Don’t Let Them Fool You; Money Can Buy Happiness, Lots of it
The common man has been hoodwinked by trump and Musk into believing that these two hugely rich men have the best interests of the average MAGA Joe at heart and that poverty is no bar to happiness.
It’s not a new scam.
Benjamin Franklin, one of the wealthiest men of his time, is credited with the phrase, “money can’t buy happiness.” The filthy rich steel baron, Andrew Carnegie, was duping the common folk when he wrote in his 1889 book, “The Gospel of Wealth,” that “the man who dies rich dies disgraced.”
And the ever-smiling Pastor Joel Osteen has raked in more than $50 million while urging his followers to buy his books and donate toward his cause as he preaches prosperity theology, a belief that the reward of material gain is the will of God for all pious Christians, including Osteen.
So while trump, musk and the rest grow their fortunes they are finding happiness by conniving and twisting the system in ways the common man could never imagine. Trump, musk and their likeminded billionaires don’t have a clue of how the common man lives and what the common man needs and besides, they don’t care.
These oligarchs with bottomless wealth have no experiences to identify with mothers telling their children to turn off the lights because “we don’t own the electric company.” Or kids collecting bottles so they could get 2 cents deposit on small Coke bottles and 5 cents on larger bottles. Or the thrill and joy of finding a dime on the sidewalk or getting a reward for a lost tooth. Or the need to wear a siblings’ hand-me-downs. Or putting cardboard in shoes to cover the holes.
The rich and powerful don’t care about the many people who go to bed hungry and have no health insurance and visit emergency rooms only when they are really sick. The rich cannot understand that people living in food deserts rely on quick and relatively inexpensive foods that have high amounts of unhealthy fat, sodium and artificial ingredients, like Whoppers and fries and Fritos and Coke and chips and hot dogs and other processed foods loaded with sodium nitrite, sodium nitrate and sodium phosphate.
Fresh vegetables are just not available in the food deserts where access to supermarkets is severely limited. So the poor rely on unhealthy fast and processed foods and end up having seven times the risk of early-life stroke (before age 45) and double the risk of heart attack, double the risk of diabetes and four times the risk of renal failure, compared with people who have easy access to supermarkets and healthy sources of food.
The era of trump has shined a light on the richest people in the universe. The blowhard almost in chief is actually not even in the top 10. In 2021, he tumbled off the Forbes list of the country’s richest people. This year, he was back on the list, mostly because of his stake in the Trump Media and Technology Group. While his riches have grown, it hasn’t stopped trump from trying every gimmick to further rip off average, gullible Americans, by hawking everything from trump sneakers and bibles to trump cologne and an $86 “GIANT Trump Chocolate Gold Bar.”
The world’s richest man, worth $343 billion, is Elon Musk, also known as President Musk. The richest woman in the world is Alice Walton, daughter of Sam Walton and heiress of the WalMart fortune. As of Dec. 2, 2024, her net worth is $112 billion. Her net worth is derived from her holdings in Walmart.
These people and others like them couldn’t spend all of their fortunes even if they tried. But they could collectively end poverty and still have leftover cash for a private jet. Jeffrey Sachs wrote in his 2011 book, “The End of Poverty,” that it would cost about $175 billion to end extreme poverty worldwide in 20 years. The figure is less than one percent of the combined income of the 30 richest countries in the world.
Millionaires are a dime a dozen, with an estimated 46.8 million millionaires in the world or about .6 percent of the global population. The U.S. leads with 22.7 million millionaires followed by China with 6.2 million millionaires and France with a paltry, 2.8 million millionaires.
Today’s real wealthy are the 2,781 billionaires around the world. For perspective, spending $10 per minute or $14,400 a day, would take 69,444 days or around 190 years to burn through $1 billion. A stack of $1 billion dollar bills would measure 358,510 feet or 67.9 miles.
Sorry Ben Franklin and Andrew Carnegie but a new study by the Wharton School, released on July 17, shows that money can buy happiness, contradicting prior studies which said that people adjust to wealth and normal levels of happiness. Researcher Matthew Killingsworth found that that millionaires and billionaires are happier than those earning up to $500,000 a year.
The research directly contradicts the long accepted, hedonic treadmill theory, which is defined as the tendency of people to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness or sadness despite major positive or negative events or life changes. According to the theory, as a person makes more money, expectations and desires rise in tandem, which results in no net, permanent gain in happiness.
Matt Killingsworth, a Senior Fellow at the Wharton School, concluded that people earning $500,000 or above reported an average life satisfaction of 5.5 and six out of seven. Those earning around $100,000 a year reported a rating of about 4.6. Those earning about $15,000 to $30,000 a year, reported slightly above a four.
“The magnitude of the difference between the low and high end of incomes is gigantic,” said Killingsworth, the founder and director of trackyourhappiness.org, a large-scale research project that uses smartphones to collect real-time happiness data from people around the world.
That doesn’t mean that all rich people are happy. Researchers found about 5 percent of people studied are included in the “unhappy group.” For these rich sad sacks, money fails to improve their sense of well-being once they’ve hit $100,000 in annual earnings. Such unhappy people may be suffering from life events that overwhelm any improvement that money might bring, the researchers noted.
As Killingsworth said, “[I]f you’re rich and miserable, more money won’t help.”
Money also can buy good health as studies have shown that rich people live healthy, disability-free lives an average of nine years longer than less wealthy people. Researchers in the U.S. and U.K. analyzed data on more than 25,000 adults over 50, teasing out factors that could predict how long they lived before they started suffering from age-related disabilities. The biggest socioeconomic factor in predicting when age-related problems began was wealth. Richer people enjoy almost an extra decade before experiencing difficulties.
From the age of 50, the wealthiest men could expect another 31 healthy years of life; the least well-off could only expect another 22 to 23 healthy years. For women, the wealthiest were projected to enjoy 33 more years of good health, compared with 24 added years for the poorest.
The richest people on the planet live in a different world than the rest of us as they treat money not as a commodity but as a measure of power. Nothing is beyond their means. Like the lumpen proletariat, the very, very, very rich also give gifts, though probably not an Amazon gift card.
A round trip to the moon costs $750 million, leaving lots of change for the billionaire. A payment of $810 million will get two Airbus A380s, the largest passenger airplane in the world.
A.C. Milan, one of the most successful football clubs in the world, can be purchased for $945 million and $988 million can cover 19, 1963 Ferrari GTOs. For a cool billion, there is the Antilia Mumbai in India, probably the most expensive house in the world with 27 floors and a full-time household staff of 600 personnel; the Chicago Cubs; five, F-35C Lightning II fighter jets; the Toronto Maple Leafs; the entire Solomon Islands; and finally, the Los Angele Lakers.
As far as vacations, forget about trips to the beach at Point Pleasant for the wealthy class.
White Desert Luxury Retreats offers a trip to Antarctica for $195,000 a night. The 24 hour trip includes a five hour private jet flight from Cape Town, South Africa, eight hours of exploration of the Antarctica with private professional guides, a gourmet dinner prepared by an award winning chef and champagne. Visitors finish the day be retiring to individual dome-like hotels filled with all kinds of absolutely necessary amenities.
The rich who are looking to buy the most expensive residence in the world would turn to Buckingham Palace, United Kingdom, if it was for sale. The home of King Charles III is valued at around $4.9 billion with 775 rooms, including 19 staterooms, 92 offices, and 78 bathrooms, 240 bedrooms, a swimming pool and doctor’s surgery.
The world’s most expensive private residence is the Antilia in Mumbai, India, and it is available for just $2 billion. The 400,000-square-foot building has 27 floors and is designed to withstand huge earthquakes. Antilia is owned by Mukesh Ambani, the richest person in India, and is named after a mythical island in the Atlantic, which was settled in the early 8th century in the face of the Moorish conquest of Iberia by the Archbishop of Porto, six other bishops and their parishioners to avoid the ensuing Moorish invasion. Each congregation founded a city, namely and once established, burned their caravel ships as a symbol of their autonomy.
Antilia includes a huge temple, luxurious guest suites, three helipads, a health spa with indoor pools, a ballroom and yoga studio, an ice-cream parlor and a private movie theatre. A snow room also makes snowflakes for relief if India’s high temperatures get oppressive.
Richard Burton offered his then-wife Elizabeth Taylor, the most expensive gift ever, a 68-carat diamond which sold for $6.6 million. Burton bought the bauble from Cartier in 1969. Nine years later, the couple divorced and the diamond was auctioned off for $6.6 million with the proceeds used to fund the building of a hospital in Botswana.
And after spending all that money who wouldn’t be hungry? The Grand Velas Los Cabos Taco could suit even the pickiest billionaire’s palate. The taco at the luxury resort in Mexico of the same name, costs $25,000. The ingredients are much better than even Wendy’s and include a corn tortilla flaked in edible gold and an inside that features Kobe beef, langoustine, beluga caviar, brie cheese and black truffle. The salsa on top is made from dried Morita chilis, luxury anejo tequila, and the world’s most expensive coffee, called civet, which sells on E-bay for $600 a pound.
Kopi luwak, also known as civet coffee, consists of partially digested coffee cherries, which have been eaten and defecated by the Asian palm civet. The cherries are fermented as they pass through a civet’s intestines and after being defecated with other fecal matter, they are collected. Yummey Asian palm civets are increasingly caught in the wild and traded for this purpose.
Untold wealth has a totally different meaning for the super-rich. Warren Buffet of Berkshire Hathaway has a net worth of $151 billion, making him just the eighth richest person on the planet. In 2021, Buffet explained his attitude toward money.
“Over many decades I have accumulated an almost incomprehensible sum simply by doing what I love to do. I’ve made no sacrifice nor has my family,” Buffet said. “Compound interest, a long runway, wonderful associates and our incredible country have simply worked their magic. Society has a use for my money; I don’t.”
Many of the richest people do give away large amounts to charities by signing the Giving Pledge. The pledge was created by Buffet and Bill Gates with signatories agreeing to contribute more than 50 percent of their wealth to philanthropic causes. As of June 2022, the pledge had 236 signatories from 28 countries and most are billionaires. But even giving away half of their wealth, it leaves billionaires with a treasure that will only grow through interest and investments.
By June Buffett had donated $4.1 billion.
These are, in order, the 10 richest people in the world. Most are well-known while others remain private and reclusive.
Elon Musk, 53, co-founder and CEO of Tesla, Space Exploration Technologies ($82.2 billion private asset), The Boring Company ($3.33 billion private asset), Neuralink ($2.07 billion private asset) and xAI ($25 billion private asset).
Jeff Bezos, 60, founder and executive chair of Amazon with a net worth of $229 billion. Bezos also owns Blue Origin ($15 billion private asset), The Washington Post ($250 million private asset), Koru, a 417 foot long superyacht ($500 million private asset) and $23.7 billion in cash.
Mark Zuckerberg, 40, worth $203 billion, is CEO and chair of Meta Platforms (META), formerly Facebook.
Larry Ellison, 80, co-founder, chair and CTO of Oracle (ORCL), with a net worth of $200 billion. Oracle is the world’s second-largest software company.
Bernard Arnault, 75, a French resident who is CEO and chair of LVMH (LVMUY), the world’s largest luxury goods company, with a net worth of $168 billion.
Bill Gates, 69, co-founder of Microsoft, the largest software company in the world, with a net worth of $164 billion.
Larry Page, 51, co-founder and board member of Alphabet (GOOG), the world’s second largest tech company by revenue. Page has a net worth of $153 billion. Page also co-found Google, the world’s dominant Internet search engine.
Warren Buffett, 94. CEO of Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) and worth $151 million. The company owns insurance, energy distribution and railroads as well as consumer products.
Steve Ballmer, 68, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers professional basketball team, with a net worth of $147 billion. He also owns the Forum worth $400 million, Intuit Dome worth $2 billion and $4.90 billion in cash. Ballmer succeeded Gates as Microsoft CEO in 2000 and oversaw the purchase of Skype for $8.5 billion.
Sergey Brin, 51, co-founder and board member of Alphabet (GOOG) with a net worth of $144 billion. Brin co-founded Google with Larry Page.