
What if billionaires could live forever? - pmoriarty
http://www.dw.com/en/what-if-billionaires-could-live-forever/a-42840013?maca=en-rss-en-all-1573-rdf
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sytelus
Looking at some examples, many billionaires are doubling their wealth every 10
years on inflation adjusted dollars. Some are obviously much less successful.
But there is a good chance that small group of billionaire can turn in to
trillionair in just a century.

This amount of wealth is sort of a tipping point because it is enough wealth
to outright buy a large portion of some region in a troubled country including
autonomy that allows to establish a new country. Another alternative could be
to use that amount of wealth to purchase politicians across the world and
twist the laws according to one's dearly held ideology. Yet another option
could be use wealth in major advancements such as building generational
spaceships or curing long standing deceases. Depending on who those lucky
billionaires are you could fair really well or get completely screwed, just
like with monarchies.

However even scarier thing is that in yet another century you could have
people owning "petillionair" or 10^15 inflation adjusted dollars assuming they
don't max out like in Moor's law due to upper ceiling on productivity of rest
of the people. If exercised effectively by developing well disciplined army
equipped with deadly weapons, this can actually bring back true monarchies and
world conquerors with some rouge groups fighting against it. At this level of
wealth, the desires won't be more wealth but more power. Hollywood was right
all along :).

Exponential laws are super interesting and this article has started lots of
thoughts...

