As a multi-billionaire, I take offense to seeing myself portrayed in the media as a manipulative murderer—someone who forces the poor to kill each other in an elaborate game set up for my entertainment. Not only is this stereotype harmful, but it’s also not true.
While I don’t speak for all multi-billionaires, I do speak for myself when I say my friends and I do not force the poor to kill each other, nor do we kill the poor for sport.
We did it only one time, and we felt so bad about it afterward that we all agreed that we’d never do it again. When we flew home from Kyle’s secret tropical island in our chauffeured helicopters, we all had a weird taste in our mouths. Sure, the island is in international waters, so technically, anything goes. But was what we just did right? We agreed to never place bets on how quickly the poor would kill each other when placed under duress again.
Except Kyle had already spent millions carving out the island’s interior so we could hold the games, and we all hate wasting money. I’ll let you in on a bit of financial advice: you can’t waste money. It’s just bad business. So we had to do it all over again a second year, despite not really feeling it.
So Kyle had his henchmen set up the traps again (which were also very expensive, as they are custom built). We all value the hard work that the henchmen put in so we can unnecessarily place the poor in life-or-death situations, which are more like death-or-death situations.
I think this might be a good point to address the accusations regarding our henchmen. Our anonymous workers are not being exploited, even as we exploit the poor for our amusement (which we do only infrequently). We understand it’s a lot to ask someone to murder another human being indiscriminately, so we pay our henchmen a fair wage. And some of them even love what they do. They may be nameless, faceless, and dispensable—but to us, they are invaluable.
After we held a few more murder games (hating every single one), we realized many of these workers rely on our murder games to make their living. We felt that outright shutting down the murder games would be unfair to the booming island economy developing on Kyle’s secluded lair. So we keep the games alive solely for the benefit of the henchmen, who now number in the thousands as our murder games have expanded over the decades.
I would be lying if I said I didn’t look forward to pitting a poor husband and wife against each other, but that’s only because it’s become a yearly tradition—like Thanksgiving. How many of us actually like going to Thanksgiving, if you sit down and think about it? No one. That’s how I feel about our murder games. It’s my Thanksgiving. Or Christmas.
(Please note that “murder games” is not our term. It’s something we heard one of the contestants call what we were forcing them to do, and it stuck.)
All the people we’ve helped outweigh the people we’ve killed, even though we’ve killed more people than we’ve helped. We create opportunities here. We’re job creators. Scrappy (she came in with a real name, which I forget) won in 1989, invested her money wisely, and now she’s one of us, watching the games while sitting on a person we also use as a chair. Are we supposed to not give her this opportunity? Scrappy earned that money based on merit by gouging out the eyes of a flower saleswoman who wanted to afford her mother’s cancer treatments. We gave her a hand up, not a handout. Also, Scrappy is missing a hand from the games. Which, again, we don’t like.
Yes, we have been floating the idea of going biannually to accommodate the growing number of multi-billionaires asking to attend. It’s not as if we don’t feel guilty about this. We wish there were some way not to schedule more murder games, but there’s nothing we can do.
So the next time you watch your Squid Game or Hunger Games or Most Dangerous Game, think about us folks on the other side of the tinted glass forced to watch poor people forced to kill each other (by us), and maybe then you’ll have some empathy.