Imagine how different the world would be if billionaires competed to solve problems instead of competing to become richer. What a world that would be!
To be honest, I think the billionaires think they are solving problems. I also think that they believe if they had the money they could do more good with it. They are obviously wrong.
I knew there’d be folks in here claiming it’s “fake money.” They can liquidate when they want to, it’s not “fake.”
Not only is it real money when its invested, typically the rich can just borrow against those shares instead of having to liquidate anything to pay for things.
For example when they need $40b to purchase a website or media corp to use so they can have better control of the narrative, they just get a loan because everyone knows they’ll be able to make the payments, instead of selling enough shares to tank the thing that inflates their networth beyond all reason.
They can liquidate part of it. If they liquidate all of it then most will disappear into thin air.
If you’re Elon Musk and own a large part of Tesla and SpaceX and you sell all your shares, both companies crater HARD.
Just remove stock from anyone who owns over 1% of any publicly traded company and nationalize all index funds’ assets (yes, that includes retirement funds). Problem solved.
Or just cap total wealth at ~5 mill, indexed to the median income so there’s no need for legislation like with minimum wage.
They don’t even need to liquidate. They can just take a loan against it like they already do.
💯 ☝️
That’s the thing; the billions don’t sit in a bank account but in the
stockbetting market. They would be heavily taxed otherwise.Just tax unrealised capital gain then. A progressive tax too so small investors wouldn’t really be penalized much.
Correct (when it comes to billionaires; Sam Altman and his ilk intentionally caused the RAM shortage by buying RAM their companies are not using and should be held accountable).
Billionaires would be impossible in a properly civilised society, which would implement progressive taxes so that anyone with a wealth above, say, ten times the median wealth of the population or 25 times the wealth of the poorest person (citizen or not) in the nation (whichever’s lowest at the time) are taxed to the point that their wealth can increase no further, with the resulting income being invested on public services so that personal wealth is irrelevant except for luxury items.
Quit making perfect sense. You’re making the capitalists nervous and ruining the hopes and dreams of all the Questrader’s out there. /s
I think we should extract the water from Sam Altman’s body and use it to cool a datacenter
That’s not how net worth works. Being a billionaire != having billion $ in a bank account.
They’re still financially obese parasites whose wealth should be taxed until it doesn’t exceed a reasonable amount (say, ten times the median or 25 times the lowest, whichever comes first), though.
the lowest is zero, or very close to it.
OK, so tax anyone with more wealth than that (exponentially proportionally to the difference) and invest in services and UBI and whatnot until it raises.
the lowest will always be zero, do not doubt the capacity of individuals to become statistical outliers and spend all their money. It might be a little bit reasonable if it was set to 100x-10000x the wealth of the 99.99th percentile
Yeah, most of it is all smoke and mirrors but they all own media companies which make it seem more than it actually is.
It doesn’t state that it’s in one person’s bank account.
This is patently untrue.
Billionaires have myriad investments because, unlike us non-wealthy plebs, they have a critical mass of wealth that can easily make greater wealth by flinging it around. They rarely keep all that much in cash because cash is static and stupid to them. It’s the only money that isn’t working for them to make more.
Which is why they look down on us for chasing money needed to live and survive. Because we have to use silly pleb levels of money that we can’t even invest.
Salaries are for suckers is the phrase.
Billionaires have myriad investments because,
no they do it for the tax deductibles.
Both. It’s tax free and earns then more tax-free money.
All the incentives are there.
I get what he’s saying, but billionaires don’t have “billions” in “banks”.
The only actual cash billionaire I can think of is the guy that created and sold Minecraft. That dude has billions in the bank. Or at least he did for a minute or two before I’m sure he invested a ton of it. All the other billionaires just own billions worth of stuff for the most part. Banks don’t even leave money in banks. They invest or loan out all of it and keep the returns. That’s the scam, same as it ever was.
It’s not really a scam to move your cash into non liquid assets for financial security. How you got there could be a product of a scam but (going off of a previous comment I made a few days ago about how they buy assets and hold their money in those) typically, after you have a certain amount of money, one can only figure boredom kicks in and that in-turn, would most likely create a sense of frivolous spending or seeing what you can hold in forever items with absurd values.
Paintings, Collectable Cars, Mid-Century Clothing, Collectable Foods (ikr), Historical Properties (that sometimes get sold and then they re-coup losses through making the historical property profitable…sigh, creating a historical society with the goal of recouping losses). …
Whoever downvoted this: For example, if you purchased a… Idfk a Rolex watch and it gained value over 40 year and you kept it pristine condition and never wore it and sold it at auction, is that a scam or just market fluctuations? Is it a scam that someone would pay twice as much at auction for a watch that due to others opinions gains market value or just ridiculous?
It’s no one’s fault or a scam that an item in the future gains value. Is it a scam that a video game system can become more valuable in 20 years or just a product of opionated market value?
It’s not fucked up to have nice things of value. People put payment plans on nice things that they may choose to keep in pristine quality for decades before it gains value and sell it at auction, is the person who did a payment plan for the item and has an item of value that gains value over time more fucked up than the person who can buy the same item outright to do the same?
It’s the fact that people who are stupid rich do it but if I, a person in financial poverty does the same, through a payment plan I’m a fucking idiot for not saving money.
So when does it become okay to buy nice things at a ridiculous value to have financial security in non-liquid assets? When, in your opinion does it become okay to buy a nice piece of jewelry or a nice painting and storing those away properly until they gain more value?
I mean shit people collect baseball cards and wait until they gain value. It’s such a normal thing, to hold value in assets.
People have this contrary view that billionaires actually have all this liquid wealth, yet that same money living in the stock market is fake. And this causes no cognitive dissonance.
It’s not “fake”. They can liquidate. Bezos liquidated 10 billion in stock to push his cock-rocket vanity project over the finish line. They can do it when they want to. The same way they can do it to pay taxes, if we make them. No, it’s not “fake money”.
since brains can be used as potential AI processing, why not use Altmans.
He bankrolled a longevity company called Retro Bio to the tune of $150M. It’s lunacy and the money would be way better spent by the NIH as tax dollars.
No see all that wealth is used to invest so it is being used by other people. Other rich people.
The billionaires think they are already doing “good for the society” by having their money invested in companies and stuff
Well you can do good and have a lot of money, I mean I think the biggest problem is that they’re unable to do it without having more income in the process. Maybe there aren’t as many as we’d like to think but I hold the naive and simplistic hope, that humanity over profits will exist in a future billionaire.
The rich person dilemma of: If I help everyone, I won’t have any money left. Doesn’t apply to people like musk
The 2,000$ stimulus checks we got before covid… That shit went to groceries, appliances, new cookware and clothing…
I didn’t pick the most fashionable clothing, the most expensive cookware, the most expensive grocery store or the best of the best with appliances but I used that money on what I needed and you know what it made me realize:
$2,000 goes fucking quick. I’m not defending the superduper rich but I am saying I can partially understand how if you just give and give and give to every cause in society, if you were worth like 10mil and your assets were already declining with no substantial gains to recoup the major net losses. eventually you hit the point of: If I help everyone who needs it, I won’t have any money left to survive and as bullshit as it is that it would likely be that way for someone who has that much money, there’s a weird understanding there and maybe it’s the growing up in capitalism that the thought of, “If I keep giving I won’t have anything left for myself,” mindset is even alive in me but I think it’s survival and I do fully understand and appreciate the difference between survival and greed.
I hate to even say it like this but the people making the least don’t give to the people who have hardly anything every single time. Like someone who’s working a minimum wage job isn’t going to give to the person begging on the street with a cup asking for spare change or even saying what it’s for, every single time. That’s because if you did that every single time, you most likely would start running out of money.
We can all agree though, once you have enough money to where you’re building your own space exploration company… give the dude begging 500$ and walk away. Like if you have so much money you can open a suitcase, throw the money up in the air let it fall and make snow angels with money… fuckin’ redo some hospitals and schools. Do something other than keep looking at the dollar signs.
They really do! Bezos can simultaneously pat himself of the back for bringing us cheap consumer goods, more fuel efficiently delivered than all of us driving to the store, all while pumping own his personal CO2 emissions and treating his employees like slaves.
One notable exception is Bezos’ ex. She carefully doles her billions out to causes her team researches so as to continually grow her fortune and have more to donate. Sustainable philanthropy! To have that kinda money and not let it go to one’s head is very, very unusual in a person.
Its easier to waste money that you didnt earn. Not only because you dont value it as much, since from your perspective, money “just happened”, but also because the person that earned it vs gotnit from being married to a person that earned it and divorcing them, is more likely to have critical thinking and a more analytical mind.
But then how will we resurrect the great israel?
