Musk has apparently gotten there with the SpaceX IPO.
I’m okish with billionaires, but, do we really need a trillionaire? Like, really?
Do we really need millionaires?
I mean, one can easily live on 250k/year (max). I know lots of people who can get by with 80k/year.
Trillionaire? No, that’s an obscene misallocation if resources. Billionaire is borderline. Claw most of that money back and improve the lives of the rest of us imo.
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I would think there’s a relatively high percentage of folks earning this close to retirement that are, in fact, millionaires.
I keep thinking of annual income rather than wealth accumulation . . . So I wonder just how much is needed in accumulated wealth to generate about $120k/year net revenue for 25 years.
3 million using the 4% rule.
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All of that money and it still won’t fill the hole where his father’s love should be.
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I’d rather have a million more millionaires
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100% agree with this.
I know a billionnaire, not there by income, got there by ownership of a company. And he’s quite clear that there needs to be more taxes paid on people like him because the company got built on the backs of resources provided by society, like roads, postal system, etc. He’d be perfectly fine paying more.
I think the solution is pretty simple, tax stock ownership. Traditionally that’s not done. But with the accumulation of wealth that’s going on in the last decade or two, and looks like it’s getting worse, I think we are getting closer to a tipping point. Bezos and musk and likely a few others like the walmart family need to have a serious amount of their wealth reallocated back. And maybe some contstraints put on how they grow.
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I’d like to retire comfortably someday. So, in the absence of suitable pensions…yes, I need to be a millionaire.
Apparently understanding how radiative cooling works in space is not necessary to be a trillionaire based on owning a space oriented company.
It’s not really the principle of his wealth that I don’t like, it’s how he got there. NASDAQ changed its rules to let investors dump their shares onto regular people’s 401ks.
The rich just engineered a way to get themselves richer by scamming regular people.
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I don’t think trillionaires is inherently bad. It’s not a zero-sum game.
What’s bad is large intergenerational wealth which becomes pseudo-nobility.
I do not believe it is possible to be a mega-millionaire+ and be a moral person. At least not while we have billions of people struggling to meet their basic needs in this era of unprecedented prosperity.
Elon Musk is a shit person regardless of his worth on paper. Add it to the list of reasons he’s a shit person.
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I’d be okay with an inheritance/gift tax of 100% on amounts over $2.5 million.
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This is capitalism in a nutshell imo. Without strong regulations it will always end up this way.
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I’d be fine with a carve-out for 1 residence, then yeah claw the rest of it back.
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Maybe not that drastic, so we don’t send the message of punishing success. (Maybe graduate the rates in some way rather than a strict cliff?).
Plus you would need to basically scrap the entire tax code and start over with it so they can’t just get around it.
But I agree with the notion that allowing grotesque amounts of wealth to be pooled in just a few families is troubling and helps no one.
In addition to the intergenerational wealth issue you note, there is the problem of the market having a bias towards catering to the wealthy / seeking profit margins that are influenced by what the wealthy can pay, creating issues in terms of access and affordability to the non-wealthy.
You’d think that the free market would smooth out such issues, but reality is more inefficient and myopic than theory.
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Agree.
At some point, economics is all about resources. Things like Energy, water, land &food, and people(services?)These are real, tangible things. Money is not a resource in the same sense.
Extreme wealth will “outbid” you on all kinds of things. Housing (for sure), Disneyland vacation packages, recreational activities, education for your children, and even police protection. It redirects the resources towards those that are able to pay.
It also ends up sequestering the “money”. It takes it out of circulation. When Bezos or Larry Paige buys an asset, it is usually by outbidding others. But they mostly buy existing assets, like shares, debt, or land. Very little is allocated to completely new ventures. The job creator label is greatly over estimated.