The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article detailing spending by Leon Black, a billionaire who had hired Jeffrey Epstein to run his finances. Black was the co-founder and former CEO of Apollo Global Management, a publicly traded private equity firm with nearly $1 trillion (yes - trillion) in client capital under management. Interestingly and perhaps - or perhaps not - unrelated, Black was right hand man to disgraced junk-bond financier Michael Milken at Drexel Burnham Lambert in the late 1970s-1990s.

You can access the WSJ article HERE.

Let’s be clear up front. Leon Black is just a pedestrian billionaire. Per the WSJ article, at the time that his finances in the article are revealed (2014-2015), he was worth an estimated $5 billion. Also in the article, according to Forbes, that estimate has increased to around $14 billion today.

Pffft. That level of wealth makes him a mere pretender when compared to the likes of Bezos, Musk, Ellison and Zuckerberg.

Remember my math question? Q: If someone earned $1 million tax free and was able to keep it all every year, how long would it take to amass $400 billion. A: 400,000 years. Well, in the case of Leon Black in 2015, the answer would have been a measly 5,000 years. We can all aspire to earning $1 million for 5,000 years, right? Especially if, according to AI evangelists, we can transfer our consciousness into computers and live forever (sarcasm, people; sarcasm).

But I digress.

Nonetheless, it’s instructive to take a quick dive into Black’s spending and lifestyle. Per the Article: “Business investments including his Apollo shares and stakes in Apollo funds accounted for $2.3 billion of his assets. His art collection, rare-book collection and other personal items were worth $2.8 billion. He also had seven homes, 11 cars, a Gulfstream jet and a Benetti yacht.”

Seven homes. I’m sure he needs them to be happy and spends a little over 1 1/2 months at each one. 11 cars because it’s really boring driving the same car for more than a month at a time. and, not to be left out, the requisite Benetti yacht (currently costing somewhere in the $100 million range).

Even more instructive are Black’s family spending habits for the first two months of 2015 (for comparison purposes, the average per capita household income in 2015 in the U.S. was about $48,000):

• $67,000 on wine and liquor (because one can’t only drink Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and buy wine from Costco)

• $35,000 on clothing (we all need to refresh our wardrobe regularly, don’t we?)

And, of course:

• $3,000 on flowers (because not everyone has a green thumb)

I want to be absolutely clear. Everyone (or arguably most people) would love to achieve a level of financial comfort that would make their lives more secure. Me and spouse Wypoxic absolutely fall into that category.

But I can also tell you that I grew up in one of the most well-off suburbs of New York City and then started my career in finance in NYC (disclaimer: I quickly realized that wasn’t me and traded the promises of financial glory for the eminently more satisfying rewards of living a more modest life of exploration and activity in the mountain west). I’ve known a boatload of uber-wealthy families, and I can attest - from that probably non-statistically valid yet real number of families - that egregious wealth is actually negatively correlated with happiness.

In addition, I’ll repeat the quote I posted the other day from Louis Brandeis (a member of SCOTUS from 1916-1939) “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

And a more recent take from AOC where she states, “The destruction of our rights and democracy is directly tied to the growing and extreme wealth inequality that has bee building for years in America…” (link here: www.dailymotion.com/video/x9hvztc)

I write about this issue repeatedly because as I say again and again, while climate change is the world’s existential issue, gross inequality is the issue that more often than not results in abrupt (and often times violent) societal disruption.

We need to find a path to reducing inequality and, frankly. pursuing a society that does not allow for the creation of billionaires.