I don’t believe people “deserve” money in any moral sense.

Money moves through systems: markets, institutions, regulation, luck. Some people are born into capital; some compound it; some lose it. None of this correlates reliably with kindness, intelligence, or effort.

So when I think about wealth, I don’t ask myself:

“Do I deserve to have a lot of money?”

I treat that as the wrong question. I will have whatever amount I have, as a function of decisions, path dependence, and some randomness.

The question that does feel meaningful to me is different:

“If I end up controlling a lot of capital, am I fit to be trusted with it?”

Not “deserve” in the sense of reward, but “fit” in the sense of responsibility.

That’s what this note is about.

1. Having vs deserving

There are at least three separate layers that often get blended into one:

  1. How much money you have. A factual state – “my net worth is X”.

  2. What kind of person you are. Your values, your behaviour, how you treat people.

  3. What you do with your money. How you make it, where you deploy it, how much harm or resilience you generate in the process.

“Deserving” tries to collapse all three into one. It doesn’t work. You can find:

  • unpleasant people who are rich,
  • decent people who are poor,
  • and every possible combination in between.

I find it cleaner to disconnect them:

  • My net worth is data.
  • My values are my own problem.
  • My use of capital is where responsibility comes in.

From that perspective, being rich is not a medal; it’s an amplifier. It allows you to:

  • protect yourself more,
  • move more resources around,
  • and affect more strangers you will never meet.

That’s where the question of being “fit” becomes relevant.

2. Capital as power, not a badge

Large wealth gives you leverage over things that matter to other people:

  • Jobs and livelihoods (if you employ or contract others).
  • Pricing and access (if you run products or services).
  • Risk and resilience (if you allocate capital into or out of businesses).
  • Narrative and aspiration (if people copy what you do or build).

You don’t need to be a billionaire for that to be true. Even a relatively modest portfolio, a small company, or a rental property can put you into situations where your choices affect other humans who don’t have your buffers.

This doesn’t make you inherently “better” or “worse”. It simply means:

Your decisions have a larger blast radius.

You can use that radius to:

  • quietly stabilise things, or
  • quietly make them more fragile.

So for me, “fit to be rich” is essentially:

“If my decisions are going to have a wider impact, do I want more of my decisions in the system?”

If the answer is “no”, that’s not a signal to reject money. It’s a signal to change the way you operate.

3. Three layers of responsibility

I think about responsibility in three layers: how I make the money, what I do with the surplus, and how I hold power.

3.1 How I make the money

This is the first filter.

  • Do my business models rely on confusion, pressure, or addiction?
  • Are my products honest about their trade-offs?
  • Is someone worse off because I had to obscure something to get paid?

There is a spectrum here. At one end:

  • deliberately predatory products: high-fee junk, gambling-like mechanics marketed as “investing”, things designed to trap people in recurring payments they don’t understand.

At the other end:

  • products that might be imperfect but try to give users clarity and agency, even at the cost of lower short-term revenue.

I can’t control what exists in the broader system. I can control which end I choose to contribute to.

“Fit to be rich” for me starts with a simple rule:

I don’t want my wealth to be built on people’s confusion.

If I make money because someone understood the trade-off and still decided it was worth it, that feels acceptable. If I make money because they could not understand it, that doesn’t.

3.2 What I do with the surplus

Beyond a certain threshold, extra money does not change your experience of daily life very much. It just accumulates as optionality and security.

At that point, I think there is a responsibility to ask:

  • How much of this surplus will I keep purely as personal buffer and optionality?
  • How much am I willing to circle back into the wider system that enabled it?

I don’t mean forced asceticism or “give everything away to prove you’re good”. I mean a conscious recognition that:

  • I grew this capital inside a functioning infrastructure built by others.
  • I benefited from stability, institutions, and other people’s labour.
  • Some portion of the surplus can reasonably go back towards keeping that system functional or making parts of it less harsh.

Practically, circling wealth back can look like:

  • Paying taxes without playing edge-case games purely to avoid contributing anything.
  • Funding things that increase resilience: education, healthcare, local institutions.
  • Direct giving to people or organisations where you believe the marginal pound genuinely helps.
  • Building tools, companies, or structures deliberately designed to reduce harm rather than extract maximum possible revenue from the most vulnerable.

The exact split is a personal choice. The key is that it is conscious. It’s not just automatic lifestyle inflation until the numbers don’t move.

3.3 How I hold power

The third layer is more subtle. It is about how you behave when you have an advantage:

  • more information,
  • more options,
  • more time,
  • more emotional distance.

Examples:

  • When you negotiate, do you squeeze the other side just because you can, or do you aim for terms that keep the relationship viable for them?
  • If people work with or for you, do you take their fragility seriously, or treat them as expendable inputs?
  • When you speak about risk, do you downplay it to make others comfortable with choices you’re insulated from, or do you insist on describing it as it is?

Here the question is not “am I a saint?” but:

“If I had to be on the weaker side of this interaction, would I consider my own behaviour fair?”

If the honest answer is “no”, there is work to do.

4. Circling wealth back to society

You can’t fix a country with your portfolio. But you can decide how your wealth interacts with the society you live in.

I find it helpful to think in terms of circulation rather than sacrifice.

The idea is simple:

  • Wealth is not static. It flows: wages, rents, dividends, taxes, donations, prices.
  • As it flows through you, you decide how much to retain and how much to redirect.

From that perspective, “circling wealth back” is:

  • Not a guilt payment for existing.
  • Not a PR exercise to buy virtue points.
  • But a structural choice: “I am willing to let some of this surplus return into the pool that made it possible.”

Practically, this might mean:

  • Accepting that you will pay tax and focusing on making sure your contribution is wise, not zero.
  • Choosing investments that, in aggregate, don’t rely on permanent degradation of the environment or deliberate exploitation, even if you’re not perfect.
  • Occasionally using capital in ways that have poor financial return but high social return, simply because you can afford to and you believe it is right.

I don’t think there is a formula for the “correct” percentage. It is more about the underlying stance:

“I do not see my wealth as a separate universe from the society around me. I am willing to let some of it flow back into that society deliberately.”

5. A personal code: what “fit to be rich” means to me

If I try to write this down explicitly, it looks something like:

  • I will not design or promote financial products that rely on confusing people.
  • If I take risk with other people’s money or livelihoods, I will be honest about that risk and accept visible downside myself.
  • I will treat employees, partners and clients as humans with their own fragilities, not as abstractions in a spreadsheet.
  • I will allow some portion of my surplus to circulate back into the systems and communities that made it possible for me to generate it.
  • I will try to make my presence as a capital allocator net-positive for the people who share my city and country, even if they never know I exist.

I will fail at this from time to time. But it is still useful to have it written down as a reference point.

6. Closing

I don’t think wealth is a cosmic verdict on anybody.

Unethical people will continue to get rich. Kind, intelligent people will continue to struggle. That is not something I can fix by having opinions about who “deserves” what.

What I can do is decide what kind of rich person I am willing to be.

For me, that means:

  • refusing to build on confusion,
  • accepting that surplus comes with responsibility,
  • and being willing to let some of that surplus circle back into the society I live in, instead of treating it as a private high score.

Being “fit to be rich” is not about being morally flawless. It is about recognising that once you control a lot of capital, you are no longer playing a purely personal game.

Your decisions touch people you will never meet.

If I’m going to sit in that position, I want to be able to look at how I use it and say, quietly and honestly:

“I didn’t get everything right. But overall, I made the system a little less fragile, not more.”