No

I think the rich can be good, for a given value of “good”. If good is defined as a lack of self-centeredness, then improving the quality of life for the greatest number of people can be considered good.

Good can be complicated. If one uses their wealth to cure disease in the jungle, but in the process upsets the ecosystem to the point where the people are now starving to death, was good actually done?

No.

Theoretically… yes and no? First of all it’s a given that any truly rich person in today’s day and age is a capitalist, no exceptions.

Modern capitalism is based on the assumption that “maximizing profit” leads to the best outcome for everyone… which is not true. So if theoretically a rich person is trying to be 100% rational then they cannot be “good”

On the other hand… also theoretically, rich ppl have a lot more resources to give and support causes they care about, so on this aspect they could be good? I know ppl who donate a ton to social causes but I honestly don’t know how much of their donations can be attributed to tax benefits

In practice… I guess most of what you could call “good” people wouldn’t want to make that much money in the first place? Or it could just be probability, good people and rich people are both quite rare, so good+rich is even rarer (if we assume they are independent).

I don’t mean doctor-making-150k-a-year rich, I mean properly rich with millions to billions of dollars.

I firmly believe there are no ways to become “properly” rich that don’t require you to be a bad person.

To get out of that “doctor-making-150k-a-year” category you need some combination of greed, exploitative practices, manipulating broken capitalist systems, nepotism, ruthlessness, corruption, bribery, and outright lying.

I think there is a line, and it’s different for every person, but on one side of the line to lift other people up you would have to sacrifice your own life velocity, and on the other side of the line you have the power to lift tens of hundreds or thousands of people out of poverty without impacting more than a fraction of your children’s inheritance.

I understand that there are issues with unchecked charity, for instance, if Bill Gates suddenly decided to take I don’t know 25 billion dollars and distribute it equally to everybody in the 50% or below category of America which is about 250 million people, then he would basically be giving these people a hundred bucks each and saying “there I’ve done my job I gave up 30% of my net worth to help the poor” and that really wouldn’t accomplish anything.

But that same $25 billion targeted at the bottom 1% of America I could do quite a bit but then there’s overhead. Buying houses and repairing them for people to solve the homelessness problem or purchasing all of the debt that you could possibly buy for $25 billion and then forgiving that debt for the poorest people, those things could be better and do more for people but then you have administrative overhead finding and communicating with the debtors and negotiating with them, and then at the end of it it’s likely that you would get a massive tax right off cuz you wouldn’t do this as an individual you do it as a nonprofit, and then bill would get back 8 billion of that in tax rebates or so.

Like there is obviously a line on both sides and while I don’t think people making you know even 200 Grand a year should put themselves at risk for homelessness in order to justify their financial status I also don’t think that any billionaire has any right to strive to continue being a billionaire for the rest of their lives. If you cannot live a happy life on a billion dollars then you cannot live a happy life.

millions to billions of dollars

Those two are very different sums of money.
But if you’re very rich, you can’t be a good person, there’s no way to accumulate that kind of wealth without exploiting others.

But then again, we all live in capitalist societies that have been built on exploiting the shit out of others, so there’s quite a bit of hypocrisy in my post.

I think a lot of these questions get into philosophical territory, which even when correct isn’t particularly useful.

To me, how much wealth you have shouldn’t be linked to anything but how much money you’ve made. The amount of money you e made should be proportional to the impact you’ve has on the world and others. I don’t see a problem with someone being a billionaire if they did something that impacted a billion people lives and collected a dollar for it.

The bigger problem I see is that the current system rewards folks for doing anything that makes money. It also prioritizes money to the point that it’s a virtue. So effectively you tell folks you matter more if you have more money, and don’t put constraints on making money.

So I guess it’s seems pretty true that "behind every great fortune is a great crime ", but it doesn’t have to be the case. Which is. 100% useless statement. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

A priori, yes. Being rich is not automatically incompatible with being good - philantropy is a thing. But depending on how rich, how much or how little they give back to the community, how they acquired/maintain their wealth, etc, you eventually reach a point where the person is simply put a social parasite. And that IS incompatible with being good.

I think a lot of people here are confusing liquid assets/cash and genuinely believe millionaires and billionaires have this as pure cash in their bank accounts.

In reality, a lot of the money is tied up in non-liquid assets like property, physical assets, and stocks.

Sure these wealthy people can sell their shares for example, but if they sell too many at once, it will drop the value of the shares.

This is likely why Elon Musk can’t afford to pay his bills. Not only is he a grifter and a loser, he’s likely extremely cash poor and doesn’t have enough liquidity to pay his debts. It’s unlikely he’ll ever admit this however.

Arguably, the majority of the money these billionares have is essentially speculative.

The more you think about how the economy works, the more you realize how much of a facade it really is. The stock market is a huge sham as well. Most stocks simply don’t exist and the amount of value manipulation that occurs is astounding. It’s all fake.

I think the sooner we begin to realize that the economy is one giant paper tiger and if we just start telling banks and other “money” purveyors that lock us into our flawed system to go fuck themselves, we can really take away the power from “the rich.”

I don’t really look at it as how much money someone has, but rather how their money was earned. Just like in your example, if someone earns a lot of money because they have an in-demand skill like being a doctor, that’s awesome. You’re making money off your own labor and you’re adding value to the world.

If you make your money off of something like being a landlord, I’m going to respect that less because you aren’t really adding anything to the world, that property would exist without you renting it out and it’s only making you money because you had enough money (usually) to obtain it in the first place.

There’s room for nuance, of course, and you can be poor and still have gotten what you have via unethical means. All this is a generalization. Ultimately people deserve to be judged on an individual basis.

It’s impossible to become a billionaire without extreme exploitation. You can’t exploit people or the planet to this degree and be a good person.

I think a mistake in thought you might be making is that people are not simply “good” or “bad.” I 100% agree with @UziBobuzi that hoarding more wealth than you or your descendants could ever reasonably spend is a “bad thing.” And maybe that’s a “very bad thing,” that would tend to cast a dark shadow on other “good” things the person might do. Still, those good things are not erased; they still exist, and should not be subtracted.

Another important concept is that, while there is a lot of overlap, a person’s actions are not the entirety of who they are. We all have bad habits, and regrets, and other shortcomings that we are fully aware of and have difficulty rising above. That doesn’t make us bad people, it just makes us people.

I suppose it depends upon how it was made and what they do with it once they have it. If it’s hoarding wealth for wealth’s sake then, yea, probably an issue. It seems though, there are some that have obtained wealth and chose philanthropy.

And in order to stay rich, you have to play your role and participate in a society that oppresses the poor which in turn maintains your wealth. Are you really still capable of being a good person?

It’s a complex topic, but this is the crux of the matter I think. If we’re talking about today’s world, then I don’t think there is a billionaire who is not complicit with participating in a system that is rigged (for lack of a better term) in their favor, and profits in an unfair scale from the work of others.

On the other hand, I also don’t think you need to disown your material wealth and start living paycheck to paycheck to be able to qualify as a good person. So… in my head, there’s definitely millionaires who are good people, who earned their riches with authentic hard work and some genius ideas/inventions/services, and pay the people they employ well, or keep good relations with the people they work with.