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Billionaires shouldn’t exist.
ABAB
All Billionaires Are Bastards
Bill Gates? Mark Cuban? (Although I can’t remember if he is a billionaire or not)
I’d argue they’re “less worse” but the fact remains that no one becomes a billionaire without exploitation. Bill Gates owned a monopoly and I’m honestly not sure what Mark Cuban did. At some point and time you must exploit a system and it’s people to amass that much wealth.
Cuban is what would have happened to Musk if he basically just took his money and walked away after Paypal. Cuban sold a website to Yahoo and the deal is arguably the worst deal (for Yahoo) of the dot-com bubble.
I like to think there may be, and could be… But I have never seen a great example.
Fill in the blanks:
A ______ billionaire is a good billionaire.
Luigi’d
B
A million seconds is 11.5 days. A billion seconds is 31.7 years.
Just a good way to ground an unimaginable number in something more familiar and drive home how ridiculous having a billion dollars is. I hear we’re on track for our first batch of trillionaires this decade.
A trillion seconds is 31,688 years.
I hear we’re on track for our first batch of trillionaires this decade.
Unless we do something about the wealth, this is kinda expected eventually. Give it another decade after that and it would be wholly expected to have our first multi trillionaire, and honestly they wouldn’t even need to do anything to make that happen, they’d just need to invest in a board market ETF.
I’m not saying this is good, but this was inevitable due to how the markets and inflation work.
Edit: Also it will probably happen sooner than anyone realizes when you take into account private unmeasurable wealth like Saudi royalty.
This is actually great! Welcoming your example to my now collection of two, alongside Wealth, shown to scale.
And then there’s that Tom Scott video
Another gem, thanks for sharing. God damn.
Yes there is Luigi showed us the way.
Brian Thompson was just a poor millionaire though. Perhaps one of the reasons why he was so easy to get.
Good Billionaire is Thousander.
While, Brian Thompson may be the exception, after The-Man-Luigi-is-taking-a-fall-for was done with him of course.
Any individual that wants to horde so much money and wealth that could satisfy the lives of millions of people is not a good person.
It’s like having a million sandwiches and thousands of hungry people around you … but you’d rather keep all your sandwiches and screw everyone else, even though you will never be able to physically eat all the sandwiches you have in a lifetime.
Being a billionaire is not a sign of intelligence, it’s a mental disorder and a person who lacks human empathy.
Not to be that person, but most people forget that the net worth oft these people is not liquid. They can not just wave a magic wand and give people money.
It’s usually in shares of their very highly valued company which they can’t give up because they wouldl give up control. Billionaires are not about money, they are about power.
What keeps you in power does not align with doing good. Thus the giving pledge exists, it allows giving away the money while you don’t lose control in your lifetime.
Most billionaires do some kind of philanthropy. Gotta control where the money they would pay in taxes ends up. Even this is about power.
Their survival bias makes them believe that they know best what’s good for the world. Taxing them would just increase their philanthropy, which is a good thing even though not perfect. Let’s start somewhere.
That is the fallacious paper millionaire argument. They have more than enough liquidity, can take loans against their “non-liquid” wealth, and are anyway working with multi-year plans to sell assets and have enough liquidity. I believe this is also explained in https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/ and there they also explain that the US market cap is bigger than their stocks and so. So they could sell a lot in one go, of course losing “efficiency”, but the market would be able to cope without any issue.
I think we are on the same side here judging from the rest of your comment, but I find it important to refute this typical argument, because it does not help that there is some sort of billionaire apologism by saying that they “don’t actually have this money in their bank account to spend”.
If a company is set up right from the start, you could have voting shares that aren’t stock based, and that can be a way to maintain control of your company without hoarding the wealth via stock, but if it’s not like that from the start, it would be very hard to make that change after the fact.
It’d probably be better if that was more common, but I still don’t think they’d give up their shares worth money on the market, and then I still think these types of shares would have off market value?
Modern age dragons, sitting on their hoards while occasionally burning a peasant village to keep those dirty plebs in line.
Well, you know what to do with dragons
Sir/ma’am/other, you are on the internet. There are many responses to that.
Donkey_from_shrek.gif
There are many responses. Not all of them are right
No, they are right.
All the many responses.
Just not right -in this circumstance-
Will someone stop this man from yelling “dragon”?
Hoarding is hoarding
If a little old lady hoards 20 cats we call her crazy … a man hoards $400 billion dollars and we call them a genius
You do know that billionaires don’t actually have billions of dollars in a vault in a Scrooge McDuck fashion, right?
A billion dollars distributed to 1,000,000 people is $1000.
All the wealth billionaires in the US hold is not enough to pay for the government to run for one year.
Let’s not pretend giving away all their wealth would fix all of our problems.
Youre not talking about running the government, which isnt really expensive, youre talking about the whole country. “10 people cant pay for a whole country of 340,000,000 including all of its infrastructure and industry, they dont have that much money”.
Can you reflect on how fucking ridiculous this statement is?
Whats next? “Elon Musk cant even buy a planet, hes not that rich”
What makes more sense in a society? One person who controls a billion dollars or a thousand people with million dollars?
The billionaire locks up all that wealth and it doesn’t do anything for anyone … sure it might make someone even more money but it essentially locks away that potential wealth from a larger group of people.
If you had 1,000 millionaires, then they would all go out to perform all kinds of other activities and businesses that would be smaller but at least benefit even more people.
Driving wealth to smaller and smaller groups of people only drives more and more wealth to fewer people while everyone else suffers.
Redistributing millions or billions of dollars might not change much … but at the very least it would be a hell of a lot better than what we have now.
The billionaires have their wealth in businesses, it’s not locked up. People don’t just put a billion in a savings account
If the people saying “kill all ceos” understood the basics of how a world worked or were past their edgy teens, they would also be smart enough not to grab for violence against entire groups as a first resort. Yes suck, hitlermelon, mexican currency and everyone running the american health insurance companies are not good people, obviously. That means society and laws must change to treat them as equals and to tax ultra rich more while removing money as a tool of influence from politics. I can’t see anyone not getting behind that.
But idunno, I see people going “all ceos, landlords and rich are stinkin fukin evil, kill em all”. Idk seems kinda violent and totalitarian. Seems like theyd want me dead too since I dont like them killing people they define as needing to be killed. Idunno, makes me not want to respect any of them or their political beliefs or their side.
Y’all see how you are actively giving fuel for the right? And now looking at the centrist threads, driving away people who dont like extremes by labling them as the enemy?
Let’s not pretend giving away all their wealth would fix all of our problems.
Let’s not pretend that assets work like cash.
Yup. Show me a billionaire who has paid their workers fairly from day one, followed every single law and regulation by the book, never spent a single dollar on lobbying Congress or contributing to political campaigns for quid pro quos, and never used underpaid contractors or foreign slave labor. You can’t, because there’s no such thing as a good billionaire.
The guy who founded Costco and was its CEO up until a few years ago is this, if not very close. A business lauded for both how it treated its workforce, and its customers. Basically no turnover unless someone retires.
Yes, even that one
I don’t have a problem with open lobbying per se. If it’s on behalf of all of the workers and customers as well and not just their own interests.
But can anyone identify such a billionaire?
And by definition that rules out any that step on their workers like bugs…
And even then, if they managed to amass that kind of wealth, it had to come from somewhere, i.e. consumers paying enough for their product that it made them a billionaire, meaning all these people could have paid less and that billionaire could be a millionaire or just middle class and more people would be richer.
That is kind of true. But on the assumption that the corporation (in this case Costco) is doing more good than bad, like generating fair jobs, it would benefit most to see that business grow. If you dont generate profit because you distribute everything to your employees or customers, you will never be able to grow. So Costco will stay with 10 employees forever and only those businesses that exploit workers and customers can grow.
You could argue that there is really no need for businesses to grow as big ss many are today and I would completely agree, but that has to be regulated by law.
Non profits are a thing and they are able to grow, hell, you would expect them to grow more because less money goes to the pockets of a CEO and more goes to growing the company.
It can also make profit without billions going to the pockets of a single person, if that money was just redistributes to all employees the business would probably grow even faster because more qualified people would want to work there and would be happier working there.
Three scenarios:
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The company makes 100B in revenue, pays its employees a fair wage, distributes 5B to the C-suites and makes 50B in total profit
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The company makes 100B in revenues, pays its employees a fair wage, distributes 10M to the C-suites, distributes 4.99B in bonus to all employees and makes 50B in total profit
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The company reduces its prices, makes 95.01B in revenues, pays its employees a fair wage, gives 10M to the c-suites, makes 50B in total profit
What’s the difference?
Hint: there’s no difference except the number of people being treated better
NPOs have CEOs as well and many earn salaries in the millions. NPOs are the exact right example, though, but not for the reason you are talking about. Non-profit does not inherently mean lower-ranking employees get a bigger share.
The big difference is that NPOs dont have shareholders or owners, which is how billionaires become billionaires, by owning companies worth billions.
But you should know that most NPOs rely almost entirely on government grants and donations. They couldnt even survive a single year on their own revenues.
If you want to establish the NPO concept in the free market, you would need to ban private ownership of ocmpanies. It could work but there is no way it will ever be implemented.
Funny how you ignored everything but the non profit bit. The reason they rely on donations and grants is because they’re mostly charities, there’s no reason a private company couldn’t reinvest 100% of its profits and try to adjust its prices to be closer to breaking even. Hell, life insurance for road users works exactly this way around here, prices are adjusted based on how much they need to pay for claims and we’re the place that pays the least for that type of insurance in North America, everything is paid for by car owners and it will covers anyone involved in an accident with a car, may they be in the car or riding a bike or walking on the sidewalk, it’s still cheaper than anywhere else for those who pay for it.
Tell me, from the companies’ perspective what the difference is between the three example I gave? You’re the one who said it’s not realistic to lower prices.
I think you are not familiar with how economy works. No offense, really, Im not an expert either but I dont really have the patience to go over everything in detail. Reinvesting profits is what ALL companies do. What youre suggesting was the opposite, you said profits should be distributed to employees or customers.
The difference between your examples is that 1 is a different company than 2 and 3. They are not different scenarios for the same company.
There are reasons why CEOs earn a lot and you cant change that by telling companies “but why not just give the money to your other employees, it would be better for them”. Thats not how economy works. Im not saying the way things are is good at all, but youre not offering an alternative. What youre suggesting would require that owners and shareholders would give a shit about the wellbeing of their employees and customers.
What a nice non answer that also ignores dividends and wealth accumulation and the fact that profits = revenues - spendings including wages :)
“ThEy’Re NoT tHe SaMe CoMpAnY!”
It’s what we call a thought experiment, the end result is the same, the difference is who gets to keep more money.
I’m done with people like you defending billionaires and being unable to think about alternatives, have a good life.
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Gabe Newell. Costco guy. Im sure theres europeans as well.
Oh theres communist billionaires too, im sure stalin and lenin and chinese ones were wery respectful of the working class, never had a genocide where up to 20% of the population (that is one in every five. Every fifth post in this thread, gone) were killed for not being the right nationality. And they never exploited entire nations forcefully.
But its okay, fuck everyone in a certain group, dehumanize them and talk about violence against them because a few do bad things. Surely the solution is not to use it to fuel political anti campaign to swing the pendulum hard in the other way by limiting power rich can have in the us via providing the myriad of evidence we already have.
No instead sit on internet and make literal hitler speeches where you replace the word “jews” with “rich” and wonder why everyone thinks far left and right are the same Nazis
What about Warren Buffet? Out of genuine interest.
While he certainly comes across as one of the more virtuous billionaires, his company Berkshire Hathaway, has massive investments in some of the worst and most damaging industries in the world, in terms of labor exploitation and ongoing contributions to the climate disaster. For example, his company owns 6.6% of Chevron and 27.2% of Occidental Petroleum, two massive exploiters of fossil fuels. That’s no good in my book.
Taylor Swift?
Nope. That amount of wealth is only generated via exploitation. Exploiting workers or exploiting customers, or cutting corners and skirting regulations, failing to internalize externalities. Mostly all of the above
I assume you have examples?
Some people think all profit is “stolen” labor value, and thus all wage labor is exploitation. I don’t think that’s true, but it is true that all for-profit firms have an incentive to pay their workers as little as possible, while getting as much productivity from them as possible, because that will maximize profits.
For-profit companies also have an incentive to cut other costs as much as possible, to maximize profits. This is why we see things like shrinkflation, planned obsolescence, or products just getting gradually crappier over time.
For-profit companies also have an incentive to externalize certain costs, like pollution, environmental destruction, or resource depletion, to, once again, maximize profits.
I love how swifties always say, “WhAt AbOuT tAyLoR?!”
And I say this as someone who loves her music.
She’s still a bad billionaire.
EVEN IF she paid everyone who works for her or her label above market rate, even if she charged her concert tickets below market value, even if she “goes green” with every CD, every piece of merchandise, the fact that she has more money than most people makes her a bad billionaire.
She could easily give half of her wealth away and still be okay.
She’s a bad billionaire.
Where do you think that wealth comes from? They don’t produce it. The workers create the value, which is stolen from them for the owners and shareholders.
To be fair to Taylor she is producing a show, but the wealth should be fairly distributed with the crew that make those performances possible
Unless her financials are public, it’ll be hard to do but the general principle is that everyone’s labour is worth the same.
She’s able to get more money through manipulation, whether intending to or not, through her fans buying multiples of her merchandise, to playing her songs on Spotify non stop to boost her profits etc.
Applying this principle, she’s gaining profit from the work of her fans who aren’t getting any compensation for their labour, resulting in millions of dollars.
So the defining factor is her work, not her staff. Her staff doing the same work at another place wouldn’t generate the same profit. And if you think listening to songs on Spotify is work…
General strike is the best and most effective means we have. If we wait for AI and robots to replace you, you loose your bargaining power.
Crash the fake economy. Your fucked either way might as well go down swinging and on your terms.
When you do it, I’ll do it. But I’m not wasting my life if it’s not a community effort.
Been on strike since the election. Come join me!
It’s not just me, there are others.
My industry doesn’t strike. It wouldn’t work. BUT I hope that all works out for you.
However, striking only works for so long. And, with Trump as president, I doubt there will be much striking allowed once he changes those laws or just replaces you with people from the concentration camp.
deleted by creator
That wealth is the spilled blood of the working class
money is both power and violence
My proof that ethical billionaires don’t exist is that there’s a line (I usually like to set it at 10 million due to living in a very high CoL area) beyond this line you will never need more money in your life. Money will no longer improve your standard of living and your savings are enough to ride out life in comfort.
When you reach or approach this line you have two options:
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Look at everyone you’re working with and help them reach that line - if you’ve accomplished that then start lowering the costs of your business to customers to help your customers reach that line.
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Squeeze harder so you get more money and everyone around you gets fucked.
If you chose #2 you are a fucking asshole. You cannot become a billionaire[1] except by choosing #2. You have actively chosen to push down those around you so you can watch number go up.
- The exception here is inheritance though someone with a sizable inheritance also has questions about using it to help those around them and, IMO, the estate tax should be near 100% and we should ensure that everyone has as equal a shot at life as we can. I loathe inheritance of wealth as a general concept though some things like having a family home are obviously pretty meaningful to a lot of people.
Well, inflation has made that more than 10 million, but yes I agree there is a number that says “I own a huge mansion, 10 cars, a yacht, and I eat caviar every meal.” That number is significantly less than a billion without having to work a day more.
You can’t own a yacht with 10 million
I’m gonna be that guy… but yes you can.
What many perceive as Yachts, the big boats that the ultra wealth have, are not the sole size of yachts.
This is a yacht for under 600k
The premise that merely having more than you need is inherently unethical is completely arbitrary, doubly so when only applied to those who have the most.
I live a fairly simple and frugal lifestyle. The amount of money where I am living at the standard of living and want, and my “savings are enough to ride out life in comfort”, is likely a much lower number than most others in the US.
Does that make me more ethical than those others? I don’t believe so.
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There is no need for billionaires. They have more money than they know what to do with and could solve a lot of world issues and still have enough money left over to not know what to do with it. There’s literally no reason in hoarding all that money if you’re not going to spend it. It’s a necessity for literally everyone else while they hold onto it to make themselves more powerful. If all the billionaires were hoarding all the food and we had to deal with the scrapes, people would be going absolutely crazy. Even though that’s pretty much exactly what they are doing when people can’t make enough money to buy food. Throw everything else like medical care and housing into the mix and what you end up with is a few people living a life of luxury while they are literally keeping your life away from you.
One single billion at any one time is more than any one person should have. There really should just be a cap. Like, 999,999,999 is the highest your bank account can get, anything after that just flows into public programs.
The game Zelda: A link to the past had a max capacity of 999 rupees (money). If you picked up more, nothing happened. That’s how life should be.
Billionaires don’t have 1 billion in their bank account
What happens when something already owned grows in value past the arbitrary maximum? Net worth is, after all, a function of how valuable everyone else thinks the stuff you own is. It’s a price tag.
If you buy a rookie baseball card for $5, and the player has a great year and now your card is worth $100, did you deprive anyone of $95 by continuing to own it?
I’m not super concerned with “things” and their value. If a person makes $1b a year and wants to buy a $1b yacht every year then they have a bunch of yachts. The point is that money went back into the economy. Now, if they have 2 and want to sell 2 for $2b all at once… sorry, no. There is a wealth cap.
The issue with Billionaires now is that money isn’t in the economy. The more they hold, the harder it is to get enough.
Greed is a horrible thing.
I think you have exactly the opposite impression of wealth than how it is in reality, then. Billionaires typically have only a tiny amount of their wealth in liquid funds (what you call “holding” money) - most of their wealth is in investments, and hence “in the economy”. So the thing you’re proposing already holds.
Maybe they could use 32-bit twos complement arithmetic so if you have $2147483647 and you add one more dollar, suddenly you have NEGATIVE $2147483648. When you call customer service, they tell you that’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Heh heh.
could solve a lot of world issues and still have enough money left over to not know what to do with it.
There is no world issue that can be solved by just throwing money at it. Those issues have had MUCH more money thrown at them than all of the net worth of all billionaires on Earth combined, without being solved.
It’s just not that simple.
There is no world issue that can be solved by just throwing money at it. Those issues have had MUCH more money thrown at them than all of the net worth of all billionaires on Earth combined, without being solved.
That seems obviously false, unless you’re proposing that all the charities in the world are scams and don’t actually do anything. I guess you could argue that as you throw money into saving lives, the low-hanging fruits get picked and the cost rises, so you can never saturate all the charities - but this is a very weak argument, since saving 99.99% of all the people in the world from hunger or poverty would be about as good as 100%. Just because there’s diminishing returns doesn’t mean it’s a doomed cause.
That seems obviously false, unless you’re proposing that all the charities in the world are scams and don’t actually do anything.
Charities do more than throw money at problems. This doesn’t contradict my point at all, which is that money alone is not the answer–if it was, all of these problems would have been solved by now.
As a small example, you can’t truly solve world hunger until you achieve world peace, and you can’t buy peace.
I’m not entirely disagreeing with you on your point, I just want to add that we have a system of cronyism. The taxpayers of a country (more specifically, the US) spend, say, $60 billion to feed an underdeveloped African country or area. The trick is, the politicians have made sure that the money goes to specific contractors. Who have no investment in using the money to solve the problem. Their business model is now not to fix something, it’s to make sure the program stays funded so they can keep getting $60b to do $3b worth of work with $2b worth of materials and make a profit and donate to more political campaigns to keep doing this on a greater scale. That $60b directly applied with government labor and government supervision would have worked. But cronyism prevented it at every step.
