 I've long maintained that billionaires should not exist because it is absolutely unjustifiable to have people with that much wealth when we still see people sleeping out on the streets, when we still see children going hungry, to let individuals like Elon Musk accumulate so much wealth that even if he lived to be 10,000 years old, he still wouldn't be able to spend all of it. I mean, it's just disgusting. And most importantly, it is a policy failure. And that's the point that author Anand Giridharis makes in a guest opinion piece for the New York Times titled, This Week, Billionaires Made a Strong Case for Abolishing Themselves. Now Anand goes on to explain how billionaires themselves inadvertently made the case for them to not exist, citing Elon Musk as one of the prime examples by running Twitter into the ground. But he also mentions Jeff Bezos and Sam Bankman Freed. And we're going to dive into his article a little bit, but first let's listen to what he has to say. He makes the pitch using Elon Musk as an example on MSNBC. And what he says is spot on, in my opinion. First of all, I think something we often forget as Americans is that billionaires exist as a class of people who have that much money at our collective pleasure, right? It is a policy choice to allow some people to accumulate that much money, hundreds of billions of dollars in the case of people in the United States before everybody has the chance to live with dignity, right? Other countries make that choice very differently. We have chosen historically to heavily prioritize having billionaires over having dignity for all people. And that's a choice I would just start by saying that we could make differently in the future. And so I wrote the piece to try to remind people of that choice we have. And last week was remarkable. I mean, I've written about billionaires for years and talked about these issues on the show. It's hard to imagine a week when there were so many spectacular reminders of the way in which this kind of billionaire class is inconsistent with democracy as we live it. Elon Musk is a sort of adolescent in his 50s. Everybody can see that. I don't think anybody would say Elon Musk is a normal 51-year-old man who has bought this platform that he himself calls a global town square. Certainly functions has that kind of social importance. And because of what is so evidently his own feeble limitations, he's a limited man. His limitations become all of our problem. They ramify into all of our lives. They start to unleash anti-Semitism because he wants Kanye back on the platform. Kanye announces Shalom when he comes back after his big anti-Semitism benders in recent years. He brings back Donald Trump who's kind of unleashed the white nationalist demons in this country on that platform and off in ways that obviously have caused us to come to the brink of losing our democracy. Elon Musk's big idea is let's bring him back. He's gutted the company. Photos of him from the company at a so-called code meeting show that there's basically like no women left working around him. It's just a big sausage fest. He's absolutely correct there. It is a policy choice to allow people to accumulate that much wealth before everyone in this country is able to live with dignity. And to have that much power as a billionaire, I don't think people fully comprehend the ways in which they are able to control society and bend democracy to their will. And Elon Musk really demonstrated that very clearly. He took over Twitter, which is a platform that is essentially this global town square. And now we're all subject to his whims. We're subject to the mood of an unhinged 50-year-old adolescent as Anand described him. And there's really no rhyme or reason or any guidelines that he's following to the policy choices that he's choosing to enact on Twitter. He likes Kanye West. Kanye West is a friend with him seemingly. So he chose to bring Kanye West back. But yet when it comes to bringing Alex Jones back, that's a no-go for Elon Musk because he personally knows how painful it is to lose a child. And what Alex Jones did to the parents of Sandy Hook victims makes him irredeemable in Elon Musk's eyes. So there's no standard that he's using. And Twitter is just one example. What's stopping some other billionaire from buying YouTube and changing it radically, wiping all of us out on this platform? They can control our lives. They buy politicians. So this case with Elon Musk and Twitter really demonstrates why we should not allow these people to amass that much wealth. Now Anand in his article goes on to talk about other billionaires. He writes this about Jeff Bezos. On Monday, Jeff Bezos made a big splash when CNN released an interview in which he announced that he was giving the great bulk of his more than $120 billion dollar fortune away with the focus on fighting climate change and promoting unity. That sure sounds impressive, but his gesture wasn't about generosity any more than Herschel Walker's Senate candidacy in Georgia is for the children. After all, the money Mr. Bezos is now magnanimously distributing was made through his dehumanizing labor practices, his tax avoidance, his influence peddling, his monopolistic power, and other tactics that make him a cause of the problems of modern American life rather than a swashbuckling solution. It's too soon to tell if Mr. Bezos' philanthropy will help others, but what's certain is that it will help Mr. Bezos a lot. Many of the philanthropists of his ilk tend to give through foundations, which they establish in ways that save them an immense amount in taxes, sometimes merely by moving the money from one of their own accounts to another. Giving will also burnish Mr. Bezos' reputation in that way, preserving and protecting his opportunity to earn yet more money and to do more social damage, and it will increase his already gigantic power over public life for plutocrats like Mr. Bezos that may be the biggest payoff of all. Their wealth is so vast that by distributing even a small fraction of it, they skew the public agenda toward the kind of social change they can stomach, the kind that doesn't threaten them or their class. Very well said. Now this is something that billionaires do all the time. Before Jeff Bezos announced that he was going to be giving away most of his fortune to fight climate change, the CEO of Patagonia announced that he was giving away his entire company to fight climate change. However, as Adam Conover brilliantly put it in a recent YouTube video, there is no such thing as a benevolent billionaire and the Patagonia's billionaire CEO announcement was nothing more than a clever PR ploy to help him avoid taxes. Let's listen. Not only was this donation designed to help Shenard avoid billions of dollars in taxes, the fact that it's even possible for a billionaire to pull this maneuver is an unmitigated disaster for the planet and for our democracy. And when we swallow PR like this, we are literally falling for the oldest billionaire bullshit in the book. Now a lot of people found this story believable, including me at first, because it fits Shenard's carefully cultivated public image. He's been described for years as the reluctant billionaire, a frugal rock climber who just loved making gear for his friends, then tripped and accidentally started a three billion dollar company. People tell stories about Shenard eating cans of cat food to save money, and he famously still drives a Subaru instead of a fancy car. The dude supposedly doesn't even own a cell phone, which is maybe why he doesn't know that human food is just as cheap as cat food? You weren't saving money, Yvonne, you were just being weird. And as far as corporations go, Patagonia does have a solid environmental record. They've donated over $140 million to a huge number of organizations promoting everything from land conservation to biodiversity to sustainable agriculture to the end of fossil fuels. Now Shenard said that he wanted the company's commitment to the planet to continue after his death, so instead of selling the company to some corner cutting capitalist who would start powering the fleeced vest factories with coal and, I don't know, cancel the Batgirl movie again, he decided to donate all of his stock to a non-profit organization with a mission of helping the planet. In a New York Times piece so glowing, it might as well have been written by his publicist. Shenard said that hopefully this donation will influence a new form of capitalism that doesn't end with a few rich people and a whole bunch of poor people. And his own accountant said that he'll receive no tax benefit for his donation whatsoever. But if you want the straight story about a billionaire's finances, it might make sense to ask someone other than the guy who cooks the books for him. The truth is, if Shenard really just wanted to make sure that Patagonia's value stayed intact, he didn't need to donate it to a non-profit. He could have just given all $3 billion worth of shares to his kids. They could have kept running the company according to daddy-dearest wishes and lovingly wrapped about him at corporate board meetings. So why didn't he do that? Simple. He had to pay $1.2 billion in gift taxes. And Yvonne's a good billionaire, so he doesn't like paying taxes. I mean, why should he have to pay for the roads his products are transported on, the schools and universities his workers are educated at, the GPS system that he uses to track his shipments, and the government research into heart attacks and cancer that have kept him alive until the ripe old age of 83. I mean, he's self-made, right? He did it all by himself. Now I know what you're thinking. Adam, he didn't pay taxes because he did something better. He donated it to charity. Well, let's take a look at how charitable that donation actually was. 98% of the shares Shanard donated were given to a brand new environmental non-profit-y formed called the Hold Fast Collective. Kind of a weird name, sort of sounds like a mid-2000s Brooklyn indie band, but more about that in a second. The other 2% though were Shanard's voting shares. These are the shares that let you actually control what the company does. And these shares were given to something called the Patagonia Purpose Trust, which is solely controlled by Shanard and his family. What this means is that even though all the headlines said Shanard was donating the company to charity, he and his family will continue to control Patagonia forever. You know, I didn't know that was how donations worked. When I donate my car to 1-800-CARDS-FOR-KIDS, I can't show up the next weekend and take it for a joyride, but Yvonne and his family can. Now you just watched a small portion of Adam's video, but I would highly encourage you to go to Adam Conover's YouTube channel and watch the entirety of that video. It's 20 minutes long, and throughout the course of that video, he thoroughly eviscerates this notion that a good billionaire is a thing. It's not a thing. There's no such thing as a good billionaire. They all simply exist to amass more and more wealth. They wouldn't have that much wealth had they not been evil in the first place, exploited their own workers, avoided taxes. So this notion of this benevolent billionaire that's going to come and save us all or save the planet, people need to stop believing it because it's stupid. Now, back to Anand Girardardis's point here. He explains that billionaires, they exist because we allow them to, and we allow them to exist because they're deceiving us. They pretend as if they provide us with a social good when in actuality, they only serve themselves. He continues, Mr. Bankman Freed embodies another pretension of plutocratic benevolence, that of the renegade, the people's billionaire. Like many others, he hawked cryptocurrency as a fight against the establishment, against the big banks, against the powers that be, man. He has said his work was motivated by the ideals of effective altruism, a trendy school of thought that encourages people to go out and make as big a heap of money as they can so that they can use it to heal the world. But as he admitted in an interview this week with Kelsey Piper of Vox, Mr. Bankman Freed's claims about the ethical nature of his pursuit were an example of this dumb game we woke Westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us. Finally, of course, this week there was Donald Trump because let's face it, there's always Donald Trump who has incarnated the most dangerous billionaire pretension of all. That of the hero who in all the world is the only one who can save us. He gamed the system so effectively that only he knows how to ungame it. He manipulated politicians so much that only he knows how to drain the swamp. He amassed so much money that only he is above corruption. And these are just a couple of examples. Another example is Bill Gates, who for years was seen as this goody two shoes. Meanwhile, he's chumming it up with Jeffrey Epstein and blocking other countries from developing generic versions of the COVID-19 vaccine, which would save millions of lives. He delayed their efforts because, you know, IP protections, money, profits. So there is no good billionaire. And a non concludes his article by saying that billionaires aren't our saviors. They're our mistakes, emphasizing that we as a society choose to allow these threats to democracy to exist. And that's not something that should be acceptable. So what's the solution? Well, we confiscate the wealth that they stole from their workers. We tax them until they are no longer billionaires. And I would go much further than others. I think that just allowing them to have $999 million is still too much until people are no longer sleeping on the streets, until every single child in this country is fed, until nobody around the globe is thirsting for water that they don't have access to. We should not allow this kind of wealth to exist. But this is the outcome of capitalism. You know, sometimes people like to refer to our system as unfettered capitalism or, you know, unregulated capitalism. And I've heard Elizabeth Warren say, you know, capitalism without rules is theft. But no, this is just capitalism. This is always going to be the end result of capitalism. And we're simply in the latest stage of capitalism. And, you know, throughout the earlier stages of capitalism, the wealth wasn't just concentrated in the hands of a few plutocrats. But this was always the end result of capitalism. Capitalism is like a virus and it seeps into every single institution in our society until it consumes the entire system itself. I mean, think about even the way that elections are run in the United States. You can't win an election unless you raise large sums of money. Our entire system of governance has become commodified. A 2014 Princeton University study by Drs. Gillens and Paige found that when it comes to policies that get passed by Congress, it's disproportionately what the wealthy and elites want, not what normal voters want. We have a statistically insignificant impact on policy outcomes. So this isn't a case of unregulated or unfettered capitalism. This is just capitalism, period of full stop. And until we move away from this regressive, disgusting, deadly system, then this is always going to be what we have to look forward to. But certainly allowing these plutocrats to exist, allowing this system to kill our planet, it's a choice that we made. And even if we want to reverse course, unfortunately, it may be too late. So really great points by Anand, a really great video by Adam Conover. I hope that more people will understand that you shouldn't simp for billionaires because this idea that, well, what if one day I'm a billionaire? I wouldn't want anyone to come after my wealth. It's not going to happen. You are statistically more likely to get bitten by a shark or struck by lightning than you are to become a billionaire. So simping for billionaires out of the hopes that one day you'll become a billionaire, it's not going to happen. The American dream is dead. So the best that we can do is take that wealth and spread it around so other people can have lives that are dignified.