Five Dollars

I watched Bill Gates try to guess grocery prices on Ellen. He said five dollars for a bag of rice. The fact that he was catastrophically wrong tells you most of what you need to know about billionaires and how removed from ordinary life they become.

It’s not complicated: rich people lose track of what things cost because they never buy anything themselves. Someone buys their groceries, someone dresses them, someone handles every transaction that normal people navigate constantly. Money becomes abstract—just a number that grows while you sleep, unmoored from any actual experience of cost or exchange.

Gates is interesting because he at least does something with the money. Malaria vaccines in Africa, education programs, attempts to prevent deaths that shouldn’t happen in countries with resources. I think he actually believes in this work. The donation is real.

But the Ellen moment still lands. You can give away billions and still not know what rice costs. His isolation from ordinary commerce is so complete that even basic staple pricing becomes a blank. I imagine his personal shopper—he definitely has one—felt something watching that clip. Your boss just guessed five dollars on national television. In front of everyone. You go home and think about your choices.

This isn’t me being mean. It’s structural. Remove someone from the ordinary economy long enough and they become genuinely foreign to it. The prices, the calculations, the small negotiations of ordinary life—none of it sticks.