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The Eras Tour made Taylor Swift a billionaire

Since cresting this ludicrous financial plateau there is new interest in the question of ethical billionaires. Namely the question of whether Taylor Swift, with all of her activism, allyship, and social consciousness, is an ethical billionaire or if it's possible for a billionaire to be ethical.

No.

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I guess for the sake of my reputation as an overly pedantic and explanatory person I'll do a deep dive into capitalism and the ethics of the billionaire class even though it's quite simple: There are no ethical billionaires in a society with poverty.

Capitalism is an unethical hellscape

Capitalism as an economic system is built on systems of exploitation and oppression. Essentially, there is an owning and managing class, and a working and producing class. The workers and producers make the products and perform the services while the owners or managers profit and keep the lights on by paying other service providers to provide their organization services. The foundation that capitalism is built on is the imperialism, hierarchies, and empire-building of Yore. The idea that goods and services carry inherent or objective external value and that goods and services should be denied to those who cannot provide that value is itself the concept that creates poverty, hunger, homelessness, and crime. Capitalism has demanded that the necessities of health, happiness, and self-actualization be paywalled and withheld from people who are from lower socioeconomic classes. The capitalist system has also decided to punish those same people for being poor by denying them a better education that could raise them out of poverty not to mention the "market forces" currently at play that have made housing unaffordable for most average people, increased the cost of living, and stagnated wages.

Billionaires should not exist in a world where poverty is possible.

The context of $1,000,000,000

One billion dollars is a lot of money. To give you an idea of how much money that is we will use time as an example.

One million seconds is about eleven and a half days. If you earned one dollar every second of every day and did not spend it you would be a millionaire in under two weeks.

One billion seconds is about thirty-one years. If you earned one dollar every second of every day and did not spend it you would be a billionaire in about as much time as it would take some people to see some benefit to their RRSP.

One billion dollars is an unfathomable amount of money that is functionally impossible to earn in exchange for a person's labour. The only way to obtain that level of wealth is by exploiting the labour of others, investments, and aggressive, opportunistic, and artificial growth. People don't "earn" billions, they obtain billions. Billionaires would not exist if poverty were not allowed to exist, but the economic system in place demands poverty so that it can justify undervaluing certain people and unfairly compensating them. There are not enough people and is not enough wealth to create infinite wealth or a planet full of billionaires. If the approximate total amount of money on earth was divided equally to every single person on earth every person would have a total of about $4,625.

As another example, if you earned five hundred dollars a month every month under normal circumstances from 1492 to today you would still not be a billionaire.

How did Taylor Swift become a billionaire?

You might be tempted to argue that Taylor Swift became a billionaire by selling so many albums and concert tickets and having so many streams that the dollar total she was entitled to eventually equalled one billion. That's not the whole picture.

Taylor Swift has a team of people in her employ responsible for helping her create a unique and enjoyable concert experience. She has a team of people doing marketing. She owns four companies. She has a team of people negotiating various distribution and partnership contracts. She has a lot of people making, storing, selling, and shipping her other merch. She has people helping her to craft and promote her image. She has producers and editors filming and recording her. She has assistants. She has a pilot and a plane so that she can quickly and effectively cross vast distances to have a breakneck touring schedule that most touring performers could not match. She has a lot of people doing things for her that make her money. She essentially functions as a business and her employees create more value for her, including other songwriters like Max Martin who co-wrote at least twenty-two of her songs from three of her albums. Max Martin, notably, has been working in the industry longer than Swift and reportedly is not a billionaire himself despite consistently writing or co-writing hit songs for thirty or so years.

Taylor Swift is a billionaire because she was able to obtain wealth that is enough to fund the work of others on her behalf.

The ethics of excessive wealth

It is functionally unethical to be a billionaire in a society where poverty, food insecurity, and homelessness exist. Multibillionaires could eliminate these social problems and still be billionaires afterward. This will be true of Taylor Swift as she accumulates more wealth, too.

In New York City, where Taylor Swift lives as of 2024, there are one hundred thirty-six billionaires and they could collectively end hunger, homelessness, and poverty with barely a dent to their net worth. The fact that New York has so many billionaires and is still a hub of poverty is a tragedy.

Wealth accumulation should have the same rules as Grandma's Buffet. We've all seen this in one form or another, I'm sure. You go to a buffet at Grandma's house, then sit down and your grandma or your mom looks you square in the eyes and says nobody gets seconds until everyone has firsts. If that's the rule for food, then it should also be that way for food, housing, healthcare, and the means to live and take care of oneself.

When it comes to money people should not have billions until everyone else has what they need. This might be a radical idea but there should be a level of wealth with an effective tax rate near one hundred percent until poverty is eliminated.

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If you were a billionaire how would you use your unfathomable wealth to eliminate poverty?