Billionaires don’t generally become billionaires by spending a lot of money on watches or apples or the like.

They become billionaires (generally) by owning things and making those things more valuable in other people’s eyes.

The vast majority of Elon Musks wealth, for instance, is in stock of Tesla, SpaceX, X, etc.

It’s an entirely different kind of situation, because the wealth is generally due to other people’s estimates of the productive output/wealth generation of those assets increasing over time.

In the musk example, it would be like if someone bought and then came in and funded the expansion of a big apple orchard that previously no one had ever heard of, and then made it internationally famous so that everyone wanted to be a part of it - and sold shares in that orchard to people.

Now people are eating more of that orchards apples, everyone values that orchard more, and now what previously he owned but was cheap is now worth a lot.

That is legitimate value creation, as much as you might hate him or the process.

If he did it by burning down other orchards, he would be a criminal. But like in the spacex case (or Tesla case), it’s pretty hard to argue that is what happened. Maybe some light fraud here and there, at most.

It mostly came from a lot of salesmanship and light/moderate gaslighting, but they are legitimately valuable companies - albeit maybe shouldn’t rationally be at the P/Es they are. But he is making the irrational happen.

And that is making a lot of people money that otherwise wouldn’t, and making something happen that otherwise wouldn’t. Those people are very happy he is doing what he is doing.

For the alternative, see the USSR. I’ve known people who lived in that system, and it was terrible.

I dont want the USSR, and I don't see the relevance. For me this is a discussion about the role of money and wealth in our economic system, I am not arguing for plan-economy. The dynamic allocation of resources provided by a market based economy is great. But there are many ways to run a capitalist society, I certainly don't belive we are at the end of history here.

Billionaires certainly CAN get more wealthy by a process as you describe. They can also get more wealthy by just owning stocks and do absolutely nothing. Last 20 years the S&P 500 has increased 8-fold. That means 64 times over 40 years, 512 times over 60, 4096 times over 80 years. With the s&p average since 1926 of 9.8%, the numbers are 42-fold after 40 years, 272 after 60 and 1770 after 80. Salaries has certainly not risen at the same rate.

My views are probably shaped by coming from a place with more old money, where more people are rich from inheritance than their own creation. And their share of the totalt wealth of the society increases even when they are just passive owners. For me this is a reinvention of Feudslism, where the owner class controls the economy because they inherited it.

Now, this is a bit of a tangent to the original discussion though. What I had been trying to say is that independently of the reason for why the billionaire has the money, the spending on that apple is not providing value to the economy. In your original post I read you to mean that, and that the billionaire provided value by buying that apple. Of course he did on the micro scale for the farmer, but not at the macro scale. All he is doing is slightly shaping the economy to provide what he wants, using money as the lube.

So billionaires can be so for a lot of reasons. They can have stolen the money, passively gained them, gained them on the back of others creating value, or they could have created the value themselves. Independently of the source, they now have power over the economic machine. They might use it to improve the machine (good) or they can make it create things the billionaire wants in place of things other people wants (less good).

The original comment I replied too was how a billionaire buying an Apple was destroying/taking things from the system - when the reality is that the billionaire traded a bit of value, and so it’s just changing ‘columns’ in the system, not being destroyed in the process, but rather now the farmers/retailers/middlemen now have some cash instead of too many apples, etc.

What is the better alternative?

Because it’s actually in their interest to buy fewer real goods, and more ownership - assuming the ownership is of productive assets. That’s how they became billionaires in the first place. By using their Capital (literally excess assets/buying power) to acquire more assets/buying power, or grow the value of their assets/buying power. Yes, that includes the orchard example above.

In the USSR, you could only buy things approved by bureaucrats who ensured the ‘right things’ were available for sale, and people didn’t get jealous, and ownership of most classes of assets was restricted to the state.

There were no private billionaires in the USSR, but a lot of administrators that had to play political games - with those on the bottom being stuck with the leftovers.

Notably, for those complaining about the US military industrial complex - military spending in the USSR as a percent of GDP dwarfed even the US. (Albeit much lower in actual value, because the USSR’s economy was relatively tiny)

One could easily argue that the biggest priority of the USSR was in fact military spending - far more so than the US even at its peak, and they happily threw everyone else but the elites under the bus to afford it.

History rhymes for a reason, and people are similar all over.