@icedquinn @adiz @lucy @sun Ehh, I think it's mostly just inter-generational wealth accumulation and not giving a fuck about the world at large. It doesn't require you to be some extreme sadistic psychopath on a personal level.

I've recently skipped out on the chance to become a millionaire, and all I would have needed to do was pump a website I own full with shitty ads, like automatically playing videos and in-content crap. Would have made a bunch of people hate me and fork the website, but that's all. There are some international industries (advertisement being one) where you just have obscene amounts of money circulating due to the sheer scale, so if you manage to carve out a nice piece for yourself somehow, you get rich quick.

What do billionaires do to get rich? I guess they loan out obscene amounts of money, control real estate, have ubiquitously purchased products like electronics manufactured for cheap in sweatshops (or better yet, it's just software so there's nothing to even manufacture), and so on. They just need to not care about the indirect damage done to people at a mass scale. They don't have to look into the eyes of any individual who's hurt, and if they had to, they probably wouldn't derive any kind of pleasure from it.

Maybe I'm naive but I think that's all there is to it. Greed and carelessness, not active psychopathic sadism.