No.
It has been pointed out before that these very rich people are actually, in modern times, pretty constrained in what they can do with their wealth, unlike the super rich of olden days.
Most of their wealth is not cash in the bank earning 3%, it's the paper value of investments in companies. If Gates suddenly sold up, the price wold crash, and it wouldn't be worth a fraction of the paper value. If he tried to use the wealth in a way that attracted public criticism, he would be risking the same thing. So in practice he is subject to quite a lot of pseudo "democratic" control over what he does with it.
Contrast with the rich of the 19th century. A private individual could buy an entire country. Leopold II of Belgium owned the Congo and ran it as a private slave estate. He could invent such laws as there were. American railway barons owned large chunks of America. They were as big as the state itself.
No modern individual can do that. No one can buy sovereignty of a country. However much land they own, they are not the state, and they do not own the other people who live there.
So the question has to be viewed in the context that the wealthier a person becomes, the more constraints he encounters. Finally, as Russian oligarchs sometimes find, they can be murdered with impunity by the state they are beginning to rival.
Last edited by: Cliff Pope on Tue 15 Apr 14 at 16:01
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