oh btw keep telling yourself that lullaby that every one of these filthy rich fucks are ackshually dumbdumbs like everyone and just lucked in into money
Trump was given money by his father, Epstein got his job on Wallstreet via Jewish nepotism and was given millions of dollars in unpaid loans by his friends (loans you give out (personal or otherwise) that are unpaid by the recipient can be counted as losses and contribute to paying less in tax), and politicians usually make similar connections once they're high-ranking enough to be of note, and so on.
The rich and powerful being
just like everyone else is something of a
conspiracy theory of mine so take it with a grain of salt lmao
All that sets them apart from most people nowadays is is a possible starting advantage, which they don't always possess - Jeff Bezos is a good example; he just did pretty well in school. Though sometimes these advantages can be reasoned to exist in hindsight, such as starting a new website during the dot-com bubble (Amazon, 1994), but that's still not an intrinsic quality, just a situational one ala Boomers during the 50s-70s.
There's often times some very simple qualities that many people just seem to not do. Looking up stuff they don't already know is a major one, especially if you're asserting something which is reliant on conjecture or, worse, making a decision based on an incomplete picture. For example: the Zoomer generation earning a reputation of being shitty with tech because many of them don't look up solutions to problems themselves before asking others or fumbling their way into a fuckup by messing with something they don't understand. Similarly Boomers/Gen-X not being familiar with the changing times around the turn of the millennium traded personal knowledge to make decisions opted to delegate it instead to broad trends told to them by data alone, which can get mired and more or less explains every contentious corporate decision made in the past 20 years. More people in general could be doing this i.e. actually learning new shit that benefits them in the immediate or long-term.
How moral or immoral someone is can also contribute. This is arguably the most intrinsic quality in some aspects (see: Indian Izzat, Jewish nepotism, etc.) but it's still more or less has a baseline most people hover around. Outside of psychopathy/sociopathy, most people can decipher good from bad. When someone does something that is considered bad to the general observer, they've usually made all sorts of internal arguments for why the action
isn't bad* ("It's good actually because of [x-reason].") or it isn't
that bad ("It's a dog-eat-dog world - they'll bounce back," "They would do the same in my position," "They already have so much, it's not like I'm leaving them with nothing," "They deserve this because of [x-reason," etc). which is the sort of thing I think everybody can more or less be familiar with.
Hell, as a society, one of the earliest stories you can learn of is Robin Hood, a story of someone stealing (bad action) to give to the poor (good action). It's not all that surprising them that this ends up in people taking it to it's logical extreme by breaking it down to its simplest meanings:
(1) Bad is not bad, when it can be justified as good.
(2) Bad is not bad if recipient of bad is bad.
(3) Bad is not bad if made up for with good.
Epstein lied about his college education (he had none) that got him his first job at Dalton and subsequent first job in Wallstreet because, "I knew nobody would give me a chance." This was a bad action (lie) couched in the idea that the only people being harmed by his action are those who wouldn't give him a chance (bad people). The subsequent empathy of Tenenbaum allowed him to keep the job. Any theft of cash from already very wealthy people (which he did, frequently) has the excuse baked into the premise:
They already have a lot of money (bad, another thing we're taught from a young age) so my action (bad, because it's stealing) simply
isn't.
Sans psychos and sociopaths, or those whose perception of reality is just considerably differs from everyone else's, most people employ the same rudimentary considerations for their actions, either prior to committing to it or thereafter to deal with some reflexively selfish or harmful action. Even when Epstein was molesting 14 year olds, or prostituting out minors to the rich and powerful, in his mind their 5-digit payout was probably enough to ease his own conscience, assuming he hadn't already contrived the conclusion he wasn't actually doing anything bad but they were "consenting" and being paid like any other employee.
Rich people aren't "dumbfucks", no. But neither are they especially more evil or more intelligent than most.
It's just as comforting a lie that they are as the idea they're retards who were given everything. It means you never had a chance to reach their level because you're not as inherently ruthless or otherwise gifted in intelligence as they are.
It makes their position in society somewhat deterministic, which takes them being responsible for their own rise out of the equation and just puts them into their own unique category.
You can't suddenly become a billionaire overnight but you can still attain their level of acumen just by making an effort to learn things that a generally relevant for the most part, and having the initiative to learn why something is if you don't know it. Intuition can get you far but it's not the be-all end-all of everything.
Edit: *I forgot to mention: stuff like this is why objectivist morality (often seen in religion) exists, as it creates hard rights and wrongs to do/not do regardless of the circumstances, because otherwise you
can argue something generally viewed as bad as being not-bad or even good if you do enough mental gymnastics on it.
