Three of those billionaires made their fortunes by stealing other’s work and exploiting other’s labor. I might dislike Taylor Swift’s music but it is her music and her work that made her a billionaire. When someone stole her work from under her, she re-recorded it from scratch and then put on the most profitable tour in history with each show being 3+ hours long.
I’m not a Swifty, but I also don’t think she qualifies to join that evil as fuck trio.
Hey look everyone! This person’s a billionaire apologist!
I’m (mostly) joking.
You are correct that she is not on the aame level as the others but as a billionaire and member of the ruling class T-Swizzle has an elevated responsibility to the rest of the world. Instead of helping she continues her massive destruction of the climate.Until she is leveraging her wealth to make positive change she does not get a pass.
Oh and buying carbon offsets doesn’t count.
I quantify it as: Taylor might not deserve the guillotine, the rest inarguably do.
I’m not a fan of hers but they are still correct that she’s not nearly on the same level as the others.
Hey look everyone! This person’s a billionaire apologist!
What do you expect from somebody who uses a corporate logo (of a Texas gas station, no less) as their avatar pic?
(I’m (kinda) joking.)
TBF Buc-ee’s is one of the most employee and consumer friendly chains across the US. They publicly post their pay (this image is from last year) and it’s far above what most gas stations (or even retail stores) will pay
Sigh… yeah, I know. For what it is, Buc-ees is pretty great: very tasty food, very nice restrooms, good policies as an employer, etc. The only problem is that “what it is” – literally “the world’s largest convenience store,” a gigantic monument to car-dependency, fossil fuels, and lazy consumerism – is fundamentally pretty terrible.
This conversation is making me crave a pastrami reuben and some beaver nuggets, and I’m kinda hating myself for it.
I have avatars turned off.
But nice. lol
I agree with you, 100%.
I still don’t understand what she allegedly does to provide significant harm to the climate.
Key word, significant. Every person in this discussion charged their phone this morning from energy that was not 100% renewable.
While I catch your meaning, cell phones aren’t the best choice for that comparison, they don’t use much electricity amazingly. Average phone may only take 4 kwh a year to charge. Where I live that would cost less than $1. While my electric bill is around $150, mostly do to air conditioning.
Mostly, the private jet. Idk if she has yachts or mansion(s) but those would also count. It’s not that ordinary people don’t pollute but the scale. The top 50 billionaires each on average pollute more every 1.5hours than an ordinary person does their entire life.
Approximately, 5840 peoples worth a year and they have the wealth to choose otherwise. People charge their phone largely because they have to to stay employed/connected nowadays.
When people have hoarded so much and actively make the world worse instead of better theres no option but to question their morality.
Okay but it’s not a 1 woman show. She has likely hundreds of people employed she would not have succeeded without, yet she’s about 1b richer than those combined
She is known for giving these people bonuses that surpass anything I’ve heard about outside corpo management, though. The occasion that made the press mention 100k USD for truckdrivers for one tour and while I dont know how much a truck driver makes a year, it’d sure make my life easier for a couple of years.
Not saying she isn’t good at making money, but I’d say the jury is still out on the issue of hoarding all of it for herself.
Of all the things to be wealthy for, making music and brining people a little bit of joy ain’t bad. Don’t condone the jet or the lifestyle. But I don’t think it’s fair to lump her in with exon and zuk
The men in the picture are the top 3 of the latest forbes list, Tylor Swift is not in the top 2,500.
Yeah I’m not a fan of her private jet shenanigans or her music, but the other 3 also use private jets like it’s going out of style, and are nowhere close to her when it comes to societal impact. If you wanted a 4th you can use one of our own billionaires from the old continent like Bernard Arnault (who is allegedly pals with Musk)
Not close to as evil as the others for sure. But there’s a lot of labor that goes into making music and into touring that she didn’t do herself. Does all her talent make it right that she makes thousands of times more money per hour of labor as all those others?
It’s people’s money that made her a billionaire, if she became a billionaire it’s because everyone who ever paid for something that brought her money was overpaying. It’s the same for each and every billionaire, even the ones you appreciate, you’re paying too much for shit so they can have more money than they can spend in a lifetime.
“I got my money’s worth!” Well no buddy, you only think so because there’s always a billionaire at the top inflating the price of everything, your money is worth a lot more if they all disappear.
I guess that all the people who downvoted think that it’s perfectly ok for billionaires to exist…
I think it’s more your implication that every time anyone make a purchase they get duped or scammed as if they’re stupid and helpless.
Everyone but the ultra rich get duped and scammed in this system, we don’t have a choice but to pay the price we’re being charged, but the price we’re being charged is inflated to enrich the few without and benefits to the majority!
This is also why all the people insisting “Proof that Valve/Steam are SCAMMING you” are hated and rightfully cast aside. People pay for Steam and enjoy what they get.
There’ll be a place for you in the gulag after the Revolution
I’m not going to argue that Taylor Swift doesn’t deserve to be on the billionaire list somewhere, but if you were only going to include 4, why would she make the cut?
Insofar as Swifties need to be reminded from time to time that their favorite billionaire is still a billionaire, with all the problems that entails, I support reminding them, but Swift being put up as some major public enemy lately is weird.
Cuz she a billionaire maybe???
That doesn’t explain why she’s on the list instead of the multitude of other, more noxious billionaires.
It makes it look more like someone just doesn’t like TS so they’re trying to say she’s as bad as musk or bezos.
She’s definitely not as bad as these other fuck bags. That is for sure. But she still represents how and why the system we live in is broken.
She is just as selfish tho and I think that’s the real issue.
How does she represent a broken system? People, of their own free will, pay money to go to her concerts. Are you saying they shouldn’t be allowed to do that?
I get the issues around for example Amazon and its algorithmic price fixing and monopolistic behaviours, or with oil companies destroying the environment. But all this woman does is go around playing music that her fans love.
The economic system should not permit such extreme wealth accumulation. It is damaging to society.
But the question is: how? If you look at every other system that has been tried you see the same results or worse. Many systems just end up picking a different set of winners.
I’d like to try LVT because the arguments for it are pretty strong but you never know until you try it and see what happens. I’m far more concerned about mass homelessness and people struggling to afford rent than I am about billionaires. Unless of course those billionaires are corrupting the political system like Musk and Bezos are trying so hard to do.
But those issues are connected. Even billionaires who don’t go as far as Musk are still sucking up the political oxygen and disempowering marginalized people. They are buying up finite resources like land or prime real estate in city centers or media time and space.
I agree that the how is an important question but I think there are many options and it’s worth it to keep trying despite some past failures. Extremely high tax rates, decaying currencies or negative interest rates are some possibilities. Or just build an alternative free economy that doesn’t involve money. I’d like to try as many things as possible to see what works best.
Her concerts aren’t how she makes all her money, but even then her private jets are awful for the environment, and her band does not make anywhere near the money she makes.
She has merchandise, stocks, REIT, etc. All of those have their own baggage and unethical aspects. I’m so tired of you people treating her as an exception. Nobody can become a billionaire without exploiting the labor of vast amounts of other people, including Taylor Swift.
But even if you want to argue music, she’s not a sole instrumentalist and producer. She has a production team. She uses session musicians. All of those people are exploited labor.
Of course her fans should get to see her perform. She should not be allowed to be a human Smaug, and accumulate inconceivable amounts of wealth because of it, especially when the system begets even “individual producers” to exploit the labor of swaths of other people.
Well, the communists who usually want to kill the billionaires would say “yes, they shouldn’t be allowed to do that, because money shouldn’t exist and she should be touring for free.” They want to abolish money entirely and run the world off “the love of the game” alone.
To them, all voluntary transactions are inherently exploitative by virtue of “money,” if it exists someone will have more than someone else and thus a hierarchy is born, whether they’re actually exploitative in any other sense is of no consequence, simply having “more” than another in any capacity is enough.
McCarthy called. He wants his personal privately owned red scare back.
“Communists want to abolish money” is ridicolous. And the straw men of going from abolishing billionaires hoarding obscene wealth to “everyone should be doing everything “for free”” is the size that it could feed an entire farm.
Well if they don’t want it they should stop saying they want it.
It’s easy to see how that falls down though. If everyone’s in it for the love of the game then lots of people are gonna want to be up on stage, like Taylor the superstar, not cleaning the outhouses like Bob the maintenance guy.
And people will say Bob is being exploited, of course, but Bob did choose to take that job. Of course Bob needs to eat and to pay rent and pay for health care and entertainment and to send his kids to university and all that. But let’s assume we take care of all those other things Bob needs the money for, would it still be exploitation if Bob was willing to accept some amount of money (less than what Taylor gets paid for the concert) to clean the outhouses?
I don’t think so, and I doubt Bob would either. I think he would be unhappy if his choice to accept payment for that job were taken away. I think Bob would say the job doesn’t bother him as much as other people and that he benefits from having a stronger stomach (or a weaker sense of smell) from everyone else. Just because we find the job intolerable and disgusting doesn’t mean Bob does. And that’s one of the limitations of empathy (which is so often brought up in these discussions).
Oh I know that, I’m not one of the “kill billionaires” guys, I’ve just unfortunately spoken to way too many of them over my 4y (or whatever) on this tankie refuge we call a reddit clone and that’s what they say. They also say “well someone is going to want to clean the shitters for free because they’ll smell otherwise” in response to what you said. They’re mostly a collection of willful ignorance and hatred. But personally I can’t imagine there’s enough coprophiliacs out there to sustain an entire waste management industry.
Ah so you’re saying that it’s perfectly fine to have billionaires?
If you can’t see what is wrong with a system that creates billionaires then there isn’t much left to talk about.
I think the main difference is she is mostly a billionaire via her own productivity. Everyone else on the list got there because they are capitalizing on other peoples labour, doing little to no actual work themselves.
She still reaps the benefit of other people’s work, but she is essentially still the product of her own labour.
Ah but she is capitalizing on other’s labor, she 100% has employees in at least some fashion, be they housekeepers, pilots, tour bus drivers, shirt makers (probably literal sweat shops contracted out tbh), vinyl pressing plants, CD pressers, printers for the art for those, probably a roady or two to hump equipment of some sort, she is employing some people. Some of those are likely third parties who are in turn exploited by their boss capitalizing on their labor, making her a degree of separation from the exploitation in that case but still she benefits and profits directly off of their exploitation.
No, not through her own productivity. At the start of her career, she had numerous song writers who were arguably exploited in that they are not getting a cut of her earnings. Even now, she doesn’t play every instrument on a track. She has a whole team of producers. In concerts, she plays with a band. None of those people are making a fraction of the ludicrous money she’s making for “her own product”.
But beyond that, like the other commentator said, she has tons of staff of whom are exploited at a paycheck.
And beyond that, all of the merchandise she puts out employs many, many different exploited individuals to make.
Just so you know, this is a textbook straw man fallacy.
Sounds like you need to look up the meaning behind what a strawman argument is because you’re way off.
It’s a system where we’re free to give money to whoever we want in exchange for goods or services. Maybe you’d prefer a system where we all are forced to get the exact same thing!
How about a system where those who earn more pay their fare share of taxes? Eliminates the billionaires and still let’s swiftys swift.
Well, tbf, the people shouting “kill all the billionaires” aren’t exactly shouting “well, not the hot one who sings ok!” This should frankly be no surprise, if billionaires are to be shot, she’ll be in the line because she “is one,” nothing “more” is needed when the only metric you’re using to justify murder is how many zeros their bank acct has.
Where Rupert Murdoch? I’d put him as even worse than Bezos.
Musk, Bezos and Zuck are just the most visible ones but by no means the worst.
It depends on where you are, of course. Here in the UK, the Murdoch press is a massive influence.
No doubt. Some hypothesize that Vladimir Putin is the actual richest man in the world. Possibly even a trillionaire. He’s definitely the worst of the radical rich.
Indeed. The Saudi royal family also ranks pretty high up there.
Alice Walton has more DUI’s than one can count. Killed someone, another time drove into a ravine. Net worth: 71 billion.
She could pay a new person $50,000 for an 8 hour shift of driving her around for every living moment, and it wouldnt dent her money. Could have a “house for a ride” program where if you give her a ride she buys you a house. 10 rides that day? She’d still make money.
And the Sacklers and the Kochs and the Murdochs and let’s not forget Musk’s handlers, Thiel and Ellison.
Koch family deserves to be on here too.
I get that tswift is a billionaire, but she doesn’t belong in this meme.
Quit trying to equate her to the oligarchs. She hasn’t demonstrated any of those tendencies.
Nobody should be a billionaire. There is no labor that can be done to become a billionaire ethically.
I agree with this take and upvoted you. But she is a billionaire, and also a genuinely good person who’s supported her fans, the people that work with her, etc. I don’t think there should be any billionaires, and I suspect TSwift would likely agree with that.
That’s the difference between her and the actual oligarchs pictured. They’re scum of the earth. She’s guilty of wage exploitation, but capitalism is designed around that idea, so she’s just playing the game.
She’s not off the deep end like so many other billionaires.
There’s shades of gray here. We can agree there shouldn’t be billionaires on principle, and also agree that not all billionaires are using their ill-gotten wealth for pure evil, like the other 3 pictured in the “meme”.
Yeah, I also agree she doesn’t really deserve to be in this meme. She’s not as bad as the others on here. However, I suspect the original creator put her on the meme so this discussion could be had, which is honestly very smart.
At the end of the day, I think it should be criminal to hoard the amount of wealth that constitutes being a billionaire. I would “take action” against any and all billionaires given the circumstances, even Taylor Swift. Eat the rich. Distribute the wealth.
This is practically jaywalking compared to the other people in this meme.
The point isn’t to subject them to gradation, it’s to note the damages they all do in their different ways.
Taylor isn’t exempt from being held responsible for her part just because she’s a nice person.
I mean what is she supposed to do, take a riverboat to her next tour? She’s a direct result of a larger cultural fascination, not the problem itself.
I’m with you, she can’t possibly take any form of public transport. Not because she’s somehow better than the rest of us, but for security if nothing else.
And honestly, I can’t imagine how much she would disrupt a public airport or train station. No way I would want to be in that place at the same time, it would be chaos.
There’s plenty she could do and tons of other acts throughout history that managed to do what she does with a smaller carbon footprint.
“She has no choice!” is not an argument to defend what she does.
Perfection is the enemy of good
Asking someone to reduce their carbon footprint isn’t asking for perfection. It’s simply asking them to participate.
And a blatant refusal to do so is what earned her her spot on this list.
I’m sure she’s a nice person- but being nice doesn’t excuse one from the responsibility of their actions.
The cultural fascination with her doesn’t demand that she use private jets to fly almost 200,000 miles a year.
Doesn’t it though, imagine her trying to go through the airport. If people would leave her alone it would work out, but cultural fascination implies people will be fascinated. And therefore she, and every other person at the airport will end up delayed over and over and over.
I think the point being missed is that she takes unnecessary flights and uses too much fuel in doing so.
Look it up. She’s been scrutinized for it pretty publicly. And there are viable alternatives- she just seems to prefer not to use them.
https://www.newsweek.com/taylor-swift-private-jet-jack-sweeney-flights-1868272
13 minute flight to go 28 miles. Maybe a car might have sufficed?
Not defending her, but it’s sorta ambiguous. It sounds like this may have been prep for selling the aircraft.
Per the article you linked:
“The last few flights on this account are right around the time that N898TS was sold,” he wrote. “Registration for the aircraft transferred 2/4/2024. These short flights are likely maintenance or demo flights.”
You should, uh…reaaaaad.
Replace Swift with Putin and I’m back on board.
“no no, my billionaire is fine. They are really different i promise”
She isn’t “my” billionaire as I don’t consume any of her content or really give a shit about her one way or the other but she does feel like a weird addition to the list.
Her tag seems to boil down to her private plane usage but is it really all that more than any other person in her income bracket? There are also a bunch of other billionaires listed by others that do a lot worse. He’ll, even the other three listed are having greater environmental impact because of their company’s pushes into AI and the data center requirements of those.
it’s not about who she is. it’s ridiculous to have her in this group. her plane is doing damage but it’s nothing compared to multinational companies that do whatever the fuck they want with your air, land and water.
She may single-handedly save America from turning into a fascist state with her endorsement, so she gets a pass for now. It is extremely important, yes, but we can worry about her carbon footprint after we get past this MAGA nightmare. Priorities.
Single handedly? So she is the one deciding the elections? I thought there is some 200 million voters deciding the elections. The fact that one billionaires endorsement is so decisive shows deep deep problems with the billionaire cult in the US.
You can’t abolish wealth, it’s practically impossible. Instead, close the loopholes that make them that rich.
Nobody wants to abolish wealth. We want to abolish people hoarding it away from others who lack basic needs.
It actually very much is, if you abolish capitalism and private property you outlaw capitalists.
there has to be some form of private property though, but how do you define the line? Maybe if you could claim stuff for varying amounts of time, be it hours or for your lifetime, but there would still need to be somekind of measure against hoarding and other abuse. Everything should still have value for this, but maybe it wouldn’t need to be monetary value we currently have.
Economy also probably cant be completely removed but it doesnt have to be exactly like it is now where money controls everything. Maybe if every type of work had some kind value determined by something that benefits society as whole and as you work, you gain some kind of credits that can be used to lay claim on stuff. Stuff could also have different tiers based on how crucial they are for life so everyone would have access to at least basic food and shelter no matter what. I dont think people just not working if they dont die to hunger or exposure as result would be problem, as life where you dont do anything is hell unless you are so simple minded you wouldnt be able to work anyway.
Then there is matter of resource allocation, if everyone uses as much as they want everything will run out. But to regulate this there would need to be some kind of authority which could easily corrupt into mockery of itself.
It would be nice if there was some serious research on how to achieve something like this. We dont have to be slaves to wealth. At least i havent heard of anything like that. But i wonder if large enough portion of humanity is even capable of thinking like that.
Private property is fundamentally evil, the only acceptable form of property is personal property. Its simple if you use it yourself (like a home or a toothbrush) its yours, if its a tool of profit then it belongs to those who use it.
that is better term for it
You can’t get rid of hard work
Shoot them into the sun on a billionaire’s space rocket!
space billionaires!
Removed by mod
It took me way to long to realise that wasn’t Bill Nye…
I think Bezos, Musk, and Zuck are each much more of a planetwrecker than Swift.
