So how do I get money from this Billionaire for my company? Not even looking for a lot maybe 100k a year for 4 years.
I think you're thinking too small :-)
To actually get anything, you should ask for 10-15 million in seed capital.
How to Steal a Billion
101–110 of 156 posts
Re: How to Steal a Billion
#102I object to the word "steal" being used to describe Adam Neumann's actions. He did not take anything by force or deception (as far as I know). If I take a piece of dog shit, spray paint it gold and sell it as a bar of gold, you could argue that is "stealing" (or at least fraud). If I say "this is a piece of dog shit that I spray painted gold but I am selling it for the price of gold" and an adult of otherwise sound m…
That's slightly underselling where he was going. Ive said before, there is some genius to his strategic acquisitions. It was looking like he was building an "Office 365 / Adobe Creative Cloud of Building Management Systems."
But, they are giving up, and venture capital is reducing the company to the value of its parts, not its potential, before that Building Management Suite gets assembled. There is a future where their software stack becomes the de facto standard for all building management, the Outlook/Excel of owning property. WeWork could pivot from a real estate company to a property ownership enablement company.
Thats not so much spray painted shit as "im using free cash flow from real estate to build this grand well defined vision, (with a coat of hippie mysticism paint) do you want to come along for the ride, for better or worse?" Because he is an executive, talking to executives, his pitch always came off as vague. But the actions of the company, and the parts they were assembling, paint a much more strategically sound and intelligent portrait.
Re: How to Steal a Billion
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So the group of people who leverage capital to sustain themselves and don't have to work have lower net income than the group of people who have to work to have a roof over their head? He’s talking about the aggregate income earned by the group. So the delta in individual incomes is offset by the massive delta in group sizes.
Huh, this is interesting. I completely missed the fact that these two groups are massively differently sized. So his 8 trillion vs 130 billion is laughable. If you define the "middle class" as roughly 50 percent of the population (this is pretty low considering how this word is actually used), then the billionaires 130 billion greatly outstrips the 8 trillion per person. There's just shy of 600 billionaires in the US…
Whether you look at things per-person or per-group is a matter of adopting a punitive outlook versus a practical outlook. If your goal is punitive, sure, it's relevant that the average billionaire makes hundreds of millions of dollars per year, while the average middle class person might make $80,000.
But I don't think Americans are punitive. They're not deeply troubled by the mere fact that there is someone out there with $8 billion. To the extent they care about billionaires, they're concerned about whether they're paying a fair amount to support the county that gave them so much. And from that perspective, what matters is the aggregate income of the group. And $130-150 billion just isn't much compared to the $6-7 trillion in annual government spending in the U.S.
Politicians thrive by disguising the punitive outlook as a practical outlook. They point to how much money Zuckerberg or Bezos have, and quickly pivot to how they could pay for universal healthcare, universal education, etc. A necessary aspect of that strategy is keeping people ignorant of the fact that even confiscating the total income of every billionaire would only pay for say 25% of U.S. higher education spending, or 4% of U.S. health spending.
Re: How to Steal a Billion
#104I object to the word "steal" being used to describe Adam Neumann's actions. He did not take anything by force or deception (as far as I know). If I take a piece of dog shit, spray paint it gold and sell it as a bar of gold, you could argue that is "stealing" (or at least fraud). If I say "this is a piece of dog shit that I spray painted gold but I am selling it for the price of gold" and an adult of otherwise sound m…
What Neumann did was unethical. He stole from We Work employees.
Re: How to Steal a Billion
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not trying to make an argument, I'm trying to understand what the GP means in practice. I know people sometimes use questions passive aggressively, but that wasn't my intent. A more even distribution of all the wealth looks like people having a few thousand dollars of wealth. Much less if we're equalizing the whole world and not just the US. What are we imagining happens?
I'm from a former Communist state (one of those states that became Communist at Soviet-tank-barrel-point :-) ). So Communism doesn't have much appeal to me. My personal perspective is that equalizing things fully doesn't work. You want incentives to motivate people. However, it's quite amazing what motivates people - after all, for the average billionaire going from $62bn to $63bn isn't really some sort of milestone,…
Let's imagine the US govt takes 10% of the shares of Amazon. These are non-voting shares. Amazon doesn't pay a dividend as far as I know, so what is the point? The government doesn't have control over the company, the government doesn't get any revenue. The government can't sell the shares because then it just has to come confiscate 10% more shares from Amazon.
How do I, as a regular citizen, benefit from this? Is there some mechanism I'm not seeing? Because it feels like it's just a meaningless paper transfer.
Re: How to Steal a Billion
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Most people out here are sweating medical bills in the low $10,000's, while the news is talking about billions being gained and lost in the span of a few weeks - so fast it makes you wonder if that amount of wealth really even existed in the first place. If people lose confidence in the system because of that it’s because they can’t multiply. Billionaires are very rich compared to middle class people, but there are…
Lost in points like this, where you’re trying to scare people by saying a large number, is that the distinction between a Medicare for All type of system and the current private system is less about how much it costs and much more about who the middleman is. * In M4A, Americans will pay ~$30T/10yr to providers through the government as a middleman. * In the current private system, Americans will pay ~$30T/10yr to pro…
The other thing about rayiner's post is that the language he uses is quite informative of his political views. Notice how he uses the phrase "confiscate wealth" to describe taxation, as opposed to, say, "paying their fair share".
Re: How to Steal a Billion
#107I object to the word "steal" being used to describe Adam Neumann's actions. He did not take anything by force or deception (as far as I know). If I take a piece of dog shit, spray paint it gold and sell it as a bar of gold, you could argue that is "stealing" (or at least fraud). If I say "this is a piece of dog shit that I spray painted gold but I am selling it for the price of gold" and an adult of otherwise sound m…
What Neumann did was unethical. He stole from We Work employees.
How?
Re: How to Steal a Billion
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lost in points like this, where you’re trying to scare people by saying a large number, is that the distinction between a Medicare for All type of system and the current private system is less about how much it costs and much more about who the middleman is. * In M4A, Americans will pay ~$30T/10yr to providers through the government as a middleman. * In the current private system, Americans will pay ~$30T/10yr to pro…
The other thing about rayiner's post is that the language he uses is quite informative of his political views. Notice how he uses the phrase "confiscate wealth" to describe taxation, as opposed to, say, "paying their fair share".
My political views are pro-taxation and pro-public services. (Except we should have the Swedes or Singaporeans come over to run our public services.) Which is why I think waging a class war against billionaires for a piddling $275 billion in additional revenue, while not increasing taxes on people making up to $250,000, is pure insanity. European countries have figured out how to pay for public services with middle class taxes. We should follow their lead instead of dreaming about wealth taxes.
Also, I used “confiscate” in the context of literally taking all of billionaires’ money.
Re: How to Steal a Billion
#109That's the funny thing about Billions-with-a-b: normal thinking about money and value just doesn't work IMO. The Vision Fund is going to lose ~$19 billion. But Masa Son still controls over $80 billion. That's more wealth and power than almost any human being will ever have in history, ever. At that point the numbers don't even matter. Maybe Neumann took Masa Son for $50 billion. Who cares? A person can live in the US…
> Most people out here are sweating medical bills in the low $10,000's, while the news is talking about billions being gained and lost in the span of a few weeks - so fast it makes you wonder if that amount of wealth really even existed in the first place. If people lose confidence in the system because of that it’s because they can’t multiply. Billionaires are very rich compared to middle class people, but there are…
The US economy already pays for near-universal healthcare through insurance premiums. The money already exists.
Re: How to Steal a Billion
#110That's the funny thing about Billions-with-a-b: normal thinking about money and value just doesn't work IMO. The Vision Fund is going to lose ~$19 billion. But Masa Son still controls over $80 billion. That's more wealth and power than almost any human being will ever have in history, ever. At that point the numbers don't even matter. Maybe Neumann took Masa Son for $50 billion. Who cares? A person can live in the US…
> Most people out here are sweating medical bills in the low $10,000's, while the news is talking about billions being gained and lost in the span of a few weeks - so fast it makes you wonder if that amount of wealth really even existed in the first place. If people lose confidence in the system because of that it’s because they can’t multiply. Billionaires are very rich compared to middle class people, but there are…
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