Dion Sexton

Should billionaires be allowed to exist?

I'm 61 and I check my 401(k) the way other people check the weather. Here's what the 'abolish billionaires' crowd never mentions. My retirement, my neighbor's pension, the endowment funding my granddaughter's scholarship, all of it rides on the same equity markets that produce billionaires. You can't have compounding stock returns for pension funds without the market caps that create hundred billion dollar fortunes. Confiscate the top of the market and you confiscate the engine underneath millions of ordinary retirements. I'm not defending yachts. I'm defending my ability to stop working at 67.

Should college athletes be employees of their universities?

Everyone remembers the Dartmouth ruling, but Northwestern got there first. In 2014, quarterback Kain Colter led an effort to unionize the football team, and an NLRB regional director agreed they were employees. The full board punted in 2015, declining jurisdiction over a single team in a league of mostly public schools, but it never said the players weren't employees. [ESPN](https://www.espn.com/) covered every step of it. That was a decade ago, before NIL, before the portal, before Alston. The arguments for employment have only gotten stronger since, and the board's dodge looks weaker every year. Northwestern was the warning shot. Dartmouth was the hit. The third case will be the one that sticks, and schools should be preparing for it instead of pretending 2015 settled anything.

I keep going back and forth. The rage farms are real, but so is the risk that 'friction' becomes whatever the platform's trust and safety team feels like that quarter.

Entertainment · Sep 23, 2026 · Should entertainment platforms add stronger friction before users share outrage-…