Billionaires are also set apart by the fact that an average person cannot reasonably aspire to be one. There are an estimated 22 million millionaires in the United States alone, more than 8 percent of the adult population. Becoming a millionaire is simple, if unimaginable for many: graduate from college with no debt, get a $50,000 starting salary at 23, save 8 percent per year, and get 2 percent raises every year for the rest of your working life. By the time you’re 65, you’ll have $2.7 million socked away, ready to burn on a long-term care facility. There is no equivalent path for billionaires. Culturally, they not only possess but represent the wealth that can be neither justified nor “earned”: the vast and malignant pools of overaccumulation that often result from long periods of pacifically exporting conflict to the periphery of the world system. When Bezos founded Amazon in 1994, there was no good reason to think that it would beat out the hundreds of other tech companies to become the world’s largest merchant monopolist, but the possibility that such a mega-capital would emerge is baked right into the technology. Under modern-day capitalism, becoming a billionaire is just something that happens to some people.