2w ago

What are your thoughts on billionaires?

156 comments

A billion dollars is a hard sum of money to wrap your head around. There is basically no ethical way to make a billion dollars. If you have a billion dollars it’s because you’ve stiffed a lot of people a lot of the value they created and kept it for yourself.
- This is exactly how I have always thought about it too. Pure greed. My father ran a company for 35 years and for 3 of those years he took either no payout or a very small payout so that he didn't have to let anyone go. I asked him why he didn't just downsize and he said that other people needed the money more than us. That's how shit needs to be run. People centric not profit driven.
  
  Unfortunately it is in human nature to compare oneself to other people, and becoming big in other people's eyes is easiest when other people around you are already smaller than you.
  This becomes truly predatory when you become the person deciding on other's situation.
  Do you know a single business where an employee makes more money than his boss? Because I sure know lots of businesses where employees posses much more knowledge or skill than their supervisor, yet none of them surpass them in earnings.
- Even if they earned it ethically, they literally can't spend this much money. They can't spend the money fast enough.
  They hold on to this much money to keep score.

Forbes did the math once and determined that Smaug, a dragon embodied by greed and selfishness, is worth $62 billion. There are 17 people richer than him.
Smaug was shot in the heart and it was a morally good act.
- I'd be willing to bet that Smaug caused less death and destruction than many (if not most) billionaires
- Fyi that math was heavily contested, i agree with the sentiment but a literal mountain full of gold, assuming the market wouldnt crash, would make him the richest person on the planet.
  
  We don't actually know the size of the hoard, though. We know it's big enough for him to sleep in it, and we know the Arkenstone was worth one share of it, but we don't have specific numbers (at least, none I can see). Any valuation has to be an estimation, and any estimation will be contested.
  Also, the value of gold today is 75 times that of what it was in the 1930s, which makes it even harder to put a price on Smaug's hoard.
  Regardless of the specific number, there is a certain level of wealth and greed that makes it morally good to shoot someone through the heart. Smaug is not the only one to have hit that threshold.
- Bard the Bowman was to blame. He gave love a bad name.

We should probably deal with them sooner rather than later

Tax them. Kill them. Whatever order

Asking this on lemmy is like asking a pack of wolves if they enjoy the taste of lamb. You already know the answer you’re going to get…
- Is ok to ask for an AMEN now and then.

Billionaires shouldn't exist; no one needs that much money. They should be taxed until there are no more billionaires.

I'm hungry.

I think they're bad for the economy. Money has to circulate. Every time a billionaire throws another million on the pile, they make things worse for everyone else.
- This is a view we don't see often enough. Everybody is into hating billionaires the way teenage girls hate the super-hot cheerleader. All they do is complain that it's not "fair" for somebody to be so rich. There's not enough discussion of the purely mechanical reasons extreme wealth is bad for the economy, not to mention the corruption opportunities it creates. The ultra-rich don't spend their money, they just exchange it to trade big blocks of asset ownership back and forth. None of that money ever gets spent on a loaf of bread or a bus ticket, or a GI Joe with the kung fu grip. It essentially disappears from the economy. I don't think most people even comprehend how that works - it involves more thought than reacting to memes.
  
  They literally steal work out of the system like a parasite. As you say, we shouldn't be envious, but fix the problem with the money leaking away.

Tax them.

- I don't support violence at all. But for every mentioned woodchipper, this scene from Tucker & Dale vs Evil is mandatory:

Billionaires are a crime against humanity.

It's why we invented the gulliotine

If you invest in the sp500, you'll have something around 8% return per year. This is highly variable year by year, of course, but in the long run, that's what you can expect to average out. You can do better than the sp500, but generally not without accepting higher risk.
With those returns, you will double your money every 9 years. Roughly. It's going to vary by decade. 2000-2010 was flat, while 2010-2020 was unusually good.
If you max out a 401k, HSA, and IRA on this strategy from a young age, you should have millions for retirement. If you're a millennial or younger, you're going to need a million or two (at least) to have a reasonable retirement.
How do you turn that into a billion? Doubling every 9 years won't do it in your lifetime. Not unless you started life as a millionaire and never withdrew a dime until you were 90. Starting with $1000 and doubling every year for 20 years, consistently, would do it.
How do you double your money consistently for 20 years? Either extreme luck or doing something extremely shady. Probably both.
In other words, they are not the genius captains of industry that right-libertarians want you to believe. They got lucky or are deeply unethical or both, and they do not deserve your respect. Most likely, they deserve your disdain. Every one of them.

It's not so much the money, the wealth in itself, that bothers me about them, it's the mind boggling absolutely insane amount of power having that much wealth is capable of.
They literally buy elections, they buy media outlets, by their actions they buy the direction entire countries take. They use their money to fund the actions of others that work on their behalf. They can create a literal army of individuals to work for them towards whatever end they wish to achieve. That's entirely way too much power for an individual or a family to have. Just imagine living next to someone who has a 500,000 strong army of militants just hanging out. Maybe theyre good, maybe they want to turn your neighborhood into a warzone for kicks, either way you would have no means to stop them.
Just look at smoething like the "tea party" movement in the US. Grassroots? No, try Koch brothers funded with the intent to install Koch approved representatives into the government.

In the words of the next post on my feed: Boil ‘em, mash ‘em, stick ‘em in a stew
- Bill-ion-aires!

Look at this visualization of how much money Jeff Bezos has, and then tell me that it is reasonable and justifiable.
https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/

They would serve a greater use to humanity as compost

I think wealth should be capped at a few million or tens of millions. Too much wealth hoarding keeps money out of circulation at the consumer spending level, which is bad for the economy in general, especially lower income people.
Without knowing anything about a person and how they became a billionaire, I have no opinion on them individually. Jumping to conclusions about someone based on the group they belong to (like say, a black guy walking down the street) is bigoted thinking, no matter who the target is.
- I've always liked the idea of you can get $999,999,999.99 after that 100% tax rate and you get a plaque that says "Congratulations, you won capitalism"
  
  I feel that eventually somebody will crack the problem of how to reward people for beating capitalism. Various zillionaires have said that at some point money ceases to be a motivating factor. They're driven by other things, and by the time they personally become super wealthy they've already achieved all the things that are going to benefit society. Further wealth accumulation beyond that point wasn't their goal, and I really don't think a wealth cap would deter those people or deprive the world of their achievements at all.

Billionaires shouldn't exist.
There should be a hard upper limit on wealth somewhere around the $100 million mark.
An amount where you can still invest your money risk-free at ~1% above inflation and live a life of plenty without lifting a finger, forever.
Any property, company, or thing in general worth more than $100 million should never be owned by one person alone.

Asking this question on lemmy is like going to a Linux comm and asking if it's a good idea to switch from windows to Linux. You're preaching (asking?) to the choir.
That said, eat the fucking rich.
- Which Linux though?

Depose.

Billionaires as individuals are just humans with all the good and the bad coming from that fact. Acting against them as individuals is pointless. We need to establish a system where becoming a billionaire is impossible in the first place.
- At least in most democratic countries you can't just bribe the politicians legally. That helps a lot.

Wealth tax that goes directly to funding a billionaire audit program. It should create a self-perpetuating cycle that means IRS audits for all of them every year.
- Yes this could fix it. But we're here because of the exact same reason that if that law was magically on the books, it'd be rewritten or repealed almost instantly.

It billionaires exist then there is a problem in the system. Billionaires are a bug, not a feature.

Ideally they'd be taxed into no longer being billionaires.
Realistically we probably need to violently remind them who holds the actual power before this becomes a reality.

They are subsidized by our government. Truly. The broken system created Elon Musk and now the broken system allowed him to buy a presidency for $134 million. Cheap, for him.
How? That is how much the system has devalued American labor since 1981.

Psychopaths

Tax, kill, eat. In that order.

I don't eat meat, so I'm not that into eating them. I'd advocate for composting instead

They need sanctions proportional to their wealth. And checks and balances. The less they can play the system, the better.

Hoarding that wealth does nothing to improve society.
Cap real wealth at 200 million EUR, any more wealth accumulated needs to be shunted to a global poverty fund.
However, the wealth earned should still be recorded as having been earned by the person, this will give the person the recognizion they crave, a highscore list to give them incentive to keep going.
This is obviously impossible to do as wealth is not a tangible concept these days.
- I was thinking about this and I'm actually curious how that would work in practical terms.
  Let's think of somebody with a large company, whose wealth is not in cash (not the largest sum, at least) but mostly on shares of their companies. Once their shares raise over 200 million... What? Do they sell the shares to pay 100% tax on the surplus? What does that mean for companies that, due to the economies of scale and it's costs, need to be massive to be competitive? (Chip manufacturing, automotive, aerospace, civil engineering...).
  To be clear, I don't think it's possible to become a billionaire without being immoral, and to hoard more than you and your children need for the remainder of their lives is also immoral. Not arguing that, only how that could be fixed
  
  Yes, they sell the shares.
  If companies need to break through the roof to compete then they'd just have to not compete.
- Give them a special achievement sticker on their license.
- I'd calculated 10M would be way more than enough but it's a good start.

Used to think: wow they've got a lot of money. Untill I grew up and realised it's not money they've got, it's estimated net worth. It's hard to turn that into cash.
If they got there by making a company that other people now value a lot: impressive.
If it's a royal family member/inheritance/..., less impressive.
Overall: don't think about it often.
- Untill I grew up and realised it’s not money they’ve got, it’s estimated net worth. It’s hard to turn that into cash.
  I used to think that, too. But just because its not cash doesn't mean it doesn't still translate to wealth or power. They essentially park their money in investments, liquidate when they need to, but otherwise use their assets to extract further wealth exert further influence.
  
  Oh, yes. But at a certain point it stops to make sense to count.
  Baradar is the leader of the taliban. He can walk into any afghani home and take whatever and whomever he wants.
  He has no repercussions, no need for exchanging net worth for influence. What's his net worth?
  At least, where I live, he isn't allowed to take anything without a warrant. I value those things more: freedom to live, freedom to express, freedom to fart in front of the most of wealthy people.
  Let others play their "maximizing net worth" game.
- Why would you want to turn ownership of a country-sized apparatus that acts solely in your interests into something as motionless as cash?
- Wealth is not the same as having cash, that is true, but it's effectively the same thing. They have cash on hand for any immediate need but if for some reason they need 200 million, it won't take them long to cash out stocks or sell some property.
  
  Or, more likely, just borrow the money. Then they get to keep everything they have. They have plenty of stuff as collateral to secure it with.

they're by definition a cancer in society

Fuck em. Instantaneous lead poisoning.

If a monkey hoarded more bananas then it could ever eat in its life, to the detriment of other monkeys around it, those other monkeys would kill it, and if they didn't, scientists would, to see what was wrong in its brain.
- Not before ripping it's face off and maiming it's genitalia. Honestly, it's too good for em

We need way less of them or way more of them. The wealth gap needs to be closed and I don't care which direction.

I don’t have an opinion on billionaires specifically. I don’t care if they take home a billion dollars. What I do care about is the ratio of top earner income with median income. It should never exceed 10-30%
- Should, and reality are a couple orders of magnitude separated.
  
  That is what the graduated tax system should be fixing

Give them an award saying "Yay, you won capitalism!" then force them to retire and enjoy the rest of their life without ruining any more people's lives.
- NG+, take away their money and have them start over again, but without help from their rich parents or with the odds stacked against them somehow.
  
  If they truly work so hard that they deserve all that money, they'll have absolutely no issue earning it again.

They're a cancer on society.

Bait used to be believable

they look delicious.

What a funny thing to ask on Lemmy.
I prefer mine well done, and grilled to perfection personally.

I think there’s about 8-10% too many of them. To make things fair, we should remove an equal portion of each (starting from the top).

I respect some of what they do but they should be taxed more and the top ones a lot more.

The easiest way to identify enemies of freedom and liberty. Count their net worth.

Medium rare with a little bit of butter and thyme.

Honestly, I try not to think about them. It's an inherently selfish and self-serving class and they've got enough money to pay people to think about them, so I'm not going to do it for free.

Like most parasites, they have an important place in the ecosystem.
Ticks for instance are a source of food for several species.

I under stand the human desire to compete in wealth as a [genitalia] measuring contest, but there should probably be a cap somewhere...
Maybe a cap at somewhere between 500K and $10Mil, I'm not sure where, but someone else fancy enough to write laws should maybe figure it out... cuz any amount higher kinda make no sense.
Oh and redistribute the excess as a UBI that everyone would get.
I don't like the bandwagon of "kill billionaires". Like why need to kill when we can just seize excess funds that they don't need and redistribute, everyone can just chill.
- The guillotines solve for the issue of using hoarded capital to tie up seizures in endless legal proceedings.
  
  I don't hate guillotines, but I'm more afraid of non-rich people getting falsely labeled as collaborators and also getting executed.
  Once you start killings, you can't really control who is next in getting killed. I just want to seize assets and call it a day.
- 500k is absurdly low these days to be considered rich. Thats like a house in the midwest, or around half a house in cali
  Unless the real estate bubble pops, which I have no faith in happening anytime soon.
  
  I mean like, I said somewhere between 500K to 10Mil. I'm no expert, but maybe someone experienced in the economy would decide where to draw the line.

If anything, I have ever so slightly less problems with billionaires like Gabe Newell (Valve ceo) since he's doing something constructive (proton/steam deck) that, while it does absolutely help line his pockets, is still helpful to people who play games.
Though on a moral level I personally feel not allowed to like him because he's a billionaire. That sentiment is spread across all billionaires for me. Either way, in general I don't like them because 99.9999999% of all billionaires do as much as possible to fuck over literally everyone else.

I'm always thinking about how bad humans are when thinking about numbers rationally. Of course we understand what a "billion" is, we know how many 0's it has and can do basic mathematical operations on it. But how much is it really? One of my favorite analogies for putting it in perspective is seconds.
A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds is … 31,688 years.
The analogy already breaks down, because while most people could understand 12 days and a lot of adults can understand 31 years for having lived it (some even twice or more!), 31,688 years is completely incomprehensible again. How many human generations is that? All of recorded human history is only like 5,000 years. It’s utterly, mind-numbingly insane. No trillionaires, ever! No billionaires!!!
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/17/business/elon-musk-richest-person-trillionaire/index.html
This was published on September 17th of this year, after most of the nonsense of Twitter and utter things. He’s still on track, by 2027 no less.

156 comments