What Is the Money For?
“What is the money for?”
That question has stuck with me ever since Candice Lane shared a Facebook post from a Threads user named bellathadon.
“I genuinely don’t get the endgame. If the plan ends with a ruined planet, collapsed economies, and no working class left to spend money, what are the billionaires hoarding wealth for? To sit in a bunker with numbers on a screen that don’t mean anything anymore? What is the actual point?”
It might be the most important question of our time. What is the actual point?
The robber barons of the Gilded Age built their fortunes by paying low wages, making people work in tough conditions, using monopoly power, and influencing politics. Their charity does not erase these facts. Andrew Carnegie’s steel empire depended on men working long hours in risky mills. John D. Rockefeller pushed out competitors while growing Standard Oil.
Yet Carnegie spent much of his later life giving away his fortune. His money helped build nearly 3,000 libraries worldwide. He funded schools, universities, museums, concert halls, and efforts toward world peace. By the time he died, he had given away about 90 percent of his wealth.
Rockefeller gave hundreds of millions of dollars to education, medical research, and public health. His foundations helped establish schools of public health and supported work that reduced disease around the world.
Ego was part of it. Reputation probably mattered too. These men wanted to be remembered for more than the harm their businesses caused. Their donations built public institutions that still help people today, even after more than a hundred years.
Today’s billionaire class gives money too. Jeff Bezos has committed $10 billion to the Bezos Earth Fund. About $2.4 billion has reached grant recipients so far. The fund supports climate research, conservation, cleaner food production, and other useful work.
Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan have committed more than $7.2 billion through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Their money has supported science, education, housing, and medical research.
Those billions make a real difference to the people and groups who get them. A climate scientist can keep working when there’s no other funding. A community group can help families stay in their homes. Medical research might save lives.
Good work deserves credit. Still, size can fool us. Bezos is worth about $270 billion. His full $10 billion climate pledge represents less than four percent of that fortune. The $2.4 billion distributed so far amounts to less than one percent. He could fulfill the entire commitment tomorrow and remain worth about $260 billion.
His life would stay the same. He wouldn’t lose any comfort or miss any chance. He would still have more money than anyone could spend in many lifetimes.
Then I think about a single mother stopped at a traffic light.
She sees someone without a home holding a sign. Money is tight. Her gas tank is almost empty. Groceries keep getting more expensive. Her child might need something for school. Even so, she rolls down her window and gives five dollars.
Her five dollars will not fund a research center. It will not build a library or place her name on a university building. It may buy someone a meal. And she might notice that money is gone.
That five dollars came from money that still had work to do. She gave away part of what she needed because someone in front of her appeared to need it more.
Jesus saw the same distinction when he watched people placing money into the Temple treasury. Wealthy people gave large sums. Then a poor widow offered two small coins. Jesus told his disciples that she had given more because the others gave from their abundance while she gave from what she needed to live.
He wasn’t confused about the math. He understood what it meant to give something up.
Other traditions reach toward the same truth.
The Quran teaches that people won’t become truly good until they give away things they care about. It’s partly about what the giver lets go of, both in their hands and in their heart.
In Jewish teaching, tzedakah carries a sense of justice and duty. Maimonides taught that the highest form helps another person become self-sufficient. Giving should restore dignity and reduce the need for future charity.
Buddhist teaching sees dana, or generosity, as a way to let go of our attachment to things. Giving changes the giver because it asks them to give up something their mind wants to keep.
The Stoics regarded wealth as something a person could use without allowing it to become the measure of a life. Seneca knew wealth firsthand and wrestled with its hold. He wrote that the shortest path to riches lies in needing less.
In all these traditions, generosity involves more than just transferring money. It asks what the gift costs the giver. It looks at what happens to the person receiving it. It also notices how tightly wealth can hold onto us.
That brings us back to Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, and the others.
Their fortunes are far bigger than what anyone needs for comfort. At that level, money does something else. It buys influence, access, safety, technology, political favors, and control. It lets one person shape public life without being elected or answering to the people affected.
A billion dollars doesn’t mean much as spending money to someone who already has twenty billion. But it means a lot when it comes to power.
Another billion can purchase a newspaper, a social media platform, a space program, a political network, or a seat near a president. It can fund a private vision of the future and push aside every competing vision.
The accumulation becomes its own purpose.
Money becomes a way to keep score. Each increase puts someone higher on the list. The person with $200 billion now compares himself to the one with $300 billion. Normal ideas of success no longer matter. Another house, yacht, jet, or island can’t satisfy a hunger that no longer has anything to do with comfort.
Maybe they think they’ll be gone before the worst happens. Climate change, social unrest, failing public services, and economic collapse might seem far away when private wealth can protect someone from the first signs.
Some are preparing for more than distance.
Some wealthy people have built private compounds and bunkers. Others have put money into research to extend life. In Silicon Valley, people are spending a lot to slow aging, replace organs, save the brain, and make people live longer.
That creates another problem. Suppose it works.
Suppose someone lives to 150 with a fortune large enough to purchase every comfort and protection available. What kind of world will surround him? Who will grow the food, maintain the power grid, produce medicine, repair machines, and keep the water running?
Money is valuable only because society agrees it is. A bank balance is really just a claim on other people’s work, goods, and trust. If society falls apart, those numbers are just numbers.
A billionaire in a bunker would still need civilization.
This might be the great delusion beneath extreme wealth. The billionaire starts to think money has made him independent. But his fortune came from workers, customers, public roads, educated employees, courts, laws, patents, energy systems, and a stable currency. Millions of people helped make his wealth possible.
Legally, the fortune belongs to him. Morally, things get more complicated.
I am glad Bezos funds climate work. I am glad Zuckerberg and Chan support medical research. Their gifts can accomplish great things. I would rather see the money used that way than spent on another private island or political favor.
But I can’t put their billions in the same moral group as the five dollars handed out a car window.
One gift changes the recipient’s life. The other changes something within the giver.
We usually judge generosity by the size of the check. We could ask how much the giver kept, what power they still have, and if the gift really cost them anything.
Andrew Carnegie died with a fraction of the fortune he once possessed. Today’s richest men continue growing wealth faster than they give it away. Even their largest pledges often leave them richer a few years later than they were when they made the announcement.
So I return to bellathadon’s question. What are they saving it for?
No one needs $100 billion to live well. No family needs $500 billion to feel safe. Even a trillion dollars can’t buy another hundred years of sunsets, talks, meals with friends, or mornings with someone you love.
Maybe extreme wealth seems to offer a way out of the limits everyone else faces. The rich can skip lines, traffic, crowded airports, tough neighborhoods, public schools, regular hospitals, and many problems that come from public failures. With enough money, they might start to think they can escape aging, death, or even the fate of the planet itself.
Time will collect them too.
And when that time comes, the final score will show how much they collected. It won’t tell us much about what any of it really meant.
Sources and Further Reading
- bellathadon, original Threads post quoted in the opening, reposted on Facebook by Candice Lane.
- Forbes Real Time Billionaires List. Current wealth estimates for Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg.
- America’s Top Philanthropists, Forbes. Estimates of money that has reached charitable recipients, including Bezos’s lifetime giving.
- Bezos Earth Fund. Details on the $10 billion commitment, grants awarded, and climate programs.
- Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Grants. Information on more than $7.2 billion in grants committed since 2015.
- Carnegie Corporation History. Andrew Carnegie’s views on wealth and the institutions created through his giving.
- Carnegie Libraries, National Park Service. History of Carnegie’s support for public libraries across the United States.
- The Rockefeller Foundation’s History. Rockefeller’s giving to public health, education, and medical research.
- The Widow’s Offering, Luke 21. The biblical account of the widow who gave from what she needed to live.
- The Quran, Surah Ali Imran 3.92. The teaching that righteousness requires giving from what one cherishes.
- Maimonides’ Eight Levels of Charity. The Jewish teaching that the highest form of giving helps another person become self sufficient.
- Dana and Buddhist Generosity. The Buddhist understanding of generosity as compassion, shared humanity, and release from attachment.
- Seneca’s Letter 62. Source of Seneca’s observation that the shortest path to riches lies in despising riches.
- Doomsday Prep for the Super Rich, The New Yorker. Reporting on wealthy technology leaders preparing for social collapse.
- The Billionaires Fueling the Quest for Longer Life, The Wall Street Journal. Reporting on billionaire investment in longevity and life extension research.
