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Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

coindesk.com

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Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Coinbase was also extremely generous with severance. 12 weeks plus two for every one year at the company, I think [...] Three and a half months of dev salary is pretty incredible. ...literally this is the minimum they can get away with in some jurisdictions. It's illegal in plenty of countries to conduct mass layoffs without either a consultation period or putting people on garden leave (i.e, severance).

Can you cite a few example jurisdictions? I am just curious because I've seen less before, even for companies with international presence.

The WARN act in California is a good example [1]. They must give 60 days notice, but the way to get around this (it seems) is to lay off without warning and give 60 days pay.

[1] https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/labor/wrongful-termination/warn...

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#202
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an arbitrary cut off and it's not just about whether they will work less hard or not. It's about effective capital allocation. If they earned their wealth through smart capital allocation, why would you want to remove capital from proven allocators and forcibly move it to the least effective allocators? TLDR. Elon makes vastly better use of capital than the government does. He turned $180M into SpaceX and Tesl…

SpaceX was funded by government contracts awarded to SpaceX. 'Ol Musky doesn't wave a magic wand for discerning capital deployment. He just gets lucky.

Luck doesn't itself explain being able to repeat that level of complex achievement. You need >99 percentile in energy, intelligence and curiosity to pull that off.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either the rock gets sold and the income is realized and the taxes are paid then, or the rock ends up being worthless and the loan margin called for possession of the rock and the remaining value is taxed as income. Either way the taxes get paid in the end. Tax deference is not tax avoidance.

I have the rock, it is now worth 1 billion dollars. I take out a 50 million dollar loan from the rock and put it into the stock market, which lets say has 2% average real returns over interest (probably low if i have 1 billion in collateral). I pass the rock on to my children and die 20 years later. The 50 million is now worth 74 million. Both the rock and 74 million are stepped up to their current value when I pass…

Your issue here is the cost-basis step-up on inheritance, not anything to do with loans.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The top 10% of the population hold 70% of the total wealth. That's just crazy and unsustainable. Been sustained so far throughout all of human history.

with minor blips where the peasants revolt and take out those above them only to settle back under the rule of someone new. it is a minor annoyance to those amassing wealth to keep in mind.

Never really happened in my country. The second tier complained at one point, and peacefully reached an agreement with the top tier (Magna Carta.) Other than that top families basically unchanged 1000 years.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#205
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You had me for one second with that argument. But if you sell off your company, you would still get rich and be taxed - so why wouldn't you stay on board and your goal is not to get richer, but to create the best business you can?

You have to sell the business to pay the tax. That is why wealth taxes are pretty dumb without carve outs for many kinds of assets.

Why not sell 49% of the business?

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep pointing to Armstrong's $110M house like it's some sort of injustice. If you think billionaires should exist at all, then that's one of the least-bad injustices imaginable Ok, I'll admit it, billionaires should not exist at all, there should be a heavy wealth tax that makes it hard to become a billionaire. Will a CEO work less hard if he (and his peers) can only ever gain $100M in net worth before a wealt…

> Ok, I'll admit it, billionaires should not exist at all, there should be a heavy wealth tax that makes it hard to become a billionaire. Will a CEO work less hard if he (and his peers) can only ever gain $100M in net worth before a wealth tax on assets kicks in? In my experience from having known a couple of mega-rich CEOs, yes. Even those who are not principally driven by the money or three-commas social signaling,…

There's a gulf between sam altman and jeff bezos. We can still have rich people with the leverage to act efficiently without giving them the ability to buy entire nations if needed.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#207
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SpaceX was funded by government contracts awarded to SpaceX. 'Ol Musky doesn't wave a magic wand for discerning capital deployment. He just gets lucky.

Luck doesn't itself explain being able to repeat that level of complex achievement. You need >99 percentile in energy, intelligence and curiosity to pull that off.

He was certainly lucky that the Obama administration was around to lend him money to finish the Model S and not declare bankruptcy, sure.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#209

Genuine question: At what point do we actually declare that we are in recession. Do we wait for GDP figures out these signs are enough to assume we are in bear markets now.

This is pretty good: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=recessio...

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then another entrepreneur who hasn't yet made $100M can start a business in the same space. If the market can bear both businesses, then they both win. If it can't, then they're in direct competition and we're still better off. This actually sounds better than what we have now: monopoly as the end goal.

Then why don't we set the cutoff at £10k instead so that the very poorest have a chance? Or set the cutoff at just above the poorest person's net worth. When they make some money they won't be the poorest any more and next year it will be updated to the new poorest person's net worth. That way we make sure everybody has a fair chance at getting rich. Or is it possible that those who have a demonstrated history of wea…

What you're describing would actually be much closer to a meritocracy than what we have now. The fact that your proposition frightens people shows that they don't actually want a meritocracy at all.

Many of those wealth creators you describe would get annhilated in the markets if they were on a level playing field with everyone around the world.

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