How To Break Up With A Billionaire
My across-the-street freighbor—that’s friend and neighbor, perhaps the single most valuable sub-species of Homo sapiens—went to Whole Foods to get ingredients for the delicious Moroccan chicken he served us last week, and in the process decided to try a new dietary restriction. He’s a successful practitioner of keto, but his latest prohibition centers less on what he eats than where he shops. My freighbor Ben is going, as he put it, Bezos-free. This resonated for me immediately, as I have long resented the cone-headed tycoon for stealing the name of the world’s mightiest river to drown us all in his lucre lust. But it also got me thinking about the buying decisions I make that add to the obscenely bloated coffers of the world’s complement of, at present, 2,668 billionaires.
So I ventured into what were for me uncharted internet waters, namely the fine folks at Forbes.com, for they are the keepers of the list of the world’s wealthiest people. What follows is my effort, for now just in pixels, to break up with the 10 richest billionaires on the planet. Yesterday I broke up with my therapist, my first face-to-face breakup in more than 30 years. I’m thinking this will be easier. Here goes.
#1—Elon Musk. I’d have thought Musk’s self-inflicted Twitter teardown would have cost him the top spot, but apparently not. For me, shit-canning Musk is not only no problem, it’s downright joyful, as while I’m in the market for an all-electric car, Teslas are way too pricey and besides, in my unscientific but keenly observed anecdotal survey, Tesla drivers are the leading domestic producers of righteous road rage. And SpaceX, well, even as a kid I didn’t want to be an astronaut, and figured kids who did were just hoping to get really far away from their families.
#2—the aforementioned Jeff Bezos. I rarely go to our local Whole Foods, because it’s wildly overpriced, its quality is wildly uneven, and its parking lot is a lot like the Wild West. We are infrequent patrons of Amazon.com, so kicking same-day deliveries to the curb won’t be tough, and we have enough streaming services that shedding Amazon Prime also will not sting. Netflix owner Reed Hastings too is a billionaire, but his paltry net worth of $3.3 billion doesn’t even crack the top 800. The Washington Post is another matter. It’s the newspaper I’ve read since I learned to read, and I’m emotionally attached to it. But I’m trying to wean myself off emotional attachments to inanimate objects, and upon further pondering the only thing I’d really miss are a few of the comics (Agnes, Zits), and even fewer of the sportswriters (Chuck Culpepper). Other than that there’s nothing in the Post I can’t get somewhere else, and if it allows to me fully cut Bezos’ cord, please hand me the scissors. If MacKenzie Scott, my wife’s favorite philanthropist, can divorce him, the least I can do is follow suit.
#3—Bernard Arnault. The bronze medal for billionaires goes to the founder, chairman, and CEO of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the world’s largest luxury goods company. Anyone who knows me would laugh to near puking at the notion that I would frequent the Arnault oeuvre.
#4—Bill Gates. Given that I’m writing this using Gates’ ubiquitous Microsoft Word, this one’s a bit tricky. In the early 1980s I hopped from one newspaper job to another, and the worst part—other than the winters in Minnesota and Iowa—was having to learn a new word processing system at each stop. I get mildly traumatic flashbacks just thinking about Xywrite and WordPerfect. A check of alternatives points to Zoho Writer, but that too is owned by a billionaire, so I’m gonna go with LibreOffice Writer, an open-source product developed by the non-profit Document Foundation, and doesn’t that sound like a fun place to work. Using Excel makes my feet sweat, so I haven’t done that in years, and I much prefer washable markers and poster board to PowerPoint. I’m a Mac guy now so no worries about Windows, I don’t have an Xbox (I can sense your shock), and Skype is so 2005. My single dalliance with Microsoft Teams was semi-apocalyptic, so it was with great joy that I vanquished its icon from my desktop forever.
#5--Warren Buffett. I already own more real estate than I ever expected to—one-half of a house that’s three-fourths paid off—so engaging with the Oracle of Omaha has never been on my to-do list. I have been to Omaha, and if you’ve been there I’m sure you’ll agree that once is more than enough. Frankly, breaking up with Jimmy Buffett would be more painful, as I love his early work.
#6 and #7—Larry Page and Sergei Brin, known hereafter as the Google Guys. As you might imagine, disconnecting from the entire Google universe is not a game of Candyland, but I’m not sure it’s three-dimensional chess either. Starting with its eponymous search engine/overused verb form, I’ll happily switch to Chat GPT until it nears its unstated but unmistakable goal of total planetary domination. I’ll admit to being in love with Google Maps, but it’s not the only GPS in town. Waze is out, as not only is it owned by Google, it sends rivers of commuters through our sidewalk-free neighborhood whenever there’s a hint of road construction nearby. Maps.Me is owned by Russians, but if they’re oligarchs they’re not very good at it, as the company sold for just over half a billion rubles (around $14 million US) in 2014, so count me in. Swap out Google Photos for SmugMug, a family-owned company that: 1) has never taken a dime from outside investors, and 2) once accepted livestock as payment for its services. They’re Mormons, but nobody’s perfect. There are tons of fine alternatives to Gmail, Google Docs and Google Drive, but I may have reached my www.Waterloo.com in YouTube, as none of the alternatives I found allow access to the single greatest video ever: Squirrel Maze 1.0. If you haven’t seen it, stop reading and watch it now. And then think of the time you just wasted and all you’d get done if you deleted YouTube. Don’t do it for me, do it for the children.
#8—Larry Ellison. The Oracle of Oracle owns 35% of the world’s second-largest software company. I’m certain I am a client of some of his clients, but as I’ve never gotten even a single annoying marketing email from him, it’s clear he doesn’t care, so he’s dead to me.
#9—Steve Balmer. Bill Gates’ successor as Microsoft CEO, the guy managed the Harvard football team and now owns the LA Clippers. Inveterate jock sniffers need not apply. Next.
#10—Mukesh Ambani. Chairman of Reliance Industries, India’s largest company, Ambani makes money on everything from petrochemicals to health care to Bollywood. I’m not proud that I’ve never seen one of his films, but now I have a solid reason to keep my streak intact.
I know I said I’d explore rupturing relationships with the world’s top 10 billionaires, but numbers 11 through 20 do include some notables, notably:
• Michael Bloomberg, whose services I most certainly have never needed, but I won’t delve further, as after Elizabeth Warren’s unflinching destruction of him on a Las Vegas debate stage in 2020, anything else would be piling on.
• Carlos Slim, who owns companies that comprise 40% of the listings on the Mexican Stock Exchange. He’s also the single largest stockholder in the New York Times company, but Wordle’s free and I pirate the Sunday crossword, so he doesn’t get a dime from me.
• Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, the richest woman in the world, is the sole heir to the L’Oreal cosmetics empire, which includes Sephora, which is Greek for beauty, which is unimaginative. Out.
• Mark Zuckerberg. I gave up my Facebook account years ago, and the only thing I miss are the birthday reminders.
• Three Waltons, and not a John-boy or Mary Ellen in the lot, so who cares?
• Cryptocurrency billionaire Changpen Zhao, who goes simply by CZ, which is not only affected but is the globally accepted country code for Czechia, so it’s cultural appropriation to boot.
• Last and possibly least, #20 is Charles Koch. Architect of the plutocracy, poisoner of democracy, if there’s a disgusting, destructive substance or process in your orbit, he put it there.
I gotta say, breaking up with a score of billionaires was even more cathartic than I expected. And in the process, I found the positive converse to the paradox of choice that so often vexes my ass, which is that if you look hard enough, you can find an alternative to just about anything.