Warren Buffet & the End of Frugality, Honesty, and the Value of a Dollar

"We were promised that a rising tide would lift all boats. A rising tide has lifted all yachts." ~ Warren Buffet, 2015

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Warren Buffett

"We were promised that a rising tide would lift all boats. A rising tide has lifted all yachts."

So said Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffet in a 2012 interview with Charlie Rose

Warren Buffet has practiced what he preached. He still doesn’t own a yacht. He still lives in the same modest home he bought 65 years ago, in central Omaha, Nebraska.

At Berkshire Hathaway's 2024 annual meeting, he pointed out that if 800 companies had paid their fair share, everyday Americans wouldn't owe a dime in federal taxes. His own company, he noted, paid over $5 billion at a 21% rate for 2023—and if Berkshire can do it, why can't others?

Federal Reserve data shows about 93% of U.S. households' stock market wealth is held by the top 10%, with the richest 1% owning 54% of public equity markets—a record high.

The top 1% continues to see their wealth grow at historic levels while middle-class workers deal with rising costs and a tax system that favors those who already have the most.

Almost all the new billionaire boys have yachts now. Ridiculous yachts where they try to outdo one another. Jeff Bezos’s yacht cost a whopping $500 million to build.

They’re all buying up property, building massive, high-tech-security complexes with luxurious, underground bunkers to ensure the safety of their families, I suppose for when the masses turn against them. Others have bought citizenships in faraway pristine lands like New Zealand, where they can escape to if necessary. The Silicon Valley crowd have even invested $800 million in buying up land to build their own city in Northern California called “California Forever.”

Incredibly, the more the billionaires flaunt their wealth, the more they bask in hero worship.

I didn’t think there could be anything worse than the celebrity worship we saw in recent years with the likes of Kim Kardashian. But the rise of this new billionaire hero-worship takes the cake.

It seems incredible that they richer they grow, the more people believe their lies that don’t worry, we’re going to pull you up with us, just hang on, just make a few more sacrifices and, oh, in the meantime, make sure to buy our latest upgraded device with its new AI agent built in so you never have to think another independent thought, because the one we sold you last year won’t work anymore.

And look, there’s absolutely no conflict of interest when the president of the United States lines a bunch of Tesla’s outside the White House, setting the example of buying one so that everyone else will run out and buy one, too, since, obviously you all have a credit line, as if you aren’t already drowning in a pile of debt.

Sure enough, thanks to Trump’s endorsement – and promise to buy a Tesla Model S – Tesla shares climbed 3.8% on Tuesday, heading in the opposite direction of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which dipped 478 points (1.4%), draining the 401Ks of everyday Americans.

Along with that extraordinary sales pitch on the White House lawn, Elon Musk has signaled that he wants to put $100 million into groups controlled by the Trump political operation.

“It is unheard-of for a White House staffer, even one with part-time status, to make such large political contributions to support the agenda of the boss. But there has never been someone in the direct employ of an administration like Mr. Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, who is leading Mr. Trump’s aggressive effort to shrink the federal government, the Department of Government Efficiency.”

“The groups that are leading Mr. Trump’s outside activities include Make America Great Again Inc., a super PAC, and Securing American Greatness, a political nonprofit. It is not clear if the money would go to those groups or to a new entity the Trump team could create.” (1)

Once the economy has been fixed by DOGE firing millions of average Americans, AI will take over those jobs.

That is, AI built by the billionaires who fired you. The ultimate goal of Musk and DOGE is to replace “the human workforce with machines,” says a US official monitoring the cost-cutting activities. “Everything that can be machine-automated will be.”

As one example, an estimated 500,000 federal jobs could be impacted over the next five years, including positions at the IRS, Social Security Administration, and Veterans Affairs. AI chatbots and machine-learning algorithms are already being tested for handling inquiries, claims processing, and basic regulatory enforcement.

If you want to find out how great AI will be at taking over from humans, read 32 times artificial intelligence got it catastrophically wrong. Or you can just think of the last time you had to call any company about anything, and you couldn’t reach a real person, and the machine gave you the run-around and drove you crazy.

Universal High Income

But don’t worry because once you lose your job, you will live off your—get this, not your universal “basic” income but your universal “high” income, as promised by Elon Musk. And yes, okay, he admits it will make you “feel useless” but “you won’t have a choice.” Anyway, there’s pills for your depression, which your AI agent will remind you to take, and you will have plenty of free time (like all day and night) to spend entertaining your deadened mind on the devices that will be “telepathically” connected to your brain, with your brain computer interface (BCI).

Telepathy is the Answer

Elon Musk’s brain implant company, Neuralink, has filed applications with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to exclusively own the names Telepathy, Telekinesis, and others for future products.

I wrote about Musk’s Telepathy here, where I asked the question: Do we have the right to NOT have our brains read—or is it already too late to ask that question?

In an illustrated explainer from 2017, Musk raved about thought communication between people:

“If I were to communicate a concept to you, you would essentially engage in consensual telepathy. You wouldn’t need to verbalize unless you want to add a little flair to the conversation or something, but the conversation would be conceptual interaction on a level that’s difficult to conceive of right now.”

Guess what? You will no longer need to go outside, and you will no longer even need to talk. You can just sit there like a vegetable and communicate “telepathically” with the help, of course, of Elon Musk’s “Grok” and your AI agent.

More recently, Musk discussed Neuralink’s telepathic ambitions on the Lex Fridman Podcast in August 2024. Humans can communicate telepathically with one another, he said. “Provided they have—they want—a Neuralink too.”

Want to have, or have to have?

Oh, come on, nobody’s forcing you to have a smart phone, right? Except you can no longer do anything, you can’t even have a job, without one.

Musk is determined that eventually EVERYONE will get brain implants, enabling humans to achieve “symbiosis” with artificial intelligence.

He’d already spelled it out in his Neuralink Launch Event 5 years ago. And yet still people insist that he’s really good at heart. He has no desire to control YOUR brain. He just wants to fix everything—not for his benefit, but for yours.

Rare Earth Minerals

Mineral-rich regions of China with poisoned water and soil have caused abnormal disease rates in “cancer villages” where residents work the mines, too poor to leave.

Oh, and you know why we need all those rare earth minerals and metals and such, right? For all the technology you need to buy from the billionaires. Also, for that wonderful dream of colonizing Mars—after we’ve completely destroyed earth, that is, by mining all the resources that we need in order to get there.

You know that’s why we don’t mine for those resources in the United States, right? Because the process is so horrifically polluting. That’s why we make deals with countries that are so desperate (think Ukraine) that they are willing to destroy their land and put the lives of their people in danger so we can feel like we are on the moral high ground—as we greedily buy the latest device mined from their blood, sweat and tears.

Ukraine hasn’t got a leg to stand on, but Greenland is still fighting. They want, horror of all horrors, to be independent.

Greenland’s elections

Just yesterday, the party that favors a gradual path to Greenland's independence from Denmark won a surprise victory in parliamentary elections. The center-right Demokraatit Party has pushed back against Trump's rhetoric, saying it is for Greenlanders to decide the future of the strategically important territory, which holds large reserves of the rare earth minerals needed to make everything from mobile phones to renewable energy technology. (3)

If developed, Greenland could meet at least 25 percent of global rare earth demand well into the future. In competition with China, American billionaire companies have been buying up interests in Greenland’s mineral resources. Billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, and Bill Gates.

Trump has promised Greenlanders, "We will keep you safe, we will make you rich, and together, we will take Greenland to heights like you have never thought possible before.”

"We strongly support your right to determine your own future, and if you choose, we welcome you into the United States of America," Trump said.

After which he added, "I think we're going to get it, one way or the other, we're gonna get it."

Really, one way or the other?

I don’t know what’s happened to this country. I must say, I had some hope for Donald Trump. But that was when he spoke with the voice of the people, and now he speaks with the voice of the billionaires.

If you truly believe in freedom, if you truly believe in honesty, and in training your children up in the right way they should go, you will not be fooled by this disturbing twist that the Make America Great Again movement has taken.

I don’t need any promises from the wealthiest people on the planet that I will “get rich.” I know they are lies. I don’t care about “riches” anyway. That’s how they buy you, by telling you that the more beholden you are to them, the more you buy of the stuff they sell you, the happier you will be. But all they will ever give you is more of the same old nothingness that will make you keep on buying more to fill the void.

Speaking as a woman who hasn’t bought all the Botox and fillers and what-not, the simple life makes me happier than Jeff Bezos’s plastic-faced girlfriend Lauren Sanchez with the scientifically engineered body that almost looks like she is already half robot. I have not personally seen her up close, but I have friends who have and tell me that she looks downright scary.

Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez

I will probably make some people mad here (what else is new) but I stand with Greenland. Because guess what, maybe they want to keep their riches for themselves. Maybe they value independence over selling themselves for a pot of stew.

In that 2012 interview, Warren Buffet said, “I have every possession I want. I have a lot of friends who have a lot more possessions. But in some cases, I feel the possession possess them, rather than the other way around.”

Now, I have never met Warren Buffett, and I am sure he has a lot of faults. And I understand how some people think I shouldn’t use him as an example, so I am adding this little tidbit of information to this essay, that was an answer to a valid comment below:

I know there is plenty of criticism of Warren Buffett. The thing is, can you fault anything that I have said here, or any of his advice?

From my own experience, I was married into California "old money" (as old as it can get in California which isn't that old) and I can tell you, the surface hid a multitude of sins, I've written a bit about that tragedy elsewhere. They were so stingy, the joke at the LA Country Club was that you could torture the Leimert men on the rack and they would never admit they even had any money.

It was the great-grandfather who made the fortune, from a time when people valued a dollar. He built Leimert Park in Los Angeles, and it was very forward-thinking at the time. But it was only for Whites of course, because that's how it was back then, so I could fault him for that. The irony is that it is now filled with Blacks and is a Black cultural center. I could fault the Leimert men for a lot of things. I’m sure Walter Hubert Leimert I's wife, who had been a Ziegfield Follies girl and then went on to write a column for the Los Angeles Times, could have given me a mouthful if she had lived long enough, and I could have returned the favor.

I am not in any way naive about any of these people. However, if I had a choice between spending a couple of hours with Buffett and hearing his stories and getting his advice, I'd much rather do that than spend a couple of hours with one of the new billionaires. That's all I'm saying.

There’s no doubt in my mind that when this 94-year-old billionaire is gone, we will have lost the last remnants of the old-school meaning of success based on frugality, honesty, and the value of a dollar.

Tell any kid they need to value a dollar, and they will give you a blank stare before quickly returning to whatever entertainment you distracted them from on their technological devices that they can no longer live without.

Make no mistake, it’s all going to fall like a house of cards. Anyone who says they have “all the cards” and you don’t have any is just another bully determined to take you for all your worth.

“But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition.” ~ I Timothy 6:9