There’s always a great deal of imprecision in conversations like this that smear “the 1%” and “the 0.1%” and “billionaires” and “Jeff Bezos/Elon Musk” as they all fall into one big lump such that we end up talking about outliers.
Even within the billionaire class, there’s like, maybe 30 - 50 people who legitimately can’t spend down their wealth on goods but you’d be surprised at just how much you can spend when you really set your mind to it and the sheer degree of excess waste and extravagance of pure consumption that can happen.
One of the YT channels I follow is a guy who critiques all the fancy mansion tours on Youtube and there’s a video of his that sticks in my mind of this $80M mansion built in the middle of nowhere in Branson, Missouri in the 90s and has basically been sitting there untouched since then:
You watch them go through room after room of beds that have never been slept in, liquor that’s sat on a shelf unopened, gardens that have been lovingly maintained by a crew of landscapers for the benefit of a non-existent audience. All of this consumption in service of essentially nothing. And the end result, according to the video is, that the remaining value only comes from the land, anyone who buys this property will have to tear down the entire thing. From reading about the guy who built it, he was worth about $1B - $5B when he died and he was a “philanthropist” in that he gave a portion of his remaining wealth to charity but every dollar that went into building this place was a dollar he threw into a fire instead of giving to charity and $80M is not nothing even within a $1B fortune.
There was a fascinating piece in the New Yorker a few years ago about how the most expensive yachts in the world now exceed the prices for the most expensive homes and why homes, even among the uber wealthy, reach a natural capping point but there’s still a desire to consume more yacht
Saying that Jeff Bezos can’t possibly spend all his money on yachts is hiding there’s an entire class just below him that is pouring a substantial part of their global wealth into pure, unadulterated consumption of absolutely trivial baubles.
There’s also this common misconception that the rich are just an opportunity to be grifted and the things they spend on must have outrageous markups and aren’t produced in a manner than different from one tier below but largely also isn’t that true. The rich didn’t get rich by being bad with their money and once you dive into the actual details what they spend on, for the most part, they’re expensive because they have to be expensive, not because someone in the chain is making a large, undeserved fortune. That house in the middle of Branson, someone had to ship all that steel in and hire the people to put it all together and those people couldn’t have been working on building houses for ordinary people while they were doing this. Those mattresses cost $10,000 a piece not because someone got scammed but because it legit costs that much to hire the people to make them and they couldn’t be doing anything else. Every single person involved in the project could have been making something that benefited a real person and instead they wasted a part of their life on a folly.
We’ve seen what the end state of this is, we’ve lived that end state through all of history. You wander through Europe and see all the castles and art and jewelry that was consumed by the nobility while the population lived as serfs. You wander through Egypt and see pharaohs piling up pointless rocks into tombs as a way to sop up their excess labor. Future historians will see our increased wealth inequality from that exact same lens and it will be simply obvious to them from the benefit of hindsight. The only reason we’re fooled today is because the same powerful interests have an investment in making us fooled.