I recently read an article about how grumpy billionaires have become. The men who used to boast about the length of their superyachts and how far their private jet, or jets, could fly.

They are actually becoming the laughingstock of society instead of shining examples for hardworking young people. Young people aren’t that interested anymore, more puzzled than impressed. Take a billionaire who switches off his satellite network for a country trying to defend itself against an invasion, without having to answer to anyone. I expect this to cost countless soldiers and civilians their lives. Just because it’s all part of doing business for a little club of people who can also put more than nine zeros after their net worth.

They do good things too, you know. While their friends in politics cut development aid or turn it into bilateral aid for their own benefit, they use their own foundations (with tax deductions) to create a cloud of goodness that often does reach the people named in their foundations’ objectives.

I recently bought a table at one of those charity events. Organized by a few princesses and some other not-too-bad members of the elite. Instead of bringing my business contacts in morning suits (I don’t have any), I took my children to show them how funny it all looks.

Nineteen tables at 5,000 euros each. A sports hall transformed with an extravagant amount of curtains, models, works of art and damask. A ballet performance, a well-known singer and a DJ doing a gig made up the program. Free drinks and a six- or seven-course dinner. We worked out that there probably wasn’t much left for the charity after expenses. That money had to come from an auction for which people had donated art or other objects they often had no use for anymore.

They told me the cause of the gala was the victims of the Dutch childcare benefits scandal. A scandal in which people with immigrant surnames were severely discriminated against and treated as criminals by the Dutch tax authorities. Both the subject and the kids (who we had been promised would join us at the tables) were conspicuous by their absence.

My children are interested in how you get that rich. Leaving the hardworking millionaires aside, many of those penguins (as I like to call men in morning suits) haven’t had to work hard for it. They inherited it and invested it in shares, or simply own shares in their parents’ company. And that brings me to one of the biggest flaws in the world’s system. A world slowly going down the drain, partly because you can earn more from money than from work.

The big car manufacturer General Motors announced last week that it would buy back twenty billion dollars’ worth of its own shares. It’s a complicated calculation, but it comes down to a shareholder’s stake in the company getting 40% bigger. There is less money in the company then, but in the long run it will give the shareholder more value and dividends.

No wonder the GM unions are up in arms. During negotiations over the labor agreement there was never any money, hardly any money for pay raises, and the pension provisions fall short.

Over ten years, GM’s share price rose to 258% of what it had been. Another complicated calculation. If I had bought 300,000 euros’ worth of shares ten years ago and reinvested my dividends, I would now have made around 634,000 euros in profit. To earn that kind of money, a GM employee probably would have had to work eight hours a day, five days a week, for ten years.

Of course it’s a bit cheap to start attacking shareholders. Everyone invests these days, including me. Because why work if you can earn it in your sleep? But in my view it is basically an unsustainable system. For the future.

A hundred years from now, in my books, the financial market no longer exists. Trading paper ownership is seen as something rather improper from the past. Companies belong to the people who work there, and when those people retire they enjoy a share of the profits. After that it goes back to the company. A kind of share buyback by the company for zero euros. I’ll come back to this on Thursday in my BFTF #75.

Back to the gala for a moment. My kids mostly found it funny to watch that rich people’s ball. A bit embarrassing too. My grandson particularly liked meeting a real princess. Princess Laurentien, probably the only white sheep in the royal family. His remark was priceless: “Are you really a princess? You look so normal.” I don’t think he quite recognized her designer kimono for what it was, because the princess came back to ask what he thought of her kimono. All in all, an educational evening.