No one should be a billionaire. No exceptions. 

Yes, even your favorite celebrities are nefarious for having that amount of money. If a person has somehow acquired — and kept — one billion dollars, then they did something terribly wrong. 

 

Who needs a billion dollars?

The answer is: nobody. It’s difficult to conceptualize the difference between a million and a billion. For context, a million seconds is about 12 days, and a billion seconds is 32 years. Once a person has bought a house, a car, and whatever else they want, the only thing they can do with a billion dollars is hoard it.

Sure, billionaires donate some of their money, but they still maintain their wealth. They also get significant tax write-offs, with the IRS allowing charitable contribution deductions up to 50% of a person’s adjusted gross income. 

Some rich people are more in touch with their generosity. For instance, Dolly Parton probably could have a net worth of a billion dollars, but she doesn’t because she has donated so much to her philanthropic pursuits. Additionally, Billie Eilish recently made a statement encouraging billionaires to give their money away. 

While these celebrities still have oodles of money, they do not have billions of dollars, which would be much more indicative of greed. Although celebrities do tend to make their money through personal talent, why should their jobs be valued so highly? 

 

How did they get that money?

There’s no question that to reach a billion dollars, a person has to throw ethics out the window. 

I’m sure you’ve heard the complaints of Amazon employees about their low wages, in comparison with Jeff Bezos’ salary. According to Amazon, their average pay for “customer fulfillment and operations roles” is $22 per hour. According to Yahoo Finance, Jeff Bezos makes around $8 million per hour. 

In addition to unfairly paying their workers, billionaires will also charge a monstrous amount of money for their products. The average cost of a Taylor Swift Eras Tour ticket before resale was $204, and Swift grossed around $2 billion in ticket sales for the whole tour. A pair of Air Jordans can cost hundreds of dollars, while the production cost is only around $16. 

Companies have the freedom to charge whatever they want, and they still get customers even with their high prices, but it’s pretty despicable to gouge every last penny from consumers and fans.

 

What about everybody else?

The idea of a “rags to riches” journey has skewed middle and lower-class Americans’ perceptions of what is achievable, because some think they have a chance to be the next Andrew Carnegie. In reality, most people are never, ever, going to have the opportunity to make that kind of money.

Let’s put into perspective just how much money Elon Musk has. As of Spring 2025, there were 15.3 million undergraduate students enrolled in a four-year university in the United States, according to the NSC Research Center. The average cost of public, in-state tuition nationwide is $10,600 per year, according to the Education Data Initiative. Based on these numbers, the total cost of tuition for every undergraduate student to attend an in-state public university for one year is $162 billion. 

Elon Musk’s net worth as of October 30, 2025, is $500 billion. Elon Musk could pay for a year’s worth of every single American college student’s tuition, and still have $338 billion left, which is $4 billion more than the world’s second-richest person, Larry Ellison, currently possesses. 

No one needs a billion dollars, let alone $500 billion. The amount of money these people have is disgusting, and keeping that amount of money from circulating in the economy is harmful to everyday people. Take a look at Forbes’ Real Time Billionaires list to see the net worth of the world’s richest people updated in real time.

Billionaires could do so much good with the money they have. They could solve problems like climate change, homelessness, and hunger, but they don’t. As Americans, we have to stop supporting billionaires’ accumulation of wealth and start standing up for ourselves.