Who do we hate more today, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Bill Gates? Let me spin the bottle so the universe can figure it out. Seeing how Elon Musk was just named Time magazine’s Man Of The Year and that he’s been flirting with being the richest person on earth, he’s the man of the hour to hate. Right behind him, though, is Jeff Bezos, who recently sat by playing with his rocket while 6 of his employees died in an Amazon warehouse during a tornado. And, of course, Bill Gates will always be hated because he’s Bill Gates, who started us down this path of cruel wealth while he piloted his Borg ship on a path that would end up delivering his 5G chips into our veins.

Does anyone out there really care that 100 people a day are murdered in America, that 100 people a day die in car accidents, or that 57 elderly people die prematurely every day due to poor care at private equity-owned senior care facilities? No to all of the above, but when six people die at a Jeff Bezos-operated facility (never mind that he’s not been the CEO since June), he’s still at fault due to his untaxed billions in cash that pour from the spigot on his bald head.

Why, America? How and why are we this stupid?

The wealth created by the fundamental shifts in the economy and technology benefits shareholders, workers, and the entire global economy as they change the very way we work and exchange our labor for food, shelter, education, health care, and transportation. But that means nothing when you have a wealthy class of propagandists who need to focus the public’s ire against a select few who become the lightning rods to attract the anger that might otherwise be directed at the entire ruling class that has failed to find a vision for the direction of humanity.

So, if you are a billionaire, you need to be prepared to have the weight of the world thrown upon your shoulders, such is the price for your fat wallet.

But John, it’s more than that. If these fat cats were properly taxed, I’d feel compensated and would be able to luxuriate in the knowledge that they paid their fair share, which would ultimately lift me out of my current difficult financial situation.

Consider this: the average rent for an apartment in the United States is $1,124 per month. Now, take the combined wealth of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates (the majority of that wealth is mostly locked up in stock), which is approximately $535 billion (a considerable but fluctuating amount), and force them to divest themselves of every bit of stock they own. Your share of those three’s vast wealth would be $1,623 after dividing it between the 329.5 million people who live on our shores. Then again, if you are a homeowner whose average monthly mortgage payment is $1,487, you’d only have $136 left of your share after making a single payment, but wait, after the average electricity payment of $114 per household there’s hardly enough of your share of these billionaire’s wealth to buy your family a meal at your local fast-food drive-thru.

It seems that NOBODY considers or cares that the combined market value of the companies these three people started is now worth $5 trillion and that the $4.5 trillion owned by the public and other companies is wealth shared by those who are invested in these people’s ideas. How about these armchair experts/haters think about what would happen to the price of Tesla’s, Microsoft’s, and Amazon’s stock if their three founders were to suddenly dump all of their stock? Those valuations of $5 trillion could be reduced to not much more than $1 trillion, which to the average person would still be seen as a lot of money for sure, but…

Jeff Bezos’ stock is currently worth $3,400 a share, but if he were forced to sell his 53,000,000 shares, the price would likely tank down to below $1,000 a share in a fire sale, he’d still net over $50 billion as the price was run down, but you’d destroy the investment of all those who’d invested in Amazon and paid more than $1,000 a share.

Now extrapolate that to the fortunes of Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the other tech titans, and let’s make them all pay their fair share, strip them of their untaxed stock wealth, and just yank some $8 trillion of wealth from investors so we can recoup $1 trillion from these billionaire despots.

I hope you see where this has gone; we are idiots and collectively have no real idea how much of anything functions on the scales that things operate. The wealthy certainly know this as they are smart enough to offer us the sacrificial lambs that can easily insulate themselves against the crackpots and stupidity of the angry horde. Just keep Bezos, Musk, Gates, and Zuckerberg in the headlines so we don’t blame the larger part of corporate America, our politicians, or the media that feeds this gas-lighting of the sheep.

Welcome to your place in the perpetual Rube Goldberg machine whereby, sharing your bias and uninformed opinions, you contribute to the greater stupidity of everyone around you just as though you were but one more piece of the machine that dazzles our imagination as everything is toppled in a succession of cascading disinformation, ignorance, and inability to see our own intellectual shortcomings.

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