LordsFire
Internet Wizard
You do realise that there's more than just one guy, and the rich people are very rich indeed? If say, Bezos, Musk and Gates wanted to, they could outspend Russian defence expenditure. Now, they're among the richest for sure but they're not the only ones. Add in the rest of the mega rich elite, and a few corporations and you can easily beat India for third largest military budget globally, possibly even beat China for second place.
Now, sure they're not going to beat American spending without ruining themselves, but they don't need to defeat the US armed forces in battle to have a very powerful impact on policy.
No, they can't. They could probably get into the top 20, but not the top 5 or 3. An enormous part of their worth (the clear majority, though the % varies by individual) is the value of the stock they hold, not liquid cash sitting around to be spent.
Let's take the second most recent Supercarrier class, the Nimitz-class. They cost 9.55 Billion dollars to build according to Wikipedia. You're not going to get a Billionaire paying for the design, development, and production of a Supercarrier when they can buy a proven one for used instead.
Let's assume the 'sale' price is discounted to 8 Billion dollars.
Nimitz-class Carriers 80-90 choppers and fixed-wing aircraft, principally the F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet. Looking at an article on pricing, we get a per-unit price of 79.8 million.
The Nimitz itself is currently flying 3 squadrons of Super Hornets (and one more of regular Hornets). I didn't easily find specific numbers on how large a given squadron on the Nimitz is (probably for security reasons), but Squadron strength supposedly averages 12-24, so if we assume 18 for all 3, that's 54 total birds. 54 super bugs puts up another 4.3 billion to the cost.
The regular Hornet runs ~34.1 million per a 2018 number I found, so 18 of those adds another 614 million to your bill.
A squadron of EA-18 Growlers, assuming it's a smaller squadron because our carrier is running low on room, at 74.8 million a pop for 6 would run you 449 million.
6 E-2 Hawkeyes will run you somewhere around another 130 million.
Since SH-60 Seahawks were apparently sold at a price of 24 for 2.6 billion to India, it's reasonable to estimate 6 of them would cost ~650 million.
I couldn't find a good price on the C-2 Greyhound that does supply runs to Carriers, but at this point, it's pretty much gravy.
All combined, just your purchase cost, not the cost for operating, repairing, or supplying all of these things, runs you to about 14.1 billion. Yes, there's a decent number of Billionares who could pay for that, but only a handful who could do so without liquidating most of their shares in the various companies that earn them their money.
Now, for operating costs, a quick search found this article which says it's about 400 million a year to operate a Supercarrier.
That's a pretty damned big investment that's not going to be turning you any profit.
Let's say there's about five or six Billionares in the world who could actually afford that ( A list of filthy rich people) without losing the ability to pay to keep supporting it, and let's say Gates, Bezos, and Musk can each afford two of them.
So now what do these people do with them? To what purpose do they set them? How do they ensure loyalty among the crew, without patriotism or national ethos? Where do they recruit the highly-skill specialists to operate the hardware, and how do they retain them?
In a world where the US allowed defense manufacturers to sell any weapon to any US citizen (which amusingly all but 2 of the top 11 billionares are), what actual utility would they get out of something like a Supercarrier and its full complement?