Seeing a lot of discussions on the internet, articles and talking to people in my life, I do not think that most people understand how billionaires or even millionaires work.
Here is how people usually think about them – They have the money in the bank and can spend them as they want. They are greedy because they sit on a shitload of cash that could help someone else, and they will never be able to spend the money anyway, so they are bad people.
In reality, no one has that much cash. When media talk about billionaires, they talk about net worth, which is a fancy word for saying how much you own in assets minus how much you are in debt.
You can own different stuff. Cash for sure, but also investments, stocks, bonds, houses, cars, ships and whatever else you can think of, even your brand name can have worth in millions.
Holding billions in cash is not how people are billionaires. They usually own a lot of stocks in few really successful companies. And if the company goes under, so does their wealth.
Also, they cannot just cash out all the money and start spending it. In theory, yes, but if a major investor would start selling all his stocks at once, the price would go rapidly down.
It also requires that there are enough investors with cash at hand to buy all that stock. Which is rarely the case.
Another reason why they cannot do it, is because if they started spending the money on material stuff like food, houses, cars or others at that scale, inflation will kick in. Stock value is not cash, flooding the market with fresh money stored in stocks and converting them to consumption will simply change supply and demand dynamics.
So even if a billionaire wanted to spend all his money on feeding the poor, the price of food would just go up and in the end would probably just generate more poor and hungry people unable to afford food on their own.
Billionaires also do not usually use their stocks to get cash, as selling them generates tax obligations. They use the stocks as collateral against loans, so actually a lot of “rich” people are quite in debt and if their stocks bombs, they usually lose their houses, cars and everything else, which happens quite often.
I am not defending shit rich people doing bad in the world, but understanding the basic dynamics before you start to criticize something should be the bare minimum.