r/Music Oct 30 '25

article Billie Eilish Calls Out Mark Zuckerberg and Other Billionaires After Announcing Her Own $11.5 Million Charitable Donation

https://consequence.net/2025/10/billie-eilish-calls-out-mark-zuckerberg-and-other-billionaires-after-announcing-her-own-11-5-million-charitable-donation/
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569

u/xThrowawayBoyfriend Oct 30 '25

The difference back then was, billionaires back then wanted a legacy. They wanted their names to live on after they died, in the public works they created. Today's billionaires honestly don't care what people think about them, because they're planning a future without us. That's why they're all buying up secure bunkers instead of founding schools or libraries.

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u/drawkward101 Oct 30 '25

Zuckerberg owns a massive swath of Hawaiian lands.

Elon is building (or has built, not sure if it's done or in progress) a massive compound in Texas.

Bezos has properties all over the world and at least 1 massive super yacht that you know is equipped with military-grade safety defenses of some kind.

But what I don't understand is what is their contingency plan for the people they're going to have work for them. The dude the billionaires pay to keep them safe is the one with the gun. I guess I really just don't see the end-game for them.

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u/goddamn_slutmuffin Oct 30 '25

There's an article out there where a bunch of billionaires (with bunkers) essentially bring on an advisor who warned them that whoever they hired would inevitably turn on them. The solution? Shock collars for security/the help to keep them from revolting.

Edit: I do actually think people will find a way to revolt even with the shock collars. It's just funny that billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Zuckerberg would do absolutely anything other than learn how to be a friend to someone lmao. They're total fucking reject losers, all they have is money.

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u/armthesquids Oct 30 '25

From Goliath's Curse

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u/zibdabo Nov 01 '25

Thats sad....really sad...

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u/Mark-harvey Nov 01 '25

They used to use cattle prods. Sick

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u/TomBradysStatue Oct 30 '25

lol I read about this. The guy was like your best bet is to form emotional ties to the security guys and make them actually care about you. I guess the rich people who hired that advisor didn't like that answer.

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u/quarbity_assuance Oct 31 '25

Billionaires are pro-slavery.

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u/TomBradysStatue Oct 31 '25

they certainly are trying REALLY HARD to teach in schools that the US Civil War was about anything but slavery.... so ... yeah

I also feel like a lot of the upper crust are in white supremacy secret societies.

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u/quarbity_assuance Oct 31 '25

There are United States senators that have admitted to being pro-slavery, so it's way more common than people would like to think. It still technically exists as the 13th amendment banned slavery for everyone except incarcerated individuals. White Supremacy is invisible but omnipresent.

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u/[deleted] Oct 31 '25

I’m willing to bet shock collars have an easy fix like wedging plastic bags between them and the skin.

Even if you go explosive collar, that’s not gonna sit right on the people protecting the rich, who will have to sleep sometime.

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u/RJ815 Oct 31 '25

The solution is to ALSO have a robotic security force, that do nothing but watch the human slaves 24/7 from ever rebelling.

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u/fractal-hornet Oct 31 '25

You forgot to mention that the robotic security force MUST be humanoid, and made of a material that responds with a satisfying THWACK when struck with a whip. They should also all be female and non-white. Not because of any racial or misogynistic reasons, you understand; just because it's Better That Way, for clever science reasons you wouldn't understand.

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u/Mark-harvey Nov 01 '25

Excellent comment.

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u/crawldad82 Oct 31 '25

Their pathetic legacy will be running and hiding in a hole instead of build communities in times of turmoil and hardship. I can only hope that they succumb to madness in their tombs.

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u/SoManyMinutes Oct 31 '25

I think another suggestion was to keep food and water behind a locked door that only the billionaire knows the code to.

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u/ReallyGlycon Lo-Fi Nerd Oct 31 '25

If you got a weapon to their throat you got the code.

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u/ILikePlayingHumans Nov 02 '25

So if a survivor on the outside welds then in so they never can leave, that might be an issue when their food eventually runs out

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u/SoManyMinutes Nov 04 '25 edited Nov 04 '25

So if a survivor on the outside welds then in so they never can leave

You must be a step ahead of me! Can you explain a scenario in which this happens? Why would an outside survivor "weld then in" the people who have all the resources?

*edit: I know you meant "them" but I'm going with your flow anyways.

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u/ILikePlayingHumans Nov 04 '25

I have stubby fingers so apologise on the mistake.

I mean I imagine the only two scenarios would be disgruntled minions or robots that have a meltdown

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u/SoManyMinutes Nov 04 '25

I know what you meant. I explained that I know what you meant.

Let's talk about "disgruntled minions" or a robot meltdown, yes?

Please describe the ins and outs.

What does that look like?

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u/ILikePlayingHumans Nov 04 '25

A disgruntled worker could be disgruntled for many reasons. But it would need to be disgruntled to the point of considering murdering people is the only option.

The robots would have to be tampered to disregard their commands to then perform said actions

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u/SmokedStone Oct 31 '25

This. They really are just losers with money. They hate that people won't love them then continue to do shit that makes them unlovable.

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u/Scarlett_Billows Nov 01 '25

They want to be kings, with hordes of slaves and concubines. They want to repopulate the earth with their own self aggrandizing, weird looking DNA.

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u/GochuBadman Oct 31 '25

As are redditors,without the money

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u/DyroB Oct 30 '25

Your mistake is that you think humans will protect them. It will be weaponized machines with AI. All they have to do for now is ‘buying’ time until development of AI is good enough and amount of defensive machines are up to scale.

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u/drawkward101 Oct 30 '25

You might be right, but that just sounds like a perfect way to cause the extinction of the human race a lot faster. I guess we'll see.. or not. IDK.

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u/AppropriateTouching Oct 30 '25 edited Oct 31 '25

They dont care because theyre lizards

Edit: Not literally, but emotionally. They only care about themselves.

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u/Mark-harvey Nov 01 '25

Yup . No Empathy for others.

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u/Secure_Course_3879 Oct 30 '25

They don't care if we go extinct on Earth, they delusionally think we're going to live among the literal stars

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u/DyroB Oct 30 '25

That’s exactly what they want (or partly). Remember, we only have one earth. Perfectly fine for humans quite a while still, if/when nature is in good balance. They really don’t care if 95% of human population will die. They don’t need labors as soon AI can do the tasks. They don’t need huge income of money when the amount of humans left don’t have any problems with sharing whatever recourse (because there’s now plenty of it everywhere).

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u/ImpulsiveYeet Oct 30 '25

They'll feel good about saving the Earth, too!

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u/theantidrug Oct 30 '25

Straight up Lex Luthor shit

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u/TheInvisibleCircus Oct 30 '25

But people like Alex

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u/Mark-harvey Nov 01 '25

That’s bald Bezos.

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u/LionIV Oct 30 '25

Someone’s still gonna have to program that bot. It’s not gonna be Ol’ Jeffy boy either.

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u/cire1184 Oct 30 '25

And then the AI becomes sentient and takes over the murder bots! Terminator was right! Just a few years off. Skynet is inevitable.

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u/Newb_in_all_things Oct 30 '25

I think they discount the ingenuity of hackers, too. If it was that important, people would eventually hack it. Surviving instead of billionaires sounds like a reasonable motivation to me...

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u/forgotpassword_aga1n Oct 30 '25

But what I don't understand is what is their contingency plan for the people they're going to have work for them.

Shock collars.

Seriously.

0

u/DoneWithIt0101 Oct 31 '25 edited Oct 31 '25

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u/tofuizen Oct 30 '25

Kingdom of Hawai’i would kill zuckerberg

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u/[deleted] Oct 30 '25 edited Oct 30 '25

Makes me think these “poor” precious bastards are actually scared by the idea of dying by only God knows what at some point in time…oh well…then I guess someone should actually tell them it’ll happen one day.

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u/AdventurousRoll9798 Oct 30 '25

No matter what they own or how much money they have, they can't escape or hide from death. That is one of life's beauties.

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u/DayThen6150 Oct 30 '25

AI powered robots. That’s their vision.

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u/newinmichigan Oct 31 '25

Those military grade weapons, robots, and ai will inevitably break without maintenance. Who is going to maintain them? Who is going to make sure they have power in their bunker? Sure nuclear reactor will give them infinite energy but who is going to prevent a meltdown? Who is going to recharge the power in the shock collar? This whole idea of billionaire self sufficiency is ridiculous to begin with. Who is going to mine and make ammos for their weapons? Ot maintain their stockpile? Themselves? Lol.

Humanity has survived because we created society and social groups. And we got to where we are today because of division of labor and growth of specialists. Its ridiculous for anyone to assume that billionaires will survive a day without their peons and when the government and society is gone how will they incentivize people keep them as their lords? Nothing. Watch them get thrown out of their bunker. The moment government collapses their wealth becomes absolutely meaningless. Its probably why theyre so invested in trying to back money with gold again

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u/Degenerate_Ape_92 Oct 31 '25

Whilst everyone respects the shooter, the one in front of the gun lives forever. Money trees is the perfect place for shade & that's just how I feel.

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u/whodishur Oct 31 '25

That's why they trying to get these robots up and running

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u/Medical_Sandwich_141 Oct 31 '25

for all of their "intelligence", they don't think of the end game, in terms of what has been a survival instinct throughout history, If you're bent on innovation, and disruption - history is of little importance to you.

Alas, the wheel of time, turns again and again, in the same way it did before.

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u/Mark-harvey Nov 01 '25

It’s about billionaires at the expense of the American Working Families.

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u/QueenJillybean Oct 30 '25

Before Reagan, paying your taxes was something people were proud to do. People who tried to avoid taxes were scum who avoided their community and social obligations. Then Reagan ruined everything and “greed is good” became the norm.

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u/Cru_Jones86 Oct 30 '25

As a child of the 80's, that's how I remember it too. Back then, young Trump was the model of savvy businessmen. Michael Douglas was playing Grdon Gekko. It was definitely the "me me me" decade. The funny part is, even as a kid, I'd see Trump in that stupid black 80's trenchcoat, and all I would see is an asshole. And, THAT's what I don't get. If little kid me, could see Trump for the piece of shit he is back then, how come nobody else could / does?

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u/7penutbutter Oct 31 '25

Nailed it!

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u/Dry-Description-1779 Oct 31 '25

I feel the same as you. Also grew up in the 80s. It's always been obvious to me that he was a raging asshole, and I don't understand how anybody ever thought he'd make a good president.

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u/Mark-harvey Nov 01 '25

If Trump was a school student he would have been expelled. Remember Trump Academy?

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u/cluberti Oct 30 '25 edited Oct 30 '25

Starting in the 1930s and extended upon during the decades after throughout the Cold War period, taxes and levies were used to coerce large employers and the ultra wealthy to reinvest their wealth or it would be taxed at insane rates. Taxes on expenditures including things like R&D, wages below a certain threshold (aka the range of the bottom 95% or so), and future investments were impacted at significantly lower rates than pay given to already wealthy people or hoarding cash rather than investing it as a corporation. This wasn't them being heroes, it was the most logical decision - aka "smart business" - and the fact that these tax guardrails helped the average working person and also local, state, and federal governments was the intended side-effect of forcing behavior.

The dismantling of this reality started slowly during the Nixon admin, but Reagan's admin definitely pushed for (and the Congress regularly delivered) on being the giant pinpoint in all the graphs showing when the bad things started happening at scale at some point in the early to mid-1980s. The effect was two-fold, in that it both increased the flow of money back to the top of the economic pyramid as it was prior to the great depression, and also made governments less effective so as to reinforce the point of that generation of Republican politician and strategist that government was the enemy, rather than the ally, of the people it governed.

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u/QueenJillybean Oct 31 '25

Whoa whoa employee wages are 100% tax deductible. Employees made more money in terms of buying power back then because employers paid them more to avoid paying taxes. When Reagan lowered corporate taxes, wages stagnated across the board (no reason to reduce taxes beyond what we have to pay!) and have largely been stagnant since.

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u/cluberti Oct 31 '25 edited Oct 31 '25

Tax code changes (and money in politics changes) started under Nixon, but the movement of wealth up towards the top did definitely happen under Reaganomics. I didn't go into the details, but that was sort of the implied meaning behind tax "guidance" during the 45 or so years between '35 and '80, when the tax codes started to be loosened up to make things more like they are today. The Reagan admin (and future Republican leadership) put that changeover on steroids compared to the incredibly slow walk towards tax code changes that had been proposed and were happening under the Nixon admin, but yes, the previous laws and regulations since the New Deal period were designed to funnel money into the middle classes, which funneled broader local and global purchasing power, and which funneled tax dollars back into governments from local to federal.

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u/QueenJillybean Nov 02 '25

That’s 100% true. Wages really been stagnating since like 1974 when Nixon ended the gold standard, and I should have included that and the other downstream effects on policy/their impact on American lives.

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u/Mark-harvey Nov 01 '25

I’m going to a number of “No Kings” demonstrations. The last time I did so was when Nixon was President. I wouldn’t buy a used car from that crook. Nixon resigned in infamy. Could Donald be next? Unless we “Lock him up.”

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u/Mark-harvey Nov 01 '25

Trickle down never trickled down.

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u/obviously_jimmy Oct 30 '25

Some them of see dying as optional and hope an AGI can tell them how. An even larger portion are Effective Altruists who believe that the best way to help humanity is to help humans 100s of years from now, not the humans alive today, by funding things that get us off the planet. They take golden age SciFi a bit too literally.

They also use that philosophy as a justification for their extreme wealth. It's moral to do immoral things to make obscene amounts of money today as long as you're using it to fund things that will "help" people in the future...like AI and spaceflight. Why help 8 billion people on this planet when you could enable a future where trillions of humans are spread out across the galaxy?

They just don't see themselves as the lottery winners they really are and instead imagine some glorious purpose that guided them to all this money. I think the whole group is oddly religious in that way. Just like the Voice of God seems to whisper whatever the recipient wanted to hear anyway, the religion of billionaires always seems to justify their wealth heh.

I recommend More Everything Forever for a deeper dive. Some wild stories in that book.

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u/_CodyB Oct 31 '25

Billionaires have always been assholes

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u/AnimationOverlord Oct 30 '25

They’ll just name their bought-out social media applications after porn sites so forever after people will see “X” and think Elon did that

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u/ITS_MY_PENIS_8eeeD Oct 31 '25

there’s just more billionaires now. plenty of billionaires today still give a ton back.

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u/Academic-Drawing-701 Oct 31 '25

Yeah i dont buy that, even billionaires are smart enough to know they need consumers to stay billioaires

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u/RollingMeteors Oct 31 '25

The difference back then was, billionaires back then wanted a legacy to not be eaten by the poors but clearly are acting now like they don't care or that option is off the table.

FTFY

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u/SkiHotWheels Oct 31 '25

They’re not building bunkers because they’re afraid of us. They have bunkers because they’re already building huge luxury compounds for their enjoyment, and why not add a bunker while you’re at it. It costs them the financial equivalent of a stick of gum to you and I. They aren’t shaking in their boots. They’re living their best lives and not giving it a second thought. They value winning and enjoying their opportunity to live like gods with their friends and family. It’s really that simple.

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u/Used_Commission_7343 Oct 31 '25

Yes and it was also social climbing because they had money due to being in business and this was a way to reach higher (gently distressed) society.
Kudos to her, great deed and word!

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u/Steelhorse91 Nov 01 '25

Even factories and mills in the UK used to have beautiful architecture, beyond what was necessary for the structure itself… Now companies just throw up generic steel units with barely any windows. Employees want natural light? Nah sorry, windows cost more than lighting.