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Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
Damn, when I read this statistic the other day I took it as ‘the bottom half has less then the 3 richest persons’, but in fact, it is ‘three people each have more than the bottom half’ holy shit.
Can someone do the math for me… If theoretically that was all liquid and those 3 got Thanos snapped with the money redistributed, how much would each American get?
About $2500 per person
As in 1 trillion / 390 million population
The french really did have a solid way of reminding the upper crust that they were vastly outnumbered by the people they were standing upon…
Remind me. Why are the worlds billionaires all building bunkers? A true mystery.
there are way more of us than there are of them.
Yeah, but to them it’s super cheap to buy and arm enough of us for their protection.
I read a thing earlier where Musk was complaining about not feeling safe to go out in public since Kirk was shot. So there’s that.
He also has a financial interest in other rich assholes being afraid.
He started a high-dollar personal security company for right-wing billionaires called Foundation Security.
Love that for him. I hope he never feels safe.
Why just leave it a fear?
As per, the only thing that trickles down is shit, vomit and piss.
The only way it trickles down is the way Charlie Kirk showed us
“own more” is putting it lightly, they literally own 10 times more than bottom 170 mil people combined
What people often forget about trickle-down economics is that wealth only trickles down to named beneficiaries
That’s not liquid money though. For each one, the figures mostly represent stock in their own companies which they couldn’t pull out without crashing the value. Musk’s wealth in particular is mostly air. At least the other two have profitable companies that actually function. In any case, much of it’s not real money we could pull out of the bank and spread around. (But we could tax the fucking snot out of them and spread that around!)
But even if they were “only” worth a few 10’s of billions, the real issue is that they own the government. And Zuckerberg and Musk own a monster chunk of our social media, control our opinions.
tl;dr: It’s not real money and the problem is influence, not total wealth.
This is bullshit.
When it comes to measuring their wealth it’s not real money.
But when it comes to calculating GDP and growth and other economic metrics these are still included. Make up your mind, either equities are real money or GDP is made up nonsense.
When it comes to measuring their wealth it’s not real money.
This is not entirely correct.
As in: it’s technically correct, but practically they just use their equity as leverage for loans, turning them into cash without actually touching them. Oh, and since they took on debt, now they get to report that as a loss and get tax breaks. They can pay off the interest from whatever actual money they’re earning.
This is exactly my point, their equities act very similarly to our real money/assets. There is nothing unrealised about it
But when it comes to calculating GDP and growth and other economic metrics these are still included
I’m not sure what you mean here. GDP is total money spent and as such would not include equity.
Tho GDP is real, or at least as any metric and proxy we use for measurement.
When it comes to measuring their wealth it’s not real money.
This bit is kinda true. Its not money until its sold. I would include being leverage into a loan to count similarly and should be taxed as capital gain (this is a current loophole)
Is the money earned by hedge funds and investment banks part of the GDP calculations or not ?
Edit: Example if Elon Musk takes out a loan with his tesla stocks as collateral, will the financial transaction that have taken place, be part of GDP calculations or not ?
Example if Elon Musk takes out a loan with his tesla stocks as collateral, will the financial transaction that have taken place, be part of GDP calculations or not ?
No, but the things he buys with said loans will.
The standard understanding of how GDP is calculated is:
GDP = Consumption (C) + Investment (I) + Government Spending (G) + Net Exports (NX).The investment must be spent that year and most of the net worth that is being discussed here was accumulated over previous years. Said net worth is not real money until it is sold (or tax side stepped with loans on assets). To be a bit more clear this is money spent by investors on securities and such that is counted; not the revenue of the brokers. Also this could just include office space and equipment.
I think in your wanting to make capitalism immoral, which it is, you are holding a private definition of these things. It is also confusing as these definitions can be somewhat similar to each other and used interchangeably (like mass and wight, have you ever said something weighs 10kgs?).
The point I am trying to make here is the equities act like real money. They can be traded, and profits can be generated by said trades and deals (the profits are part of the GDP calculations). Which means that for all practical purposes equities are equivalent to real money.
Now we can debate what actually constitutes real money, and whether the definition ends at dollars or all global currencies or government bonds or assets like gold etc etc.
. Which means that for all practical purposes equities are equivalent to real money.
I mean, all money is a social contract, but still; equities being close to cash is not the same as being cash. Similar idea to holding a collectable item with some value. Until you sell or use it as collateral the value is hypothetical.
But when it comes to measuring the success of any country’s economy, we don’t caveat it with something similar.
Except that we do caveat. The ultimate question is how healthy is the economy or how insert question is the economy; which is non-trivial, mostly because things that we agree should be measured cannot be, so we take a proxy. At this point its worth pointing out that metrics that are used as targets stop being useful metrics.
Part of how we might agree to measure the economy is by items made; which is hard without considering all the intermittent steps. So the final amount bought by consumers (which could be people, business, foreigners, or the government). Some caveats here are that the data is not normalized by currency, costs of living, people that are served by said economy, velocity of money (search this one as it is somewhat relevant to what you might be asking), and so on. Keep in mind we did not mesure economic health or performance, just something we might find easier to tabulate which may help us infer other things. When making an inference it is important to list out assumptions made about the dataset.
Still, this is a different topic from “is billionaire wealth real”.
The success of American economy is heavily reliant on these unrealised gains compared
I mean I am not even sure what this means. It just reads like a non-statment that sounds good. Having better banking and financing will be better for an economy. Like there is a reason why we moved away from cash/gold to keep things going. Think of how long it might take to buy a house if you are going cash. It is faster to just get a loan. And everyone in that chain can spend their money sooner (velocity of money I said earlier).
Does China have a less developed equity market? Maybe, but that does not mean that they are a weaker economy. Just that some transactions might take more time.
Remember we cannot actually measure some questions we have, just take a proxy measurement. Take for example brain damage from football or boxing. As of this writing we cannot see the CTE, but we can take symptoms to build a case that someone might have CTE. We can build a similar story for how resilient or not any given economy in the world might be. So yeah we do caveat quite a lot.
Thanks for the detailed response, I’ll probably need to Google a bunch if stuff in here which I will.
But to the point that didn’t make sense to you: The american economy is considered to be big/high growth simply because it’s financial sector is so big. And yes this could mean it’s markets are efficient, but efficient at what? Often it’s trading stocks or debt instruments or some obscure financial instruments, and if that’s the case then the size of the economy seems quite made up just like Elon’s wealth.
And my second issue is that when it comes to personal wealth of billionaires we always caveat it with ‘it’s not real money’. .
But when it comes to measuring the success of any country’s economy, we don’t caveat it with something similar. Countries like Singapore or even US make a lot of money from financial services. The success of American economy is heavily reliant on these unrealised gains compared to China for example where I am guessing it will be a smaller proportion of the total economy.
So then forcibly nationalize their companies if they won’t share the equity in their companies with the workers who built it. Fuck your stupid argument that defends oligarchs
On Elon Musk, it’s funny because he never put a profit, like tesla isn’t the biggest, X is draining money, his robotics shits are just that: shit, only spacex is relatively successfull, but it’s not on the same level of half trillion dollars.
There isn’t much that he’s done, all of his companies are making less profits (or losing more money if i’m being correct), he is just a jake paul that fakes being a fake intelligent person.
Edit: Deleted my edit, i’m drunk
Yeah, its ironic. The richest man in the world doesn’t have a single truly profit-making venture under him.
How the bubble around him hasn’t burst yet I don’t know, but it would certainly be a feast for sore eyes.
SpaceX has been phenomenally successful. I don’t think he can be attributed to much of that success. The Falcon 9 handled 95% of launches in 2024. SpaceX has went from non existant to a near monopoly in 23 years while competing against some of the most powerfully connected companies in the world.
I’m not a SpaceX fanboy (I’m a space fanboy). They have done a lot of good for the space industry, while also causing a lot of harm to the scientific space community (earth based observations). I just don’t think you can make an argument that SpaceX is not a successful company.
I agree. Changed the text!
Apartheid-man’s basically a bubble unto himself.
Go home drunk, I’m too Dad
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only spacex is relatively successfull, but it’s not on the same level of half trillion dollars.
Not exactly sure what you’re trying to say here but spacex has tentative plans to ipo at a 1.5 trillion valuation.
Wallstreet is salivating over this because they know they get in first and will make bank when retail investor drive the price to ridiculous levels.
I’m saying that it isn’t so profitable to make anywhere near that amount of money in decades.
I doubt spacex is profitable. The ipo is so they raise cash. They probably burned it all up with the starship failures.
I’m sure on paper it will look profitable same as Tesla looks profitable from certain angles but is actually propped up by the ability to create more shares. He’ll do the same with spacex. Bleed it for his own gains.
I don’t think he actually cares about any of this tech. It’s the only explanation for how he keeps wasting first mover advantage.
Gov gotta have their corporate frontman. Keeps their hands clean.
Just like his paypal buddy, spinning the golden wool of palantir from the unwelcome rot of total information awareness.
And now no pesky joe-public to get in the way, since it’s corporate, not public.
They’re clever like that.
Now, I might be misreading this data, but from what it looks like either one of these billionaires by themselves have more wealth than the bottom 50% of Americans, right?
More like one Billionaire own 5.6 times the wealth of the bottom 50%
Yeah, this is phrased like those three just slightly edge out the bottom 50, as opposed to each individually owning significantly greater than the bottom 50. I’m going to assume these three own more than the “bottom” like 85%.
What’s about the other twelve multi-billionaires that are worth more than $85B? Why were they left out?
It’s the “that guy wants your cookie” meme, but billionaires ranked 4th and lower are pointing at these 3.
The weird thing is that these people don’t think they’re rich enough and want to extract more money from government and the people, and they simultaneously think that the government gives too much money to poor people.
They race to who will be the first trillionaire. It’s disgusting. Meanwhile children are starving.
It’s bound to happen soon.
And you know what they say, the difference between a trillion and a billion is about a trillion.Surely someone’s already there, quietly, long time ago.
… Who owns the debt?
To these people, there’s no such thing as “enough”. Contentment is not a concept that exists within their minds, only a sociopathic urge to acquire more.
Imagine how rich we’d all be if all the suppressed emancipatory technologies got availed to each and all. No more impoverishment by rents. Free energy. Negligible cost of travel. All space opened to us each and all.
No more impoverishment by rents.
You’ve put your finger on it there.
Three bullets could do so much for this country
not really, not by themselves. the billionaires would just be replaced.
Let’s keep ‘replacing’ them until the replacements end
But that would require more than 3 bullets
All I’m hearing is how great this would be for the bullet industry.
Could you imagine how many jobs it would create
now we’re talking!
We gotta start somewhere
I’m okay with that.
And they are so cheap!
