Billionaire Hoarding: A Psychological Exploration

In this episode of PsyberSpace, host Leslie Poston explores the provocative idea that billionaire behavior may resemble a form of hoarding disorder, typically seen in people unable to part with physical objects. The discussion gets into the clinical understanding of hoarding, its evolutionary basis, and how similar psychological patterns might drive compulsive accumulation of wealth, power, and resources at a global scale. The episode critically examines society's celebration and protection of billionaire behaviors as opposed to recognizing their potentially pathological impact, drawing parallels between individual and systemic hoarding while proposing cultural and policy interventions. It challenges listeners to rethink how extreme wealth concentration affects democracy and social stability.

00:00 Introduction: Billionaires and Hoarding
02:39 Understanding Hoarding Disorder
05:06 Evolutionary Roots of Hoarding
06:30 Financial Hoarding: Billionaires and Beyond
09:21 Personality Traits and Hoarding
12:13 Cultural and Systemic Implications
16:56 Interventions and Solutions
25:19 Conclusion: The Path Forward

Research

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Canale, A., & Klontz, B. (2013). Hoarding Disorder: It’s More Than Just an Obsession - Implications for Financial Therapists and Planners. Journal of Financial Therapy, 4 (2) 4. 

Coupé, T., & Monteiro, P. (2015). The charity of the extremely wealthy. Economic IInquiry, 54(2)

Damecour, C., & Charron, M. (1998). Hoarding: a symptom, not a syndrome. The Journal of clinical psychiatry, 59 5, 267-72; quiz 273 . 

Davidson, E.J., Dozier, M.E., Pittman, J.O.E. et al. Recent Advances in Research on Hoarding. Curr Psychiatry Rep 21, 91 (2019) 

Dozier, M.E., & DeShong, H.L. (2022). The association between personality traits and hoarding behaviors. Current Opinion in Psychiatry, 35, 53 - 58. 

Frost, R. O., & Steketee, G. (2010). Stuff: Compulsive hoarding and the meaning of things. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Frost, R. O., Steketee, G., & Williams, L. (2000). Hoarding: A community health problem. Health & Social Care in the Community, 8(4), 229–234. 

Frost, R. O., Tolin, D. F., & Maltby, N. (2010). Insight-related challenges in the treatment of hoarding disorder. Cognitive and Behavioral Practice, 17(4), 404-413. 

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Mataix-Cols, D., Frost, R. O., Pertusa, A., Clark, L. A., Saxena, S., Leckman, J. F., Stein, D. J., Matsunaga, H., & Wilhelm, S. (2010). Hoarding disorder: A new diagnosis for DSM-5? Depression and Anxiety, 27(6), 556–572. 

Mataix-Cols, D., Pertusa, A. , & Snowdon, J. (2011). Neuropsychological and neural correlates of hoarding: a practice-friendly review. Journal of Clinical Psychology, (5), 467-76. 

Mataix-Cols, D., & de la Cruz, L. F. (2018). Hoarding disorder has finally arrived, but many challenges lie ahead. World Psychiatry. 17(2):224-225

Peebles, G. (2020). Hoarding and saving. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology

Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Harvard University Press.

Raines, A. M., Boffa, J. W., Allan, N. P., Short, N. A., & Schmidt, N. B. (2015). Hoarding and eating pathology: The mediating role of emotion regulation. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 57, 29-35. 

Rose, P. (2007). Mediators of the association between narcissism and compulsive buying: The roles of materialism and impulse control. Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, 21(4), 576–581. 

Steketee, G., & Frost, R. O. (2003). Compulsive hoarding: Current status of the research. Clinical Psychology Review, 23(7), 905–927. 

Svolik, M. W. (2008). Authoritarian reversals and democratic consolidation. American Political Science Review, 102(2), 153–168. 

Timpano, K. R., & Schmidt, N. B. (2013). The relationship between self-control deficits and hoarding: A multimethod investigation across three studies. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 122(1), 13–25. 

Tolin, D. F. (2011). Challenges and advances in treating hoarding. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 67(5), 451-5. 

Vickers, B. D., Preston, S. D., Gonzalez, R., & Angott, A. M. (2016). Hoarders Only Discount Consumables and Are More Patient for Money. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 10, Article 30 

West, D. M. (2014). Billionaires: Reflections on the upper crust. Brookings Institution Press

Winsberg, M. E., Cassic, K. S., & Koran, L. M. (1999). Hoarding in obsessive-compulsive disorder: A report of 20 cases. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 60(9), 591–597. 

Zuckman, G. (2025) The Trump-Musk feud exposes America's wealth-hoarding crisis. [OPINION ARTICLE] The Guardian. (Newspaper)  Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/10/the-trump-musk-feud-exposes-americas-wealth-hoarding-crisis