A billion dollars is a hard sum of money to wrap your head around. There is basically no ethical way to make a billion dollars. If you have a billion dollars it’s because you’ve stiffed a lot of people a lot of the value they created and kept it for yourself.
This is exactly how I have always thought about it too. Pure greed. My father ran a company for 35 years and for 3 of those years he took either no payout or a very small payout so that he didn’t have to let anyone go. I asked him why he didn’t just downsize and he said that other people needed the money more than us. That’s how shit needs to be run. People centric not profit driven.
It depends on the billionaire.
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George Lucas comes to mind as an example this week. Am amazed he’s going out of his way to buy back a franchise that almost did him in, all for the fans.
So instead of more evenly distributing the profit from the franchise to everyone who contributed, he’s going to hand the wealth to an already obscenely wealthy corporation so that he can have control over it again?
You need to own the franchise first. Unless I misunderstand you.
Where do you think he got his billions?
He owned the IP. He ensured that he’d retain merchandise rights and sequel rights via his contract for the original Star Wars film. He made his billions off of that. Mostly merchandise. Then he sold his company LucasFilm (along with those rights) to Disney in 2012 for a few billion in cash and a few billion in Disney stock (making him one of the largest shareholders).
So yeah, he did own the franchise first.
I wasn’t saying he didn’t, in fact that’s a part of the point. If doing all that and selling to Disney was advantageous, buying it back would not be. As it stands right now, he’s going against the billionaire director playbook here.
Or he could have distributed the billions he made, as he was making them, to more equitably pay everyone who’s work generated that wealth.
That’s my point.
Give them an award saying “Yay, you won capitalism!” then force them to retire and enjoy the rest of their life without ruining any more people’s lives.
NG+, take away their money and have them start over again, but without help from their rich parents or with the odds stacked against them somehow.
I dont think about them
