Wealth & Money Quote by Aristotle Onassis

Onassis is selling you a fantasy of post-money clarity, and he’s doing it with the breezy authority of someone who had the receipts. “After a certain point” is the crucial sleight of hand: it turns obscene wealth into a mere threshold you cross on the way to something nobler. Not greed, not accumulation - mastery. It’s a line that launders ambition into sport.

The subtext is blunt: money is only the scoreboard early on. Once you’ve won enough times, the real addiction is the proving. “Meaningless” doesn’t mean he doesn’t care about money; it means money no longer disciplines him. It’s no longer a limit or a fear. That’s what the rich often mean by freedom: not the absence of desire, but the absence of consequences.

Calling it “the game” is also a way of moral distancing. Games have rules, winners, and losers, but they’re insulated from human cost. Shipping empires, labor, monopolistic leverage, political access - all of that gets reframed as play, as strategy, as a kind of elegant competition among titans. The rhetoric turns power into personality: he’s not extracting, he’s competing.

Context matters: Onassis rose in a 20th-century world where capital wasn’t just cash, it was geopolitical muscle - oil routes, fleets, media, prestige. In that landscape, the “goal” can’t stay money because money is just the tool that buys the next arena. The quote works because it’s half confession, half alibi: a candid admission that wealth becomes psychological, and a convenient story that makes that compulsion sound sophisticated rather than insatiable.