Let’s start locally with this one. Mike Lazaridis of Blackberry fame is still a billionaire. He started and named the Perimeter Institute which is the premiere physics institute in Canada. He used the name Perimeter because he expected that the science to be done there would be on the edge of known science. It’s acronym is PI which brings fond memories of the first constant we were likely to know. To me this sounds like a Dad joke but it is a joke nevertheless.
Mike Bloomberg is at a very high risk of being the joke Democratic candidate. Even if he pulls himself up by the bootstraps, he has already made a joke out of most of the rules that candidates have to live by. It’s surprising how much a few millions can actually buy in politics.
Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame made the same joke politicians have been making for the last few decades. Instead of delivering quality jobs, he had virtually every large metropolitan area vying to be the second Amazon headquarters with about 50 000 new jobs on tap. This would be wonderful if Amazon was known for creating only good jobs. But they are not. Some jobs might indeed pay well but I heard the majority of the jobs would be poor paying.
The quantity of the jobs appealed to the politicians of almost every large city in North America. After all they’ve been promoting jobs, jobs, jobs for decades even if they end up being temporary or part time. Politicians know the quantity not quality joke, too.
Elon Musk’s recent joke is calling the spaceship part of his rocket/spaceship, Starship. Even with some improvements in longevity, we won’t be alive to see Starship reach the closest star. Indeed all the plans for Starship currently involve the Sun and its environs – not other stars. His name overreaches quite a lot.
To my mind the funniest joke of any billionaire is the one that Bill Gates made when he said he was now going to give most of his wealth to charity. Ha! Why does Bill Gates’ wealth continue to grow then? Granted he’s let other billionaires surpass his wealth but he aims to be super rich for the rest of his lifetime and I’ll bet that his kids will inherit billions of dollars if he ever dies. Not the 10 million dollars he alluded to leaving them some years ago.
But the biggest joke of a billionaire is, no surprise, Donald Trump. That is of course if he even is a billionaire.
