And that's fine, but I wish we lived in a society where "runs a company that doesn't mistreat users" (or treats employees well, or helps the planet, etc) was clearly more important to someone's reputation than the size of their yacht.
This may or may not be the opinion of people in the position to actually assess it. It can be the difference between being able to go to a place you want to go or not, based on range or seaworthiness. It can be the difference between having an amenity on the craft or not.
Or a mistress or three.
And you have to crew the yachts - usually more crew than passengers.
And a helicopter, and a private jet.
Those'll chew up 300 mill easily.
(Yes there are diminishing marginal returns etc., but once you’re used to X, 50% of X feels painful, even if 50% of X is still an extremely luxurious lifestyle)
Let's say that X is your favorite food. If you already have 100x the amount you could ever eat, a 50% reduction won't feel painful at all, because you'll still have far more than you could ever eat.
I'd posit that at a certain point, you have more of everything than you could ever use, except for things that demonstrate your wealth to others. The naming rights to buildings are one example—they don't actually increase your quality of life in any way, they just show how wealthy you are.
Maybe I was wrong about the threshold for this, and it's actually higher than $200 million dollars, but it can't be that far off...
It's not about whether they are happier, are making the world better, or have enough. It's only about having more at all costs.
After all, their employees — especially the executives — are the group of people a CEO is surrounded by every working day. So, assuming they're neither a sociopath nor an Effective Altruist, why wouldn't they feel a strong empathetic desire to "help" the people right in front of them?
And presuming they want to help those people, why wouldn't they then conclude that the best, most scalable way they have to do that, is to make sure that those people are all set for life by holding high-value amounts of company stock; and that the most comparative-advantage-y way the CEO has of accomplishing that, is to make the share price go up?
Or, to put that another way: a pirate captain doesn't go home once they're personally rich. They made a (perhaps unstated) agreement with their crew: they won't go home until everyone is rich, and they can all comfortably retire. Until then, they'll continue to exploit others for their own gain.
Perhaps it is, but your reputation among which group? HN users or the other billionaires that you're hanging out with?
I wouldn’t want to and won’t if I was ever lucky enough to have the opportunity.
But what are the alternatives?