Why do billionnaires and tyrants even try?

[lautaro]

There's an anecdote about a guy who asked Alfredo Yabran, an Argentinean bussinessman who at some point he had a fortune of a couple billions (it may be more, considering he owned a lot of companies he didn't admit and a lot of black money), why did he did it, if he had a fortune enough for his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren already.

"Oh, <name of the guy>, you don't know what power is like!" (how does it feel).

Yabrán ended up killing himself after a journalist that was unto him appeared killed by a headshot, probably by the police to throw the body at him. He had a monopoly on mail companies he took over by mafious ways and deals with the military, through which he allowed drug trafficking, and had some involvement in dirty deals with the syrians which led to the bombing of AMIA, Israel's embassy and the killing of Menem's son. He was the Argentinean Al Capone, but richer.

 

[FunPosting101]

A fighting chance of 0% to be exact, never going to happen and I'm extremely interested in hearing the information that has led you to the conclusion "they have a fighting chance"

It depends on what you mean by "immortal" really. If you mean, reversing the aging process, then yeah, that's probably going be available for just about everybody in the developed world within the next few decades.

Actual immortality is impossible without technology that might as well be magic though.

 

[BLACKHAWK_Entropy]

God will outlive you.

not a real being.

 

[mindlessobserver]

Very often they cannot accept their mortality and invest fairly heavily into extending their lives, particularly into something that promises some form of biological immortality that will allow them to cling to the delusion that it doesn't have to end some day.

Tale as old as time. Many such stories. In ye olden days, it was Alchemy and wasting money on quacks promising miracle cures by distilling lead into philosophers stones.

Now it's the Soyence, or becoming one with the blessed machine. Death always wins though.

 

[Otterly]

Nobody who has made a billion or inherited it is normal. They’re either insanely driven or wastrel offspring.
When you’ve bought all the things, shagged all the models, and taken all the drugs, your mind probably turns to shit like LEGACY.
You become like gates - with his nefarious plans for humanity, or like musk, wanting to do really fun stuff like take us to mars.
What I’m saying is these projects are a shed. Plebs have sheds they go and tinker in. When you’ve got infinite money you can build rockets or start tinkering with immortality.
Whether it works or not isn’t really the point, any more than Joe Public is ever going to get that classic car he’s had up on bricks in his shed for twenty years to actually run.
It’s a project.

 

[Ibanez RG 350EX]

the rich by nature are hedonists.
hedonists live in the moment and not in some sort of existential abstract moral framework.
simple as

Maybe people who've just inherited a lot of wealth, but not those who've made it themselves.

You can say a lot about the very wealthy, but having a high time preference or inability to delay gratification is not among those things pretty much by definition - you make huge sums of money by being singularly, autistically driven, not by being hopelessly impulsive.