Many of them act like assholes. Just watch their actions, everything about the way some of these people conduct themselves.
Jul 06, 2026 – Click to Read the Full Substack Article!
I want to say something up front so nobody mistakes what this piece is actually about. This is not an argument against making money. I don’t care that some people have a billion dollars while others have twelve. That, on its own, has never bothered me, and I don’t think it bothers most Americans either.
What bothers me, what should bother anyone paying attention, isn’t the size of the fortune. It’s the character of the people attached to it and the fact that a significant share of today’s wealthiest Americans accumulated their fortunes through methods that were never really about building anything. Now, many of them use that wealth to avoid the one obligation that comes with living in this country, paying into it.
Most of all, many of them act like assholes. Just watch their actions, everything about the way some of these people conduct themselves. At the same time, I think this is an age-old phenomenon. Henry Ford, for God’s sake, was widely associated with antisemitic views and publications, and his writings were praised by the Nazi movement. He also supplied that military some trucks.
Set that aside, we just wrapped a weekend built around the idea that America turned 250 years old. Fireworks over the Mall, a president talking about the founders, the whole production. And somewhere underneath all of that pageantry sat a much older, far less comfortable question that this country has never really answered. Once you’ve made an enormous amount of money here, what do you owe the place that allowed you to make it? Or, better yet, what about the people who make enormous amounts of money through shady, suspect, or corrupt means? Right now, for a huge share of the people at the very top, the answer is nothing. And they’ve built an entire financial and political architecture to make sure it stays that way, including a whole vocabulary designed to make anyone who says otherwise sound dangerous.
Making Money Isn’t the Problem. How You Made It Is. Let’s one more thing straight before anybody accuses me of jealousy or class warfare. There are plenty of people at the top of the income ladder who built something real, they made a product, hired people, took genuine risks, and got paid for it. I have no argument with that. Click to Read the Full Substack Article!
