Do we need billionaires? • Hacker News Board

Re: Do we need billionaires?

#91

Post by 9999px » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 2:01 PM UTC

keiferski wrote: post #40

voidUpdate wrote: post #22

I heard a while back that the average person will see about a million of their currency over their lifetime. So we can take a million dollars to be about 1 lifetime's worth of money. Elon is currently sitting on 817,000 lifetimes worth of money. I feel like we could have like a >95% income tax when you are worth more than like $20 million and it wouldnt actually matter too much to the people who would cap it out? Of…

To me it all comes down to time. If you have money to cover your needs, you functionally have control over your time. And your time is more or less the closest analogue to your actual life. The tragedy of course is that the vast majority of people have no real control over their time, and the free time they do have is aggressively fought over by media corporations and advertisers convincing them they need to work mor…

This is the same conclusion Karl Marx came to.

“The entire development of wealth rests upon the creation of disposable time.” —Karl Marx, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), 1857

“…real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time.”

“The saving of labour time [is] equal to an increase of free time, i.e. time for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts back upon the productive power of labour as itself the greatest productive power.”

—The Grundrisse, 1857

“Labour-time, even if exchange-value is eliminated, always remains the creative substance of wealth and the measure of the cost of its production. But free time, disposable time, is wealth itself, partly for the enjoyment of the product, 3 partly for free activity which—unlike ‘ labour—is not dominated by the pressure of an extraneous purpose which must be fulfilled, and the fulfillment of which is regarded as a natural necessity or a social duty, according to one’s inclination. Karl Marx Theories of Surplus Value”

“Just as plants live from the earth, and animals live from the plants or | plant-eating animals, so does the part of society which possesses free time (disposable time not absorbed in the direct production of subsistence) live from the surplus labour of the workers. Wealth is therefore disposable time.” —Economic Manuscripts, 1861-1863

Re: Do we need billionaires?

#92

Post by the_solenoid » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 2:26 PM UTC

It would be fine if:

Labor was better protected Elections were funded by the gov and any money spent outside of that sent you to jail and confiscated everything from you and your company and your family They were taxed at the top marginal back at 90% They could not buy or own anything in media

My problem with capitalism is the rules were made at a certain time and place. Then the industrial revolution happened which bricked the old rules, and let wealth concentrate, which started eroding rules to favor those with the accumulated wealth.

Then the sale of single input products and services (first software, then the web - or make one sell infinite) bricked what was left of capitalism and let wealth accrue at 99% of light speed. And the laws/regulations never got changed to put a clamp on that, the tax rules and everything else went to favor those with more than they could spend, then the self-interested actors spent a pittance to do what the framers were trying to avoid: buying up all the government reps.

And here we are - all the monied people who mostly dont seem to grasp that they are just hastening their own implosion doing their 60 year old plan of robbing the bank, as it were.

Re: Do we need billionaires?

#93

Post by dqv » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 2:33 PM UTC

joncrane wrote: post #4

We need intensely ambitious and competitive people. We shouldn't use money to keep score.

"Competition" is too ambiguous a term to be something to strive for. It needs to be qualified further to remove the domination mindset that many competitors have. I just don't get the mindset of living in a society where you know you have to cooperate with others because they have skills you do not have, but also of the mindset that, if push comes to shove, they must be homeless so that you don't have to be. "Why aren't there any clothesmakers?" the person who made the clothesmakers homeless asks.

I wish billionaires were competing on how many people they've lifted out of homelessness or how many people they've fed without making a profit (with the additional caveat that it is a carbon negative, sustainable production). And not in the fake way where they use creative language to obfuscate the harms they've done, but in an actual tangible way where when you look at it, it actually shows a genuine desire to be participant in society, not a dominator of it. All the "good" that billionaires do these days comes with caveats or over representation.

Of course, this stuff all gets rationalized away by people. They will ask stupid questions like "why don't you open your home up to homeless people then" or the classic "do you know what capitalism has done for you you ungrateful little shit? you better do 5 hail Bezos prayers right now before I report this to Palantir", because why would you try to understand a metaphor? Things have to be this way! There are no other options. We have to fuck people over to survive.

Re: Do we need billionaires?

#94

Post by paulcole » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 3:00 PM UTC

harimau777 wrote: post #52

paulcole wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this misses the point as well. If we eliminated billionaires would everyone have healthcare, a decent roof over their head, and other basic things? I generally believe that to not be the case. The government misspends (to an extent) the money it has now. So the solution is to give them more money to misspend?

The billionaires themselves cause massive harm on society due to the extreme power that wealth inequality gives them. So getting rid of billionaires, even if their money wasn't actually used for anything useful, would still be a win for society.

So if Jeff Bezos (and every other billionaire) was worth $999,999,999, then the world is much better off?

You’re going to have to explain the logic of that to me.

Do you disagree that (many, perhaps not all) billionaires also create a massive amount of value for society? Would Jeff Bezos be a billionaire if Amazon was a net drain on society?

Jeff Bezos being incredibly rich doesn’t make my life worse. In fact, Amazon makes my life better. I’ve had jobs that existed because Amazon existed. I’ve had things I wanted to buy delivered very quickly. I read my Kindle for hundreds of hours a year.

Re: Do we need billionaires?

#95

Post by stvltvs » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 3:05 PM UTC

sschueller wrote: post #67

storus wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ebola is a bad example as the easiest way to prevent it is to ban bushmeat markets (or at least some types of bushmeat), but for some reason that's never discussed.

> Wild meat, also known as “bushmeat,” refers to the meat of wildlife species hunted or collected for human consumption. USAID staff developed the Wild Meat Learning Agenda to generate and share evidence to inform efforts to improve wild meat programming and to understand those connections to food security, health, and conservation. The Learning Agenda defines learning questions and associated activities to address t…

In other words, USAID was helping with the bushmeat situation and therefore ebola, but Trump killed USAID.

Re: Do we need billionaires?

#96

Post by quirkot » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 3:13 PM UTC

Havoc wrote: post #14

Capping it makes sense but should also be quite high. 1B actually seems good...congrats you've won capitalism but that's enough for one person

Made $1 billion? Throw 'em a parade, put their name on a plaque on Wall Street, and never let them touch a new penny from here on out.

Re: Do we need billionaires?

#97

Post by quirkot » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 3:17 PM UTC

Brendinooo wrote: post #49

d3ckard wrote: post #43

Controversially, yes. The right frame of comparison is not towards average Joe, but towards governments. Billionaires, for better or worse, are independent power sources, which IMO in grand scheme of things are useful. I think the problem with modern world is not that some people have lots of money, but that we allowed money to buy pretty much everything else.

Yeah I was gonna offer a similar hot take: in a world where government can have trillions, it's probably good on some level that some people have billions. Checks and balances.

If you want good checks against a government, one dude rich enough to field an army has historically been a bad way to keep the government in existence

Re: Do we need billionaires?

#98

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 3:33 PM UTC

nelsnelson wrote: post #57

ChrisGreenHeur wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They own stock in the company they founded. So, you force the founder to sell 95% of the stock they own in the company. Is this a good idea for the stock price of that company as well as the for the ability of that company to raise cash?

Shares do not require sales to achieve more equitable distribution. They merely require dilution.

[deleted]

Re: Do we need billionaires?

#99

Post by disgruntledphd2 » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 3:46 PM UTC

papaver-somnamb wrote: post #72

oulipo2 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares about the stock price. They should be forced to split their companies in smaller, competing companies, so that: 1. there's not a huge asshole controlling enormous companies (and then also buying all the media and ruining the public information) 2. we have more competition and lower prices (that's EXACTLY why capitalism was supposed to have anti-concentration laws) 3. you spread the wealth. Now there are mor…

I feel this is closer, but still not equitable. More people owning less, but what about the vision that holds the ship together and leads the org to the goal? In the case of SpaceX, it's Elon and to a lesser extent Gwynn by way of osmosis that hold the light aloft. We force division of wealth, then what about the leadership and direction? SpaceX is what it is because the vision is much less tyranny of the masses, and…

I think SpaceX is great, fwiw. However, the vast majority of Mr Musk's worth comes from Tesla (which again, made a great product back in the day), but his wealth appears to be driven by some kind of weird hypno-toad like power over the markets.

Like, Tesla should not be valued the way it is, and I still can't understand what's going on here.

I think that both Tesla and SpaceX have been net good for the world, but do we really think that wealth taxation would've stopped Musk from doing anything post Paypal?

Re: Do we need billionaires?

#100

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 3:50 PM UTC

voidUpdate wrote: post #22

I heard a while back that the average person will see about a million of their currency over their lifetime. So we can take a million dollars to be about 1 lifetime's worth of money. Elon is currently sitting on 817,000 lifetimes worth of money. I feel like we could have like a >95% income tax when you are worth more than like $20 million and it wouldnt actually matter too much to the people who would cap it out? Of…

> you are worth more than like $20 million

Nick pick ahead. I really dislike this phrasing about people's wealth. 'this person is worth $X', when they really mean 'this person has assets valued at $x'. They own things that have monetary value, they themselves are not assessed that monetary value. Some may think this is an innocuous shorthand, but I see it more of a Freudian slip revealing the the actual belief that the rich really are many 1000s or 100000s of times more valuable than other lesser humans.

Try phasing it another way, 'person x is hoarding over $20M in assets'.