In the first year of his second term, Donald Trump enriched himself mightily.
“President Trump has made more money while in office than most of us can even conceive of. In 2025, he took in more than $2.2 billion,” the New York Times reported recently. “The fact that a president generated billions in revenue while occupying the Oval Office is unheard of.”
Many billionaires seem equally money-obsessed. In this country, which some now call an oligarchy, the untrammeled greed of the rich and powerful has struck a nerve among the public.
In February, independent Vermont senator Bernie Sanders railed against the “greed” and “arrogance” of billionaires during a speech in Los Angeles, as reported by the Guardian. “‘Never before have so few people had so much wealth and so much power,’” Sanders thundered on stage at the Wiltern theater, where a raucous crowd of longtime supporters shouted ‘shame.’”
“Sanders also named names and listed assets, drawing boos and jeers as he catalogued Larry Ellison’s jets and Mark Zuckerberg’s yachts and his Palo Alto compound,” the article stated.
“‘For these people enough is never enough,’ he said. ‘They are dedicated to accumulating more and more wealth and power and they do that no matter what harm they bring to working families.’”
Defining greed
Some view the greedy with emerald-green envy. Others disdain them, wondering why those with so much would constantly grasp for more. What drives such greed and materialism?
The eternal problem of greed has occupied not only philosophers and religious leaders, but also modern-day researchers. Martin Weiss, a psychologist at the University of Wurzburg in Germany, has proposed a comprehensive definition of greed: “The excessive, insatiable desire and striving for more (especially money and material things), even at the expense of others.”
“At the core of the construct is the excessive striving for more…striving that goes beyond what one needs,” Weiss and his colleagues write in a 2023 paper published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. “In addition, greed is characterized by insatiability, indicating that the desire for more is never satisfied, no matter how much has been obtained. Finally, a person’s greed may come at the expense of others. Although greedy individuals do not necessarily intend to harm others, they accept that their striving for more may have negative consequences for others.”
Greedy people might harm others unintentionally because they have less empathy and concern, economic psychologist Marcel Zeelenberg writes in the journal Discover Psychology. “They simply do not care that much about others.”
Yet they “do care a lot about themselves,” Zeelenberg states. “Recent research has found that greedy people suffer from a ‘fixed-pie bias’….They do care about the behaviors of others being a threat to their own outcomes.” In other words, the greedy play a zero-sum game: They perceive others’ gains as their personal losses. Therefore, they’re unlikely to help others through sharing, volunteering or coming up with inclusive solutions to problems, Zeelenberg says, “because they think that this means that they get less.”
Hence, “Greed’s end is not to gain satisfaction, but to avoid frustration,” Zeelenberg says. Being ungrateful and never being satisfied are central features of greed, he adds.
Other experts dispute that the greedy are unintentionally harmful. Canadian psychologist Livia Veselka describes a malevolent greed in action: “A tendency to manipulate and betray others for personal gain.”
Greed as a personality trait
Greed is a part of human nature, so most people are greedy to some extent, Zeelenberg argues. Individuals fall along a continuum, with differences that remain stable over time and can predict behavior, he and other researchers have found. “Greed is a normally distributed trait, with most people in a position of intermediate greed, and few being especially low or especially high in greed,” he writes.
Psychologists have devised several tools to measure individual differences in greediness. The Dispositional Greed Scale, for example, asks subjects how much they agree or disagree with seven items:
- I always want more.
- Actually, I’m kind of greedy.
- One can never have too much money.
- As soon as I have acquired something, I start to think about the next thing I want.
- It doesn’t matter how much I have. I’m never completely satisfied.
- My life motto is ‘More is better.’
- I can’t imagine having too many things.
Researchers are especially interested in the folks who score high on greed, Zeelenberg writes. “Their behavior may seriously impact the well-being of others, for example, by hoarding resources that others cannot use or by showing socially and environmentally unsustainable behaviors.”
And that’s not all. Being greedy is linked to many other negative personality traits, including acquisitiveness, low agreeableness, egoism, meanness, risk-taking propensity, entitlement, materialism, envy and miserliness.
Furthermore, Zeelenberg writes, “In a study with prospective corporate managers, greed was correlated with the dark triad of personality: Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy, with typically leads to exploiting others.” Those with Machiavellian personality traits view people as objects to be manipulated in pursuit of their own goals, even through deliberate deception.
In a stunning example of greed, lies and exploitation, former NASDAQ chairman Bernard Madoff was convicted in 2009 of fraud, money laundering and other crimes. For decades, he had run a Ponzi scheme worth an estimated $65 billion. Thousands of investors, including Madoff’s family members and close friends, were bilked out of large sums—in some cases, their life savings. Madoff never invested the money that they had entrusted to him, but used the funds in part to bankroll a lavish lifestyle filled with luxury homes and yachts.
Not only is greed associated with immoral and dishonest behaviors, but Zeelenberg found that greedy people also had less humility and conscientiousness, “which might be an indication that greedy people could be a threat to organizations,” he writes. “The potential problems stemming from greed are particularly salient in the business world. People working in finance, management and sales are, on average, greedier that those working in healthcare, education or services.”
As for greedy CEOs, they’re less willing to invest in corporate social responsibility and can even have a negative impact on the shareholder’s return, studies have found. “The pursuit of extreme wealth by top managers can lead to lower performance and loss of shareholder value,” University of Delaware management professor Katalin Takacs Haynes writes in the Journal of Management. Executives who receive excessive compensation lower employee morale. Such overconfident leaders also might focus on short-term strategies, leading them to make poor decisions and take risks that harm a company’s long-term development and sustainability.
Moral objections to greed
With such a bad rap, it’s no surprise that greed counts among the seven deadly sins in Christian tradition, along with pride, envy, wrath, lust, gluttony and sloth.
Despite fictional financier Gordon Gekko’s famous pronouncement in the 1987 movie Wall Street that greed is good, few people would openly admit that they’re greedy. And they’d think twice before insulting others by calling them greedy.
Greed is a complicated concept, though. It’s considered a key motivation behind economic growth and prosperity. As Zeelenberg notes, “Capitalism has been called a system of greed—yet it is the system that raised the standard of living of its poorest citizens to heights no collectivist system has ever begun to equal.” There’s also evidence that greedy people work harder and enjoy greater family incomes.
However, the idea of harm looms large. Greedy people can harm others by taking more of a scarce good and by engaging in immoral behaviors and being more corrupt. Rapacious magnates race to beat out competitors in order to gain profits and power, even at the cost of degrading the environment, harming ordinary citizens and unleashing potentially destructive technologies without investing in adequate guardrails.
The greedy hurt themselves, too, researchers say. They’re prone to constant upward social comparison, so they tend to be less happy than they would appear and less satisfied with life. They’re more distrusting and envious of others. Furthermore, Zeelenberg writes, being greedy is related to emotional instability, neuroticism and lower self-esteem.
For the ultra-greedy, the downfall can be Shakespearean. After Madoff’s conviction in 2009, he began serving a 150-year prison term. He died of natural causes in 2021.
His family life had long unraveled. Unable to pay panicked investors who wanted to withdraw their money during the Great Recession, Madoff was forced in 2008 to confess the Ponzi scheme to his wife and two sons, Mark and Andrew. Furious, the men reported their father to federal authorities and cut off contact. They and their mother, Ruth, claimed that they never knew of his crimes and had felt betrayed.
His older son, Mark, was consumed with shame and despair. In 2010, he hanged himself at age 46 on the second anniversary of his father’s arrest. In 2014, Madoff’s younger son, Andrew, 48, died of cancer. His lymphoma had returned, a recurrence that he attributed to the stress of dealing with his father’s offenses.
Ruth Madoff, 85, has retreated from public life, having lost both sons and now left to cope with the legacy of greed, deception and infamy that has stained the Madoff name.
Published on katherinekam.com, 2026