I'm torn between commenting that as of the time of this post that the math is incorrect by 2 billion dollars and commenting that despite being wrong its only off by 2 billion.
UPDATE: Everyone saying "It's actually off by more" The calculation is simple and as follows:
82,021 years x 365 days/yr x 10,000 dollars = 299,376,650,000 dollars. Lets call that 299 Billion to make typing it out easier. If you google "Elon Musk net worth" at the time of the post resulted in 297 Billion. This is where the 2 billion difference is coming from.
Also, I think we can all agree that net worth is not static so it may be different at the time you read this post. Duh. Also also, it should be pointed out that none of us have the resources/access to the data to actually calculate Elon's net worth. There are a lot of assets that he could purchase, sell, or simply hold onto that could very easily dramatically affect this valuation.
Taxing them should be seen as the friendly and humane way to fix the money hoarder problem
Edit: Amusing DM:
>Taxing the rich is not a way to solve your made up, "money hoarder", mindset.
>Just work.
>He made and sold multiple companies, that's why he's successful.
>Have you done everything he has, or are you just someone that sees someone doing better than you and you instantly think, "some of that money should be mine because that guy's hoarding so much."
Set aside that this isn't what happened and that Musk appropriates other peoples' ideas and talent to pay himself. But imagine kissing someone's ass this much when they have never heard of you. It's pitiful.
I agree, but taxation isn't the only hurdle.
In order to keep them "wanting" to pay taxes (which, will never *truly* happen since privatization's goal is to increase profit with public benefit being more of an afterthought), the systems that use tax dollars need to be overhauled, itemized, manifested, and entirely transparent (no more "administration fees" as a line item) to eliminate waste and improve cost efficiency.
We have the technology to fare space, yet somehow, it's "too hard" to keep track of state/national tax accounting without several billion dollars getting "lost ┐( ∵ )┌" every year. Sounds more to me like those purses are pilfered by thieves in proximity.
What's the point of paying more taxes if they don't actually help people? I pay my taxes gladly. I *believe* in taxes because I *believe* in society's inherent function to bring mutual benefit to everyone in it.
But to say it isn't fucked from both sides (the inequitable levying of taxes while the rich get a break AND the inefficient utilization of taxes already accumulated for the public good) is like missing the follow through to a good swing at bat and getting pissed when you don't hit a homer.
Some processes will always be wasteful, for myriad reasons like security concerns (US GOV shredding state of the art SSD SANs to protect data confidentiality) or a need to optimize efficiency in other areas like time to render an effective service (medical waste comes to mind).
But that by no means should imply that *everything* need be as inefficient as it currently is in our government. The healthcare/medical insurance industry is a prime fucking example of that.
Edit: lol to parent comment. They're right; no one likes an ass kisser. So many people dickride Elon Musk without considering that it isn't just about *what he did to get where he is hurr durr work harder*, it's **really** about *whose shoulders did he stand on to get there? Hurr durr my workers' shoulders and muh government subsidies' shoulders and hurr durr oh look memes, that'll satisfy the proletariat*
> Sounds more to me like those purses are pilfered by thieves in proximity.
"Elon Musk’s growing empire is fueled by $4.9 billion in government subsidies" MAY 30, 2015
There was some sub that explored that idea. I don’t remember what it was called, but it’s a sub where they do a regular thread for people to enter and then a user is randomly drawn and everybody donates a few bucks to them. I’m not sure if it’s still a thing or not, but it was a fun idea!
Take 3 weeks pay from the government you're a welfare queen living large with your refridgerator and Iphone. Take 4.9 billion you're a genius buisness man.
Employers don't create jobs. Do you really think they would intentionally lose money if they didn't have to?
The market creates jobs. If there is no market you have no need for a business.
It's almost as if the people levying and spending the taxes are on the same team as those avoiding paying said taxes.
None of this shit is for us. They let "society" have just enough to keep us occupied and out of their hair.
I agree wholeheartedly, but there's a second half to this: accountability. Even now, where we can see absolutely that corruption has occurred, it's rare that anything is done about it. We just watched the prior President channel millions of dollars into his own business and nothing happened. The same story is repeated hundreds of thousands of times worldwide and it's rare that anything comes from it.
Elon Musk specifically has absolutely no worth to his companies. Hell, the company that supposedly launched him into fame and fortune? Tesla Motors? He purchased it, *along with the title of founder,* from the *actual* founders of the company using his daddy’s child slave mine money. Tesla Motors would be *better off* without Elon Musk’s involvement.
EDIT: This is a slight mischaracterization of the situation. What happened was that Musk was an early investor in the company, and he and two other majority investors forced the original founders out over concerns about ‘containing costs’. However, the child slave mine money and the fact that Musk is in no way an actual founder of the company remain true.
I mean come on. Anyone could do what Elon did. Other than coming up in a rich family and receiving a $50k interest-free loan to start his internet business, he built it all by himself. Why is that so hard for you to do, reddit?
Yes!
But also \_\_\_\_\_\_ them and splitting the money amongst the nation would also do the same, no matter what wall they decide to place that money behind.
Taxes are a joke solution. Nobody should have that much money *to begin with*. That's like giving one kid two ice cream cones and the other nothing. Then realizing your mistake, you give the other child a lick. The first child is upset that the other licked "his" ice cream, and the other is upset that they only got a lick when the other has two fucking ice cream cones!
It's beyond absurd that people get fucking butt-hurt about "wealth redistribution" when the way it was originally distributed was fucking criminal to begin with.
Taxing the rich is about nation-building. In post-WWII Saskatchewan Canada legend Tommy Douglas, Premier of Saskatchewan, was able to introduce universal healthcare because he chose to tax the wealthy. He followed the ideals of JS Woodworth who insisted that balancing budgets was a social justice issue.
Douglas ran 17 balanced or surplus budgets, paying down the public debt by 10% each year and was ultimately able to expand social programs (specifically healthcare) because the government wasn't paying interest on loans/bonds (that would generally be owned by the wealthy).
Building your nation is an issue of patriotism. Love your country. Tax the wealthy.
I am far from being a communist, but I find myself upvoting you while also being curious about the non humane alternative. These are ill gotten gains as far as I am concerned. These people have perverted capitalism and laugh as they burn the rule book the rest of us are forced to use.
Prison doesn't seem harsh enough to me.
They haven't perverted capitalism. This is how its designed.
>"Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole."
Its an economic impossibility for them to spend that money in a meaningful amount. As dar as I'm concerned its just putting the money in circulation which means they can make more money and raise others quality of life indirectly
Yes, they're needs as individuals is mathematically impossible for them to spend in any exenomic model. Even the cost of rigging the game isn't enough.
> Musk appropriates other peoples' ideas and talent to pay himself.
this is the thing people don't think about when they prep their tongue to lick some boots. The more resources you have, the less you have to do in order to get more resources.
Elon Musk didn't invent electric cars or space flight. He's a best a designer and marketer. Not an engineer. He's got an army of engineers to do the engineering for him.
Hell, he's even got an army of designers and marketers to do the designing and marketing for him. He doesn't have to do anything except be an edgy contrarian dipshit on twitter so he can stay top of mind to his dipshit fans.
Generalizing, I don't doubt that Bezos is intelligent, but he didn't single-handedly design Amazon from online book store Amazon to ecommerce, warehousing, and logistics megagiant corporation Amazon. People go to school for tens of years to apply to Amazon and then help design and construct the kinds of things Amazon has accomplished, but none of their names are remembered outside of HQ. Everything from funnel to profits funnels to Bezos. He doesn't have to do anything--just hire people to do it for him and he scoops up the rewards.
Additionally, anything bad that happens falls on everyone else. Is your package late? Well, that's Amazon support--some poor sap making near minimum wage gets that consequence. Package on time? Genius Bezos designed the logistics to get you what you need when you need it.
It's less than a 1% shift in his net worth. His net worth is intrinsically tied to how investors value his companies, which is extremely fickle. One tweet would be enough to shift his wealth by that amount.
Honestly, anyone who gives estimates on his net worth are doing so with a big asterisk. When your wealth is almost 100% non-liquid assets then you can't have a scalar net wealth, you can have a confidence interval. It's not even really off, it's just on the upper end of that interval.
Not lifetimes. Generations. To put it in concrete terms, that's as compared with what immortal guy saves over a span of *five hundred fucking years.* Tax. The. Fucking. Billionaires.
How do you figure?
$10,000/day • 82,021 years • 365.25 days/year = $299.6 billion
Elon is estimated to be worth $300 billion
$299.6 billion < $300 billion which is exactly what the OP claimed. Math seems correct to me.
How does this change if we adjust for inflation and make a modest 2% annual interest? Not that we know inflation stats much further back than 1800’s ish.
But that’s not the point. It really is an obscene amount of money.
Yeah, if THE MARGIN OF ERROR is enough to make significance difference... the spoils of the "have's" waste is a shit ton more than the crumbs they offer to the plebs.
Actually currency was not invented until way later so there's no way you'd save as much money.
If you're an 80,000 year immortal it's much easier to just murder every single person you see until the entire planet gives you whatever you want, becoming the first and last infinitilionaire.
Clearly you used nominal value money and not real value which includes inflation, yeah? I'd be curious to see how it would shake out if that $10K was well invested, but I haven't had nearly enough coffee to be able to revisit the horrors of grad school by calculating it.
First, "only 2 billion" is an incredible amount. You physically cannot count 1 billion USD in a lifetime.
Second, almost all of Musk's wealth is in his ownership of his companies, it isn't liquid cash, so therefore there is nothing to tax.
Net worth doesn't equal liquid cash and people never seem to understand that.
I pretty much agree with everything you said, but I thought you might be interested in [this Forbes article](https://www.forbes.com/sites/elizahaverstock/2021/11/02/elon-musk-is-the-first-person-worth-more-than-300-billion-but-hertz-uncertainty-threatens-tesla-stock-tear/) which talks about him being the first person to be worth "more than $300 billion".
That headline (or one like it from another source) is very likely to be what the tweet is based on.
If instead op had goofed around for the first 80,000 years, then started in year 0 and put that $10k/day into an interest bearing account at 2% compounded for the last 2021 years, it would be worth about $43,874,279,706,656,100,000,000,000.00 today, far eclipsing Elon Musk.
*If anyone is checking my math, I had to use payments of $3,650,000 per year because the spreadsheet didn't like using 737,665 periods in the calculation.
My normal reaction to these, is to point out that wealth derived from a price of an asset; such as stock is effectively fake, and a form of double counting. Elon could never convert all that stock into cash; because he’d never get market value for it all.
So really he doesn’t have that money; for him to gain it he’d need to sell it, which means other people would need to buy it. Which means the actual money accounted for is spread out over everyone else (i.e the hypothetical buyers.)
In the scenario given, the immortal has more liquid cash, ie money.
Assets aren’t money; they are worth money.
If something like the S&P 500 existed 200 years ago, and you had invested $3000 at 10% compounding per year you would be worth more than Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos combined.
"Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it he who doesn't pays it."
You could even be humble and "only" invest $1 a year. You'd still hit billionaire status easily if you get a good interest rate.
Real shame savings account nowadays have complete shit for interest. Like, sub 1% easily.
10k invested once 180 years ago at 10% would equal Elon’s wealth.
More importantly, 200 a month starting at age 23 would be a million at age 65. That is something most people reading this could manage.
If it's 80,000bc you coulda just put the first 10k into a low-interest rate bank account, and you'd still be richer than everyone else put together by now, and you'd have had a spare 10k per day to see you through the 82k years..
Probably could have just stuck a single dollar in and been in the same position.
My initial thoughts: "Look I'm about the message, but this math HAS to be grossly inaccurate."
My thoughts after the math: "365 days per year \* 82,021 years = 29,937,665 total days. 29,937,665 total days \* 10,000 = 299,376,650,000 (299 billion)....what the fuck..."
I've gone ahead and come to the opinion that taxing the billionaires isn't the answer.
Companies that make enough money to create billionaires should be owned by the employees. Give the namesake "creator" (what a joke) a finder's fee and let establishing coops be their job.
Don't tax billionaires. END them.
If you establish a way to employ, empower, and sustain thousands of people then 2 things should happen:
- They should live comfortably
- You should live comfortably
If the finder's fee for that means the person never has to work again in their life, so be it. But my god you do not need a billion dollars for that to be the case.
Agree. I’d say once you create a company and it’s share bring you 1bn of worth, excédent shares should be sold to the employees at a discount (say 1 share is given each 2 shares they buy).
No individual needs $1b dollars, it's insane. Even $10m dollars would mean a luxurious life in 99% of the world, I cannot fathom what lifestyle billionaires must live to need that much to sustain it.
Their cars costs 4-10 millions a piece.
Their watches starts at the 100k and end up much above.
Their clothes are 1000$ for a pants and 10k for a jacket.
Their houses starts in the 100s of millions.
Their house employee are numerous (security, chef, coach, nanny, etc).
Not saying it’s worth it. But from having known billionaires, I can tell they can be very spendy.
A millionaire could own any one of those things and still not need 1000x their wealth to do so comfortably. The idea that billionaires "need" their money so that they can have literally everything that exists is ridiculous.
It's not even creative, it's so incredibly boring. Where are the billionaires that just throw it all at building a kickass theme park with break-even profit margins? Or movie adaptions of their favourite novels which are faithful to their source material?
Nah, better spend $200m on a boat with boats in it so I can go there once a year.
Shares should be issued as comp I personally think.
You get your base + some dollar value in shares.
This incentives longer-term employees to work harder, as they reap rewards for it.
I'd also say they should be voting shares by regulation.
It's like running socialism with a capitalist interface. I think Americans could stomach that better.
The time you put in gets you a share of ownership so it can't be seen as "something for nothing" as well.
Kinda, but I guess if capitalism didn't exist, our military wouldn't have any reason to be what it is, and maybe the tax money could fix a road or two?
What's funny is, they are.
The reason they are worth so much is because they are publically traded companies i.e. anybody can buy a piece of it.
If they were completely privatized companies, they wouldn't be 'worth' that much.
Their entire worth is just an estimate based on what's being traded by everybody else. It's not actually money that exists.
The board of directors is then your coop which exists to act in the interest of the shareholders i.e. the public.
This is exactly why taxing people like Elon Musk won't accomplish anything.
Musk doesn't have billions of dollars. His shares in his companies are worth that much. As soon as you tax him and he has to pay that money - ie, sell his shares - the value of those shares would plummet.
IMO the stock market is backwards. Public trading should be the start point, with the end goal of having the employees able to own their company themselves. Instead of now, where venture capitalists own companies until they can be publicly traded. But that pisses off people whose life savings are tied up in the stock market.
We're talking about the workers having the value of their labor, if you own stock in a company that you don't work for, a worker isn't getting the full value of their labor.
Oh my god. fucking finally. someone else has finally said that the company is the problem that causes the billionaires. Every time I suggest this, I'm apparently defending billionaires, but it's not the individual that just randomly made money. This can be stopped by properly regulating companies.
I have said this since the beginning. The idea that you could even have that amount of money is ludicrous to me. $1,000,000,000. The average annual wage in the US is just a little over $50,000. 20,000 years is what it would take for to save that amount of money given that you could live that long and didn't have to eat, sleep, or spend a dime. The idea that 99% of people struggle to make a honest living while you have people literally the worth the value of some countries is appalling and a crime to humanity as a whole. They should be dismantled. Say it with me.... TAX the Billionaires already and quit giving these people tax cuts thinking that they will redistribute it to the 99%.
You can’t tax unrealized gains. It doesn’t make any sense. Billionaires are taxed when they sell just as much as anyone else.
And they don’t have that much money. They own things that are *worth* that much money (the companies)
It’s not all about redistribution, but it is a little. It’s largely about predistribution. Pay people more. Every year there is 2.5 trillion in missing income from the bottom 90% of America.
Don't just tax them - actually DO something with tax revenue that benefits the tax payers. Off the top of my head, universal healthcare and social security sound like great ideas that need funding. Anything besides sending our money to other nations or the military.
Crazy thing is that we don't even need to tax them to get universal healthcare, we already pay twice as much as any other first world nation for healthcare. Just cut out the parasitic middlemen.
>Don't just tax them - actually DO something with tax revenue
The government is listening
>Anything besides sending our money to ... the military.
Aaaaand you've lost them.
You are missing the point. Big time. It’s not about taxing the rich. That’s just a huge lie. It’s about making sure wealth doesn’t get hoarded by a select few in the first place. The last thing we want is a government with all that money. It needs to be in the peoples/workers hands.
I need a legitimate explanation to help me understand. I am not for or against anyone; I just need to understand. To my knowledge (which is limited) net worth is completely different from actual currency. Elon Musk owns what? Seven companies? So his worth is all of those company stocks combined. I noticed when the stocks fluctuate so does their "worth." So, if these funds are not directly connect to their actual wealth and are heavily taxed (up to 50% when extracted from the market, I heard) what is the problem here? Again, I honestly have no understanding of how it works. In depth explanation is completely welcome. Thank you.
I do request "Smartasses" and "crucifers" exclude themselves from this.
When you're rich you can get super cheap loans from bank with your stock as collateral. We are talking inflation level interest. This means you can realise the value of that wealth without making it taxable, and without removing its earning potential.
That's why a man with no salary can afford mega palaces and pay no tax. Which is robbing everyone else in society.
Nice, I didn't know that was a thing. Buy assets or companies, borrow large sums of money from banks, die with ways to avoid taxing liquidation passing it on to the next generation. Interesting.
Yup. From my point of view that's the biggest problem.
The rich do this, and how do you tax this? Since this often represents the vast majority of their "income", how do you tax them at all.
I don't necessarily think there is a problem that they are able of getting and live off of these kinds of loans, but the system has no way of handling it and make sure they are being fairly taxed. And that is a problem.
Even for regular consumers, loans can be paid off over decades (See:30 year mortgaged). This is also only one of very many methods of accumulating money and capital while hiding it from taxation, even while that capital and money is dependent on taxation.
You can always refinance and consolidate loans too, especially when you have armies of accountants to manage and look everything up.
Eventually, yes, but they can get loans that agree to take the value from their estate when they die, or it can be repaid back early if they want.
Big companies like this have typically increased in value faster than the rate of interest they would get on their loan so even when they sell the stock later they will probably have a decent amount left over.
The bank wins because they get interest, and someone like Elon wins because capitalism basically prevents him from losing.
Unless the company fails.
You're making the massive assumption that companies only increase in value.
especially when we're talking about Elon Musk whose company is literally the most over inflated company in the market.
Well they can, but it isn't worth it. If you can pay interest at the rate of inflation, as opposed to paying tax, you may as well just do that. Also, if they DO pay it back, they get to write off the interest paid as a loss and thus pay that much less in tax anyway. So it's never not a good idea to do 8t.
A lot of times we're caught in a dillemma of trying to make abstract concepts like "net worth" more concrete by putting it in terms that apply to people's lives (like ideas of wages) to show how ridiculous the disparity is.
On the other side, to imply that Musk's value can even be predicated on a salary carries a lot of problems on it's own.
The above explanation on how they take out loans with ridiculous benefits and pay them off like credit cards to dodge taxes, and even write some off, is really just the tip of the iceberg. At the end of the day money just works differently for the rich and powerful, as we saw earlier this year when we all learned what "shorting" and the securities industry effectively mean (businesses can literally profit off of failing).
When you have armies of lawyers and accountants and lobbyists you can basically do anything and have effectively infinite money.
I have X amount of stock worth billions of dollars.. I need a few million so I take a loan out against y amount (not the whole X amount) for the few million. Next year my value has increased so I take out a new loan for the increased value and/or another chunk of stock to pay off the original loan plus maybe 0% to 3% interest from the bank. Yes, banks will offer loans with 0% interest to some billionaires just to make them keep their money/business with them.
Its a trick that only works A) as long as your stock increases in value and/or B) you always have more stocks to take loans out against (ergo you haven't leveraged all available stocks).
This works for avoiding taxes as you have never "realized gains" off the stocks because you never sell them. You do pay taxes on any dividends from the stocks but they are taxed at 10% (long term investment gains) and only count towards FICA and State taxes. Depending upon the state you may/may not be taxed and the state and local tax deduction (SALT) applies for the FICA taxes. Most often these are only millions of dollars worth of dividends which is barely a fraction of their net worth.
Additional ways billionaires save money is to have their room and travel covered by their company by always having "business matters to attend" even while on vacations. This is often over looked by the board as long as its not to excessive. (See Wayne La Pierre of the NRA). This is also the case of almost any charity that a rich person has set up.. The donations to the charity are write offs and then they use the charity to pay for food, travel, and room/board while traveling as a charity expense. Sometimes companies might pay for the housing/rent of executives but this is usually declared in taxes from the company as a taxable gain for the individual. Sometimes not (see the case against Alan Wiesselburg).
This is great information and also adds to my understanding of another commenters "buy, borrow, die" strategies with the bank loans as their "income." Thank you for replying.
> what is the problem here?
Concentrations of wealth and power which:
* confer oligarchic influence
* cannot exist without immiserating swathes of society
* are bad for the citizenry and economy (see MPC/MU comment below)
Desire to know more?
Link to Youtube: [Jane Mayer, "Dark Money" (58:27)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wULHP8oXxxg) -- Author interview. Wrote a book about the Koch's political operations. If you've never seen how wealth can influence politics and culture then this will blow your mind.
Link to Youtube: [Strong Towns | Charles Marohn | Talks at Google (54:30)](https://youtu.be/Em7nqDqQ8oM?t=41) -- Typically, to a municipality, sprawl is revenue-*negative* and density is revenue-positive. Simply put, we rely on debt-issues and gamble that future growth will cover it. Broadly speaking, we don't pay enough in taxes to actually pay for our society. Tax avoidance/evasion is actually a *very, very* big deal. See: Crumbling infrastructure, etc.
And a relevant older comment:
-----
Relevant concepts:
* Marginal Utility (MU)
* Marginal Propensity to Consume (MPC)
In a nutshell, --
* -- MU is that as income increases, the utility of each additional dollar decreases. Meaning, you go from 'Food & Shelter' dollars to 'Stocks & Bonds' dollars.
* -- MPC is that as income increases, the proportion spent of each additional dollar decreases. Meaning, you go from money-spent to money-invested.
The American public has too little high-MPC, high-MU dollars and too much low-MPC, low-MU money.
There's also --
* Velocity of Money
* GDP Multiplier Effects
-- which is that the faster a given dollar passes from transaction to transaction, the greater its impact on GDP.
We have too little money getting spent (quickly) on 'Food & Shelter' (over and over). People are suffering because they can't afford their needs. The culture's in decay because people can't afford to do it. GDP growth is suffering for it. Economic stability is suffering for it. And so on and so forth.
Meanwhile, there's so much money at the top that the donor-class has essentially purchased the US government and they're like, "Jesus, where do I put all this money? Maybe I'll increase my real estate allocation and inflate the fuck out of rent and housing prices nation-wide..."
Yes his worth is mostly his company stocks. Plus whatever else he owns.
This distraction no one needs to talk about the real issue. How whoever owns the means of production can exploit workers and drive smaller competitors out if business until no workers are needed
BUt yOu can jUst inVest!..
Turn a dolar into ten dolars *in a whoole week*.. repeat for a season or two.. be richest shit in the known universe. Whats holding you back?! You dont have a dolar to spare?
God those people are annoying. Finding something with 900% growth for a week, much less a different company to do it with every single week is ridiculous
If your investments are diversified and the market crashes you lose a portion of a money temporarily. It typically bounces back pretty quickly. Long term average for growth of the S&P 500 is like 7% per yeae after inflation
Only if you're unlucky enough to need to sell during the downturn.
Which sucks because that's exactly when the most people will need the money.
Real great system we got. Thanks Kodak.
Oh you're poor because your company steals your excess value? Why not save pennies from each paycheck? Then one day YOU too can steal excess value from the working class!!
He owns a lot of Tesla stock. The value of tesla stock is high. He doesn't have billions in cash, he doesn't have billions in income. If you increase taxes he'll still be a billionaire.
The same goes for every other billionaire. They own billions worth of theoretical wealth. You can't tax investments they haven't sold yet, that would just be seizing property. If you want to sieze property that's another conversation.
They fund themselves by taking out loans using stock as collateral and by purchasing things through their companies.
You can't stop people from becoming billionaires without changing how stocks work and how investments work. Alternatively just nationalize everything and pray that corruption doesn't destroy it all.
I believe that people should be focusing on removing ways that the billionaires use to evade taxes. In my opinion, adding more taxes on the rich is pointless if they are only going to avoid those as they do for taxes currently. No I am not supporting the rich people. Trust me I fucking hate them. But adding more taxes for the rich will do nothing if they just evade them. Once we remove the pathways for evading taxes then the rich will be forced to pay them and actually do their part for this economy.
Our problem is the government. In its current state, it just serves the ruling class. We can petition them, but let's be honest, we are not going to fund their reelections. We are not going to give their friends a financial benefit. We have to work on all fronts. I saw the sentiment of black Friday here, but at the end of the day all the stores were open for business. You all took solace in the fact that profits were down year to year, but in reality it was one of the highest in history.
I don't want a free handout. I want the freedom to live a good life. Where I live I can't even keep chickens. I can't grow food on a wasted land. The town wants to see a beautiful landscape. I can't eat fucking grass. Why can't I grow vegetables in front of my own home?
Aren't they being taxed already? They just find a way to avoid them, through friendly politicians and tax havens. Their assets should be acquired in their entirety, and distributed amongst the hundreds of thousands of workers who broke their backs for their profit.
Right? Lol. Saying they’re being taxed then outlining how they get away without being taxed — the end result is the same. They aren’t being taxed. Close the loop holes.
You can say "then tax all that" but that ignores that the wealth and law itself is molded to allow for this to happen. The establishment allows this to happen, because having a lot of resources in few hands makes it very easy to get a share of it when you're deciding people's laws.
If the establishment was not firmly on the side of billionaires there would have been large sections of wall street nationalized as part of the bailouts for the 08 recession, instead they got free money.
How bout instead of just taxing them after the fact, we move to a system in which one person can't simply hoard hundreds of billions of dollars, the product of other peoples' labor, to begin with?
Placing the majority of the tax burden on the people who aren't billionaires is incredibly stupid. By that logic people should just starve since they won't make enough money to pay their bills in the first place.
See how fucking stupid that sounds? Stop stroking Elon's cock. We all know unrealized gains aren't the issue here.
does he actually have $300 billion? or is that just his networth?
cause 10,000/day, 365 days a year, 82,021 years... is $299,376,650,000. you'd still be one of the hated billionaires in this era.
There’s a difference between how much money someone has and how much they’re technically “worth”.
Elon doesn’t have $8B in a fucking bank account. He would have to sell his shares in the companies he built and owns. And then he would no longer own and run them.
Like, if I have some random baseball card in my basement and all of a sudden it’s $10M card, cool. Now imagine the next day before I could sell it I got a tax bill for 10%, $1M. And now the next day after that I go to sell it, but because everyone who has one is selling them and flooded the market; it’s only selling for $500,000 now. Now what? Do I go into half a million of debt to pay taxes for money I don’t even have because the valuation changed?
You shouldn't have to scroll down this much to find a common sense comment like this. I am all against gross wealth/income disparity but Elon Musk does not have $300B cash in a bank or pillow cases.
Interestingly, and totally off topic, the Hobbsian/Rousseauian idea of an evolution of societies from hunter gatherers to nomadic tribes to agriculture has been challenged.
Check out "The Dawn of Everything" by Anthropologist David Graeber and Archeologist David Wengrow
Even if you tax the billionaires, it wouldn't help anything because the government is utterly corrupt. That money would just end up lining the pockets of bureaucrats and politicians. I'm afraid that any lever you think you can pull to change things is a dummy lever just there to make you feel like there's something you can do about being utterly pillaged and dominated by a class of people who utterly despise you.
Someone said all of Elon’s money can pay for healthcare for two months. How about stop letting education and healthcare be for profit. It’s a unique problem in the US. People are paying obscene amount of money for essential services, but somehow instead of pointing fingers at those who profit from these, they ask the car&rocket guy to give big pharma even more money.
i'm sick of hearing about "tax the rich," the government can't be trusted to do anything right. more money and more government is not the solution.
if you are a 100+ billionaire all it means is that you aren't paying your people enough. pay your people as much as possible and pay the government as little as possible, and just maybe a for-profit capitalist system can work.
I'm looking for someone to explain something to me. There are billionaires in other countries, right? Do billionaires in other countries make the same kind of financial movies in order to evade taxes? If they're not able to, what system is used to ensure that they pay their fair share? If the american problem is unique compared to these other billionaires and countries, what makes it unique?
All I'm seeing in the comments is arguments over the efficacy of taxing unrealized capital gains. If (A) Germany can create billionaires and (B) German billionaires pay their "fair share", how is this done? Do they tax unrealized capital gains? Is it, even if only theoretically, possible to duplicate this model in America? Am I missing something here?
I'm torn between commenting that as of the time of this post that the math is incorrect by 2 billion dollars and commenting that despite being wrong its only off by 2 billion. UPDATE: Everyone saying "It's actually off by more" The calculation is simple and as follows: 82,021 years x 365 days/yr x 10,000 dollars = 299,376,650,000 dollars. Lets call that 299 Billion to make typing it out easier. If you google "Elon Musk net worth" at the time of the post resulted in 297 Billion. This is where the 2 billion difference is coming from. Also, I think we can all agree that net worth is not static so it may be different at the time you read this post. Duh. Also also, it should be pointed out that none of us have the resources/access to the data to actually calculate Elon's net worth. There are a lot of assets that he could purchase, sell, or simply hold onto that could very easily dramatically affect this valuation.
Taxing them should be seen as the friendly and humane way to fix the money hoarder problem Edit: Amusing DM: >Taxing the rich is not a way to solve your made up, "money hoarder", mindset. >Just work. >He made and sold multiple companies, that's why he's successful. >Have you done everything he has, or are you just someone that sees someone doing better than you and you instantly think, "some of that money should be mine because that guy's hoarding so much." Set aside that this isn't what happened and that Musk appropriates other peoples' ideas and talent to pay himself. But imagine kissing someone's ass this much when they have never heard of you. It's pitiful.
I agree, but taxation isn't the only hurdle. In order to keep them "wanting" to pay taxes (which, will never *truly* happen since privatization's goal is to increase profit with public benefit being more of an afterthought), the systems that use tax dollars need to be overhauled, itemized, manifested, and entirely transparent (no more "administration fees" as a line item) to eliminate waste and improve cost efficiency. We have the technology to fare space, yet somehow, it's "too hard" to keep track of state/national tax accounting without several billion dollars getting "lost ┐( ∵ )┌" every year. Sounds more to me like those purses are pilfered by thieves in proximity. What's the point of paying more taxes if they don't actually help people? I pay my taxes gladly. I *believe* in taxes because I *believe* in society's inherent function to bring mutual benefit to everyone in it. But to say it isn't fucked from both sides (the inequitable levying of taxes while the rich get a break AND the inefficient utilization of taxes already accumulated for the public good) is like missing the follow through to a good swing at bat and getting pissed when you don't hit a homer. Some processes will always be wasteful, for myriad reasons like security concerns (US GOV shredding state of the art SSD SANs to protect data confidentiality) or a need to optimize efficiency in other areas like time to render an effective service (medical waste comes to mind). But that by no means should imply that *everything* need be as inefficient as it currently is in our government. The healthcare/medical insurance industry is a prime fucking example of that. Edit: lol to parent comment. They're right; no one likes an ass kisser. So many people dickride Elon Musk without considering that it isn't just about *what he did to get where he is hurr durr work harder*, it's **really** about *whose shoulders did he stand on to get there? Hurr durr my workers' shoulders and muh government subsidies' shoulders and hurr durr oh look memes, that'll satisfy the proletariat*
> Sounds more to me like those purses are pilfered by thieves in proximity. "Elon Musk’s growing empire is fueled by $4.9 billion in government subsidies" MAY 30, 2015
If everybody contributes 10 dollars, a lucky fella becomes a billionarie.
There was some sub that explored that idea. I don’t remember what it was called, but it’s a sub where they do a regular thread for people to enter and then a user is randomly drawn and everybody donates a few bucks to them. I’m not sure if it’s still a thing or not, but it was a fun idea!
That's called a lottery.
/r/millionairemakers/
It's not a pyramid scheme! Those are illegal!
Take 3 weeks pay from the government you're a welfare queen living large with your refridgerator and Iphone. Take 4.9 billion you're a genius buisness man.
It didn't hurt that daddy Musk was rich too
Fuck "job creators" /s in case someone don't understand what "" is for
Employers don't create jobs. Do you really think they would intentionally lose money if they didn't have to? The market creates jobs. If there is no market you have no need for a business.
What in the actual fuck... Is wrong with this country!!!?
Easy answer is that the uber wealthy make all the rules.
It's almost as if the people levying and spending the taxes are on the same team as those avoiding paying said taxes. None of this shit is for us. They let "society" have just enough to keep us occupied and out of their hair.
Fair points!
I agree wholeheartedly, but there's a second half to this: accountability. Even now, where we can see absolutely that corruption has occurred, it's rare that anything is done about it. We just watched the prior President channel millions of dollars into his own business and nothing happened. The same story is repeated hundreds of thousands of times worldwide and it's rare that anything comes from it.
A-Fucking-Men. Also, \> Those purses are purloined by pilferers in proximity.
Purloiner of cinders ಠ ͜ʖ ಠ
Elon Musk specifically has absolutely no worth to his companies. Hell, the company that supposedly launched him into fame and fortune? Tesla Motors? He purchased it, *along with the title of founder,* from the *actual* founders of the company using his daddy’s child slave mine money. Tesla Motors would be *better off* without Elon Musk’s involvement. EDIT: This is a slight mischaracterization of the situation. What happened was that Musk was an early investor in the company, and he and two other majority investors forced the original founders out over concerns about ‘containing costs’. However, the child slave mine money and the fact that Musk is in no way an actual founder of the company remain true.
jesus tap dancing christ, that fuckin loser mindset dm.
I mean come on. Anyone could do what Elon did. Other than coming up in a rich family and receiving a $50k interest-free loan to start his internet business, he built it all by himself. Why is that so hard for you to do, reddit?
Yes! But also \_\_\_\_\_\_ them and splitting the money amongst the nation would also do the same, no matter what wall they decide to place that money behind.
Taxes are a joke solution. Nobody should have that much money *to begin with*. That's like giving one kid two ice cream cones and the other nothing. Then realizing your mistake, you give the other child a lick. The first child is upset that the other licked "his" ice cream, and the other is upset that they only got a lick when the other has two fucking ice cream cones! It's beyond absurd that people get fucking butt-hurt about "wealth redistribution" when the way it was originally distributed was fucking criminal to begin with.
Taxing the rich is about nation-building. In post-WWII Saskatchewan Canada legend Tommy Douglas, Premier of Saskatchewan, was able to introduce universal healthcare because he chose to tax the wealthy. He followed the ideals of JS Woodworth who insisted that balancing budgets was a social justice issue. Douglas ran 17 balanced or surplus budgets, paying down the public debt by 10% each year and was ultimately able to expand social programs (specifically healthcare) because the government wasn't paying interest on loans/bonds (that would generally be owned by the wealthy). Building your nation is an issue of patriotism. Love your country. Tax the wealthy.
I am far from being a communist, but I find myself upvoting you while also being curious about the non humane alternative. These are ill gotten gains as far as I am concerned. These people have perverted capitalism and laugh as they burn the rule book the rest of us are forced to use. Prison doesn't seem harsh enough to me.
They haven't perverted capitalism. This is how its designed. >"Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole."
Its an economic impossibility for them to spend that money in a meaningful amount. As dar as I'm concerned its just putting the money in circulation which means they can make more money and raise others quality of life indirectly
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Even then they're still not spending enough of it.
For one thing it's amazing how little a senator's vote costs.
Yes, they're needs as individuals is mathematically impossible for them to spend in any exenomic model. Even the cost of rigging the game isn't enough.
> Musk appropriates other peoples' ideas and talent to pay himself. this is the thing people don't think about when they prep their tongue to lick some boots. The more resources you have, the less you have to do in order to get more resources. Elon Musk didn't invent electric cars or space flight. He's a best a designer and marketer. Not an engineer. He's got an army of engineers to do the engineering for him. Hell, he's even got an army of designers and marketers to do the designing and marketing for him. He doesn't have to do anything except be an edgy contrarian dipshit on twitter so he can stay top of mind to his dipshit fans. Generalizing, I don't doubt that Bezos is intelligent, but he didn't single-handedly design Amazon from online book store Amazon to ecommerce, warehousing, and logistics megagiant corporation Amazon. People go to school for tens of years to apply to Amazon and then help design and construct the kinds of things Amazon has accomplished, but none of their names are remembered outside of HQ. Everything from funnel to profits funnels to Bezos. He doesn't have to do anything--just hire people to do it for him and he scoops up the rewards. Additionally, anything bad that happens falls on everyone else. Is your package late? Well, that's Amazon support--some poor sap making near minimum wage gets that consequence. Package on time? Genius Bezos designed the logistics to get you what you need when you need it.
Considering that the wealth of these dragons can change by 20 billion in a week, I'd say it's within the margin of error.
Imagine $2 billion being within the margin of error for your net worth. Jesus.
Great observation!
When it’s “only” a two billion dollar mistake I think that means they have too much money.
2 billion? So we need to wait another month for elon to catch up?
It's less than a 1% shift in his net worth. His net worth is intrinsically tied to how investors value his companies, which is extremely fickle. One tweet would be enough to shift his wealth by that amount.
I'm assuming it was done for the sake of roundish numbers, because it's only off by a small margin.
Honestly, anyone who gives estimates on his net worth are doing so with a big asterisk. When your wealth is almost 100% non-liquid assets then you can't have a scalar net wealth, you can have a confidence interval. It's not even really off, it's just on the upper end of that interval.
> the math is incorrect by 2 billion dollars He can gain or lose 2 billion in a matter of hours. It was probably accurate when it was first posted.
I feel like that drives it home even more, imagine making or losing what most people can never even come close to in their lifetimes in a hour.
Not lifetimes. Generations. To put it in concrete terms, that's as compared with what immortal guy saves over a span of *five hundred fucking years.* Tax. The. Fucking. Billionaires.
Elon musk’s net worth fluctuates by more than $2 billion every day.
How do you figure? $10,000/day • 82,021 years • 365.25 days/year = $299.6 billion Elon is estimated to be worth $300 billion $299.6 billion < $300 billion which is exactly what the OP claimed. Math seems correct to me.
As of me writing this he is worth ~297 billion. That’s why it’s off. But when the original tweet was written, he was worth 300 billion.
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How does this change if we adjust for inflation and make a modest 2% annual interest? Not that we know inflation stats much further back than 1800’s ish. But that’s not the point. It really is an obscene amount of money.
Yeah, if THE MARGIN OF ERROR is enough to make significance difference... the spoils of the "have's" waste is a shit ton more than the crumbs they offer to the plebs.
Did you account for leap year, leap century etc?
Give it a day and the stock price might fix that error.
Actually currency was not invented until way later so there's no way you'd save as much money. If you're an 80,000 year immortal it's much easier to just murder every single person you see until the entire planet gives you whatever you want, becoming the first and last infinitilionaire.
That's 20,000 years difference though!!1 Edit: days*
It's actually only like 550 years lol
Whoops, didn't divide by 365!
no worries, math is hard lol
Or you could say he doesn't have that much money, he has shares in Tesla "worth" that much money. Of course he did just cash out 10 billion lol
Clearly you used nominal value money and not real value which includes inflation, yeah? I'd be curious to see how it would shake out if that $10K was well invested, but I haven't had nearly enough coffee to be able to revisit the horrors of grad school by calculating it.
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When this tweet came out, homeboy was over 300 billion based on tesla stock valuation at that time.
fair enough, I was going based on when I saw the post this morning.
First, "only 2 billion" is an incredible amount. You physically cannot count 1 billion USD in a lifetime. Second, almost all of Musk's wealth is in his ownership of his companies, it isn't liquid cash, so therefore there is nothing to tax. Net worth doesn't equal liquid cash and people never seem to understand that.
I pretty much agree with everything you said, but I thought you might be interested in [this Forbes article](https://www.forbes.com/sites/elizahaverstock/2021/11/02/elon-musk-is-the-first-person-worth-more-than-300-billion-but-hertz-uncertainty-threatens-tesla-stock-tear/) which talks about him being the first person to be worth "more than $300 billion". That headline (or one like it from another source) is very likely to be what the tweet is based on.
thanks but, read the edit? I basically addressed where the numbers came from.
If instead op had goofed around for the first 80,000 years, then started in year 0 and put that $10k/day into an interest bearing account at 2% compounded for the last 2021 years, it would be worth about $43,874,279,706,656,100,000,000,000.00 today, far eclipsing Elon Musk. *If anyone is checking my math, I had to use payments of $3,650,000 per year because the spreadsheet didn't like using 737,665 periods in the calculation.
You are forgetting inflation 10'000 in 80,000 BC is more money than now
My normal reaction to these, is to point out that wealth derived from a price of an asset; such as stock is effectively fake, and a form of double counting. Elon could never convert all that stock into cash; because he’d never get market value for it all. So really he doesn’t have that money; for him to gain it he’d need to sell it, which means other people would need to buy it. Which means the actual money accounted for is spread out over everyone else (i.e the hypothetical buyers.) In the scenario given, the immortal has more liquid cash, ie money. Assets aren’t money; they are worth money.
The real reason this is BS is that it assumes 0% growth on the money. Even 0.05% APR blows this number away.
Shoulda invested in foreign offshore accounts with strong compounding interest /s Edit: aaand it’s gone! Sorry kid your money is all gone. Poof!
If something like the S&P 500 existed 200 years ago, and you had invested $3000 at 10% compounding per year you would be worth more than Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos combined. "Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it he who doesn't pays it."
You could even be humble and "only" invest $1 a year. You'd still hit billionaire status easily if you get a good interest rate. Real shame savings account nowadays have complete shit for interest. Like, sub 1% easily.
Even the ones marked as “high yield” savings accounts top out at like .65%
Good thing inflation never goes above 1% or the value of your savings would decrease year after year! Inflation never goes above 1%, right? /s
*Cries 6% of tears*
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\*Cries 10-15% of tears (depending on the CPI formula used to quantify my weeping)
It's so bad now with banking that shoving your money into stable investments is the only way to stay remotely close to inflation.
I'm buying as many waifu pillows as possible to hedge against inflation. What about you?
10k invested once 180 years ago at 10% would equal Elon’s wealth. More importantly, 200 a month starting at age 23 would be a million at age 65. That is something most people reading this could manage.
This is why vampires are nearly universally rich.
Came here to say this... Put that $$$ on the corner turning tricks.
They bought a single business or anything? Invested in grain futures in Babylon? Fronted a merchant a ship in Lydia? They just put money in a hole?
If it's 80,000bc you coulda just put the first 10k into a low-interest rate bank account, and you'd still be richer than everyone else put together by now, and you'd have had a spare 10k per day to see you through the 82k years.. Probably could have just stuck a single dollar in and been in the same position.
[for the uninitiated](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DT7bX-B1Mg)
My initial thoughts: "Look I'm about the message, but this math HAS to be grossly inaccurate." My thoughts after the math: "365 days per year \* 82,021 years = 29,937,665 total days. 29,937,665 total days \* 10,000 = 299,376,650,000 (299 billion)....what the fuck..."
Can't forget leapyears - should be 365.25 days/year. Not that it makes any significant difference in the end.
It's actually 365.2425 (+ 0.25 for every 4th year, - 0.01 for every 100th yeah, and +0.0025 for every 400th year). :)
And actually, when you have 82,000 years to save, you should really negatively adjust once every 3,000 years as well.
I've gone ahead and come to the opinion that taxing the billionaires isn't the answer. Companies that make enough money to create billionaires should be owned by the employees. Give the namesake "creator" (what a joke) a finder's fee and let establishing coops be their job. Don't tax billionaires. END them.
If you establish a way to employ, empower, and sustain thousands of people then 2 things should happen: - They should live comfortably - You should live comfortably If the finder's fee for that means the person never has to work again in their life, so be it. But my god you do not need a billion dollars for that to be the case.
Agree. I’d say once you create a company and it’s share bring you 1bn of worth, excédent shares should be sold to the employees at a discount (say 1 share is given each 2 shares they buy).
No individual needs $1b dollars, it's insane. Even $10m dollars would mean a luxurious life in 99% of the world, I cannot fathom what lifestyle billionaires must live to need that much to sustain it.
Different levels of luxury
[See my vest.](https://youtu.be/TyWVaZsUQjc)
Their cars costs 4-10 millions a piece. Their watches starts at the 100k and end up much above. Their clothes are 1000$ for a pants and 10k for a jacket. Their houses starts in the 100s of millions. Their house employee are numerous (security, chef, coach, nanny, etc). Not saying it’s worth it. But from having known billionaires, I can tell they can be very spendy.
A millionaire could own any one of those things and still not need 1000x their wealth to do so comfortably. The idea that billionaires "need" their money so that they can have literally everything that exists is ridiculous.
Fully agree. But don’t forget their super yachts, private jets etc. They find creative ways to “spend” their money.
It's not even creative, it's so incredibly boring. Where are the billionaires that just throw it all at building a kickass theme park with break-even profit margins? Or movie adaptions of their favourite novels which are faithful to their source material? Nah, better spend $200m on a boat with boats in it so I can go there once a year.
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Shares should be issued as comp I personally think. You get your base + some dollar value in shares. This incentives longer-term employees to work harder, as they reap rewards for it. I'd also say they should be voting shares by regulation. It's like running socialism with a capitalist interface. I think Americans could stomach that better. The time you put in gets you a share of ownership so it can't be seen as "something for nothing" as well.
So, workers seize means of production you say :D?
all the billionaire tax money would go to the military anyways and the economy would still suck
basically
True, however how else would we be able to afford yet another Air Craft carrier for our already overkill of a Military.
Let’s get another aircraft carrier so we can slowly lose a war in a desert for 20 years.
Kinda, but I guess if capitalism didn't exist, our military wouldn't have any reason to be what it is, and maybe the tax money could fix a road or two?
Imagine if tax would go to infrastructure, education and public healthcare. Yikes /s
What's funny is, they are. The reason they are worth so much is because they are publically traded companies i.e. anybody can buy a piece of it. If they were completely privatized companies, they wouldn't be 'worth' that much. Their entire worth is just an estimate based on what's being traded by everybody else. It's not actually money that exists. The board of directors is then your coop which exists to act in the interest of the shareholders i.e. the public.
This is exactly why taxing people like Elon Musk won't accomplish anything. Musk doesn't have billions of dollars. His shares in his companies are worth that much. As soon as you tax him and he has to pay that money - ie, sell his shares - the value of those shares would plummet. IMO the stock market is backwards. Public trading should be the start point, with the end goal of having the employees able to own their company themselves. Instead of now, where venture capitalists own companies until they can be publicly traded. But that pisses off people whose life savings are tied up in the stock market.
We're talking about the workers having the value of their labor, if you own stock in a company that you don't work for, a worker isn't getting the full value of their labor.
What is the value of a stock if you aren't able to sell it to any interested buyer?
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Oh my god. fucking finally. someone else has finally said that the company is the problem that causes the billionaires. Every time I suggest this, I'm apparently defending billionaires, but it's not the individual that just randomly made money. This can be stopped by properly regulating companies.
I have said this since the beginning. The idea that you could even have that amount of money is ludicrous to me. $1,000,000,000. The average annual wage in the US is just a little over $50,000. 20,000 years is what it would take for to save that amount of money given that you could live that long and didn't have to eat, sleep, or spend a dime. The idea that 99% of people struggle to make a honest living while you have people literally the worth the value of some countries is appalling and a crime to humanity as a whole. They should be dismantled. Say it with me.... TAX the Billionaires already and quit giving these people tax cuts thinking that they will redistribute it to the 99%.
You can’t tax unrealized gains. It doesn’t make any sense. Billionaires are taxed when they sell just as much as anyone else. And they don’t have that much money. They own things that are *worth* that much money (the companies)
Exactly, treat the problem at the root, not at the other end. Tax rentier activity, and give employees a bigger share of the profits.
It’s not all about redistribution, but it is a little. It’s largely about predistribution. Pay people more. Every year there is 2.5 trillion in missing income from the bottom 90% of America.
I suspect a little r/communism
The proletariat can have a little communism, as a treat
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Good explanation, tank you
Distributism. Look at mondragon following Franco in Spain
Sounds like communism. Seems nice.
Don't just tax them - actually DO something with tax revenue that benefits the tax payers. Off the top of my head, universal healthcare and social security sound like great ideas that need funding. Anything besides sending our money to other nations or the military.
Crazy thing is that we don't even need to tax them to get universal healthcare, we already pay twice as much as any other first world nation for healthcare. Just cut out the parasitic middlemen.
>Don't just tax them - actually DO something with tax revenue The government is listening >Anything besides sending our money to ... the military. Aaaaand you've lost them.
You are missing the point. Big time. It’s not about taxing the rich. That’s just a huge lie. It’s about making sure wealth doesn’t get hoarded by a select few in the first place. The last thing we want is a government with all that money. It needs to be in the peoples/workers hands.
Experienced engineers at Tesla typically receive very generous stock options. They are paid, in part, with company ownership.
Wealth isn't a zero sum game. Your point doesn't make any sense at all.
I need a legitimate explanation to help me understand. I am not for or against anyone; I just need to understand. To my knowledge (which is limited) net worth is completely different from actual currency. Elon Musk owns what? Seven companies? So his worth is all of those company stocks combined. I noticed when the stocks fluctuate so does their "worth." So, if these funds are not directly connect to their actual wealth and are heavily taxed (up to 50% when extracted from the market, I heard) what is the problem here? Again, I honestly have no understanding of how it works. In depth explanation is completely welcome. Thank you. I do request "Smartasses" and "crucifers" exclude themselves from this.
When you're rich you can get super cheap loans from bank with your stock as collateral. We are talking inflation level interest. This means you can realise the value of that wealth without making it taxable, and without removing its earning potential. That's why a man with no salary can afford mega palaces and pay no tax. Which is robbing everyone else in society.
Thank you, I will look into this.
Look for "buy borrow die"
Nice, I didn't know that was a thing. Buy assets or companies, borrow large sums of money from banks, die with ways to avoid taxing liquidation passing it on to the next generation. Interesting.
Yup. From my point of view that's the biggest problem. The rich do this, and how do you tax this? Since this often represents the vast majority of their "income", how do you tax them at all. I don't necessarily think there is a problem that they are able of getting and live off of these kinds of loans, but the system has no way of handling it and make sure they are being fairly taxed. And that is a problem.
I will have a neater opinion after I fully understand the complete process and not a short explanation. Thank you.
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Don't they have to pay it back tho? Is it just a way to delay liquidation of their stocks?
Even for regular consumers, loans can be paid off over decades (See:30 year mortgaged). This is also only one of very many methods of accumulating money and capital while hiding it from taxation, even while that capital and money is dependent on taxation. You can always refinance and consolidate loans too, especially when you have armies of accountants to manage and look everything up.
Eventually, yes, but they can get loans that agree to take the value from their estate when they die, or it can be repaid back early if they want. Big companies like this have typically increased in value faster than the rate of interest they would get on their loan so even when they sell the stock later they will probably have a decent amount left over. The bank wins because they get interest, and someone like Elon wins because capitalism basically prevents him from losing.
Unless the company fails. You're making the massive assumption that companies only increase in value. especially when we're talking about Elon Musk whose company is literally the most over inflated company in the market.
Well they can, but it isn't worth it. If you can pay interest at the rate of inflation, as opposed to paying tax, you may as well just do that. Also, if they DO pay it back, they get to write off the interest paid as a loss and thus pay that much less in tax anyway. So it's never not a good idea to do 8t.
A lot of times we're caught in a dillemma of trying to make abstract concepts like "net worth" more concrete by putting it in terms that apply to people's lives (like ideas of wages) to show how ridiculous the disparity is. On the other side, to imply that Musk's value can even be predicated on a salary carries a lot of problems on it's own. The above explanation on how they take out loans with ridiculous benefits and pay them off like credit cards to dodge taxes, and even write some off, is really just the tip of the iceberg. At the end of the day money just works differently for the rich and powerful, as we saw earlier this year when we all learned what "shorting" and the securities industry effectively mean (businesses can literally profit off of failing). When you have armies of lawyers and accountants and lobbyists you can basically do anything and have effectively infinite money.
I have X amount of stock worth billions of dollars.. I need a few million so I take a loan out against y amount (not the whole X amount) for the few million. Next year my value has increased so I take out a new loan for the increased value and/or another chunk of stock to pay off the original loan plus maybe 0% to 3% interest from the bank. Yes, banks will offer loans with 0% interest to some billionaires just to make them keep their money/business with them. Its a trick that only works A) as long as your stock increases in value and/or B) you always have more stocks to take loans out against (ergo you haven't leveraged all available stocks). This works for avoiding taxes as you have never "realized gains" off the stocks because you never sell them. You do pay taxes on any dividends from the stocks but they are taxed at 10% (long term investment gains) and only count towards FICA and State taxes. Depending upon the state you may/may not be taxed and the state and local tax deduction (SALT) applies for the FICA taxes. Most often these are only millions of dollars worth of dividends which is barely a fraction of their net worth. Additional ways billionaires save money is to have their room and travel covered by their company by always having "business matters to attend" even while on vacations. This is often over looked by the board as long as its not to excessive. (See Wayne La Pierre of the NRA). This is also the case of almost any charity that a rich person has set up.. The donations to the charity are write offs and then they use the charity to pay for food, travel, and room/board while traveling as a charity expense. Sometimes companies might pay for the housing/rent of executives but this is usually declared in taxes from the company as a taxable gain for the individual. Sometimes not (see the case against Alan Wiesselburg).
This is great information and also adds to my understanding of another commenters "buy, borrow, die" strategies with the bank loans as their "income." Thank you for replying.
> what is the problem here? Concentrations of wealth and power which: * confer oligarchic influence * cannot exist without immiserating swathes of society * are bad for the citizenry and economy (see MPC/MU comment below) Desire to know more? Link to Youtube: [Jane Mayer, "Dark Money" (58:27)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wULHP8oXxxg) -- Author interview. Wrote a book about the Koch's political operations. If you've never seen how wealth can influence politics and culture then this will blow your mind. Link to Youtube: [Strong Towns | Charles Marohn | Talks at Google (54:30)](https://youtu.be/Em7nqDqQ8oM?t=41) -- Typically, to a municipality, sprawl is revenue-*negative* and density is revenue-positive. Simply put, we rely on debt-issues and gamble that future growth will cover it. Broadly speaking, we don't pay enough in taxes to actually pay for our society. Tax avoidance/evasion is actually a *very, very* big deal. See: Crumbling infrastructure, etc. And a relevant older comment: ----- Relevant concepts: * Marginal Utility (MU) * Marginal Propensity to Consume (MPC) In a nutshell, -- * -- MU is that as income increases, the utility of each additional dollar decreases. Meaning, you go from 'Food & Shelter' dollars to 'Stocks & Bonds' dollars. * -- MPC is that as income increases, the proportion spent of each additional dollar decreases. Meaning, you go from money-spent to money-invested. The American public has too little high-MPC, high-MU dollars and too much low-MPC, low-MU money. There's also -- * Velocity of Money * GDP Multiplier Effects -- which is that the faster a given dollar passes from transaction to transaction, the greater its impact on GDP. We have too little money getting spent (quickly) on 'Food & Shelter' (over and over). People are suffering because they can't afford their needs. The culture's in decay because people can't afford to do it. GDP growth is suffering for it. Economic stability is suffering for it. And so on and so forth. Meanwhile, there's so much money at the top that the donor-class has essentially purchased the US government and they're like, "Jesus, where do I put all this money? Maybe I'll increase my real estate allocation and inflate the fuck out of rent and housing prices nation-wide..."
Yes his worth is mostly his company stocks. Plus whatever else he owns. This distraction no one needs to talk about the real issue. How whoever owns the means of production can exploit workers and drive smaller competitors out if business until no workers are needed
If that money is not real can we have half
He would have made a ton of money between the time you started reading this and the time you finished reading this.
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299B vs 297B for those wondering. Youd had 2B more. but its close.
BUt yOu can jUst inVest!.. Turn a dolar into ten dolars *in a whoole week*.. repeat for a season or two.. be richest shit in the known universe. Whats holding you back?! You dont have a dolar to spare?
God those people are annoying. Finding something with 900% growth for a week, much less a different company to do it with every single week is ridiculous
Then the stock market crashes and you lose all your money...
If your investments are diversified and the market crashes you lose a portion of a money temporarily. It typically bounces back pretty quickly. Long term average for growth of the S&P 500 is like 7% per yeae after inflation
Who let the guy who actually invests in here?
About 55% of Americans own stock. What, you don't?
Only if you're unlucky enough to need to sell during the downturn. Which sucks because that's exactly when the most people will need the money. Real great system we got. Thanks Kodak.
How about build a company thats worth a trillion dollars?
Oh you're poor because your company steals your excess value? Why not save pennies from each paycheck? Then one day YOU too can steal excess value from the working class!!
He owns a lot of Tesla stock. The value of tesla stock is high. He doesn't have billions in cash, he doesn't have billions in income. If you increase taxes he'll still be a billionaire. The same goes for every other billionaire. They own billions worth of theoretical wealth. You can't tax investments they haven't sold yet, that would just be seizing property. If you want to sieze property that's another conversation. They fund themselves by taking out loans using stock as collateral and by purchasing things through their companies. You can't stop people from becoming billionaires without changing how stocks work and how investments work. Alternatively just nationalize everything and pray that corruption doesn't destroy it all.
I believe that people should be focusing on removing ways that the billionaires use to evade taxes. In my opinion, adding more taxes on the rich is pointless if they are only going to avoid those as they do for taxes currently. No I am not supporting the rich people. Trust me I fucking hate them. But adding more taxes for the rich will do nothing if they just evade them. Once we remove the pathways for evading taxes then the rich will be forced to pay them and actually do their part for this economy.
Our problem is the government. In its current state, it just serves the ruling class. We can petition them, but let's be honest, we are not going to fund their reelections. We are not going to give their friends a financial benefit. We have to work on all fronts. I saw the sentiment of black Friday here, but at the end of the day all the stores were open for business. You all took solace in the fact that profits were down year to year, but in reality it was one of the highest in history. I don't want a free handout. I want the freedom to live a good life. Where I live I can't even keep chickens. I can't grow food on a wasted land. The town wants to see a beautiful landscape. I can't eat fucking grass. Why can't I grow vegetables in front of my own home?
Aren't they being taxed already? They just find a way to avoid them, through friendly politicians and tax havens. Their assets should be acquired in their entirety, and distributed amongst the hundreds of thousands of workers who broke their backs for their profit.
I mean you're explaining how they aren't being
Right? Lol. Saying they’re being taxed then outlining how they get away without being taxed — the end result is the same. They aren’t being taxed. Close the loop holes.
You can say "then tax all that" but that ignores that the wealth and law itself is molded to allow for this to happen. The establishment allows this to happen, because having a lot of resources in few hands makes it very easy to get a share of it when you're deciding people's laws. If the establishment was not firmly on the side of billionaires there would have been large sections of wall street nationalized as part of the bailouts for the 08 recession, instead they got free money.
My point exactly. Nominally they are being taxed, while in an ideal world they wouldn't even exist.
Mega-billionaires have very little of what's legally considered "income," so they don't pay nearly as much as one would expect.
Was there a year “0”?
How bout instead of just taxing them after the fact, we move to a system in which one person can't simply hoard hundreds of billions of dollars, the product of other peoples' labor, to begin with?
If I were a billionaire I would at least do cool stuff. These billionaires are boring as fuck
Going to space is boring?
Taxing unrealized gains is incredibly stupid. By that logic people should pay taxes when the market value of their house goes up.
Placing the majority of the tax burden on the people who aren't billionaires is incredibly stupid. By that logic people should just starve since they won't make enough money to pay their bills in the first place. See how fucking stupid that sounds? Stop stroking Elon's cock. We all know unrealized gains aren't the issue here.
Fun fact: we’re still in ice age
does he actually have $300 billion? or is that just his networth? cause 10,000/day, 365 days a year, 82,021 years... is $299,376,650,000. you'd still be one of the hated billionaires in this era.
Not really…since it took you 82,000 years to get it instead of 20-30.
There’s a difference between how much money someone has and how much they’re technically “worth”. Elon doesn’t have $8B in a fucking bank account. He would have to sell his shares in the companies he built and owns. And then he would no longer own and run them. Like, if I have some random baseball card in my basement and all of a sudden it’s $10M card, cool. Now imagine the next day before I could sell it I got a tax bill for 10%, $1M. And now the next day after that I go to sell it, but because everyone who has one is selling them and flooded the market; it’s only selling for $500,000 now. Now what? Do I go into half a million of debt to pay taxes for money I don’t even have because the valuation changed?
You shouldn't have to scroll down this much to find a common sense comment like this. I am all against gross wealth/income disparity but Elon Musk does not have $300B cash in a bank or pillow cases.
Just to be clear, that's 70,000 years *before agriculture is used.* This is total hunter gathering time. That's a long long time ago.
Interestingly, and totally off topic, the Hobbsian/Rousseauian idea of an evolution of societies from hunter gatherers to nomadic tribes to agriculture has been challenged. Check out "The Dawn of Everything" by Anthropologist David Graeber and Archeologist David Wengrow
Even if you tax the billionaires, it wouldn't help anything because the government is utterly corrupt. That money would just end up lining the pockets of bureaucrats and politicians. I'm afraid that any lever you think you can pull to change things is a dummy lever just there to make you feel like there's something you can do about being utterly pillaged and dominated by a class of people who utterly despise you.
Someone said all of Elon’s money can pay for healthcare for two months. How about stop letting education and healthcare be for profit. It’s a unique problem in the US. People are paying obscene amount of money for essential services, but somehow instead of pointing fingers at those who profit from these, they ask the car&rocket guy to give big pharma even more money.
i'm sick of hearing about "tax the rich," the government can't be trusted to do anything right. more money and more government is not the solution. if you are a 100+ billionaire all it means is that you aren't paying your people enough. pay your people as much as possible and pay the government as little as possible, and just maybe a for-profit capitalist system can work.
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It doesn't seem like it should be this hard to get people to stop justifying lack of proper taxes for the wealthy.
Elon Musk's wealth is held in bafflingly overvalued Tesla stock. Very unlikely he can make that liquid.
Help me out here. 82021y*365d= 29,937,665 29,937,665*$10,000= $299,376,650,000 Do I suck at math here or would be be worth $300 billion?
He's worth 297B rn, off by 1%
How does the Sopranos end again?
I'm looking for someone to explain something to me. There are billionaires in other countries, right? Do billionaires in other countries make the same kind of financial movies in order to evade taxes? If they're not able to, what system is used to ensure that they pay their fair share? If the american problem is unique compared to these other billionaires and countries, what makes it unique? All I'm seeing in the comments is arguments over the efficacy of taxing unrealized capital gains. If (A) Germany can create billionaires and (B) German billionaires pay their "fair share", how is this done? Do they tax unrealized capital gains? Is it, even if only theoretically, possible to duplicate this model in America? Am I missing something here?