The degree to which we allow the rich to insulate themselves from the unpleasant reality that others are forced to experience is directly related to how long that reality is allowed to stay unpleasant.
This *should* apply to problems, too. For some reason, the wealthy seem to believe they can protect themselves from the impacts of climate change — but no one can buy nicer weather. Even jetting from location to location, following decent weather, doesn’t really save you because then you waste a bunch of your life flying and you have no life anywhere — plus climate change will make turbulence worse 😉
Rich people also rely on our shared food systems, at least for variety; they may be able to afford expensive foodstuffs longer than others, but if strawberries or cacao or whatever simply won’t grow anymore, wealth cannot manifest them.* If all the oranges are affected by the greening disease, wealth can’t buy you orange oranges. If a fungus kills all the bananas, wealth can’t get you extinct bananas. I read a portion of Land of Milk and Honey, which imagines the wealthy hoarding the last of the fancy food varietals post apocalypse, foods that will never be able to be produced again — and sure, the rich can eat from stockpiles for a while, but stockpiles don’t last forever.
This is why billionaires are obsessed with space colonization; they don’t want to address the problems with our systems — the systems that allowed them to extract so much wealth from others’ labor and give so little back. They can’t face the idea that there are consequences they can’t buy their way out of. Forming their own little Martian “utopia” — with them as de facto (and maybe even nominative) King — is much more appealing than fixing our systems (which might make them marginally less wealthy), even though it’s pretty idiotic considering it’d be way easier to stop emitting greenhouse gases here than it would be to terraform Mars.*
See also: The small harms of climate change add up