Hot take: billionaires aren’t human. They’re planets.

Maslow’s hierarchy is basically a scarcity allocation framework, right?. You have limited resources (monetary, emotional, social, material) and how you allocate them decides what kind of person you are. That forced prioritization is what makes us human. You care about your family because you can’t care about everything equally. You show up for your friends because your time is finite and showing up costs something. Choice under constraint is where values come from.

Now remove the resource constraint entirely. What happens? You lose the guardrails, not because you’re evil, but because guardrails were always a byproduct of scarcity. Without them, you become ennui-driven. And then the escalation begins: bigger risks, wilder bets, stranger projects. You’re chasing the feeling of something mattering at all. You buy a social media platform not because you have a vision for public discourse but because you can, and because “because you can” is the only decision-making framework left when cost is no longer a variable.

This is also why I’m obsessed w the planet analogy. Planets have gravitational fields. They warp the space around them. That’s exactly what extreme wealth does. You stop navigating social reality and start generating it. Everyone around you gets pulled into orbit. Your employees, your partners, your friends, your family, they all start moving in relation to you rather than in relation to reality. You lose access to honest feedback, genuine friction, real consequences, the idea that there are some decisions that cannot be undone. It’s not just that constraints disappear, but your entire information environment degrades. You’re making decisions inside a reality distortion field of your own creation, and no one around you is incentivized to tell you it’s distorted.

Which is why it’s not just boredom driving the behavior. It’s what happens when you remove all negative feedback loops from a system. You don’t idle, you escalate and escalate and escalate. Every impulse gets reinforced because nothing checks it. From the outside, billionaire behavior looks erratic. From inside the gravity well, it probably feels entirely logical.

The rare exceptions are billionaires anchored by something strong enough to substitute for organic constraints- deep family ties, religious conviction, genuine community, an ideology they hold tighter than their wealth. I’d argue that that means that the “good billionaire” is just someone who successfully rebuilt scarcity-like constraints voluntarily. They chose to re-impose the very limitations their wealth was designed to eliminate. And how many people are truly capable of choosing limits when the entire architecture of their life is engineered to remove them?

We keep asking the wrong question. We keep asking “why are billionaires so weird” as though it’s a function of individual character. It’s not. It’s physics. Remove gravity and things float. Remove consequences and behavior untethers. Remove scarcity and you don’t get a freer human, you get a less human one. The billionaire isn’t broken. The billionaire is what any of us would become without the thing that made us us in the first place. And that’s not a critique of billionaires (thought God knows they deserve it richly). That’s an indictment of the system that creates them.