When you hear the phrase “ billionaires work hard for their money “ , what does that mean to you specifically?

27 comments

1. I don’t believe I have ever heard that phrase.

   It sounds like the beginning of a strawman argument.

2. I haven’t heard that phrase, it sounds like what an “eat the rich” type thinks people who like free markets say.

3. It means nothing. Some of them probably put a lot of time and effort into what they’re doing, but wealth is not a good measurement of how hard somebody works. There’s crypto billionaires who just bought and sold crypto at the right time, and there’s billionaires who manage multiple businesses and have to deal with a lot of responsibility. There’s also people in the same effort-range that works for a minimum wage.

4. I would guess I was talking to an Elon Musk fan boy or some tankie trying to make a stupid point

5. I’ve paid attention to the social-political debates in this country my entire life, I’ve heard some wildly anti-billionaire/rich people in general screeds and I’ve heard from the other side with their wildly anything a rich person does is great and proper rants and I have never heard this turn of phrase.

6. It means that there are some porn stars making a lot more money than I thought they were.

   In my experience, anytime someone uses the phrase “works hard for their money” there’s an implication that the work involves stripping, sex, or something adjacent.

7. Some people really need to think the world is fair and will integrate the most preposterous fallacies into their worldviews to maintain that fiction.

   I don’t think everyone’s work is equally valuable, and I am completely comfortable with a world in which people enjoy material comforts on a sliding scale in proportion to the worth of their work output. Some people work harder, or longer, or smarter than others, and some people have rare gifts and talents that they’ve developed so that they can produce sparkling gems where others turn out rough ores. And there’s nothing wrong with a system that rewards those people with extra amenities, in fact it is desirable that excellence is rewarded.

   But, I’m a smart motherfucker and I work like a demon, I mean I’m a regular John Henry. Ain’t nobody worth ten of me, let alone a million of me.

8. Jeff Bezos activating the speed force to sort packages and piss in bottles 37 billion times faster than the average warehouse employee.

9. That some rich asshole doesn’t want to pay taxes anymore than anyone else does, but thinks they’re special somehow, so should be exempt.

10. An outright lie.

11. it means the person I’m talking to loves the taste of boot.

12. “Loooool”

13. “I don’t know about worker exploitation but even if I did, I’d be ok with it”

14. Nothing without context.

15. Billionaires don’t work

    When you’re that rich you just talk to other rich people about what to do with your money

16. To me it means “Oh Lord, here we go…”

17. That whoever said it is rather naïve.

18. It means they work hard for their money

19. In America its objectively true. Something like 90% of all billionaires in America had no inheritance and 95%+ had less than a million in inheritance.

20. That someone is trying to start a flamewar.

21. It means laughter, lots of laughter. None of these people are billionaires because they’re gritty.

22. This ‘phrase’ (that I have never heard before) is a bit of an unfair ‘gotcha’, because billionaire wealth is almost always derived from passive rather than active income. In other words, you can’t really become a billionaire just collecting pay checks. (Professional athletes are becoming pretty much the only exception to this rule.) But it doesn’t mean that billions are never made through a base of effort. So take Bill Gates for instance. Bill Gates put in work to create and build his company. Then his company became very valuable and he doesn’t really have to do anything just by owning stock and having the price go up. Gates definitely directly worked hard for millions, but his 10s of billions–not really. Still, his billions are a kind of result of his efforts, although he didn’t directly work hard to acquire them.

23. It means nothing because it’s untrue.

24. I have never heard that and can only imagine it in a niche argument. I will say that its most likely true, there’s very few people in the billionaire class who did not do any work/business to get their wealth due to a combination of multiple heirs splitting the large fortunes of the last generation, incompetency of said heirs in keeping the money, and the rise of new companies for wealth generation.

    The ones that are probably most questionable looking at the top 25 list are those who inherited large companies and made them larger Koch, Mars, and Walton (Walmart) families, but even then those heirs ran business in extremely competitive environments so their survival and continued family ownership indicates atleast some level of work/business savy

25. The kind that works nonstop every day and ruins every personal relationship they have until theyre old and alone.

26. It means that the person who said it isn’t someone I want to talk to.

27. A big fat giant eye roll. Billionaires don’t create anything, their workers do.