Stop Calling Them Billionaires. Start Calling Them Predators
The Predator Class. They extract. Corrupt. Bet on catastrophic outcomes—wars, crop failures, housing market collapse, climate chaos—profit from suffering. They don't build. They acquire what others built to strip it for parts. They don't invest in communities. They buy infrastructure for their enrichment. They're not job creators. They're rent collectors—of labor, attention, data, government, future.
They've learned the most powerful tool available isn't actually their hoarded cash. It's fragmentation of language. Our inability to call them out clearly together. Yes, Cliff Schecter's messaged it for months. Ellie Leonard's revealed crimes and cravenness in Epstein Files emails. It's time the rest of us caught up. Not as a rhetorical flourish, but precise description. We're labeling them what they are: predators. By definition, a threat.
What Epstein did—grooming, exploitation, networking powerful men who partook in barbarity and protected him—isn't a metaphor for what this class does to us all. It's the same instinct, calculus, belief expressed in many arenas. Some people exist to be used. Power confers the right to take. Accountability's for other people.