1983
Bill Burr calls on 'billionaires to be put down like rabid dogs' in podcast
(www.the-express.com)
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this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2025
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Good. Need more of this.
I do think he's quite wealthy though....
His net worth is between $14M and $20M. That's a lot for you and me, but he is nobody for example next to musk's $400B (20,000 times more)
One million seconds is a about 11 days, 1 billion seconds is just under 32 years. People underestimate the difference
The one I've always liked is "the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is... about a billion dollars"
Considering the horrifically shit quality of education in the US, you're probably better off saying "the difference between a million and a billion dollars is 999 million dollars".
Considering the average American is more ignorant than Philomena Cunk, are we sure they can count that high?
I mean, he is still 980 MILLION dollars away from being a mere billionaire. He is WAAAAAAAAY closer to you and me
20 million is what a rich person should be not 20 billion. the latter one is more akin to cancer, hoarding resources to the extent of the suffering of everyone else.
We need to define rich. To me, 14 million is rich.
Right now, Bill Burr could buy a house, cash, buy solar power for that whole house. And buy a new car every 5 years.
Then just sit at home, and not do shit. Ever.
I can't do that. Nobody I know can do that.
He's rich, but only "American Dream" rich, not "controlling the media" and "funding anti-science think tanks" rich. It's the latter that are the problem.
It's not like he's "give a Nazi salute to millions of viewers and nothing of consequence happens" rich.
Exactly!
Millionaires aren't the problem. Oligarchs are the problem.
$14M is in the reach of normal people though. With a good job, judicious spending, and a little investment luck, it’s possible to get there.
The problem is that most people don’t have a good job.
No one person can make a BILLION dollars though, without exploiting others.
Without a passive income it is difficult to become rich.
He who is paid by the hour can only trade his time for money.
$14M is almost exactly the top 1% of US households by wealth, around a million to million-and-a-half of them. There's only 750 billionaires. The billionaires are less than 0.1% of the US 1%.
$14M is plenty to live very comfortably, but it's little enough that you still have to consider costs of big purchases. You're not going to own a jet. You can have multiple houses as long as you keep them normal-sized. $14M is rich, but it's not Rich-rich.
You know the difference between 14 million and 14 billion?
About 14 billion.
I'd consider this way; assuming the upper bound there (20m), Elon spent over 14 Bill Burr's worth helping Trump get elected, and that was pocket change to him.
That's the difference in scale. Musk could lose everything Burr has ever owned and he literally would not notice.
You can maybe argue that what Burr has is too much. Personally, I really don't care at this point. I'll ponder the moral rightness of the existence of millionaires when there are no more billionaires.
$20M is 20,000x more than $1,000.
Someone living paycheck to paycheck to him is about the same jump as him to Musk.
The way I always put it is the difference between $1 million and $1 billion is about $1 billion.
The difference is that he isn't exploiting the labor of others to make most of his wealth. I'm not a huge fan of most celebrities, but at least most of them are actually earning their money by generating demand for their "thing."
Very true. I like Bill Burr, but he's still on a lovely crested hill of property that is way out of scope of attainability from the average person.
I don't understand the obsession with wealth here. I feel like people are missing the point that utilizing wealth to advocate for those less fortunate is still based. Most everyone is richer than us if we know their name and chopping allies down to only poor people means that your convictions to doing what's right is contingent on meaningless values rather than class values of levels of exploitation. He makes money through his labor, just like us, it reminds me of how the internet reacted to the dock union president making bank. Your convictions end up pretty weak if a CEO could remove them by giving a raise to one person.
This is a shit fuckin take. Bill Burr made his wealth from his own labor, and he's 56. He's been a relatively famous comedian for ~20 years, touring every single year, producing tv shows and shit.
Acting as though his 15-20 million makes him not like us is some mentally ill tankie bullshit. There are hundreds of thousands of boomer and gen x millionaires who made their wealth from cheap labor, slave wages, exploiting the poor, landlording, etc, and you call out Bill Burr? Get the fuck outta here.
We need more from his class to speak up. This whole system is basically the Billionaires paying the Millionaires to keep the thousandaires hating the rest.
We need to stop acting like it's the 1950's and a million is "rich". 1 million in 1950 would be equal to 13 million today, except in 1950 you could buy a fucking mansion for ~30k, with a < 30 minute commute (the official inflation figures are oligarch propaganda and off by a factor of 5-10).
In like 30% of developed world cities a million isn't even enough to own a home without an hour plus commute. The minimum for "rich" in 2025 is a paid off home and another million in investments, which will net you about 50k a year without working (e.g. able to exit the rat race and live off capital). Even then, in the USA you need several million to buffer the likelihood of a medical condition bankrupting you...
The VAST majority of Hollywood — especially comedians and writers — are working class and poorly paid. Even the majority of the famous ones grew up relatively average/poor. Most are not nepo babies or even in the 1%. Most are allies that are silenced or neutered by studios and production companies (capitalists) out of fear of being sued or blacklisted. Only an extreme minority of them have anything near oligarch money, and none of them made that from their labor.
I'm not sure why that matters? Pretty sure he has profited off of the fruits of his labor unless he owns some kind of orphan crushing enterprise I'm not aware of.
In today's world a million dollars means that you're successful at what you do. Not that you own massive swaths of society like billionaires.
You're right, but I do think we'd see societal improvements long before we got to Bill Burr if we started slaughtering the richest from top to bottom. I bet after you take out the Forbes top 200 list, anyone with that kind of cash would be racing to give it up, or to disappear. Either way, sounds like a huge win for the world.
I don't care about that. And this just feels like trying to discredit what he's saying.