Why billionaires don’t give a damn

Every day we learn that the richer you get, the less empathy you have for those in need. And now scientific studies are telling us that what we knew all along was right

It takes more than imagination to understand how big a billion is. A million is within the average mind’s grasp; it’s 10 lakh. A one followed by six zeroes. Add three more noughts and you get a billion. These three zeroes more may seem like three nothings more, but if a million is an ant, then a billion is a gigantosaurus.

I always thought that a billion was a little more than a million, and that millionaires and billionaires were more or less interchangeable. They’re not. If you saved Rs 100 a day, it would take you about 27,397 years to reach a billion rupees.

You’re wondering why I’m going on so much about billions. Honest truth: the word has been cropping up far too often for my liking in recent times, buzzing around my ears like a mosquito after sunset.

First we all heard that Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s boss, blew $5.5 billion to spend 11 minutes in outer space.

I read recently that Mark 

Zuckerberg, the man who’s made his wealth selling your private details to others, lost $20 billion in just one year of his virtual reality platform, Meta. He had invested $10 billion in it, and plans to invest tens of billions more. 

The clincher was last week. We all heard that the world’s (current) wealthiest man, Elon Musk, threw in $44 billion to buy the world’s most influential social media platform—Twitter. To put that in perspective, NASA is sending human beings to the moon in its Artemis programme for $6.68 billion.

In the name of preserving free speech, Musk has already sacked half of Twitter’s employees, is doing away with nearly all fact-checking and moderation teams, and plans to reward any customer who pays $8 a month with a blue-tick certifying their credibility. Advertisers are fleeing and politicians are in panic, with conspiracy theories, hate speech and election lines suddenly burgeoning unchecked on Twitter. 

But to Elon Musk, $44 billion is a sideshow. He now has a shiny toy. He’s having fun.

I use a party game to demonstrate the value of money. Imagine you’re about to buy a Rolex watch—roughly $5,000. Just as you’re reaching for your wallet, I tap your shoulder and whisper that the same watch is available for $350 less at another shop one block away. Would you go for the bargain? I doubt you’d say it’s too much of a walk.

Now imagine you were buying an Aston Martin Vulcan costing $2.3 million. I tap you again, same shoulder, to tell you that it’s going for $350 less a block away. I’m guessing this time you’d tell me to leave your shoulder alone.

The reason why $350 feels less significant when it’s part of a few millions rather than a few thousands is that human beings assign a value to a thing based on how much of it is available. It’s that simple. The more money you have, the less it matters.

To an unskilled Maharashtrian worker earning Rs 466.42 ($5.6) a day and with five mouths to feed, Rs 100 has the value of Rs 10,000. To Mukesh Ambani, earning R90 crore an hour, that sum would be an invisible mote of dust in the evening sunlight.

The billionaires named here share several traits. None of them knows what it feels like to be deprived and struggling to survive. Three of them were born brats, albeit devilishly clever and inventive. But here’s the thing that binds them all—along the way to their billions, they all lost empathy, the ability to see other human beings and feel their pain. No matter how many hospitals they fund and scholarships they hand out in a nod towards corporate social responsibility, billionaires are inevitably blinded by their money.

In 2012, psychologists from the University of California in Berkeley showed college students two videos—one of a man explaining how to build a patio and another about the difficult lives  of children with cancer. Wealthier participants, they found, were less likely to report feeling compassion for the children and their families in the second video. 

An earlier study led by a University of California, San Francisco psychologist found that wealthier people are less able to read other people’s emotions than poorer people.

Psychologist Daniel Goleman argues that if the wealthy who hold more power do not ‘see’ those who have less, there’s an empathy gap. Without addressing that first, you can’t do much about the wealth gap.

Elon Musk doesn’t care about lies, truth and hate speech. Bezos could have eradicated world hunger with the money he casually blew on 11 minutes in space. And Zuckerberg, whose first move towards Facebook was an app to help frat boys rate girls based on their breasts and bottoms, is blowing billions on Meta because he’s expecting trillions back.

If there’s a lesson in all this, it might be in the words of my favourite revolutionary mystic, Steve Jobs. “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

I’d add—“Stay poor.”

You can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopi@gmail.com

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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper

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