Nobody earns a billion dollars through honest work. You don’t become a celebrity billionaire on your own. Creating and maintaining celebrity takes a large team of workers who sees none of the profits created by the celebrity.
Those profits are most often created by being able to demand far greater prices for branded merchandise than the cost of labour and materials, justified solely by the brand and image of the celebrity. This allows them to extract a form of monopoly rent by creating an artificial scarcity in the market.
Celebrity billionaires might not be the most consciously evil billionaires but they are exploitative and parasitic, just like any other kind of billionaire.
I think especially in the digital age you could theoretically earn a billion dollars without exploiting anyone, like if you wrote an ebook or made a video game that pops off like Undertale, where there is little to no labor required for distribution. It’s still unethical to hoard that much wealth and society should tax it away from you. Even if we were to accept the narrative that some billionaire celebrities made their wealth through ethical means (which they didn’t), they still very much have the ability to give it to people who need it and choose not to.
The Harry Potter books have sold over 600 million copies. Of course there were a lot of people involved, but I think nowadays with digital self-publishing, it could be possible to have a book series that sells millions of copies while only requiring the labor of a handful of people.
Nobody earns a billion dollars through honest work. You don’t become a celebrity billionaire on your own. Creating and maintaining celebrity takes a large team of workers who sees none of the profits created by the celebrity.
Those profits are most often created by being able to demand far greater prices for branded merchandise than the cost of labour and materials, justified solely by the brand and image of the celebrity. This allows them to extract a form of monopoly rent by creating an artificial scarcity in the market.
Celebrity billionaires might not be the most consciously evil billionaires but they are exploitative and parasitic, just like any other kind of billionaire.
I think especially in the digital age you could theoretically earn a billion dollars without exploiting anyone, like if you wrote an ebook or made a video game that pops off like Undertale, where there is little to no labor required for distribution. It’s still unethical to hoard that much wealth and society should tax it away from you. Even if we were to accept the narrative that some billionaire celebrities made their wealth through ethical means (which they didn’t), they still very much have the ability to give it to people who need it and choose not to.
The wealth gap between just being a millionaire and being a billionaire is so unfathomably massive.
Millionaires are believable in a single lucky lifetime, but billions? One thousand millionaires in one person?
The Harry Potter books have sold over 600 million copies. Of course there were a lot of people involved, but I think nowadays with digital self-publishing, it could be possible to have a book series that sells millions of copies while only requiring the labor of a handful of people.