As with most of these things, the (shallow) comparison is interesting but there is no actual justification for why it's _bad_. Why do I care how many jets an ultra wealthy person can buy? I literally am not affected by it at all. In fact, my best friend is an aircraft mechanic at a popular private airport. He directly benefits (full wage, salary and benefits) from the rise in private air travel.
Jets are rather problematic in their carbon output, but I'm much more concerned with how many politicians a rich person can buy than jets.
Most billionaires cannot extract most of their wealth without crashing the price of their remaining assets. No doubt the gulf is still great, but it's a little smaller than the raw numbers imply.
It's much easier to do this than many people think as wealthy individuals frequently borrow against their non-liquid assets. This circumvents the price drop associated with flooding the supply of some stock.
Nice comparison, but this piece of math doesn't quite work out: > If you earn $25 per hour, Musk makes that equivalent in passive investment returns every 58.400 seconds (assuming a conservative 5% annual return on his wealth). (450,000,000,000 * .05) / 365 / 86400 (seconds/day) = $713.47/second. You'd have to work 28.539 hours at $25/hour to make what he makes passively in one second. Put another way, your annual in…
I find this visualization of wealth where every dollar is a pixel a lot more compelling: https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/?v=3
This one is rather preachy. It is unintentionally arguing the existence of Amazon itself is bad and that everyone would be better off without it, including all the people it employs and serves, directly and indirectly.
If it is preachy it uses very few words to preach. In fact it only mentions Amazon once, and that's to highlight the average pay of an Amazon warehouse worker.
Consider this too next time you read about a billionaire supporting charity (besides their motives likely being tax breaks). For example Zuckerberg donated $75 million to a San Francisco hospital, which was plastered all over the news. Proportionally it's less than what the average person spends on charity a year.
Even Bill Gates who donated tens of billions still sits on an unimaginable amount of money. And unlike your grandpa leaving $10k to charity and getting a honorable mention plaque, Gates's donation buys him and his heirs significant influence over entire nations.
Most billionaires cannot extract most of their wealth without crashing the price of their remaining assets. No doubt the gulf is still great, but it's a little smaller than the raw numbers imply.
They want Bezos to be forced to sell off his assets and give the money over for government use. Sell it to who, though? Where did they get the money to buy it and why are they allowed to have that money in the first place? Why not just find out who wants to buy Bezos's assets, then take their money instead?
Give the stock to the government. Maybe to destroy some USD if you want you could make companies pay tax half in stock and half in cash.
I hear this muddy defense of billionaires every time anyone tries to compare the wealth held by the working class vs. the ruling class, and it's pure BS. A billionaire's net worth is measured in dollars. If that isn't a valid unit of measuringing their wealth, then find another way to measure it. The theoretical loss in stock price if they sell their holdings shouldn't factor in here, because it isn't universally tru…
you fail to see that their net worth is dependent on everybody else’s actions: if the combined shareholders of their companies start selling for whatever reason, what happens to musk’s net worth? the only way that rich people are rich is because other people want to get rich on their succes and that’s why they buy in. regardless of the real value produced, net worth is much like influencer reach.
No, this is true for most random people. My net worth is largely tied up in assets like my car and house - if everybody else decides these are worthless, because I live in a "bad neighborhood", or if they decide that they prefer new cars way more, I stand to lose huge proportions of my net worth.
I hear this muddy defense of billionaires every time anyone tries to compare the wealth held by the working class vs. the ruling class, and it's pure BS. A billionaire's net worth is measured in dollars. If that isn't a valid unit of measuringing their wealth, then find another way to measure it. The theoretical loss in stock price if they sell their holdings shouldn't factor in here, because it isn't universally tru…
you fail to see that their net worth is dependent on everybody else’s actions: if the combined shareholders of their companies start selling for whatever reason, what happens to musk’s net worth? the only way that rich people are rich is because other people want to get rich on their succes and that’s why they buy in. regardless of the real value produced, net worth is much like influencer reach.
This is no less true for the average person. If the real estate market in your area crashes and you own a house, your net worth would crash through other peoples collective action.
The only difference is that most of these billionaires are invested in a few specific companies, however there are plenty of people who (likely for bad reason) are also heavily invested in only a few companies.