 There should not be one billionaire in America None And I'll tell you why Because there is nobody that works hard enough to earn a billion dollars and My argument is this the two jobs I did in my life that were physically the most demanding and mentally the most difficult that I ever did Paid me the least amount of money One was going through butts, and I challenge any billionaire to put up with six weeks of that shit At sixty two dollars every two weeks, you know, and the second was right before I went in the Navy I had a job with the Minnesota Highway Department a couple bucks above minimum wage I Worked for the bridge crew, and you know what my job was I worked a four-day work week ten hours a day So I could have Friday Saturday Sunday for the weekend you're 18 of course you're gonna do that But I worked 40 hours in four days on the bridge crew and Guess what I did ran the 80 pound jackhammer. I Challenge any billionaire to run the jackhammer for 40 hours one week and tell me he works harder than that No, he doesn't That's why I believe there should not be a billionaire in the world That was incredible You just listened to former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura make a very simple yet compelling case against the existence of billionaires And what he said there is apparently resonating considering the fact that that rent is now going viral on TikTok And I think that the reason why it speaks to people so much is because it just makes sense on a visceral level So consider this the CEO to worker pay ratio was about 20 to 1 back in the 1960s And since we are told that we live in a meritocracy, it's not true But since we're told this while it makes sense to equate pay with productivity So you'd have to assume that back then CEOs worked 20 times harder on average than just regular employees Which is a pretty insane proposition to accept in the first place, right? But consider this since 1978 average CEO pay jumped by 1460 percent according to the Economic Policy Institute, which means that CEOs are now paid 399 times more than average workers ask yourself Do you believe that CEOs are working 400 times harder now than they were in the 1960s? Does anyone actually believe that CEOs ever worked harder than average workers? I don't think so but as absurd as that ratio is Most CEOs are not even billionaires. Sure. They're multi millionaires multi multi millionaires in some instances But most of them are not actually billionaires billionaires aren't even smaller subset of the population In fact, the total number of billionaires is estimated to be 3311 according to visual capitalist with a plurality of them living in the United States totaling 975 in total mostly living in New York and California now most of these individuals own multiple companies. We're talking empires here So this includes the likes of Elon Musk worth 151 billion dollars at least according to when this estimate was taken Bill Gates worth 106 billion Warren Buffett worth 97 billion Jim Walton worth 57.9 billion Mark Zuckerberg worth 57.7 billion now Billionaires a word that gets thrown around a lot and we all know that to be a billionaire means you have a metric Fuck ton of money, which is an actual unit of measurement by the way I'm kidding. Of course, but I want you to truly comprehend How much money that is because it's difficult to visualize that amount of money But what I want to do is share this video that is almost 10 years old It went viral back in 2012-2013-2014 around that era and it helped me realize just how enormous That amount of money is an actuality. So let's watch and then we'll discuss when we come back Here is $100,000 current here that it is there it is. That's a lot of money That's what we can hope at best to make in a year, you know doing really fucking well after taxes That'd be crazy to make an ear, right? Right. That's a lot of money. All right now We have someone named on hi who is top twitch donator of all time. He has like probably a billion dollars, right? There are people in the world with a billion dollars to regard this okay anyways a billion dollars That's a big fucking number We can see that there's a lot of zeros on top of the 100,000, but we don't really feel it You don't really feel it until you go like this. You know, it's 10,000 times more but here One two three four five. That's 500,000 Copy paste that's a million dollars. Okay? Then we go we have to go Two three four five. That's five million. Let's copy paste that. That's 10 million. Okay. Let's copy paste the 10 million That's 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 a hundred million dollars. Okay, let's copy paste the hundred million Okay, that's 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 a billion dollars, okay? And now I'm I'm high and I'm gonna donate soda pop in a hundred thousand dollars like this Is that the elite key? Yeah, and now we're gonna try to find we're gonna try to find the money that we're missing now Okay, it's on the right. It's on the right. I see it There it is He saw it it was right there But it's kind of hard to feel it if I put it somewhere in the middle you guys probably wouldn't find it But you know what you wouldn't find it for sure. Let's donate Two million dollars to my good friend venruki and he could actually let's donate this let's donate Fucking four million. He could probably live a swell life with four million dollars here up. I'm I'm high I'm giving venruki four million dollars real quick four million dollars I actually do not notice it's gone. I can never find it again. It's really difficult You know because it's just lines missing. I'm not gonna count my lines. There's so many Jesus fucking christ I could actually Hold on. Let me real quick. Let me buy like the most expensive Fucking bugatti or like limited edition lamborghini for two million dollars somehow And let me just drive it over to like a valet. Let me leave it there and I'm gonna get really drunk and I'm gonna just Uh, I'm gonna go home with my friend and I'm just gonna leave the lamb lambo there Man, I don't even want to pick it up because you know what next day. Let's buy another one Okay, we got another lambo. It's cool. This one has a nice. I like yellow. You know, I don't like yellow I'm gonna buy green Okay, green lambo. Okay, then hold on Let me just normal priced lambo. Let me buy normal priced lambo for like five of my friends It's like 300k. Okay 300k there one friend two friend Three friends. Okay. Let me buy for the rest of you. There you guys all have lambos. Oh, wait. I want another lambo for myself Okay, there we go. We're chilling. Okay. Let me see if I still have any money left. Hold on Looks like I got a little bit So that kind of helps to put it into perspective, right when you're talking about a billion dollars Spending 100,000 is similar to us spending pennies. We don't even realize that we're missing those pennies But then you scale that level of wealth to elon musk and jeff bezos And they have more than 100 times that amount right there that we just watched So we're talking about sums of money So incomprehensibly large that it could probably sustain someone for more than a thousand years If human beings could live that long like it would be difficult to spend all of that money Even if you tried after you bought multiple mansions and multiple super yachts and a private jet and luxury vehicles and a couple of sports teams and You bought a private island or two and you took a trip to space you would still have so much money left over That most of us wouldn't even have a taste of what that amount of wealth feels like Now in truth Money is fake. We made it all up But within the confines of our capitalist system money is finite It's a resource that is limited Which means that battle over resources by its nature is a zero-sum game and billionaires earning more money Is the direct result of exploitation and working class people losing money the empires that these individuals Undemocratically lord over weren't built exclusively by them Their workers are the ones who are responsible for their success But regardless of how productive the workers are in these instances despite them Making capitalist owners like elan musk and bill gates rich. They don't get to share in the fruits of their labor The rich people the billionaires They took it all as jesse ventura was saying it's impossible to work hard enough to earn a billion dollars And he's right. So how exactly do people become billionaires in this current context? well, if you can't feasibly earn that much then They're not working hard. They're not working harder than anyone. So Where does this money come from? Well, they steal it obviously and they keep getting an increasingly large share of the pie And it's to the point where average workers, they don't even get a small slice of the pie They don't even get crumbs at this point What workers get is an infinitesimal amount compared to some of these CEOs And the existence of billionaires isn't just problematic because their existence is inherently immoral Their existence also poses a threat to democracy Because as the new york times put it the issue with billionaires is not that they're sociopaths though, certainly some are It's that their power comes with no accountability They dwell or don't dwell as is often the case above the clouds in super tall skyscrapers They fly to private islands on private jets and do god knows what there their yachts remind us That no matter what the paperwork says, they're citizens of no nation that if we try to fix them in place They can just go elsewhere They become enamored of certain ideas fixing african agriculture resurrecting von misis and hayak terraforming mars being the president and can spend nearly unlimited sums in pursuit of making them a reality Even if they fail at any or all of it, they will remain billionaires and there's not much you can do about it They're not elected to the role so you can't vote them out of it very well said in my opinion So think about the implications of this the implications of the existence of a billionaire They can spend money to buy off politicians and entire political parties. They can take over massive news organizations They can control social discourse by purchasing social media organizations And these aren't just like hypothetical examples that i'm bringing up. We've seen it happen These are things that they are doing currently and there's nothing that we can do to stop them If a billionaire decided to buy youtube tomorrow They could fundamentally change this platform that we all use and love and there's really nothing that we can do about it It's their world and we're just living in it now. You might think mike I mean there are things that we can do we can pass laws Taxing them out of existence. We can have a wealth tax We can invoke anti-trust when they go on these purchasing sprees and try to rein in the amount of companies that they own And look you're right about that I support all of these policies But the problem is when they control government and media and social media To say that this is a david versus goliath situation would be an understatement See it's so hard to put the cat back in the bag once it's out once we allow human beings to accumulate that much wealth Well, that's a level of power that Is almost impossible to rein in and remember in a capitalist system Wealth directly translates into power. So allowing people to get that rich in the first place That's where we as a species I think went wrong But despite the media manipulation and capitalist brainwashing that we've all been subjected to since we were children People are beginning to comprehend that this is absurd. This entire system is genuinely absurd And people are tired Of living with crumbs while these rich fuckheads have it all Hence why I think videos like the one that we watched are so popular Because even if these billionaires hold more power than us The biggest disadvantage that they face is that there's far less of them than there are of us And once people realize the power that we have collectively at the macro level. Well, that's when billionaires are really in trouble