According to the New York Times Magazine, when Forbes embarked on its first billionaires list in 1982, its reporters discovered the world's richest man, a shipping magnate, was worth $2 billion — that's $5.8 billion adjusted for today's dollars. Let me reiterate: Musk and Bezos are now worth a combined $448 billion. The difference between Musk and the shipping magnate, bumping him to a 2022 adjusted net worth of $5.8 billion, is like comparing someone with $100,000 to someone with $2,157.
And that's what makes the two richest people on Earth blithely discussing how to convert portions of Twitter and Amazon HQ into one-off homeless shelters so cartoonishly offensive. Their imaginations and ambitions shrink infinitesimally smaller when they can't make billions off a product (real and imagined). They would never, will never, seriously confront the inequality challenges that lay before us because they don't care. They can't care. It's antithetical to their existence.
That's from Alex Shultz, "The infuriating insincerity of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos' chat about San Francisco homelessness," who explains the context of the 'chat.' I recommend his commentary, which includes this observation: "The public exchange between Bezos and Musk was a detente of sorts in the cold relations between two fake space cowboys. It was also enraging, as are any conversations between the richest people on Earth about piecemeal solutions to systemic problems that they've only made worse. But most notably, it shows just how untouchable both men truly are, a reality they both seem to understand and relish."
As noted in my previous post, high and growing levels of economic inequality pose a threat to democracy. In no other wealthy country in the world is the gulf between rich and poor as great as in the United States. Well over a half million people in this country are homeless. The two richest men in America (and the world) have found time to make light of this.