All Billionaires Are Addicts

and they should be treated like it

I’ve dedicated about one of my two decades of life to the study of pro-capitalist propaganda. You may know it by a different name: Hustle Culture.

As someone who grew up in truly profound poverty, this was a matter of survival. It was my chosen method of both coping with the shames of childhood and learning how I could escape it. The secrets were being revealed! It was a fault of my parents, and not the system that we struggled so hard. If I just invested in stocks and crypto and work twelve hours a day on a startup of dubious profitability, if I convinced my friends to work for me and hoarded their surplus labor. If I contorted my art into a product that I could sell, maybe I would be lucky. Maybe I would be chosen by the strange, twisted hands of fate. The gurus promised: “Fate favors the bold! Here’s my 5am gym routine.”

God, I tried to be good. I starved myself. I worked three jobs while in school. I sold off parts of my heart and crushed the wild voice in my head that begged to go camping and draw for fun and not commission. I was on track. I was doing it.

Regrettably, while putting myself through college and taking one too many humanities classes, things began to feel off.

Jeffrey Epstein altered reality for many of us. There was a deep puncture in the fabric of our society that rippled quietly in the dark grey days of early COVID. The documentaries were damning, yes, but they were clearly protecting more than they revealed. It was salacious enough; the tactical trauma dumping of literally hundreds of young women did most of the work for them.

Who could wonder why the British Royal Family and Dubai were bumping elbows while weeping over Jane Doe 1, 2, 3, 4, and 447’s incredibly gruesome and detailed rape stories? A mind can only bear so much breaking at once.

Epstein died (or whatever) and most of us moved forward with a darker view of the world. Nothing changed. No one significant, well-documented serial child rapist went to prison. No kids were released from tunnels or mansions in the hills. The collective shock and disgust began filtering out of popular media, drowned by the steady churn of our news cycle.

But the truth was there, out in the open. Diddy brought it back to light. Brian Thompson crystalized many shadowy pieces.

Here’s what we knew for sure:

We, serfs, are taught that our plight is escapable if we do what we’re told. One day, we will be elevated out of our poverty. Our neighbors are our enemies. Our siblings and parents are our competition. Go to college, work hard, struggle, take drugs to offset the agony you feel. There is something deeply wrong with you, and that’s why nothing works out like they said it would. Billionaires are poster children for discipline, morality, and innovative genius. This is why they succeed and we fail. They deserve what they have.

Right. So. That was clearly a complex ecosystem of lies. It’s lame to realize you’ve been in an abusive relationship with a pathological liar but the liar in question is your government and most distinguished institutions.

In reality, billionaires are freaks. Sociopathic addicts who’ve rubbed their dopamine sensors so raw they only have one drug of choice left and we are producing it. What is it, you idly wonder, thumb over the x button ready to click out of this article? Don’t go. I’ll tell you:

It is human suffering.

Any addiction can be succinctly described as a narrowing of things that bring you pleasure. For you and I, that may mean our screen time grows from one hour to five over a year. One cigarette on the weekend becomes a whole pack in a day. A cup of coffee becomes an entire pot. One lover isn’t enough, we need five. Just to feel normal.

It's the nature of our nature and some people have it worse than others. Billionaires, as a demographic, have an unusually high concentration of addictive personalities. Shocker.

Here's where it gets disturbing

Addictions are determined by what pleasures we are able to access. In a society with a central moral code that can be corrupted and rewritten with money, we’ve developed a monetary morality built on the foundation of “might makes right.”

The more money you have, the more permission you have. You can do anything. To anyone.

So, if you could take any drug, experience any fantasy, buy anything, go anywhere, eat any fruit or creature, what is left to be thrilled by? How do you get your kicks when you can kick anything?

The answer is frightening: power and the exercise of power over others.

The largest industries in the world: tech, agriculture, construction and development, real estate, weapons manufacturing, big pharma, health insurance, mobility, electrification, et cetera. Each of these represents a group of vile, perverted addicts.

One quick myth to debunk: Billionaires don’t fear judgment because they’ve spent their lives rewriting the rules of reality itself.

While an understandably popular theory, it’s not at all true. Zuckerberg, Jobs, Bezos and many other troubled, insecure white men have figured out how to play capitalism like a game and win. However, their victory has shaped our culture into a macro expression of their own deepest insecurities. Zuckerberg, for example, feared ostracism so he created a platform that enslaves us all to each other’s judgement. Using, I might add, the nerdiest method possible to determine our popularity (numbers. Fucking dork). Elon bought Twitter because he wanted to play in this sandbox.

There’s only so much joy you can squeeze out of compromising the integrity of our social cohesion before you need something stronger. When private islands, corporate monopolies, and political finagling gets dull, the ultra-wealthy inevitably chase more extreme highs. And what’s more extreme than inflicting suffering? Billionaires don’t just hoard money; they hoard power, and the purest exercise of power is making others miserable for sport.

Sadism is a uniquely novel form of pleasure seeking because no one screams quite the same. Some billionaires like Diddy and Epstein favor this physical or sexual domination. Others prefer psychological domination. (Looking at you, media tycoons).

Dick Cheney is a good character reference for the average billionaire. He literally shot his friend in the face and still ended up on the receiving end of an apology for all the stress it caused the Cheney family…

When we say there are no ethical billionaires, there’s an uninvestigated irony I'd like to point out.

Sure, it's awful for us, the people they're oppressing, but we never stop to think of the wellbeing of our oppressors. It is inhumane to allow anyone to accumulate that much wealth at the expense of the general public. It is also inhuman to the billionaires.

Their own biology turns against them and begins cannibalizing their minds. Next fix, next venture, next war, next vaccine launch. How will they beat last year’s numbers? How can they feed the hungry demon in their own head? It’s hard to have even a shred of empathy for them, but it doesn’t seem like a peaceful existence.

WE ALL DIE ANYWAY, WHO CARES?

If the ultra-wealthy have one great fear, it’s their own demise. Rupert Murdoch’s own son said in multiple interviews that his dad will never die. At 93 years-old, the man’s been drinking the blood of young interns (allegedly) since the Nixon administration and still won’t cede the reins of his company to a worthy successor.

Jesse Armstrong confirmed that Murdoch was the inspiration for Succession’s Logan Roy—a character so rich, powerful, and morally bankrupt that even God himself seemed hesitant to smite him. If Logan Roy had survived the last season, he’d be working on a way to sue the Grim Reaper for emotional distress.

Let’s not pretend this behavior is limited to media monoliths. The oil tycoons? They’re playing their own game of Monopoly, but with the planet itself. Weapons manufacturers? They keep things fun and flirty by funding genocides and ensuring war never goes out of fashion.

What should we, the people do about it?

If a common junkie can be locked in a state facility to kick their Fentanyl habit, shouldn’t billionaires—who are demonstrably addicts—get the same treatment? At this point, we could sincerely argue it's for their own good. They're crashing out at presidential inaugurations. It's a bad look.

Picture it: The Wealth Detox Center

Strip them of their assets. Toss them into a studio apartment with a normal salary and a Keurig and watch them spiral into withdrawal at the prospect of having to treat people with kindness and hear the word “no.”

Weekly sessions on empathy, volunteering, and the radical idea that human beings have intrinsic worth beyond being cogs in their profit machine.

Is this disease even curable? It’s impossible to know without a test subject (choose your fighter in the comments. I want Bezos). But the facts speak for themselves:

Billionaires are more dangerous than any junkie on a street corner. Until society stops sucking them off and tosses them out of power with the same fanfare my uncle got when my grandma caught him doing heroine in her basement, they’ll keep turning our collective suffering into their next fix.

It feels impossible. They are a many-headed hydra and we’re a twelve-year-old armed with a ballpoint pen sword, ADHD, and a 7-hour daily screen time. But if we can them down to a human level, if we can laugh at their pathetic attempts to fill the void, if we can identify their “success” as an expression of a concerning addiction, we can push our whole crumbling society away from this ledge of mutually assured destruction.

So point and laugh for a minute. Then tar and feather. Then toss them in rehab.

I am not joking.