If You Have More Than $5 MILLION, Read This
Thank you for deciding to read this letter. If you hold wealth of more than 5 million dollars, than this letter is for you. Why 5 million dollars? Because this is the threshold to put you in the top 1% in the United States. If you live in any of the following countries, the threshold to be in the top 1% by wealth is this: Germany 3.4 million, China 1.58 million, United Kingdom 3.66 million, Canada 3.61 million, with a world average of 1.53 million dollars.
I would like to convince you of two things: (1) accumulating wealth above this threshold does not make you a better person and may cause severe damage to the world, and (2) you should give away all your wealth above the threshold in the most direct way possible, to those humans who need it the most.
This is a brutally honest letter. I do not intend to deploy psychological tricks to soften your heart. However, I do hope to appeal to the better angels of your mind and soul.
If you read books like Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas, or Wealth Unpublished by Jake Hayman, or Enough: Why It's Time to Abolish the Super-Rich by Luke Hildyard, or The Trading Game by Gary Stevenson, or Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth by Ingrid Robeyns, and many others like these, you will notice a pattern. Making lots of money is almost never about the money itself. Sometimes it is performative, being about reaching a psychological number, like ten million, ten billion, or one trillion.
However, in almost all cases, accumulating excessive wealth is a proxy for something else: validating meritocracy, running away from the risk of poverty, accumulating more power that allows you to impose your system of values on other humans. But you know all of this already.
What you probably do not know, are the answers to these questions:
1. What are the moral foundations for limitless wealth accumulation?
2. Why do companies not have full informed consent from all citizens in the Global South, to extract cheap labor, cheap land, cheap resources?
3. Why do some of the super-rich hide their wealth in fiscal paradises?
4. Why is democracy not allowed inside corporations?
5. Why is a primary healthcare worker paid well under a hundred dollars per hour, when an executive is paid thousands of dollars per hour, when they both work the same number of hours per week?
6. Why is wealth taxed so much less, if anything, than labor?
7. Why do shareholders have as many votes as they have shares, instead of having one vote per person, as citizens do when they vote for their political representatives in liberal democracies?
8. Would every person on Earth agree that limitless wealth is good in order to maintain a functioning civilization?
9. What are the fundamental links between the climate crisis and the personal investment portfolio of the super-rich?
10. Can we actually continue business-as-usual and prevent the collapse of Earth ecosystems?
Many of you have probably not taken enough time to reflect on questions like these. Upon careful inspection these questions lead us to think about the fundamental fabric of our society; the relationships between power, property, and capital; the moral legitimization of inequality; the cognitive biases which cause us to focus only on what we can remember, cause us to ignore complexity, cause us to put excessive faith in solutions that have not been tested.
Did you know that European colonisers plundered around 100 million kilograms of silver out of the Andes between the early 1500s and 1800s? If the value of that silver had been invested in 1800, it would today be worth $165 trillion. The world’s GDP is just over $100 trillion. If the US were to have paid enslaved Africans at today’s US minimum wage, those payments would have totaled $97 trillion today.
Did you know that “[We exist in] a world where it is estimated that the Global North drains $2.2 trillion from the Global South every year.” (Derek Bardowell)? The world’s richest 1% own 43% of all global financial assets. The richest 1% globally emit as much carbon pollution as the poorest two-thirds of humanity (Oxfam Report 2024). Every dollar invested in companies that harm life is a bad dollar.
How different would our world be, if all workers globally earned the same minimum wage, let’s say 20 dollars an hour, adjusted for inflation? How would the world look like if the maximum wage was six times more than the minimum wage, or even less? Simply by asking these questions, we guide ourselves to thinking about fairness, universal moral values, connectedness between all humans.
Our current economic system, whether we call it capitalism or socialism with Chinese characteristics, operates with several rules: (1) meritocracy, often a vague concept which mixes references to hard work, genius, innovation, luck, ability, personal choice; (2) the desirability of endless growth of wealth, which infuses the thinking of many humans, poor and rich alike; (3) the legal code that legitimizes capital to overpower the will of indigenous communities; (4) the natural legitimacy of inequality; (5) the economic freedom of corporations is not the same as the economic freedom of individuals. How often have we considered the legitimacy and the morality of these rules?
Baked deeply into the entitlement over accumulating excessive wealth is the notion of deservingness. It is a feeling that we deserve rewards for the work we do in the benefit of society, whether it is creating a successful business, or doing philanthropy. Deservingness, however, is a product of a social relationship, when humans collaborate toward the creation of a mutual goal that is above the personal goal of each individual. When deservingness generates tragic levels of inequalities of rewards and outcomes, then it no longer serves the purpose of a mutual goal. It no longer benefits the group.
Giving away your excess wealth is the best thing you can do for your own personal health, and for the health of the world. No tax gimmicks, no fake foundations, no fiscal paradises. Find individuals and organizations who struggle to make the world a better place, while not having concerns for personal wealth accumulation. Do not listen to wealth managers that tell you to protect your inheritances for the sake of your relatives. You already have enough for yourself, and your extended kin. I urge you to consider all other living humans, all future generations, and all forms of life.