Those who have achieved great wealth in our society often have the acumen and skills from which many benefit, mainly in the jobs their innovativeness creates, or we’re all living happier, healthier, longer lives from products, methods and technologies they adopt, discover or bring about in their ascent to billionaire hood.
In a way, they are a key component, in some ways the bedrock of a successful nation such as ours because they were willing to stick their necks out, take risks. They did something different, maybe invented, explored or just financed some advancement. So perhaps they deserve credit for that as well.
So, maybe we need to begin improving the image of the wealthy set in America seen as always succeeding, ever winning and widening their wealth by constantly achieving their own goals, hitting mega targets, buying and building businesses from casinos and restaurants to rockets like themselves.
As they’ve gone far beyond just reaching that utopian place in life called getting ahead, many view billionaires as brazen success hunters, who just yearn to keep triumphantly achieving success that’s already over the top, one triumph after another, showing off how prescient, ingenious and cleverly industrious they are.
They’re seen living incredible lives, far too extravagant for the average voter to relate to? To feel empathy with? I doubt very many look up to them as heroes.
So what good are more billions when you already have a bunch? Is there such a thing as too much of a good thing, like excessive wealth, and the yacht loads of riches that successful careers inevitably bring to these extraordinary go-getters.
Wouldn’t failure once in a blue moon be refreshing? So, human? Something the average person can relate to? So why not make it more fashionable for billionaires to try it on for size, wear it proudly showing they were gallantly gutsy to take the risks they took not just for themselves, but for us too.
Wouldn’t it heighten their human side to emphasize their willingness to take risks showing their gutsiness is alive and well and they too can make honest miscalculations. Mistakes! Even bad bets occasionally. Wouldn’t it underscore that they’re just like us, human?
Aren’t billionaires like Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg and Musk bored with their incredibly successful ventures? Don’t they long to finally flop, just once, not stupidly, but grandly, fabulously! And wouldn’t flopping fashionably be super newsworthy and get wide media coverage evoking what’s so missing in their heroic lives. Us! And our empathy.
Wouldn’t doing so in a splashy, visible manner garner a plethora of impressive headlines and accolades from a predatory press loving to highlight their splendiferous financial losses? Isn’t failure something most can relate to these days? Feel a kinship with? Identify with?
Let’s show billionaires how they can enjoy the thrill of throwing in the towel, losing their silk shirts while still retaining vast wardrobes and all the other accoutrements of success after having lost only a smidgeon of their wealth.
They’ll be seen as falling from Olympian heights into the intriguing abyss of ignominious failure which will generate rewarding publicity knowing the press will relish the incongruity as much as the ignominy.
Okay, we’ll leave out the part they’re still packing yachts and mansions while receiving an uptick in fame and empathy from losing billions, which is far more newsworthy and protective than when having earned them, especially when you’ve just been anointed to an ambassadorship.
Just as Cyrano de Bergerac tells opponents with whom he’s about to fence how “exquisitely” they’ll die, wouldn’t it be equally noble and valiant to announce how a company such as 23andMe in which you invested has succumbed exquisitely.
Here’s a company with the greatest intentions going so blatantly bankrupt after only 550,000 subscribed to its gene testing, which incidentally is how I met one of my wonderful daughters.
She sprang to life just a few years ago when she called me one day to say I had turned up as her father in genetic testing showing she had resulted from a relationship I had decades earlier with a high school sweetheart who unbeknownst to me had become pregnant and had given birth, then gave her baby, our baby, immediately up for adoption.
Wouldn’t it have been noteworthy for a billionaire to have had a huge stake in DNA testing that made such a discovery as mine possible when it went public valued at $3.5 billion but now has tanked?
Then after losing a small chunk of those billions that investor would be getting as much publicity and empathy as its co-founder Anne Wojcicki, not to mention my gratitude for uniting me with my Robin.
Besides financial awards, isn’t fame and respect what billionaires need most?
Isn’t that what they want when parking lavish yachts so conspicuously on the Potomac as they await their Senate confirmation hearings as did the billionaire Tilman Fertitta who not only owns the Houston Rockets basketball team, but 600 restaurants along with the Golden Nugget Hotel and Casino?
Tilman is Trump’s pick to be the next Ambassador to Italy, ironically one of my favorite countries where I once lived and worked at Cinecittà Studios dubbing movie dialogue from Italian into English. Late one night watching black and white movies on TCM you just might hear some gladiator speak with a New Jersey accent.
Fertitta is a shoe in for the post proposed despite a complaint recently filed in District Court in Jacksonville, FL by my long-time friend, attorney and Freedom Watch founder Larry Klayman, charging Fertitta “fraudulently misrepresented” a deal to sponsor his Houston Rockets that cost Klayman’s client, ROKiT Drinks, millions of dollars in lost business.
Ever wonder what the ancestry tests of billionaires would reveal?
Probably it would show only a few, if not zero failures in life, mostly just straight lines to success, riches and yachts like the one above worth $150 million called the Boardwalk.
That was also the name of an inspiring walkway near where I grew up stretching alongside the beach in Atlantic City, NJ and on which I would go out on the prowl at night hoping to score with some pretty girl while daytime I was flunking in high school.
I can only wonder how distant the owner of such a magnificent yacht must seem to most people today who are struggling just to make ends meet.
For Tom Madden, acquiring wealth is admirable when it comes from hard work and successfully running businesses, especially those run by the clients of his public relations firm TransMedia Group. And when not promoting businesses like ROKiT Homes providing easy and quick housing for victims of fires, floods and tornadoes, he’s writing books like Planetary Lifeguard, Blowing the Whistle on Climate Change that’s causing so many of them these days.