What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos's Private Retreat

[Johnny2X2X]

54. Succession

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.