A little over a week ago, Billie Eilish took to the stage at the Wall Street Journal Magazine’s Innovator Awards to accept the prize for Music Innovator. Just moments before her acceptance speech, Stephen Colbert introduced Eilish with her pledge to donate earnings from her Hit Me Hard and Soft Tour. According to Colbert’s introduction, these proceeds, which total at $11.5 million, will be used to “support organizations, projects, and voices dedicated to food equity, climate justice, reducing carbon pollution, and combating the climate crisis.”
When it was time for Billie Eilish to come up and address the crowd herself, she utilized the time she had for altruistic purposes, “calling out” some of the big billionaires in the room. She didn’t hold back, telling the audience, “Love you all, but there are a few people in here that have a lot more money than me. If you’re a billionaire, why are you a billionaire? No hate, but yeah, give your money away, shorties.” Billie Eilish said this, referring to a few particular people in the room. Among some of those who made it onto the star-studded guest list were notable billionaires Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan, and George Lucas.Â
It’s rather difficult to conceptualize just how big the wealth inequality is between billionaires and the average American. To put into context the drastic difference between being a part of the top 2% and part of the top of the top 1%: a million seconds is roughly 11.5 days, while a billion seconds is approximately 31.7 years. Someone with a million dollars spending $1,000 a day would be destitute in less than three years, while someone with a billion could spend that same $1,000 for 2,740 years. A billionaire has about 1,000 times the wealth of a millionaire. The 800 billionaires in the United States hold 3.8% of the nation’s wealth, which seems statistically insignificant until you take into consideration that the rest of the hundreds of millions of Americans combined only hold 2.5% of the nation’s wealth. A billion dollars is so much money that it seems nearly impossible to spend it all in one lifetime.
While it may be true that billionaires don’t have access to all of their money as liquid assets, they still have an exorbitant amount of cash to go around. If billionaires hoard their wealth rather than use it to engage with the economy, they have the potential to hurt the economy. Elon Musk, who is currently the richest man in the world, has a net worth of about $469 billion. The World Economic Forum states that, as estimated by the World Food Programme, just $6.6 billion could end up providing aid to tens of millions of people in need. Not to mention that this money can also be purposed toward climate action, housing, sustainable energy, and research. In the past, billionaires like Andrew Carnegie have dedicated their money to philanthropy. Carnegie helped build public libraries, universities, and various educational institutions all over the world.
The only way to keep being a billionaire is to sit on wealth that you could never possibly use. This is money that could instead be used to help the global community. People from Taylor Swift all the way up to Mark Zuckerberg could do more to give back. So to all the billionaires out there, as Billie Eilish said, “[…] give your money away, shorties.”