May 10, 2021--Frisky Billionaires

I prefer my billionaires to be boring. They run the country and the world and should take that work seriously. No fooling around. Especially in public.

So I was upset Saturday when Tesla-SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who is the second wealthiest man in the world, worth at least $191 billion, turned up on Saturday Night Live as guest host, cracking jokes and singing and dancing. He was decent but really?

You can thus understand how Bill and Melinda Gates's break up also upset me. Bill, the fourth richest, worth $130 billion, is needed to help us understand how the world works. Especially now when everything is out of kilter. But the Gateses are creating a mess. Divorcing. Now I fear that white-supremasists will see Gates's upending as evidence that he has in fact been running the world in cahoots with George Soros.  

I didn't experience even one moment of schadenfreude as the result of this--taking pleasure when the rich and powerful are brought down or held up to ridicule. We need to have the illusion that someone knows what's going on.

I'll restrain myself then from satirizing Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, Amazon's founder, who has more than $191 billion left, even after writing a check for $60 billion to his divorcing wife.

Why this hesitancy when it comes to Bezos? Didn't he run off with a glamorous TV personality, Lauren Sanchez, after abandoning his wife of nearly 30 years? The ultimate cliché? And post images of his privates on the Internet?

He did but, again, he runs the world's consumer economy and that amounts to more than 50 percent of American's discretionary spending. Though I prefer his keeping an eye on the business, not Ms Sanchez or the 400-foot yacht he is currently ogling and about to buy. 

And we are now learning that Bill Gates has had a funky deal with his wife, Melinda, for decades that allowed him to spend one weekend a year with an old girlfriend. His version of Same Time Next Year. Maybe he should watch it. It might bring him back to his senses. And calm me down.

Musk also has an open marriage and apparently doesn't sleep except on his office floor curled up under his desk. He married his first or second wife at least three times after frequent divorcing and remarrying. So he has first, second, third, and fourth wives but with a total of two people. Or something. 

I almost forgot the world's sixth wealthiest man--90-year-old Warren Buffett. He has $110 billion in assets and his own version of an open marriage. While his wife was alive, for decades they remained married but he lived openly with another woman.

I suspect like the rest of us he heard that Jennifer Lopez, in a good move, just dumped A-Rod.

If Buffet gets to her before her previous boyfriend, Ben Afflack, we'll be able to refer them as J-Buff.