If you're a billionaire, why are you a billionaire?

"That question does not go away. " 

“If you’re a billionaire, why are you a billionaire?” That was a question put to a room full of very wealthy people at the 2025 Wall Street Journal Innovator Awards in New York City on October 29 by 23-year-old musician Billie Eilish. Eilish herself had just given $11.5 million from her Hit Me Hard and Soft World Tour to climate change and Palestinian children, but her question was not meant as a recruitment pitch for other donors. Eilish was seriously asking.

Among those in the audience were Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan Zuckerberg. They have donated 99% of their lifetime earnings from owning Facebook to a medical research initiative in Chicago. That left them with a bare minimum of $2.2 billion to scrape by on.

Becoming a billionaire seems easier these days. Certainly quicker. You don’t have to slowly acquire railroad stocks on market dips, like Warren Buffett. That could take half a century. You just learn to code and dream up a killer app, like TikTok, Tinder, PayPal, or Zoom. Zuckerberg was 19 when he coded Facebook. Evan Spiegel was 21 when he coded Snapchat. Evan Moana started his toy reviews channel, EvanTubeHD, when he was in the fourth grade. Still, the trick is not just to come up with a brilliant idea, but to monetize it before someone else does. Bill Gates’ mother sat on a board with the CEO of IBM. Zuckerberg chanced to meet Peter Thiel. Bezos’ genius was less about creating a web presence in the early days of the internet (a big advantage all the same) than attracting private investor capital and buying out smaller competitors.

Bezos borrowed $2 billion from banks, nearly went bankrupt in the dot-com crash, then landed a $600-million contract with the CIA for Amazon Web Services. Four years later, his personal wealth surpassed $100 billion. In 2020, Elon Musk was within a month of filing for bankruptcy when Joe Biden dished him a pandemic payroll subsidy that bailed out Tesla and boosted investor confidence in its stock price. Musk went on to secure $22 billion in government contracts, with potential future NASA contracts totaling over $89 billion. He used only a tiny fraction of that to buy both Twitter and the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Now he is rewriting Wikipedia in Orwellian style.

It should be concerning that so many of those entrusted with such power have murderous pathologies acquired by nature or nurture. Several in the Trump/Vance inner circle grew up in South Africa on the wrong side of apartheid. Other uberrich are big-time backers of Bibi Netanyahu’s coalition of cleansers. Those coming from the tech world generally fantasize that their fortunate birth—one that coincided with a rare phase shift in history—comes rather from their own brilliance or earnest effort. Like their simian relatives, billionaires assume all must think as they do, and if they don’t, the unaligned are other, lesser, and dispensable. If you don’t grasp this yet, download an episode of their All-In Podcast and drink in the Kool-Aid mentality. These are the people to whom we have entrusted Earth’s future.

In Goliath’s Curse, Luke Kemp, after examining over 400 civilizations spanning 5,000 years, argued that a global elite’s pursuit of self-interest leads to wealth extraction that hollows out society, making it more vulnerable to shocks. He also suggested the “dark triad” of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism is fragile and bends toward collapse. He says it can be averted through real democracy, wealth redistribution, and a return to cooperative, “gift” economies.

Long before Kemp, Joseph Tainter said that societies collapse when their complexity becomes a liability and the costs of maintaining that complexity (e.g., infrastructure, bureaucracy) exceed the benefits. Increasing concentration of wealth benefits a small group while the costs are borne by the many, ultimately leading to the unraveling of the system. In the United States, that small group of billionaires numbers 902 to 1,135, depending on your source. That places the US 11th in the national rankings of billionaire residents. Monaco holds the top spot.

Once these two conflicting trends — the exponentially rising energy cost of achieving the next increment in scientific/technological progress on one hand, and the falling net energy available to fund such activities on the other — collide, progress can be expected to halt abruptly.

***

No technology, no good (or bad) leader can print cheap resources or restore energy returns on investment to its previous levels, nor reduce overshoot. All they can do is to protect the interests of their donors and supporters: an ever shrinking group of individuals at the expense of the many. Not realizing that we are all in this together, however, can only make matters worse.

—The Honest Sorcerer

Jared Diamond emphasizes that elite failure to adapt to environmental problems is a key precursor to collapse, but Kemp exposes a flaw in Diamond’s research. Diamond and others (myself included) cite Easter Island as a classic example of overexploitation (deforestation) leading to extinction, a consequence of wealth accumulation and wasteful activities such as moai building. Kemp said that while the separation of an elite and the process of overexploitation may have contributed to vulnerabilities, the most severe shock came from European contact.

A Pacific Island with a steady-state economy being exploited for its resources is just an expanded form of wealth concentration. Rapanui forced to work on sugar plantations in Tahiti enriched distant plantation owners in London. Slave raids and epidemics of smallpox and tuberculosis killed the few elders who could read the rongo-rongo script. It meant the catastrophic loss of cultural and historical knowledge and the ecological stewardship that underpinned everything.

Currently, we are in a state of ecological overshoot on a planetary scale. We consume and pollute more each and every year than what could be regenerated and absorbed by Nature in the same time period. We can temporarily increase the carrying capacity by feeding more people than ever before—think precision fermentation, genetic engineering and chemical fertilizer—but only at the cost of destroying the living world—think soil microbiota and epigenetics—and thus our future prospects. Physical limits apply to both our technology and our brain capacity. I know some readers don’t like my conclusion, but as long as industrial, consumerist civilization lasts — with or without fossil fuels, A.I. and stellar breakthroughs — our predicament is bound to worsen.

A debt-based money system, combined with an unequal distribution of opportunity, virtually guarantees an exponential growth in social inequality. In this system, the wealthy get wealthier simply by owning assets and seeking rents, effectively operating a ‘wealth pump’, at the expense of the less fortunate. (Contrary to what ‘trickle-down-economics’ used to teach us, wealth and power can only migrate upwards.) This naturally results in the rise of a billionaire class (called oligarchs or plutocrats elsewhere), and eventually leads to democracy and capitalism self-terminating themselves. As the middle class disappears, consumption declines and people end up spending all of their income on food, medicine, energy and housing, the service and manufacturing sectors start to decline as well — leaving nothing but a few monopolies behind. And as wealth gets increasingly translated into political power (hello, donations) this leaves little to no option for counter-elites (still produced in vast quantities) than to attempt a constitutional coup. What usually follows is an increase in political violence, rebellion, or civil war, customarily ending in tyranny, then finally: dissolution or subjugation to rising powers.

—The Honest Sorcerer

Back to Billie’s question: If you’re a billionaire, why are you a billionaire? Do you imagine that you will somehow escape the fate of everyone else on the planet when mammals follow the path of the corals? Left unchallenged, that fate is coming, if not for you, then for your child, grandchild, or great-grandchild.

What I think not everyone realizes is that when you talk about ECS or equilibrium climate sensitivity, it’s the amount of warming you get for a doubling of CO2—that is sort of the standard measure. But as Hansen pointed out, you get the first third of the warming in the first 10 years, the next third in the next hundred, and the next third in the next thousand years. And so … we’re really at a doubling when you throw in all the other non-CO2 greenhouse gases. We’re not done warming. And again, all the measurements say we’re going way faster than we thought. So, given all of that, I think it really comes down to like, survival.

—Dan Miller, Climate Chat, November 2, 2025

You, Mr. Billionaire, might instead devote the unexpected, unimaginable wealth which serendipitously befell you— as a function of an exponentially growing human population encountering an algorithmically-enabled marketplace propelled by fossil sunlight extraction and concentrating, for just a moment, a fraction of supersized humanity’s productive hours to bestow that billion dollars upon you—to reversing our collective fate and rescuing the whole enterprise. Maybe there is an app for that.

Or, you could dither it away on sprawling mansions, atomic yachts, or private space flight. Your choice.

But then again, it was our choice to allow you that choice, and how stupid was that?

References

Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph A. Tainter

Limits to Growth — the original study and the latest update

Geodestinies: The Inevitable Control of Earth Resources over Nations and Individuals by Walter Lewellyn Youngquist — there is also a free audio recording by the late Michael Dowd

Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change by William R. Catton Jr. — here is a link to a free audio recording by the late Michael Dowd

 

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#RestorationGeneration.

When humans are locked in a cage, the Earth continues to be beautiful. Therefore, the lesson for us is that human beings are not necessary. The air, soil, sky and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.

We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the tremendous old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. Coral reefs rebuilt with biorock build beaches faster than the seas are rising. It is not too late. All of these great works of nature are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize, not destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.

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