Billionaires’ worth continuing to soar – as yours tumbles

It adds pretention to the sense of trivia conjured up by the original title. For me, anyway!

It also fails to adequately accommodate those of us who write sentences with 500+ characters, but setting that prejudice aside, it is not that the concept itself irritates, but that such a significant number of people find no better use for this mass communication tool than exposing their own woeful ignorance of facts of every matter, shape or hue, and feel entitled to respond to the mildest challenge to their own opinions and prejudices masquerading as information with a level of meanness, insult and abuse that few of the guilty might engage in were they in the real-life presence of the ‘twitter-handle’ person under attack.

See what I mean? That’s a 632-character sentence!

Like some big media personalities we won’t mention, Twitter – now X – seems to encourage and facilitate the ‘schoolyard sham-brawling’ approach to a difference of opinion, and then it washes its hands of the consequences.

While adding little to the general body of global knowledge available to the multi-lingual masses, the trading of insults, and rehearsing of opinions, aids and abets Mr. X – AKA Elon Musk – to recoup the losses on his purchase of Twitter, and retain his position as the richest person in the world.

A person’s wealth and a person’s worth are two very different things.

Elon Musk is a billionaire. He possess $269,800,000,000-worth of wealth (that’s more than a quarter of a trillion dollars)!

If, like me, you get confused with more than four noughts in a row, there are nine of them in one billion of anything.

Just think for a minute what a wad of dollar bills that size looks like.

If you stacked a billion one-dollar bills one on top of each other, they would reach a height of just under 68 miles.

That is where scientists say the Earth's atmosphere meets outer space.

Mr. Musk controls 270 stacks. Laid flat, his money would cover half a billion soccer pitches.

Enough noughts in a row to make your eyes start spinning!

I find it hard to accept that any human being should be considered – with that many noughts – more worthy than the person sleeping rough on the street.

Nonetheless, the reality of life is that money would appear to count more than men, women, and children in the way the world we live in does its business.

As you might have guessed, I don’t know Elon Musk personally.

I have no idea what contribution, if any, he makes at any level to the wellbeing and sustainability of humanity; it’s just that I think there an obscenity – as in, ‘an offence to public decency’ – in the accumulation of personal wealth to that degree.

You could say that is a prejudiced position, but I would disagree, and make a rational argument that the compulsion to keep accumulating personal, and corporate, wealth to that degree is irrational and destructive of self–worth, democracy and human society itself, especially when the existence of individual poverty and destitution is undeniably so closely intertwined with the consequences of a rampant and uncontrolled global obsession to accumulate wealth, and the almost total glorification throughout the world media and governments of what is commonly known as ‘greed’, pursued on a scale few of us can meaningfully visualise.

The impact of that culture and practice on the most basic quality of life means almost three billion people, the poorest across the world, struggle to survive each year on less than US$10,000. That is just over £8,000.

Elon Musk is roughly three billion times better off than each of one of those human beings.

That is 3,000,000,000 times richer (with nine noughts)!

I wouldn’t want you think that I am picking on Elon Musk just because I don’t like Twitter. There are other billionaires available on the planet for scrutiny – 3,310 of them, in fact.

All over the world, common, ordinary people who have to sell their labour in order to make money are getting poorer and hungrier, and all over the world, governments are taxing working people within an inch of their lives to pay for inadequate public services, and blaming workers for asking for enough wages to live on for every under-resourced service funded by their taxes.

Meanwhile, they allow the rich (who get richer without getting out of bed in the morning) their ‘investments’ to make them money while they sleep – to get richer and avoid paying their fair share of taxation.

If you read last week’s Impartial Reporter, you will be in no doubt about the rising levels of real poverty and homelessness in Fermanagh and South Tyrone.

The pattern is the same everywhere, and globally there are people much, much worse off than we are in the post-Brexit Tory-led UK, or indeed, the corporate greed-collaborating government across the Border.

Meanwhile, as our bank balances reach zero and head for red, billionaires add more noughts and commas to their financial ‘worth’.

During the global pandemic and cost-of-living crisis years since 2020, nearly two-thirds of all new wealth created across the entire world, which was no small sum, was captured by the richest one per cent of people on the planet, which just might help explain why the remaining 99 per cent of us are finding it really hard to get by on the leftovers.

The solution to the problem is not rocket science, but it cannot be solved by food banks and recycling the clothing and furniture property of the working people to the point where the clothes are threadbare, and the furniture fit only for the skip.

Nonetheless, the underlying concept of sharing what we have with those who have less and need more is not simply the better human and moral approach; it is the only concept that will save billions from starvation, N. Ireland from bankruptcy, and the human race from extinction at its own hands.

We need to tax the wealth of that small minority (10 per cent) of the world’s population who own and control the world’s wealth.

According to Oxfam, taxing the really, really rich at an extra five per cent of their net pot would realise enough global funds to lift two million people out of poverty.

I would say you could make that 10 per cent, which would eradicate poverty, and it would barely make a dint in those billion-dollar ladders reaching into space.

If I had the power to do so, I would make the unnecessary accumulation and hoarding of half the world’s wealth for personal gain a crime against humanity, and haul the governments who allowed this before the International Court of Justice.

While I don’t see that happening any day soon, history tells us that a hungry people will ultimately eat its government.

Even those with hearing difficulties can hear stomachs rumbling across this whole island and the neighbouring one.