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this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2025
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Because she owns the IP and is the brand. This isn't different from Bill Gates owning the IP to DOS/Windows in the beginning and Steve Jobs being the face of the brand of Apple. And your argument also fails to address the opposite direction. Without security guards, waiters, stage riggers, stage technicians, event organizers and many more workers, none of her shows would work and people would never have started to want to pay in the first place.
The core principles of people becoming billionaires is that they own something that other people don't own and the billionaires can extract rent from. Swift is just the brand. She doesn't produce the music. She doesn't organize the events. She doesn't do anything except for singing somewhat well and looking pretty in public. The idea that his should make her a billionaire, while the security guards at her venues can't afford to buy a house for their family from their salary is part of the ideological problem. There is no good billionaires. "Stars" are the same capitalists engaging in the same exploitation. And unlike people like Ed Sheeran who started as street musicians, or heck even Justin Bieber who started with youtube videios, Swift got the golden ticket as her father broke her into the industry thanks to his existing wealth and connections.
You're literally talking about herself and her past creations as some illegitimate ownership. Tax her wealth away, criticize her insufficient philanthropy, but saying she has not earned the money generated from her own personal brand and performances is nonsense. Even if you think she's due less of a percentage of the profit that the Swift brand has produced, the lights guys, the ticket takers, and the producers aren't such a large percentage of that brand that she's not still a billionaire. Individual people can be popular enough for millions of people to give them money and simply doing a job for them doesn't make you a partial owner of that person's personal brand.
Again, where is the difference to Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos?
Actually talking about personal brand, we need to add Elon Musk to the mix. We see that Tesla is strongly dependent on the brand of Musk, while not providing anything unique in their products. Thereby by your logic Musk deserves all his billions and the workers at Tesla got compensated the same way that the people at Swifts brand got compensated.
You retain the logic that the capital owner is right to be the billionaire, because he or she generates the billions off what they own with minimal work put in, while the workers are compensated much less for what they work.
You cannot criticize the US oligarchy without including people like Taylor Swift. It is the same oligarchs working in the same way, favored by the same system and exploiting workers in the same way.