The above scene has always stuck with me since I saw the original film.

You can literally feel the resentment that pours through Anne Hathaway’s delivery of her character’s (Catwoman’s) line.

And though Bruce Wayne (Batman) certainly wasn’t the exploitative type of billionaire, the larger point spoke to the current reality in the country at that time in 2012. That is, the gap between what the rich paid themselves and what the poor ended up getting was already getting huge.

And today, that gap has gotten even worse.

Indeed, according to Federal Reserve data, in 2012 (at the time of the film), the richest 1 percent held 28% of the nation’s total wealth, while the bottom half held roughly 2.5% to 3% of the wealth. Today, the top 1 percent own 33 percent of the wealth, while the share of wealth held by the bottom 50 percent hasn’t changed.

Think about that for a second. Roughly 3 million people have more than 10x the wealth of 132 million people.

Don’t kid yourself. That expansion of wealth by the top 1 percent didn’t happen by accident. The people in power, the company/business owners, the CEOs and other top executives rigged the system to pay themselves (or keep) more and more of it over time. Meanwhile, they made decisions not to increase, or to minimally increase, the pay of the lowest 50 percent.

Want another fun stat?

From 1978–2024, big-company CEO compensation shot up 1,094%, compared with a 26% increase in a typical worker’s compensation, and is now 281 times that of the average worker,  according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Once and for all, we as ordinary people need to dispel this idea that immigrants, or the poor, or people of color are the ones stealing from us, either our jobs or via government fraud or waste.[1]

It’s very clear from the data who stole from us/you, the average person. The richest did.

The Lack of Character and Social Responsibility Among the Ultra-Rich

I know some people out there might think I’m anti-corporation, anti-growth, or anti-capitalist, but nothing could be further from the truth. What I don’t like (and what I think decent people don’t like) is the economic extraction that has been occurring by the richest among us, as well as their willingness to do whatever it takes to hold onto those extractive gains – engage in misdirection, for example, by pointing the finger at immigrants and the poor as the cause of economic disparity. Or, buying their own tax cuts through campaign donations. Or the fact that they enriched themselves at the expense of their workers. Or that they have essentially enabled villains in power and have refused to stand up for the right thing.

Meanwhile, what are all our amazing billionaires currently up to?

Well, they’re all trying to stay safe:

• • Mark Zuckerberg has been building a bunker at his 1,400-acre compound on the Hawaiian island of Kauai and investing in other properties in California with underground shelters.
  • Investor Peter Thiel decamped from the United States to go to Argentina, partly due to safety concerns. And he’s buying property, like other billionaires, in New Zealand, thought to be the “wink wink” place to ride out the apocalypse.
  • Larry Ellison, similarly, is positioned to ride out any global crisis through his Lanai resort.

And then, the crazy part? It’s not just the fact that the rich are worried about the wealth gap and the common people rising up against them for that. It’s AI too.

Remember, this is the very technology that the richest themselves have been pushing to implement, the technology that allows them to make more money individually, while slashing jobs. It’s now a source of anxiety for them?  

Indeed, many have long been worried about the sheer speed of the progression of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), the state at which AI matches human intelligence. Let’s consider one of the more seemingly ethical rich, too: Ilya Sutskever, chief scientist and a co-founder of OpenAI who left in 2024.

According to a book by journalist Karen Hao, Mr Sutskever suggested to colleagues in 2023 that they should dig an underground shelter for the company’s top scientists before such a powerful technology was released on the world.

So, a technology that the richest among us built, which no one asked for and is currently being used by them to make more money while reducing the need to employ others, is something they now want to run from?

It would be comical if it weren’t so sad. The fact that none of them seem willing to risk losing money in the short term, despite potentially wiping out human society.  

What Is Character, Really? And Why Should It Matter in Business?

If you look up the main definition of “character,” you get something related to this: “moral excellence and firmness” or this: “the inner compass of moral and ethical qualities that guides a person’s choices and actions, especially when facing pressure or adversity.”

I would argue, though, that character is much more detailed than that.

At its core, it’s how individuals consistently treat other people, especially when they have more power, comfort, opportunity, or security than someone else. A person of good character does not measure himself/herself/themselves by what they own, how useful they are, or whether they have influence. A lot of it is simply caring about what happens to other people.

The question is: Do they act with honesty, fairness, courage, respect, and compassion, even when no one is watching or when doing the right thing is inconvenient or costly to them?

If you think of it that way, many of our ultra-rich don’t come close to meeting that definition.

In their worldview, it seems to be a kind of “survival of the fittest.” Through their demonstrated work and success, they were the most fit, so they will survive. It’s not about anyone else, after all. Just about how good they were. 

OK, you might argue, isn’t that just the attitude you need in business? After all, the corporate world is dog-eat-dog. Behaving that way just means our business leaders are competitive, and they have proven successful at becoming winners. 

The problem, of course, is that many of them have repeatedly demonstrated they are more than willing to use others as a stepping stone to their own success without acknowledging, realizing, or compensating people evenly for their own role in their cause.

And look, no one is suggesting founders, owners, and C-suite leaders should compensate themselves at the same rate as the workers. They’re the ones who carry the risks, the responsibilities, or had the original idea for a business in the first place. But when workers don’t share in it, when you exploit customer ignorance, or harm broader society with what you produce or the offshoot of your production, we all pay the price. The average person is barely getting by while they jet around the world, dine at Michelin-starred restaurants, and stay at $4,000-per-night resorts.

‘There’s a Storm Coming’: That Is Almost Certainly True

Certainly, the sense of unease many of us feel is that our current situation is untenable, to say the least. We’re getting divided by cynical, wealthy manipulators. We’re sharing less of a shrinking pie. And we’re being thrown into a world none of us asked for, and few really wanted.

So, whether that’s a Civil War due to Orange Nightmare, the French-Revolution-like rich-poor divide finally boiling over, or even the advent of an out-of-control AI unleashed because of the greed of the already ultra-rich, we do know one thing is true.

The storm is coming.

And for those who believe in the survival of the fittest, they’d better be careful what they wished for in the first place.

[1] Does it happen? Of course. But not nearly on the same scale.