Hacker News Reader

Brings to mind the famous Joseph Heller quote: "At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds, 'Yes, but I have something he will never have … enough.'"

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10651136-at-a-party-given-b...

View on HN

This is arguably not very scientific but if we didn't have the media fascination around the power and influence that billionaires carry, we would like come to accept that rationally it is a mental disease no different from Plyushkin's syndrome.

You won, you can provide for you and for your whole bloodline if you so choose. You can choose your adventure, go fully epicurean or fund Humanity impacting projects. Yet they keep going and going unable to exit the carrousel.

Survivorship bias... Maybe we never hear about the people who made their fortune and quietly exited the scene?

Fair my issue is not that there are no Joseph Heller's in the world, my issue is that due to the inherent power and influence, we as a society, have a huge reluctance in considering people like Bezos, Musk, Buffet, Slim, Arnault, as just suffering from some variant of a mental health hoarding disorder.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com