Im so tired of seeing billionaires be lauded as good options for governing roles because they can’t be tempted by money because they have plenty of it. You don’t get to be a billionaire because money has no effect on you – duh.
Every election cycle, some billionaire decides they’re the answer to our problems because – get this – they don’t need more money. I just read that Tom Steyers running for California governor with the usual line about not being beholden to special interests. He can take on the big corporations, he says. Hes already rich, so he must be pure. Cue my masssive eye roll.
Let me tell you what that actually means.
To become a billionaire, you make choices. Lots of them. You choose profit margins over employee wages. You choose quarterly returns over long-term community impact. You choose efficiency – which usually means cutting people – over stability. You make these decisions thousands of times, and each time, you pick the option that builds your wealth instead of distributing it. Thats not a moral judgment about capitalism. Its just math. You don’t accidentally stumble into a billion dollars by prioritizing other peoples wellbeing.
Heres what billionaires don’t seem to understand. The very skills that make you successful at accumulating wealth are often the opposite of what makes you good at governing. Business is about eliminating competition and maximizing return. Government is about managing competing interests and distributing resources. In business, you can fire people who don’t perform. In democracy, those people still get to vote, and you still have to serve them.
The whole Im too rich to be corrupted pitch isn’t really about corruption. Its about perspective. When youve spent decades making decisions that concentrate wealth upward, that becomes your default setting. You genuinely believe that what’s good for business is good for everyone because that framework has worked for you. Youve surrounded yourself with people who think like you, live like you, and benefit from the same system you do. Thats not necessarily corruption. Its just living in a completely different reality than the people you want to govern.
Not to mention, there’s something even more fundamental here. The argument that billionaires don’t need more money assumes that money is the only thing people want. Its not. Power is the thing. Influence is the thing. Legacy is the thing. And running a state like California gets you all of that. You think someone whos already accumulated more wealth than they could spend in ten lifetimes is done wanting things? Theyre just shopping in a different store now.
I watched this play out with Trump, and frankly, its embarrassing that were still falling for it. The pitch was identical. Hes so rich he can’t be bought. Hell run government like a business. Hell make deals. Howd that work out? Turns out that running government like a business means treating citizens like customers you can afford to lose. It means viewing everything through the lens of transactions rather than responsibilities. It means measuring success by metrics that have nothing to do with whether people can afford housing or healthcare.
Government is not supposed to turn a profit. Its supposed to provide services that the market won’t because they’re not profitable. Its supposed to protect people from the very forces that billionaires spent their careers unleashing. You can’t expect someone who made their fortune by being really good at capitalism to suddenly pivot and admit that capitalism needs serious guardrails. Thats asking them to betray the entire worldview that made them successful.
And let’s be clear about what taking on corporations means when you are a corporation. Or were, or still have massive financial stakes in them. Youre going to take on your former competitors? Your current investment portfolio? Your golf buddies? The basic formula was simple for actual progressive change: you need people who understand what its like to worry about rent. To choose between medications. To wonder if your job will exist next month. You need people whose empathy isn’t theoretical.
The thing about empathy is that it requires imagination when you haven’t lived something, or memory when you have. Billionaires are asking us to believe they can imagine their way into understanding struggles theyve spent their entire adult lives insulating themselves from. They live in different neighborhoods, send their kids to different schools, use different healthcare systems, and interact with different justice systems. At every level, theyve purchased separation from the consequences that regular people face.
Therefore, when they make policy decisions, they’re drawing on a completely different database of experiences. What looks like a reasonable tradeoff to them – say, raising transit fares by two dollars – might mean someone choosing between getting to work and feeding their kids. They don’t mean harm. They genuinely don’t see it. Thats not corruption. Thats just the natural result of living in a different economic reality.
Im not saying billionaires are evil people. Thats too simplistic. Im saying they’re the wrong tool for this job. You wouldn’t hire a professional swimmer to teach rock climbing just because they’re really good at a different athletic thing. You wouldn’t ask someone whos never cooked to run a restaurant. But we keep pretending that being good at accumulating wealth qualifies you to manage a society. It doesn’t. Those are different skills requiring different values.
While were having this conversation again, actually progressive candidates with government experience and track records of fighting for working people are getting drowned out because they can’t self-fund at billionaire levels. Thats the whole game. The system that allowed someone to become a billionaire in the first place is the same system that makes it nearly impossible for anyone else to compete with them politically. And then they pitch themselves as outsiders. The call is coming from inside the house.
If you want someone who isn’t beholden to special interests, find someone who never had the option to be beholden to them. Find someone whos been on the other side of those interests their whole career. Find someone whose version of I don’t need more money means they’re living on a government salary and think that’s actually plenty.
Because heres what I know: anyone sitting on a billion dollars who isn’t actively giving it away has already told you everything you need to know about their priorities. And those priorities don’t include you.