I do not get the motivation of billionaires like Musk and possibly Trump. They seem to spend their entire lives trying to add to their fortunes at the expense of others, which doesn’t make any sense to me. I retired the second I thought I might have enough money to last me the rest of my life (and I will, if inflation ever dies down–I could get by, even if it doesn’t, on scrambled eggs and ten-year-old cars) which I plan to spend indulging myself in things I enjoy, watching movies, traveling, reading, gardening, painting, etc. I wouldn’t consider working, wearing suits, taking meetings, scheming plots to acquire new businesses, driving myself crazy as these rich guys seem to do, and I don’t understand what motivates these guys to spend their precious remaining years doing what they choose to do. It makes no sense to me–just seems self-destructive to me. Do these rich guys enjoy doing what they do, or is their behavior just a manifestation of very low self-esteem?
You are seriously confusing “rich people” and businesspeople.
Also, you have to be motivated to succeed in business—if I offered you a job with a substantial salary + bonuses, I’m sure the millions of dollars sound enticing but would you put in the 100+ hour weeks? No retiring for at least five years, either. Nor would you get the position if you were not going to be a 110% team player plus have the skills to begin with…
Outside inheritors (is that a word?) and lottery winners, no-one who would rather watch movies, read books, and tend a garden ends up with millions. People who are extremely driven do. These people want nothing more than to work and to succeed.
To us common folk, working to get, say 10 million, is a cheap fantasy at best. To a succesful businessperson, that 10 mil is hanging right at their fingertips, then another, then another. It would be against common human nature not to extend one’s arm, again and again.
“It would be against common human nature not to extend one’s arm, again and again.”
Am I not human? I have no desire at all to extend my arms when I already have more than I can carry. Beyond a point, well short of Musk’s billions, it seems to me you are describing greed bordering on pathology.
Have you considered that other people may not have the same motivations as you?
Not everyone wants to retire the very moment they know they can live out the rest of their life without a job.
You have probably worked with or known people whose entire existance, their entire life, is defined by what they do. That does not change once they get rich enough to stop working, that would be to stop doing what defines them.
A lot of it is ego. They would not know how to exist if they did not feel essential to their work function in some way. That is why many people who are rich enough to just sit down, go into politics. It allows them to have a perceved value and provides an outlet for their energy.
I am recently retired and today is Saturday. You know what tomorrow is? Saturday, with another week of Saturdays to follow. Not everyone can adapt to just letting whatever they did for a living go. I had a fine career doing many things and I am sure that I could bore your socks off telling you about them.
Persons like Elon Musk are doing what they do to feed that ego need. Any company that they own will be better managed by hiring competent people to run things while they just go fishing or something, but ego will not let it go.
[quote=“Joey_P, post:5, topic:974435”]
Have you considered that other people may not have the same motivations as you?
[/quote]That’s exactly what I’m asking–to explain what their motivations are.
Most people I’ve met need to work, without much pleasure in their work, to survive, and some of them get to do exactly what I’ve done, to retire when they think they can afford to do so. Some work longer because they’re conservative about how much they need to accumulate to retire comfortably, and some because they genuinely enjoy their work or have made some commitments they don’t feel right about abandoning, or a combination thereof.
But this describes people at a stage multibillionaires have long since reached. Their financial futures, and that of their unborn great-grandchildren, have long been assured.
Maybe the
Ask me again tonight after the Powerball drawing! 
~VOW
Noah Cross explains it rather succinctly in Chinatown:
One of my favorite scenes. Of course, Noah Cross is an insane person, a totally twisted villainous, incestuous murderer. Is this your explanation? Rich people are psychopaths?
The problem with quoting me selectively here is that those I felt “genuinely enjoy their work” only continue to do the work for a while longer than they need to. Eventually, even the people I know who like their work, or who don’t utterly detest it, withdraw, cut back on the responsibilities, and do less and less of it until they all decide to retire entirely. Not what billionaires are doing, not at all.
One of my motivations in retiring was that I could see there were young people who hungered for my job, and I felt I was being selfish in earning top dollar in my field and not getting a lot of satisfaction from my work when my company could hire two young people to do my job who would be thrilled to have it. Rather than work for the ego-satisfaction , I chose to retire, which doesn’t seem to be in billionaires’ playbook.
Some people are driven by their work, but you are not. It’s as simple as that. They don’t see any downside to continuing to work and acquiring wealth. They enjoy it. Some billionaires do retire. Bill Gates threw himself into his non-profit foundation. He still “works”, but not to increase his wealth. In fact, he’s giving a lot of his money away. Isn’t that crazy?
Rich, powerful people want as much control over things as possible - indeed, more than is possible - to protect and increase what they have, making them (seem) less vulnerable to other sources of wealth and/or power that are potential threats to engulf and devour them.
Nobody’s perfect.
If a monkey hoarded more bananas than it could eat in ten lifetimes; while other monkeys starved, primatologists would try to figure out what the fuck was wrong with that monkey. If a human does it that human gets on the cover of Forbes magazine.
Of course, that’s not true. If a monkey hoarded those bananas the other monkeys would quite sensibly beat it to death and take their bananas, no primatologists needed.
I imagine they do, in some sense. That sense might be that they enjoy the fame/notoriety, or being the best/richest/most powerful. It might be like an addiction. They might have a similar psychology to a hoarder or collector, who is driven to keep acquiring more and more of something.
But I don’t know, since I’m not a rich person.
At a certain level, high-level business executives are not unlike top-tier athletes: they are incredibly driven and competitive, and they have, for their entire lives, defined their self-worth around their success in their chosen field. It’s why, when you see top athletes who retire (or think about retiring), a lot of them really struggle to figure out what to do with the rest of their lives. Michael Jordan and Brett Favre are two examples of guys who struggled to finally “hang it up,” because they didn’t get the same kind of enjoyment from anything else.
It’s a very extreme (and, IMO, not very nice) kind of personality, but I suspect that super-achievers in business are the same way. They may have “hobbies,” but in a lot of cases, those hobbies (such as golf) are just different ways in which they can be competitive. Even if this kind of person has a family, they delegate much of the details of “family life” to their spouse (or employees, such as nannies), because they spend much of their time on work.
I work in advertising, and I see this, to a large extent, in a lot of the people who are highly successful in the industry. They work 80+ hour weeks, and are extremely focused on their jobs – and it’s not only because they need the money, but because it’s what meets their need for achievement and success.
Yes, I would say that Bill Gates is closer to what I’d think a normal person would do once he’d acquired billions, namely think of something challenging yet satisfying (in terms of “accomplishment”) beyond simply adding to his wealth. I’m not suggesting that all mega-wealthy types should spend their days on the beach, or whatever their pleasures might be, but this compulsion to earn more money after they’ve acquired many times the amount they could ever spend seems very peculiar to me. Many of the explanations given here seem not very far from diagnoses of various species of mental illness.
For some super-rich, money is a way to keep score. The thrill is less in having the dough, but what they accomplish while raking it in. In a way, it’s similar to compulsive gambling.
There are those who figure that the more dough they have, the more they’ll be able to influence people and events the way they want. Best of all, accumulating $$$ is a great way to get attention. No one would bother listening to Jerry Jones or Warren Buffett without their big bucks.
Attributing everything to greed is simplistic. As for those born into wealth…
"Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.”
- F. Scott Fitzgerald