Should Billionaires exist at all?

[The Stormbringer]

Only if it's me, because I would use it right! /s

I don't think so. There's just way too much exploitation built into the current system. I doubt there's a single one of them that hasn't caused a ridiculous amount of suffering and heartache, even unintentionally, in their rise to the top.

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe there's an exception here and there where someone really did just make something incredible that was insanely popular and it catapulted them to fortune without screwing over people along the way. Even then, it comes down to allocation of resources. Could that money be better spent elsewhere in society? Should it be? These are difficult questions to ask, but personally I think we need more focus on human necessities like food, water, shelter, clothing, education, healthcare, transportation, and so on.

[Elegiac]

There is no legitimate reason whatsoever for that level of wealth inequality to exist. It is both unjust and violent.

[Logwyn]

Definitely. Who else are we going to eat once the apocalypse happens?

Or feed to the Bronteroc?

No, that level should not exist.

[PACOX]

I think some people confuse 100 million with 1 billion when asked this question. 1 million is already a large number for the human brain to comprehend. 100 million, crazy. 1 billion is 1,000 million. Numbers start to feel fake at that point. Even if you're a seemingly humble person like Taylor Swift was alluded to earlier in the thread, there's a lot of grabassing that goes on to get someone to that point, even that said billionaire was just on the receiving end.

At no point should singular people be able to amass that much wealth while others are going hungry. Its just poor management of resources.

[Endus]

I think some people confuse 100 million with 1 billion when asked this question. 1 million is already a large number for the human brain to comprehend. 100 million, crazy. 1 billion is 1,000 million. Numbers start to feel fake at that point. Even if you're a seemingly humble person like Taylor Swift was alluded to earlier in the thread, there's a lot of grabassing that goes on to get someone to that point, even that said billionaire was just on the receiving end.

At no point should singular people be able to amass that much wealth while others are going hungry. Its just poor management of resources.

It's 80,000 B.C.E. You're immortal. Every day, you put $10,000 in a vault. You never touch this money.
It's 2024. It's been 82,024 years. You still don't have as much wealth as Elon Musk.

People have no concept of how ridiculous billionaire fortunes are.

[Hotmail]

Or feed to the Bronteroc?

Loved that movie Great conclusion for what was overall a pretty grim ending.

[Raeph]

It's 80,000 B.C.E. You're immortal. Every day, you put $10,000 in a vault. You never touch this money.
It's 2024. It's been 82,024 years. You still don't have as much wealth as Elon Musk.

People have no concept of how ridiculous billionaire fortunes are.

How much of that is actual liquid assets though.

A big issue with a lot of these conversation is that we take the current market value of their assets and then equate it to cash on hand. All the billionaires have most of the wealth in non-liquid assets and if they were forced to liquidate all their assets to cash could they even do it for the same current market value of those assets?

Musk owns about 411 million share of Tesla stock as of Feb this year. Current market price is $147. What happens to that share value if he starts liquidating those shares and how fast could he liquidate them before one of the other share holders, the NYSE, SEC or any number of others stake holders files an injunction against him to stop him from selling more stock, all the while the value of the stock crashes.

If anyone doesn't believe me look at the timeline that lead up to the collapse of FTX. One of the factors was the CEO of Binance, Changpeng Zhao, announcing that he was going to liquidate his position in FTX. Just the announcement caused the market to go into chaos even though it would take months to complete the trade. Binance and FTX were small players compared to Elon Musk.

The man on his own could collapse multiple countries stock exchanges and banking systems if he tried to liquidate his Tesla stock. That does raise the specter of the question of "Why should anyone have that much control over the international markets/banking system?".

The only answer is that governments and politicians allow him to exist for tangible and non-tangible reasons, taxation being one of them.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/10/inves...ill/index.html

Elon paid 11 billion in taxes in 2022 due to his sale of tesla stock to finance his Twitter purchase. This was a unique situation though and most years he only pays about 60-70k in taxes because he restricts his income to meet his tax deductions. Income however is not wealth and the USA does not have and most likely will never have a wealth tax so we have to limit tax extraction to sales and income taxes. Even that low amount is multiples of how much an average household pays in taxes per year (about 17k for a family of four if you include all taxes).

Its up for debate if what Musk or any billionaire brings into the economies in which they operate in if it makes up for the destabilizing influence of their ownership stake in that economy.

[Karreck]

Why specifically in your opinion?

First, as others have pointed out, you do not become a billionaire without some form of exploitation.

Second, it's the hoarding of wealth for the sake of hoarding wealth when said wealth could better serve society as a whole. Come me a pinko commie all you may want, but there comes a point where you have already won the game of Capitalism and are just running up the score.

Third, wealth = power. No single person or family should have that much power.

Fourth, none of them are using this wealth to become Batman, so what's the fucking point?

[Endus]

How much of that is actual liquid assets though.

It fundamentally doesn't matter. Liquidity is just about how fast you can sell things. You make some points about fast divestment meaning the asset loses value, as with stocks, but that just demonstrates even more flaws in the entire system because that value is ephemeral, based on feelings rather than anything concrete. But like I said, that's another and largely separate issue.

The issue here, though, is just the attenuation of society's wealth into the hands of increasingly few rich people, at the expense of the majority of the workers in society who actually produced that value through their labor. Profit (at least, profit derived from the labor product of employees) is theft, fundamentally, it's just a form of theft we've decided to applaud, for reasons that don't really hold up well to scrutiny.

Like, yes, sure, it's legal, so it's not theft theft. But if you removed the laws criminalizing pickpocketing, stealing someone's wallet isn't suddenly not-theft, it's just legalized theft. Right? So why do we consider taking the labor value that employees produce for a company away from those employees and handing it to the owner not-theft? It's just another "wallet".

[Masark]

How much of that is actual liquid assets though.

Doesn't really matter unless he wants to get out, as your example wanted to.

Otherwise, he can just use the assets as collateral, obtaining rolling loans at sub-inflation interest rates to supply his cash needs, without having to pay a cent in income or capital gains taxes, because it isn't considered income or realized gains.

[NED funded]

How much of that is actual liquid assets though.

A big issue with a lot of these conversation is that we take the current market value of their assets and then equate it to cash on hand. All the billionaires have most of the wealth in non-liquid assets and if they were forced to liquidate all their assets to cash could they even do it for the same current market value of those assets?

Musk owns about 411 million share of Tesla stock as of Feb this year. Current market price is $147. What happens to that share value if he starts liquidating those shares and how fast could he liquidate them before one of the other share holders, the NYSE, SEC or any number of others stake holders files an injunction against him to stop him from selling more stock, all the while the value of the stock crashes.

If anyone doesn't believe me look at the timeline that lead up to the collapse of FTX. One of the factors was the CEO of Binance, Changpeng Zhao, announcing that he was going to liquidate his position in FTX. Just the announcement caused the market to go into chaos even though it would take months to complete the trade. Binance and FTX were small players compared to Elon Musk.

The man on his own could collapse multiple countries stock exchanges and banking systems if he tried to liquidate his Tesla stock. That does raise the specter of the question of "Why should anyone have that much control over the international markets/banking system?".

The only answer is that governments and politicians allow him to exist for tangible and non-tangible reasons, taxation being one of them.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/10/inves...ill/index.html

Elon paid 11 billion in taxes in 2022 due to his sale of tesla stock to finance his Twitter purchase. This was a unique situation though and most years he only pays about 60-70k in taxes because he restricts his income to meet his tax deductions. Income however is not wealth and the USA does not have and most likely will never have a wealth tax so we have to limit tax extraction to sales and income taxes. Even that low amount is multiples of how much an average household pays in taxes per year (about 17k for a family of four if you include all taxes).

Its up for debate if what Musk or any billionaire brings into the economies in which they operate in if it makes up for the destabilizing influence of their ownership stake in that economy.

The harm of billionaires isnt on Musk individually owning a bunch of Tesla stock and fear that je might crash it. The harm is more on the power their wealth and infrastructure have. Tiktok using its size to tell children to call their representatives. Individual tiktok investors going out of their way to support Trump in reversing the bill and so on.

[Raeph]

Doesn't really matter unless he wants to get out, as your example wanted to.

Otherwise, he can just use the assets as collateral, obtaining rolling loans at sub-inflation interest rates to supply his cash needs, without having to pay a cent in income or capital gains taxes, because it isn't considered income or realized gains.

Partially true, he will pay taxes on purchases, as well as property taxes depending on the locality that he lives in. Federal Income tax and Capital Gains is not the whole picture of taxation. Texas as an example has a property tax rate of about 1.6% of the value of owned property, variable depending on the municipality you live in. To say nothing of fees like vehicle registration among others.

Secondly yes he can leverage his ownership stake in any assets he owns for a Securities Based loan but many of those types of loans have significant restrictions on them and you often have to put up double if not triple the value of the loan as collateral. Say he takes out 10 million in a SBL but to get it at (whatever interest rate) he will have to put up something like 20-30 million, maybe more, in assets value and the entity may require him to front more collateral if the value of the assets goes down. Its not as much of a money printing machine as people think it is but it does have it's place in managing a rich persons capital flow.

How much of a billionaires assets is in liquid form does matter. You may have someone who has 15-20 billion in a trust that they are the sole beneficiary of but if the only they can they can pull out of it, due to the rules of the trust, is 500k a year in dividend payments, then their wealth value is meaningless, their income from the disbursement from the trust is all that matters.

Elon Musk and many of the other billionaires are in a different position in that the laws of a Trust contract don't bind them, but corporation bylaws as well as Federal and State criminal codes do.

As much as people want to belief him being some all powerful entity that can destroy the planet and enslave people with a wave of his hand, he does have to follow some fairly strict rules. His forced purchase of Twitter is an example of this. He shot his mouth off one too many times and even though it was arguably a bad deal because Twitter is fairly worthless as a company (the value of the social media community it manages is something I won't touch at all) having never made a profit, he still had to go through with it because of legal action that bound his behavior because of his own speech.

Anyone in this thread doesn't have that issue to that degree. I can say I want to buy twitter for x-y-z price but no one will take me seriously enough to take me to court.

Musk doesn't have that issue and most other billionaires are in the same boat.

Just look at the Sackler Family with the opiate lawsuits. Mess of their own making that destroyed lives and their own words condemn them because they are subjected to legal scrutiny that we W-2/1099'ers don't really have to worry about.

Is that level of legal scrutiny enough to restrict them from abusing the leveraging of their wealth or income in the communities they are apart of. Maybe and maybe not, but I don't think that their influence is as far reaching and all encompassing as people assume it is just because the perceived asset value of their ownership stake in the economy crosses $1 billion.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

I imagine in a room filled with people that are not billionaires or even millionaires the opinion is going to be pretty skewed towards no. Which makes sense. I am sure if anyone walked into a billion or two here they wouldn't be angry about it at the same time. Most billionaires certainly have done a lot of dirt to people to get there. I am fairly certain plenty of dirt goes down everywhere though.. just most people don't have the means to get it to the paper or to the scale they would if they actually had billions of dollars. Just look at how most people on this forum treat each other with just mildly different opinions for example. I probably could agree with 8 or 9 out of 10 things with people on here and get endlessly sucker punched in the gut over that 9th or 10th thing we disagree on. So just being totally shit to people is kind of human nature. Billionaires are not an acceptation to this rule. You just notice it because the scale of which it happens is very very apparent.

[Raeph]

The harm of billionaires isnt on Musk individually owning a bunch of Tesla stock and fear that je might crash it. The harm is more on the power their wealth and infrastructure have. Tiktok using its size to tell children to call their representatives. Individual tiktok investors going out of their way to support Trump in reversing the bill and so on.

Apples to Rutabaga there.

Multinational corporation controlled by the Authoritarian laws of a adversarial country is a separate issue from a person who owns 20%+ of one of the highest valued companies in the country...and whatever Twitter is.

The laws the each of their behavior is different and secondly Tiktok's use of its platform for activism blew up in its face to such a degree that I don't think anyone will try to do that again.

A billionaires' wealth does not give them as much leverage as people things it does because until they can translate it into spending power/liquid capital, their threats is really all they have. Yes the threat of their action is more powerful than an average person but we have seen many times where a few voices in the community are able to push back against the activism against corporations and individuals.

Musk getting sued by the Board of Twitter to follow through with his purchase after he tried to back out. AoC and CO forcing Amazon to pull back and not put a Head Quarters in New York.

Their words are powerful, but their words also bind them in tangible ways that common people with a little effort can exploit. We have just done such a bad job of teaching civics to the last several generations that they would rather believe they are powerless against someone with with a millionaire or billionaire title to their name then do the hard work of fighting against them. Instead we are left with stories like this.

https://lbpost.com/news/community-gr...long-la-river/

A community group that sought to block a housing development along the Los Angeles River has reached a settlement with the developer that will allow the project to proceed with some concessions, such as keeping a privately owned park available to the public in perpetuity, the group announced today.

The deal, reached last month, marks an end to the Riverpark Coalition’s challenge of a 226-home development the City Council approved last year at a parcel of land along the Los Angeles River between Wardlow Road and the 405 Freeway.

Is that NIMBY-ism? Is this civics at work? I'm not sure but they were able to restrict a moneyed interest with legal action and activism.

[LilSaihah]

Nothing wrong with being wealthy.

If you're exploiting people that's bad.

If you're a billionaire I don't think you're implicitly exploiting people. These four guys got lucky in emerging markets.

[Doctor Amadeus]

Personal observation. Millionaires wield their wealth to hold on to whatever wealth they have. Say a millionaire in real estate? He will be among the first ones advocating against new development. Millionaire farmers? He will be among the first to use their wealth to lobby for priority access to water rights and to keep subsidies afloat. And so on. Millionaires have enough wealth to influence politics but not enough to be secure in their positions like billionaires do so they intensely lobby and parasite wherever they can. Thats why you hear people like Mark Cuban scam their aduience for a quick buck despite having millions of himself while Bezos is focused on other stuff. Mark Cuban's position is much more fragile and he knows so he does everything to keep it

Yeah, Ok I see what you mean, and yeah. I think there something psychological about it or can be sometimes, especially depending on how some were able to be millionaires.

- - - Updated - - -

I don't see why billionaires should get any special treatment when it comes to taxes, if we regulated markets properly and stopped giving them welfare they wouldn't exist. For example no negative tax rates, no tax rates lower than everyone else, no tax loopholes you can run a mac truck through, no bailouts, no PPP loans that get forgiven etc. The biggest welfare queens in the US are the rich, the only time there is a concern about handouts is when it benefits people that need it.

I agree with every line with you here.

- - - Updated - - -

First, as others have pointed out, you do not become a billionaire without some form of exploitation.

Second, it's the hoarding of wealth for the sake of hoarding wealth when said wealth could better serve society as a whole. Come me a pinko commie all you may want, but there comes a point where you have already won the game of Capitalism and are just running up the score.

Third, wealth = power. No single person or family should have that much power.

Fourth, none of them are using this wealth to become Batman, so what's the fucking point?

Well pinko commie or not I don't disagree with any of this at all.

[Draco-Onis]

Apples to Rutabaga there.

Multinational corporation controlled by the Authoritarian laws of a adversarial country is a separate issue from a person who owns 20%+ of one of the highest valued companies in the country...and whatever Twitter is.

The laws the each of their behavior is different and secondly Tiktok's use of its platform for activism blew up in its face to such a degree that I don't think anyone will try to do that again.

A billionaires' wealth does not give them as much leverage as people things it does because until they can translate it into spending power/liquid capital, their threats is really all they have. Yes the threat of their action is more powerful than an average person but we have seen many times where a few voices in the community are able to push back against the activism against corporations and individuals.

Musk getting sued by the Board of Twitter to follow through with his purchase after he tried to back out. AoC and CO forcing Amazon to pull back and not put a Head Quarters in New York.

Their words are powerful, but their words also bind them in tangible ways that common people with a little effort can exploit. We have just done such a bad job of teaching civics to the last several generations that they would rather believe they are powerless against someone with with a millionaire or billionaire title to their name then do the hard work of fighting against them. Instead we are left with stories like this.

https://lbpost.com/news/community-gr...long-la-river/



Is that NIMBY-ism? Is this civics at work? I'm not sure but they were able to restrict a moneyed interest with legal action and activism.

But that's simply ignoring the details we have legalized bribery with citizens united so the billionaires power is simply not the potential but with the power of their corporation. That power is much easier to translate at the federal level where they literally craft legislation that gets passed by lawmakers. It is however much harder to do it on the local level because you lack the time to bribe the local politicians and make a connection beforehand. However that is not true when a billionaire does this in his own community where you have some of them and their kids getting away with literal murder because they have so much power and influence.

When you have money equal speech it means that a billionaires power is unlimited, it's just that there are circumstances where another factor plays against them which is time. Even the most corrupt politician is aware that a change of heart after a first time donation may cost them their job so that power projection is a long term thing unless it's Washington.

[Raeph]

But that's simply ignoring the details we have legalized bribery with citizens united so the billionaires power is simply not the potential but with the power of their corporation. That power is much easier to translate at the federal level where they literally craft legislation that gets passed by lawmakers. It is however much harder to do it on the local level because you lack the time to bribe the local politicians and make a connection beforehand. However that is not true when a billionaire does this in his own community where you have some of them and their kids getting away with literal murder because they have so much power and influence.

When you have money equal speech it means that a billionaires power is unlimited, it's just that there are circumstances where another factor plays against them which is time. Even the most corrupt politician is aware that a change of heart after a first time donation may cost them their job so that power projection is a long term thing unless it's Washington.

Billionaires making large single donations aren't driving government policy and haven't for years.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/30/o...ll-donors.html

Small dollar donations, under $200, made during a partisan primary do more to sway public policy then a SuperPAC does buy $50 million in TV adds that everyone DVRs away.

Where billionaires do control public policy is through tax incentive negotiations in cities to set up large facilities that hire workers in that locality. Often times the tax breaks to get the company to move into that city don't make up for the tax benefit of the jobs that are created but local and state politicians still think that giving away everything and a bag of chips is necessary to get business to create or move jobs into a city, rather than invest that money in local concerns that can organically grow with the community.

[liyroot]

We should take all their billions are distribute them evenly.

Total wealth/ Total population:

8,700,000,000,000/7,689,201,450 = $1,131.46

So yeah, $1000 bucks each. That would be fair. Then I could buy a new graphics card.

[Polgara]

Nothing wrong with being wealthy.

If you're exploiting people that's bad.

If you're a billionaire I don't think you're implicitly exploiting people. These four guys got lucky in emerging markets.

It's simply impossible, because for this to be true those people would have had to put in 100% of the work, entirely, on their own. Otherwise, people HAD to be paid less than the money they made those above. It doesn't pass the pub test at all. Billionaires just have an obscene amount of money accumulated in a system that doesn't punish, nor redistribute it.

someone with 10 million dollars doesn't mean mistreatment was involved. A hundred million is starting to broach it, if not already there. You'd have to give an example where someone garnered multiple billions of dollars without a single person being underpaid for their contribution, and if they aren't also walking with an equitable amount of money (and by "they" I mean pretty much the entirety of a staff/employment concern), then someone/s had to be underpaid.