Sometimes, someone observes an extremely wealthy people spend lots of money on unnecessarily and gets mad. E.g. buying a (second) yacht, or an unusually expensive ring.
Sometimes, the person who gets mad is thinking something along the lines of — “why did they spend $X million on a yacht/ring/beach house? I’ll likely never be worth a tenth of that. Why don’t they just give it to me, or something?”
I think that, most of the time, the person getting upset has a net worth two to five orders of magnitude lower than the person they’re complaining about. However, I also think that, most of the time, the person getting upset often has a surprisingly high net worth — when compared to the net worth of many people globally.
Some stats: the median net worth in the US in 2023 was $\$\text{107,739}{2023 \text{ USD}}$. The median net worth of the top 1% of Americans in 2019 was $\$\text{17.4mm}{2019 \text{ USD}}$ (source, slightly sketchy but the Fermi estimates roughly check out), a bit more than two orders of magnitude higher than the median net worth in the US.
So a reasonable comparison would be to look at someone with a net worth of a-bit-more-than-two orders of magnitude less than median net worth in the US — which ends up at about $\$750_{\text{2023 USD}}$. There aren’t great official numbers here, but a conservative estimate would land at ~1 billion people.
All of these numbers are somewhat rough, but they’re not crazy. And they add up to the following:
If you feel upset about the consumption habits of the ultrawealthy — spending e.g. $1mm on a yacht, ring, or beach house — it is then consistent that close to a tenth of the world feels at least as upset about the median American spending $10k on a wedding, family vacation, or extra car.
To be clear: I think there are two ways of resolving the possible contradiction:
I think that one reasonable response to (2) is donating 10% of your income (or your spending, if you’re not working) to the global poor. At that point, in my eyes, you have justification for getting upset at the ultrawealthy without incurring similar wrath — until, of course, the ultrawealthy start donating 10% of their income/spending.
Alternatively, you can just go with (1), and realize that ultrawealthy people spending what-seems-to-you-egregious amounts of money willy-nilly is exactly analogous to you spending what-seems-to-the-global-poor-egregious amounts of money willy-nilly. In other words: their spending habits are roughly consistent with your spending habits, normalized by wealth. So consider just relaxing!
(But probably donating 10% is better.)