Tony Stark was the good billionaire who saved us all, but Iron Man isn’t real, and real billionaires aren’t like him.

“Think like a billionaire” – a type of lifestyle advice that illustrates how much respect we hold as a society for those with extreme wealth. We’re told that billionaires have earned their money and for this we should revere them, as they’re more deserving than us.

But how can you be worth something that humans can’t understand? Humans have no need to and are therefore incapable of accurately contemplating one billion. Hence a “billionaire” is a person denoted by a degree of value that we can’t mentally quantify.

That assigned social value is something we need to question.

It’s first important to dispel the notion that billionaires have “earned their wealth.” While some may be entrepreneurs who did positively impact our societies, the simple fact is that there is no way for someone to acquire that much money and have so many employees for that upwards transfer not to be exploitative. Jeff Bezos didn’t earn his $190 billion; his over 1 million employees did, who only got a $15 minimum wage after Congress threatened Amazon directly. 

Amazon is infamous for its violations of basic workers’ rights, subjecting employees to constant surveillance, impossible schedules and the potential of firing by AI. Has Amazon changed how we do online shopping? Yes. Is the monopoly of a company that treats its humans as anything but humans a good thing? Something that should garner respect for its figurehead? Yes – in the eyes of a culture so detached from morality that it can only worship wealth.

Especially beloved by the internet is Elon Musk, who via Tesla, is supposedly making the world a greener place – something that should be celebrated. Yet Tesla’s true impact on electric vehicle technology has been to establish them as a luxury item, counteractive to the mission to replace carbon vehicles on a scale that the whole world can afford. 

There’s a special danger in how Musk is idolized on the internet; nobody knows Musk for his support of Lithium Coups in Bolivia – “We will coup whoever we want!” Instead, they know him from that time he looked at memes with PewDiePie.

There’s also the undeniable cost of billionaires on the planet. From private jets to inconsequentially-minded business practices, billionaires rack up a carbon output that can be thousands of times that of average citizens.

There is absolutely no justification for an individual having such an outsized impact on our decaying world; their indulgence in the face of crisis should be seen as an act of violence against us all. As island nations sink and desert states face famine, the world’s wealthy will escape from our collective doom on superyachts and recreational spaceflight.

We as a culture need to change how we view billionaires. We cannot continue to allow a few people to violate our planet, workers and markets, all while being venerated by virtue of the fortune they make doing it. Two billionaires ran for president on the Dem ticket in 2020. If we fail to reign in their power and redistribute their wealth, we will grant ourselves a future of corpocratic oligarchy that will worsen the already visible effects of their power while their cultural cult exonerates them.