Let's Kill All the Billionaires

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Welcome to the 69th edition of Trying! When I realized the significance of this moment, I wanted at first to write something that was, somehow, 69-shaped: a gentle, thin intro buttressing a hefty dollop of whatever it is I do here, followed by a similar dollop cradled in diaphanous prose. You know, elegant shit. But then I started thinking about the news—namely, Meta’s giving up on fact-checking and the censored Washington Post cartoonist—and I realized that intellectualizing a horny middle-school joke was the wrong way to go about things.

Instead, I have a modest proposal: Let’s kill all the billionaires on the planet.

According to ChatGPT, which billionaires love, “As of 2024, there are approximately 2,781 billionaires worldwide, collectively holding wealth totaling around $14.2 trillion.” That means, on average, each possesses or controls $5,106,076,950.

I say we kill them all.

They have outlived their usefulness, if they ever had any. They are now sycophants and brown-nosers, helpless, hapless enablers of the autocratic idiots who want to rule this planet unopposed, and destroy it with their willful ignorance. Their money has long insulated them from consequence, but no longer. They are done. They need to die.

Once, I wanted merely to tax them out of existence. No one, I thought and still think, should have a billion dollars. It’s unnecessary. You can eat well, live well, plan for your children’s future, and their children’s future, on less than that. You could possess $100 million in wealth and never have to worry about a goddamn thing for your entire life: Your kids can go to college wherever they like, they needn’t work anywhere afterwards; you can just enjoy spending what you have and living off the interest, not to mention the investments. You could go running in the morning and write essays in the evening. You could learn to play piano and perfect your French. You could do anything you’ve ever felt like doing. Anything! (Okay, maybe you couldn’t buy a private nuclear sub. And you probably couldn’t afford to build or buy a rocketship to Mars. Fine. Ya got me.) You could also just say: Enough. How could you want more?

But billionaires do. To amass that kind of wealth is the purest, vilest greed, and I once thought—hoped, really—that this country could enact the kind of taxation scheme that would, little by little, reduce the acquisitiveness to a more modest, if still nauseating, level. Christ, what was I thinking? This will never happen, especially not now that the richest of the richest business interests have aligned themselves with the antidemocratic, antihuman fascists about to take power.

And so there is no other answer but death. You may kill them however you like: shooting, stabbing, poisoning, strangling. They can “fall” from the windows of business hotels in third-tier Russian cities. They can be crushed inside deep-sea submersibles. They can develop exotic cancers. They can waste away, as long as they don’t take too long to waste away. You can pester them to death if you like. You can lock them inside Cybertrucks and drive them into rivers. You can make them moderate their own social media platforms, unfed and unwatered, until they expire, or you can make them mine iron ore until a cave-in buries them alive (but not for long). The one way they should not die is of old age.

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Some of you—the more skeptical ones, whom I appreciate almost as much as my paid subscribers—may want some justification here. So: Those who have strained for and attained such wealth are not the 1%. They are not the 0.1% or even the 0.01%. Those 2,781 billionaires represent 0.000034% of our planet’s population, and by dint of their gargantuan, stomach-turning riches have so separated themselves and their interests from those of not just the vast majority but the entirety of the planet that they have turned themselves into something other. What they want, and what they want to maintain, is diametrically opposed to our interests. They will use, and they have used, their unlimited monies to preserve their dominance, to increase their treasure, and to ensure their control of the world—its businesses, its governments—will never be challenged.

Concentration of extreme wealth in the hands of a tiny minority is bad. I can’t believe I have to fucking say that, but it’s true. The more money they have, the more tightly they hold onto it, the worst life is for the rest of us.

And they will not give it up. Apart from McKenzie Scott, who else is attempting to give away their fortune to those who could use it better? Anyone? (Seriously, let me know if I’m missing a self-sacrificingly generous billionaire here.) No, they have riches beyond anything you could imagine, and they want not only to keep what they have but to get more. They can’t even spend it on themselves fast enough, not that they’d know what to do with it. They have and they want, they want and they have, and there is no way to stop it except to kill them all.

You are allowed to feel sad for the ones who will die. They have families, of course, who will inherit the wealth. With any luck, it will be divided up among enough heirs that none of them will themselves become billionaires; but those who do cross that ten-digit line should be killed as well. Their heirs, too, will inherit and be rich—so spectacularly rich that you can’t ever imagine what that would be like. Honestly: Imagine never needing to worry again about paying for food, for rent, for doctors, for your children’s food and rent and education and doctors. And those expenses are just not even anything at all for an individual or a family with $1 billion at their disposal—they can pay a $200,000 surgery bill and earn it back in days.

But no matter how much you pay, you can’t come back from the dead.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I am not a communist. I like work, I appreciate the effort that goes into building businesses, and I do not think the gubmint should control everything. You can have $100 million. Hell, you can have $200 million! But when certain individuals—2,781 of them¹, to be precise—allow their unchecked greed to dominate not only their lives but ours, something must be done. And it must be done not only to them but to demonstrate to the rest of the world the consequences of such selfishness. What’s more, I don’t think it should be done officially. This should not be a sanctioned program. Rather, it should be the duty of the remaining 99.999966% of us to carry it out, whenever and wherever possible. Billionaires have no real fears right now, so let us give them something to be afraid of: death—sudden, spontaneous, irreversible. They can, if they wish, give away their wealth to avoid this fate, or lobby the governments they control to tax it out of them. But if they don’t, they should expect to meet an early end at the callused, arthritic hands of those from whom they’ve separated themselves.

Do I want to advocate mass murder? Not really. A massive tax increase on the wealthy would be vastly preferable; billionaire blood is as sticky and messy, after all, as that of the proletariat, and I’m going to assume you hate cleaning up after yourself as much as I do. Still, sometimes we must all get over ourselves and do what is necessary.

I know this may sound dark, but I say all of this because I am an idealist: I like to think—I want to think—that humanity can set aside its worst impulses and work together for a better, safer, happier world. But without rules, without consequences, it’s clear that cannot happen: When we see billionaires, when our culture idolizes them, we want to become billionaires ourselves, and the obscene and evil cycle continues. If, however, we can put that off the table, if we can draw a bright line between a whole helluva lot and just way too fucking much, then maybe there’s hope for us yet. 🪨🪨🪨

Notes

1. Is 2,781 a large number? Consider this: In 2024, 5,757 people were killed or injured by landmines worldwide. If only we could get billionaires to go walking through the world’s war zones and former war zones—Cambodia, Yemen, Myanmar, Ukraine—one problem would take care of another!

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