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big news on rihanna the superstar singer
and entrepreneur gaining a new title
billionaire chief business correspondent
rebecca jarvis joins us with more on the
talented media moguls incredible journey
good morning rebecca
good morning robin yeah this is a great
story a fun one women entrepreneurs and
founders business leaders they are
moguls they are creating businesses they
are disrupting industries and rihanna is
among them she can now add billionaire
to the top of her titles list here in
the united states we'll often hear
stories like these it's no secret that
americans love to hear about
billionaires you'll find them everywhere
they're on the news have their own tv
shows movies and even make their way
into elected office specifically we
consistently give massive audiences to
self-made billionaires the people who
unlike the aristocrats and monarchs of
yore didn't simply inherit their wealth
in this episode we're talking about the
obsession with so-called self-made
billionaires how misleading that term
can be and everything wrong with the
myth of the self-made person
at the heart of every favorable
depiction of a billionaire is this idea
that they have earned their success and
their wealth the most compelling stories
are those of billionaires who through
sheer hard work and grit so we're told
have conquered the american dream and
made a better life for themselves those
around them and our society as a whole
but there are a number of reasons this
is simply incorrect we'll get to exactly
how this idea is wrong in a second but
first we should talk about why the myth
of self-made billionaires is such a
problem for starters vanishingly few
people ever become billionaires in the
u.s it's around 600 people or
0.0002 percent of the population
perversely however the myth of the
self-made billionaire tries to trick you
into believing that anybody yes even you
dear viewer could one day be just like
them after all if they can do it so can
you
you already know how they attempt to
sell this falsehood it's always so
incredibly simple they tell you they
started from nothing that they were once
just like you they too had a 9-5 job
that they hated they too had trouble
paying their bills but instead of
complaining they just worked harder and
eventually after 100 hour work weeks
they were able to lift themselves up by
their bootstraps and just look at them
now here's where the problems start if
they can successfully convince you that
one they have earned their wealth and
two that you can do it too they can use
those two assumptions to convince you of
some far more nefarious things for
starters they can convince you to act
against your own self-interest and the
interest of the vast majority of
americans the most obvious example of
this is making it seem like it would be
better for everyone if billionaires paid
less in taxes if we just got the
government out of the way of these
people who have proven to us that they
are visionaries that they alone know how
to manage money to be clear the
ultra-rich already have a good way of
avoiding taxes you can see exactly how
they do it in our video how billionaires
pay less in taxes than you but of course
that doesn't matter since they'll always
try to lower that number further and
further the more they do the less money
goes towards things that actually affect
your day-to-day life roads public
services health care education the more
they keep of the wealth they have no
intention of spending in the first place
the worse off we all are
they'll convince you that that might be
you someday that when you're in their
shoes you'll want the same thing after
all what's the government ever done for
you we'll get to just how much it's done
for them but first let's get back to the
self-made story in some cases that story
is simply a blatant lie take elon musk
and jeff bezos the last decade's
favorite billionaire duo loves to weave
a compelling story of their 100
american-made success jeff bezos likes
to tell this story of a young guy who
built a strong work ethic at his
mcdonald's job he loves to emphasize how
it was his hard work that eventually
landed him a spot at princeton then on
wall street and finally pushed him to
one day risk it all on the crazy idea of
selling books on the internet his story
reaches a dramatic pause when he starts
amazon out of a garage with nothing but
a dream and it resumes satisfyingly when
his company becomes the internet giant
it is today elon musk tells a very
similar story that of an industrious kid
bullied for being too nerdy and into
science fiction who climbed out of
adversity and overcame the all too
common american hurdles of student loan
debt and people not believing in him
with the sheer ingenuity of his
entrepreneurship
these stories are of course embellished
and while individual elements of them
may not be false the overall image
they're trying to sell you is a lie
because it wasn't the novelty of amazon
alone that catapulted it to the center
of the internet so much as the absurd
head start that an initial three hundred
thousand dollar investment that jeff's
parents gave him and although musk likes
to play up his version of the everyman
story too his family is most infamously
known for his father's ownership of a
lucrative emerald mine and role as a
property developer in apartheid south
africa these people didn't start from
nothing it wasn't just hard work
billionaires never get there alone they
get there in any combination of three
ways one family wealth and privilege two
labor exploitation and three government
help let's start with number one
family wealth and privilege explains the
success of a lot of the billionaires
that sit at the top of our social
hierarchy we've already seen how much of
a role family wealth played in the
success of even the quote self-made
celebrity billionaires like musk and
bezos so it should come as no surprise
that the great majority of billionaires
have similarly favorable advantages the
racial and gender makeup of the
billionaire class is not an accident it
is no surprise then that the people who
face the fewest societal hurdles white
men overwhelmingly dominate the forbes
rankings while women and people from
racial minority groups only make up a
fraction but privilege doesn't explain
every single billionaire's climb to the
top exploitation however does
what do we mean when we say exploitation
those familiar with marxist literature
will already know that exploitation is
the expropriation of surplus value from
labor by capital okay but what does that
mean it's actually very simple according
to marx society is divided into two
classes the owner class the bourgeoisie
and the working class the proletariat i
promise i'll make this quick the owner
class people who own businesses
factories farms and so on offer a deal
to the working class
work or starve as you already know just
about every single one of us takes that
deal
so
what do the owner class say they say
that for x amount of hours worked
workers will be paid y amount of money
in order for that deal to be profitable
for the owner class they need to pay
workers less money than the value they
actually produce
that difference is what marx calls
surplus value the money that you make
for the company will always be more than
the money the business puts back into
your hands in the form of a paycheck
otherwise it has no money to give the
people who own the company the
stakeholders who may never have even
stepped foot on the premises if you want
an idea of just how much value business
owners steal from their workers just
look at this ohio pizza shop where for
one day the owner decided not to siphon
off that surplus value and instead put
it back into the hands of the workers
the result
employees made 78 dollars an hour
that's the marxist definition of
exploitation and every single capitalist
business in the world relies on it
whether they want to or not the most
egregious examples of course are those
we see with billionaires companies in
which figureheads who no longer work on
or only ever held stock in the company
walk away with hundreds of millions of
dollars a year
but even with a more relaxed definition
of exploitation we see this kind of
behavior playing a massive role in
billionaires wealth you may have
recently heard of exploitation occurring
in newly minted billionaire rihanna's
fenty beauty factories or beyonce's ivy
park sweatshops it's immediately obvious
to us how sweatshop labor is clearly
exploitative when workers often children
make mere sense for each grueling hour
spent in unsafe conditions compare that
to the billionaire status of those at
the top and it's impossible not to see
something deeply wrong and exploitative
in the working arrangements they have
created while rihanna and beyonce might
be the face of the club this week they
are no more or less culpable than their
mega wealthy peers those whose less
glamorous companies manage to avoid the
spotlight once again how does this kind
of behavior make a person self-made
that brings us to point number three
government help here the conservative
and libertarian views of the world's
billionaires are the most evidently
hypocritical elon musk is probably one
of the biggest offenders so let's come
back to him for a second musk often
talks about the government in very
disfavorable terms he regularly decries
government regulation does everything he
can to avoid taxation and fiercely
defends the belief that markets should
be free that said the billionaires
companies spacex tesla and solarcity
would have no hope of existing without
the government's absurd 4.9 billion
dollars in loans and tax breaks we're
using musk as a flagrant example here
but the nature of our current economy is
that throughout the entirety of the
chain of production government subsidies
are granted from public money only for
the profits to be privatized by people
who hoard wealth at a level we haven't
seen since the gilded age pharmaceutical
research is another classic example of
this phenomenon where large amounts of
government funds produce the innovations
needed for life-saving medication only
to eventually be appropriated by the
private sector where profits stay
squarely within the hands of a few
executives who jack up prices and strand
countless americans without access to
the health care they need
this is not the vision free market
proponents are selling us where their
ludicrous profits are justified by all
the risks that innovation entails in
reality they benefit from the largest
public money safety nets in our society
billionaires receive the government help
most analogous to socialism of anyone
but fiercely get in the way of the rest
of us enjoying the same privileges so
that they can pocket more money than
entire nations
no billionaire has ever gotten to their
status by ethical means and to revere
them as icons of self-made success is to
give them a pass for their selfish
parasitic behavior
we can dream of success without them we
can achieve greatness without them we
can let go of the myth of self-made
billionaires
imagine for a moment a world without
billionaires imagine that world where
you could actually get the full value of
your work like those pizza shop workers
with their 78 an hour wage how much less
stressful would your life become how
much more pleasant and fair would it all
be were it not for someone at the top
hoarding far more than their share
hundreds of millions of lives would be
improved in an instant at the end of the
day we produce enough for everyone let's
stop pretending it makes sense for so
much of it to be in the hands of so few
people
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