And no, your favorite pop star is not on the list.
Written by Elif Idil Uluçay
The Wall Street Journal recently named Billie Eilish as the winner of the Music Innovator of the Year award. During her acceptance speech the singer urged others in the room to donate more, pointing the finger specifically at the billionaires in the crowd. “If you are a billionaire, why are you a billionaire?” she asked. Many sources reported that Mark Zuckerberg, who has a net worth of 217 billion dollars, did not clap along with the rest of the crowd at the end of the singer’s speech. Billie Eilish’s simple act of encouraging the super wealthy to give back to the community sparked yet another online debate, as many users on X, really empathized with billionaires in the room and felt the need to defend their honor, while others turned the call for action into a fan-war between pop stars.
The long-discussed ”ethical billionaire” debate begs the question: do we really comprehend how much a billion is? The answer, unfortunately, is no. Humans aren’t wired to grasp extreme numbers. The bigger the figure gets, the harder it becomes for our brains to truly comprehend it. Close your eyes and imagine a field, filled with a million people. Can you even do that?
Let’s put things into perspective: one million seconds is about eleven days and thirteen hours, while one billion seconds is more than thirty one years. I haven’t even been alive for that long. If you were given a million dollars tomorrow and spent a thousand dollars everyday, you would run out of money before the fourth year. With a billion dollars it would take you roughly 2,740 years to spend it all – we are currently in the year 2025 by the way. Following the same logic, if Mark Zuckerberg spent a million dollars everyday, it would take him around 595 years to run out of money. A stack of a million sheets of paper would be approximately 130 meters tall, while a stack of a billion sheets would reach 130.000 meters, tall enough to break the atmosphere. If you earned 100,000 a year, it would take 10,000 years to make a billion.
We can find countless examples to help visualize the numbers, but the point stands that we cannot even truly wrap our minds around the scale of such wealth, not to mention the inherent power that comes with it. Maybe that’s why we struggle to hold billionaires accountable. Maybe it is not just the public, but the billionaires themselves lose perspective on what their wealth could achieve. And maybe it is worth wondering: at what point does it all stop being about comfort, success, or hard work, and start being about power and greed?
Once wealth reaches a point where it can reshape entire systems, the question of ethics becomes impossible to ignore. Granted, no one has the obligation to give away their own property. I have no objection to that principle, but does the principle still hold when someone has more than “enough” to live in comfort for the rest of their life while still leaving behind a fortune that their great-grandchildren could never spend? Can that amount of money come without any responsibility? Or does wealth that immense start to blur the line between having and taking?
What does “enough” even mean for someone with limitless wealth? For most people, “enough” means stability, comfort, safety, the ability to live life without the worry of losing it all. However the concept of enough shifts once your basic needs, your luxuries, and even your dreams are covered a thousand times over. At one point, “enough” stops being about survival or satisfaction. It starts to blur into identity, becoming a measure of power, influence, control. Growth starts to be a goal in itself. The number written next to the name on some “world’s richest people” list starts to define everything about that person.
Imagine having the ability to save countless lives, reverse years of environmental damage, and feed millions with one donation you make. Imagine knowing that you could actually change the world. That kind of power can inspire incredible good, and at the same time, distort one’s entire perception of good itself.
And this is where philanthropy enters the conversation, not as an obligation, but as a choice. The undeniable fact is that philanthropy can lead to extraordinarily good outcomes. Countless research, scholarship programs, and innovative initiatives exist today because of it. In many ways, this shows that sharing wealth for greater purposes can create real, lasting change. Still, giving back on that scale is not simple. Where the wealthy choose to forward their donations can shape public opinion, affect government policies, and even transform industries. When a single act of giving can change lives, how can we ever be sure what truly drives it? Whatever the reason, one thing seems certain: even the choice to give is shaped by the privilege of having more than most ever will.
This simple call for empathy that Billie Eilish made quickly turned into an online spectacle. The focus shifted from her words to the guest list, who was in the room, how Mark Zuckerberg might have felt, and which pop star donates more. A moral conversation became a show for the internet, a trending topic, for all the wrong reasons.
Maybe people are inclined to defend billionaires, whether it’s Mark Zuckerberg or Taylor Swift, because they like to believe they’d act differently if they ever had that kind of money. Maybe it’s tied to the hope that one day they will get to be the winners of this game that we are all forced to play. But the truth is, the average person is far closer to losing everything than to owning everything. And maybe that’s why the idea of an “ethical billionaire” feels impossible, because no one becomes a billionaire without standing on the labor, the exhaustion, and the underpayment of others – not even your favorite pop star. Wealth that vast isn’t harmless, it’s built on imbalance.
So when Billie Eilish asked, “If you are a billionaire, why are you a billionaire?” maybe the question wasn’t meant to provoke, but to remind that no one should have the power to change the world and still choose not to.