My grandparents were not billionaire-rich, but still quite wealthy. They were huge proponents for investing in the community and would often tell us “high taxes are a good thing. The higher your taxes are means you made more money that year and more people will be helped from you earning money!”

But, because they weren’t billionaire-rich, most of their big projects required help from other investors who inevitably always fucked them over. My grandfather tried building an area that would be driven by big businesses and be primarily filled with inexpensive starter-homes. His intention was to attract young talent to the area and help families find success. His business partners eventually pushed him out and now it’s one of the more expensive parts of town that’s constantly under construction. The whole area is a massive blemish on the face of an ugly city.

Since the late '80s, my grandparents had been trying to get investors to lobby for/fund a trans-Texas railway, but the airline lobby was always too big to tackle. In the early 2000s, not long post 9/11, he started making a lot of headway since there was a lot of fear around airplanes. A few days after after returning from a big meeting in Dallas where reps from Southwest Airlines were infuriated listening to arguments about how the railway would primarily serve people who couldn’t afford to fly, my grandparents were shocked to find out that Southwest had placed them on their no-fly list. Because of the huge reaction to 9/11 and the fact that airlines found themselves more empowered instead of punished, getting placed on Southwest’s no-fly list landed them on a federal no-fly list and they had to sit through a lot of very intimidating interviews to get taken back off.

So where are those billionaire hype-men? They don’t exist. The closest thing to that are collections of millionaires getting shit on by billionaires. And for the record, fuck my grandparents’ disproportionate capital. They tried their best to do the best they could with their money, but what’s the fucking point in building a community center to “help those less fortunate” when the most destitute will be forced to move and continue to starve? Wealth vacuums are the craziest fucking things to watch people try to justify.