Greed at the top

To my mind, there is something vaguely indecent about the boss - the boss that is, not the owner - of a large company paying himself of the order of $100m a year. What on earth can anyone - let alone someone near the normal retiring age - do with so much money? What on earth is the point? 

There is also an element of nonsense about it. Such bosses are apt to be the sort of people who work all the time, more or less all their waking hours. The nearest they get to leisure is strutting about the executive floor of their tower block and feeling very important. Perhaps screaming at their secretaries and aides. So no time to actually spend any of this money.

One wheeze that occurs to me is that such bosses should go in for competitive donations to charitable causes. Or perhaps competitive donations to the taxman? Or to the Bill & Melinda foundation?

From where I jump to the ancient Californians who were very into amassing money and showing it off - in the form of large numbers of flawless, identical shells. Amassing and showing off was the point, rather than spending it and when you died it was buried with you. Or perhaps destroyed. Competitive destruction of money being an important element of a high status funeral. For a slightly more prosaic take on all this, see reference 2.

Which brings me to another wheeze. Money is all dated and expires after so many months or years. So you don't just have X pounds in your bank account anymore, it is all organised by date of issue. With expiry making it much harder to accumulate lots of it.

References

Reference 1: https://www.gatesfoundation.org/. Bill and Melinda.

Reference 2: The origin and use of shell bead money in California - Lynn H. Gamble - 2020.