took their lives seriously and any mismatch netween behavior and stated motivations…malice and or stupidity should not be the go to guesses.

The systems humans have in place are robust enough when humans exert rights we already have instead of using the tails of the distribution wrt bad behavior aka oligarchs and politicians as the mean with the dumbest counterpropaganda ever.
Ha

Last edited Tue Apr 21, 2026, 02:29 AM - Edit history (1)

for addressing the pitfalls of the human condition.

And unfortunately that's about the only thing that actually "trickles down" in our society.

Poor man wanna be rich. Rich man wanna be king. And a king ain't satisfied 'Til he rules everything.

...a straw breaks the camels back, nothing major, just a society that says enough. Many of the extreme wealthy probably have completely forgotten or become dismissive it could happen to them. They think their wealth can insulate them. They've crapped enough on communist and socialist ideology to think no one would ever use it as a means to bring them down, and they are right. But when shit hits the fan, usually there isn't one underlying ideology, just anger and frustration. The ideological ones just take advantage later after most of the work is done.

They may be shrewd and successful business people, but students of history, they are not.

The rich are able to insulate themselves to a degree previously unknown, jetting away to safety whenever they need. And thanks to the extreme changes to weaponry, it has never been easier for a small group of properly armed and trained individuals to keep at bay larger numbers of angry citizens armed only with means available to the average person.

"For a billionaire, $1,000,000 a year is a negligible amount of money, roughly equivalent to a middle-class person finding about $1 to $5 on the sidewalk. It is a small fraction of their passive income or interest earnings, not their primary wealth."

Google AI, take it for what it's worth; accurate or not, it's an eyeopener.

enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different. ”

In my mind. I am compelled by the govt to see my PCP every 3 months if I want my pain meds. That means costs for office visits, a 45 minute trip to my doc, the gas and a working car. It also means I have to keep body and mind together to make the drive... something that gets harder to do the older I get.

Wanna bet the rich have to go through this just to get medicine that keeps the chronic pain to a point where they can function?

And yet I'm told it's all to keep me from being an addict, or selling my meds... like I could do the latter and still survive. I'm not addicted, dipshits... I depend on these meds for even a small quality of life. The latter words came from my PCP.

And when there’s no accountability, their delusions only inflate.