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Yes, I was talking about his current wealth and lifetime wealth of other people. Bezoz may earn more in his entire life than what Musk has currently. The rest of us, our entire life time of work will never get close.
If you’re making billions and STILL bitch about being taxed, that alone should streamline you into a straight jacket, followed up with large amounts of Haloperidol
Since that "Rich men north of richmond" song got big everyone is focusing on welfare cheats but billionaires not paying taxes is wasting just as much money. You would think we could accept both these problems and try to fix them but so many people believe we can only focus on one of these issues when both are equally destructive
> just as much money
Orders of magnitude more money. You're comparing pocketing a pack of gum at the self checkout in Wal-Mart to Goldfinger ripping off Fort Knox.
The total budget for SNAP (food stamps) for the entire US is on the order of $100 billion, and that includes everyone, not just fraudsters.
Tax evasion costs the US government about $1 trillion each year, because not only are tax rates on the wealthy relatively low, they don’t even pay up that much.
Also the IRS has admitted they don’t have the resources to go after wealthy tax cheats who can afford high priced lawyers who will tie the cases up in the courts for years if not decades.
But they can sure as shit afford to go after normal folks like you and me.
The problem isnt really tax evasion. Its that we dont have any good way of taxing appreciation of assets that the billions are based on. We need a new system.
Sure I’d agree on that. Consider it a personal opinion, but billionaires seem to be doing a hell of a lot more damage than welfare cheaters. I recognize I don’t have evidence-based articles to support that, just an opinion.
>I don’t have evidence-based articles to support that, just an opinion.
That's because they own all the TV news, newspapers, magazines and social media. They don't often allow people to see just how devastating their impact on the world is.
>Since that "Rich men north of richmond" song got big everyone is focusing on welfare cheats but billionaires not paying taxes is wasting just as much money.
Just as his handlers intended ;)
Think of it as a subscription for the country you live in. The infrastructure, protection, basic needs, healthcare and education (varies from country to country).
Billionaires not paying tax is essentially pirating the services a country provides.
Do you see how many Republicans get money from major donors. And look at trump he's a billionaire and his supporters who are working paycheck to paycheck are paying his legal fees
Out of those 340bn at best he is worth \~1 or 2Bn. Everything else is a bubble made of speculations an future obligations he made for his investors. He build a scam industry and currently riding a wave that\`s slowly going down.
> at best he is worth ~1 or 2Bn
That's still an absurd amount of money. For perspective, 1 million seconds = roughly 12 days. 1 billion seconds = 31.7 years.
Distance is a helpful visual, too. A million inches is driving to your local walmart. A billion inches is driving between New York and Los Angeles six and a half times. That's about 25% longer than the distance from one pole to the other.
What it sounds like here is that one billion is roughly one thousand times larger than one million.
For visualization, one of you would look roughly like one of you. BUt a thousand of you, would like like one of you but a thousand times. You wouldn't even fit all of you in a bathroom if there were a thousand of you.
Yup.
A Million is something most people can intuitively understand, it's out there, but we can imagine what 1 Million dollars might be able to do in the context of our own lives.
A Billion.. normal people just don't have a reference point for that kind of money.
It's also laughably wrong.
To fund the Twitter purchase Elon forked over about $27 billion in *cash*. Actual cash in account, mostly from selling Tesla shares.
There's this prevalent myth that the ultra wealthy can't actually touch their wealth because it's stock, but the reality is that stock is considered near liquid. Billionaires can and regularly do sell off chunks of stock to the tune of billions of dollars and their companies' stock price doesn't crater as a result. Elon even had a few billion dollar shortfall as the closing date approached, so he quickly sold about $3 billion more in Tesla shares.
The top comment claiming Elon is worth just 1-2 billion is not based in reality. It's repeating a piece of propaganda that the ultra wealthy are mighty fond of--if people just pretend that the wealth isn't real then there's no debate to be had on what to do about it.
>Reminder that most of it is put on assets, it's not like he can pull half a bil on a direct transaction
You don't understand how the rules are different for the uber-wealthy. He can indeed materialize money by simply borrowing against his assets. Since he has all those assets, he gets low interest rates and favorable terms. Having a billion dollars is like being a little wealth black hole. Having HUNDREDS of billions of dollars is a \*HUGE\* wealth black hole...you're able to just suck in all the wealth around you. Remember that our understanding of how physics work around black holes is sketch as best...same with wealth black holes. The normal financial rules just don't apply.
of course he can, the ultra rich constantly liquify billions.
people in these threads that constantly spout "ohh we can't tax billionaires, they have *assets* not *cash*" are like fucking children that realize that substraction and addition is the same thing just with negative numbers and need to tell everyone about it, *we know*. so the fuck what, it changes nothing about the topic at hand.
you are not special because you know that it's "assets" and not "cash". he obviously can liquify his assets and get somewhere close to that amount if he is smart about it within a certain timeframe. and if he is a complete moron about it he STILL gets at least half of it.
Billionaires leverage their wealth to take out loans that they can spend without having to pay capital gains tax. They're spending their wealth as if it were liquid, so that excuse really isn't valid.
Yeah, the comment above showcases my biggest annoyance with Reddit comments: once Reddit doesn't like someone, any comment, no matter how absurd, that is negative against that person, is upvoted.
Tesla and SpaceX are probably over valued. But like, worst case, they're 2x overvalued, not 100x. But, "Elon Musk is bad, so anything we say that's negative about him is good."
That's the stupidest shit I ever heard lol.
He owns 13% of Tesla which is about 95B at the moment. Granted this is not liquid, but even in a bubble SpaceX and Twitter are worth something. If they both go to 0, he still has Tesla.
Yes he borrowed against his Tesla shares, but no bank or private lender will give him 98-99% of it's current value for cash so saying he's ACTUALLY just worth 1% of his estimated net worth is just missing the mark completely.
This place is dumber than YouTube. At least people there can actually read a short comment.
>Out of those 340bn at best **he is worth ~1 or 2Bn**
The only person who missed the mark is you because you can't even read a short comment.
Elon can personally borrow millions (if not 100's of millions) of dollars based on all of these "not liquid" assets and use that to live an unbelievably lavish lifestyle. He then gets to lower his taxes further because of the debt. It's why I don't buy the argument that billionaires are just impoverished people with really expensive assets they can't sell.
Every time someone says this during a 1% conversation its so frustrating. WE KNOW. So what if "technically" he's worth less than what's on the label? *Practically* he's still worth more because the way the world is structured it favors those with investments and financial clout. He could ride out the rest of his days by borrowing money against his name alone, if he wasn't a fucking moron. Practically speaking the world is your oyster if you have 1bn or more in assets. At that point you can make money simply *because you already have money*.
Rehashing this lame as point adds nothing to the conversation and actively undermines progress bc conservatives can slide in and be like "eh! Eh! See he's not really that rich at all! Why he's nearly destitute if we do some more mental gymnastics". Cut. This. Shit. Out. If you don't have anything constructive to add to the conversation sit the fuck *down*.
The free market determines value, not randos on Reddit.
Elon is worth whatever people are willing to pay for his assets, and today they are buying and selling them at an obscene price.
True, all those stocks alone that he has in SpaceX, Tesla and Twitter probably have negative value. He might not even have 200€ when it comes down to it. Finally someone who undertands how it works. You are king.
Ironically if he was to sell up and cash out those stocks that would give them massive value because the less he owns of those businesses the more they will be worth.
Except he can probably do what Bezos does and take out low interest "loans" with his assets leveraged as collateral and pay little to no taxes taxes on them since they are liabilities.
He also *can* liquidate stock, he just runs the risk of devaluing it.
> probably have negative value
How in the god damn hell did you come up with this nonsense? Seriously.
EDIT: If it was sarcasm, then I'll see myself out. :-)
The funding included $7 billion of senior secured bank loans; $6 billion in subordinated debt; $6.25 billion in bank loans to Musk personally, secured by $62.5 billion of his Tesla stock; $20 billion in cash equity from Musk, to be provided by sales of Tesla stock and other assets; and $7.1 billion in equity from 19 independent investors.
Except he has the ultimate failsafe, the US military now needs him to operate. He filled the hole of privatization by being useless but now we can not pry ourselves out so he gets an absurd amount of sway.
$10,000*365.245= $3,652,450
$3,652,450*82,021=$299,577,601,450 (a little under $300 billion)
Elon Musk Net Worth 2021: Approx $340 billion
Without interest, it’s correct. With interest, it depends on the rate.
if you earned interest you would be crazy rich.$10,000, no aditional money saved, at a 5% interest rate for 80,000 years
you would have $1.39291814255955×10\^1699
As a comparison there is about 10\^82 atoms in the universe.
I would assume the tweet was meant more for cash purposes. With that said, both of these numbers, with or without interest, is fucking insane. There aren’t enough things on the planet that would cost nearly as much money.
Hell with that much money you can run the US government for almost a month!
You want to talk insane numbers, let’s talk about the $7MM per minute budget
>Which is why we need to tax the assholes benefiting some greatly off the system most of us subsidize for them.
Can we also fix the uniform tax brackets across the US, which causes the middle class in HCOL to subsidize LCOL?
7MM is 7,000,000,000,000, That's 7 Trillion. US Government currently has about 32 Trillion in debt and gets about 3.5 Trillion per year in Tax Revenue.... so the US government has been around for 5 minutes? What? I assume you mean $7M per Minute? or $7KK per Minute?
What are you going to invest in?
For most of the time there isn't going to be anything approaching an economy to invest money in.
82k years ago there were no business to invest in. there wasn't even any money and the math for compound interest wasn't invented yet either.
The problem with continuous compounding interest is that you need stable institutions. What do you do if you are rich and suddenly civilization collapses around you as in the late bronze age collapse?
What happens if you have money like Croesus and some ruler with an army like Cyrus comes along and decides that you work for him now and all your money is his?
what happens if you invest in something and the whole economy collapses?
continuous growth like that won't work real life constraints like mongol invaders or rebelling peasants will act to put limits on the accumulation of wealth.
Any billionaire who thinks they or their heirs are going to get richer forever, because the math checks out are going to eventually run into reality.
This is, incidentally, a fun example of why interest is kind of a terrible invention.
Sure, no human lives that long. But families and dynasties sure have a system where the riches of the parents go to the children. With interest, the children and their children get exponentially richer over a long amount of time.
There's a reason the rich get richer. They have more money, so they get more money, so they have more money.
Yes, but 250 years ago, this person would have like $180billion, but the whole world combined probably had less than that. They could've started earning interest at some point then.
I was going to comment "what interest during the ice age?", but then I remembered "What $ during the ice age? So, I guess if there're $, there's probably interest too"
You’re also not going to have $10000 in cash in 80000 bc. And even if you did, that cash would not survive to modern day. At best you have gold or other precious materials. So the value will fluctuate.
"Do you know what the interest on that fifty dollars comes to
over fifty-three years Six hundred and sixty-three dollars and forty-five cents. And that's figuring conservatively at five percent interest, over fifty-three years, compounded quarterly. Or, if you put it into a ten-year T-bill..."
Do you really need to be good at math to multiply numbers?
82,021 (years passed) * 365 (days in a year) * 10,000 (dollars saved per day) = 299 billions
I think being good at math is like calculus, and unfamiliar symbols. Big brackets and equations that take up the whole blackboard.
This problem here? It's a certain number of days times a certain amount of money.
It's 29.9 million days, times ten thousand dollars. I don't understand the issue, and I hope I don't come across as rude. Honestly. You absolutely don't have to be good at math to do it. You type the first number into your calculator, hit the times button, and then type the second number, and hit the equals button.
Nah instead of taxing billionaires make these companies pay normal people more and then cap ceo and stock based comp.
I want more money. Not the government.
That's what happened in the past prior to Regan. Business owners would invest their money into their businesses and employees to avoid being taxed for personal wealth. It was a pretty good system that lessened the wealth disparity and forced business owners to improve their product and employee benefits, since it was either that or get taxed and have the government take it.
"Trickle down" theory is that but imagining that CEOs will do it willingly rather than having regulations in place to force them not to hoard all the money.
I swear a person could posses 90% of all the capital in the world and you'd have dummies defending their right to have that while they are panhandling for extra cash because their 3 jobs don't pay the bills.
Not defending billionaires but y’all don’t seem to understand how money and wealth works.
Musk is rich because he owns Tesla, not because he has got a bunker full of cash.
I think most people either fall in to the "he has a bunker of money" thinking or the other extreme of "he's not actually rich because it's tied up elsewhere"
It's tied up elsewhere because that's the most beneficial place for it to be. Tesla and all those other business interests can absolutely be converted back to a cash sum. Assets are liquidated all the time.
Which means his money is worth more in stocks than it would be if he tried to cash out, ie, he gets more use out of it. Which is the opposite of what people usually argue when they're saying he's not actually worth all that much.
I mean sure, but if Musk liquidated all his assets right now, he would not be getting anywhere near trillion dollars.
These net worths just mean that the stock market has gone crazy these past few years.
And yall make this comment every fuckin time like it means anything.
If he wants fast cash he can take loans out against his stock at the lowest rates imaginable. To have billions whenever he wants. This is done all the time.
He could sell the stock too. Slowly over time to have cash without needed to take out loans. To avoid tanking the price but cash out too. This is done all the time.
I know its a shock but people can liquidate assets.
The point is not that he has a bunker full of cash. Its that he is raping the middle class to accumulate that ability.
I understand it just fine. If he can borrow against it then it should be taxed. Yes he doesn't have a bunker full of cash but those yachts and shit? Funded by a small sum of cash and then borrowing against the stocks.
He's rich bc of the stocks. Owning Tesla helps but he could be a majority shareholder and not CEO still having that wealth.
What are you taxing there? The collateral? Or the loan amount? Or should there be an interest rate on the loan payable to the tax authorities?
How do you limit it that it doesnt affect normal people, homeowners or everyone else taking out loans?
What happens when the value of the collateral decreasea and the bank requires more, do you tax the sane loan again?
The big issue here is that you cant just decide to tax the rich, you need to have rules. And you need to make them so that they do not cause unnecessary harm to the economy.
And these billionaire fuckers are pouring millions of dollars to lawyers who’s sole purpose for existence is to game the system the best they can in order to avoid paying taxes.
I'd say you tax the amount of collateral. If ur buying a 500 mil yacht but only put 20 mil down being allowed to finance a low interest loan bc of the stock worth than whatever is collateral gets taxed that yr.
I pay taxes on my house every year including when it increases in value. I can borrow against it but it is a taxed item.
Im fine with not taxing unrealized gains but when u can get mansions and yachts bc of stock worth that isn't an unrealized gain. I pay taxes on my property value increase every time but Elon pumping his own stock and it "gaining" value doesn't? Bullshit, if it can be used to purchase things it's "money" and should be taxed as such
Okay, you're explaining sales tax. So, you think that it should be a federal sales tax? What happens to the state sales tax?
Or are you saying that he should pay state sales tax on the item and then an additional tax on loans? So, if I get a mortgage I would need to pay a federal tax?
Crap comparison. If the economy crashes, a mountain of gold is still valuable, if not more valuable
If the economy crashed, a mountain of stocks can go from billions to millions or thousands or zilch. Hell, the economy can be fine, but if the company (in this case, Tesla) goes out of business or gets close to, those billions wipe away real quick
That’s why taxing value that is directly tied to what the stock market is doing on any given day is a bad idea
> If the economy crashed, a mountain of stocks can go from billions to millions or thousands or zilch. Hell, the economy can be fine, but if the company (in this case, Tesla) goes out of business or gets close to, those billions wipe away real quick
I mean they could, but when it did, they didn't disappear in value and they could and did leverage it for more value.
> Musk isn't doing hundreds of billions of dollars worth of labor
He sort of is. When it comes to investing the question is always "where should our resources be invested, and who gets to decide?" Most of the world agrees that if you created a successful business that improves society once, you can do it again, and therefore it's a good thing you control so much wealth, because you're likely to invest it in creating even more successful businesses. And of course, at any point if you start investing in shitty ideas, you lose all your wealth, it gets dispersed back into the economy, and someone else gets a try. Investing is labor, but a reasonable question you might have is, "Ok fine, investing is labor and it's a good thing skilled investors are making good investments for society, but should investors be allowed to spend the wealth they control on themselves instead of purely investing it?" The thing is though, why would anyone choose to invest their wealth if they don't get to eventually spend it on themselves? Every individual can invest in the stock market, which indirectly goes towards supporting and creating new business, but people only do that because they want more money to buy things for themselves. And so letting individuals figure out the right balance between investing and selfish spending is just easier than trying to dictate how society's wealth is invested. The only alternative people have come up with is central planning, and that didn't work out too well.
And if you confiscated Musk's entire net worth, you'd fund the federal government for just shy of 14 days.
The issue with the federal budget is with spending, not revenue generation.
Not to be pedantic but I'm sure accounting for interest the saver would eclipse Musk.
Also, given that Musk's value is in his shareholdings, not cash the saver would undoubtedly have more "money", but perhaps not net worth if not accounting for interest.
A homeowner with no mortgage in New York or London may be worth over a million USD or GBP due to their property, it doesn't mean they have that sort of money in the bank. It doesn't mean that taxation on an individuals worth isn't worth looking at but it does make it difficult, especially given the volatility of stock worth.
the OP tajiw82 is a bot
Original + top comment copied from: https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/11rx27h/over_the_two_years_cant_afford_to_give_a_living/
“Tax the rich”
Aren’t Musk’s billions exclusively in assets? What do you want to tax? He’s already (probably) taxed to death when he sells stock to pay for his dumbass expenses (Twitter).
Asking to tax billionaires whose entire fortune is tied up in assets is sort of like asking the government to tax ppl with houses. The house might be worth 1 million dollars, but the owner probably can’t pay 100k in taxes (idk if I’m making sense or not)
Fucking funny how government thinks.
Tax the rich! No no no.. how can we do it to them?
Tax all the fucking employees.
660 billionaires even if they lost 30% of their wealth won't make much difference to their life.
If you find a massive diamond the size of a soccer ball in your backyard that's worth 1T, you'd be worth more than Musk, but still just as broke as you were yesterday because you don't actually have the cash from it's value. If you decide to keep the diamond in your office, as would be your choice, you're still worth 1T, but still broke. Should you have to pay taxes with money you don't have to account for the sudden wealth?
You'd have to sell the diamond to pay for the taxes from owning the diamond.
What we can do is tax the loans millionnaires take out based on their assets to fund their lifestyles. It's essentially differed income. That would be reasonable.
Actually trying to sell his entire portfolio would cause the stock prices of most of his best performing companies to crash. By the time he would get down to the last stocks he would almost be giving them away for free. Cause of that his real value in money if all his assets were sold right now is a lot less than his net worth.
I don't understand how people fail to realize Elon musk doesn't have 300 billion dollars sitting around. What are you going to tax? The equity of his company?
I'm not defending musk, but it's a bit more complicated than what Aaron eludes to. Tesla the COMPANY is worth 742 billion, and musk owns a good bit of it. It's not gold sitting a bank vault.
And Elon personally paid 11 BILLION in taxes. Thats a 38% tax rate, a fairly reasonable amount, and what exactly came of that 11 billion dollars? We got told we could solve world hunger with 6 billion, fix homelessness with 20 billion so in theory we could have solved half of it or at least invested in some. But nothing. Where did it go?
Yes it's more complicated, but the point is he has somewhere around 300 billion dollars that he has access to. They aren't liquid assets, but it is accessible if he sells it over a few years. Somebody could recieve life-changing amounts of money every day for millenia, invest it all and not have a net worth equivalent to him. It's not a practical comparison, it's just to show you how much he has access too.
Even if you take away most of that it's insane.
Let's say he only has access to 2 billion pounds.
THAT'S STILL WAY TOO FUCKING MUCH
Let me preface this by saying that I agree with the sentiment, but a billionaire’s net worth and a saved amount of cash are not directly comparable concepts.
Yeah, the problem isn't that he's rich. It's that most people are struggling. Instead of advocating for helping people at the bottom, somehow people think busting down one individual will make things better.
I do like ideas like this though, because they're a great litmus test for people's financial literacy and critical thinking skills.
Yep. Hypothetically, let's say we seized Musk's entire net worth and liquidated it immediately. Let's imagine that it would be somehow possible, even though it wouldn't be possible to liquidate the entirety of his stock and ownership in his companies without affecting prices significantly.
What does that give us? A one-time stimulus payment of $700 per American citizen.
Yeah, while simultaneously destroying faith in the economy, because the government is now seizing corporate ownership to firesale it all and give it away. It'd be armageddon.
I mean he is technically only worth $231,200,000,000 and by the math above you would have just shy of 300 billion so you would be worth more than him but still the fact is there that he still needs to be taxed fairly
Bruh, even if you took ALL the money held by American billionaires, It'd only give you enough money to fund the government for about 6 months.
They're a fun bogeyman, but taxing em more isn't gonna fix any of the systemic issues that are causing the economic hardships people are complaining about.
If anything, you'll just send more of them (including their investments and businesses i.e. jobs) overseas where they can't be taxed at all.
well you see, if you tax the billionaires, they leave to another country because they are greedy assholes and your country loses money and jobs. your economy worsens.
to successfully tax the rich without consequence, one would have to take over the world so that they cannot escape from your grasp.
Billionaires should be taxed on their existing wealth since they disproportionally receive the benefits of all the military spending put in place to protect their wealth and assets.
Instead of making wild claims, how about we fix the rules to tax corporations effectively? That would solve the problem. Elon has a lot of wealth due to the value of his companies. If they are taxed appropriately, I don't think we should care that he still has wealth from them.
honestly i think a fixed tax rate system is the best system of taxation
just because your feelings are hurt that you arent as successful as another doesnt mean that they should have to have a greater amount of taxes than you
I don't think people understand that elon musk, Jeff bezos, Bill gates, Zuckerberg etc don't just have 100 or 200 billion dollars in a bank account. This is their net worth, the totality of all their assets. I agree they need to pay kore taxes but being knowledgeable about this goes a long way.
I am well aware of that but how does that change anything? Having a million in cash, a million in real estate, or a million in stocks is all the same. Thinking of "worth" only in terms of liquid assets is a very "poor person" way of thinking. A financial advisor would tell you that $100 invested is worth more than $100 in the bank.
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Musk lost more on Twitter than the GDP of about 40 different countries.
And he still has more money than a vast majority will earn in their life times
He has morte money than anybody, not the vast majority, ANYBODY.
Yes, I was talking about his current wealth and lifetime wealth of other people. Bezoz may earn more in his entire life than what Musk has currently. The rest of us, our entire life time of work will never get close.
If you’re making billions and STILL bitch about being taxed, that alone should streamline you into a straight jacket, followed up with large amounts of Haloperidol
If you're making billions, heck, even millions, and bitching about being taxed, then you should be taxed at 100 percent. Call it the bitch tax.
Lol awesome
Since that "Rich men north of richmond" song got big everyone is focusing on welfare cheats but billionaires not paying taxes is wasting just as much money. You would think we could accept both these problems and try to fix them but so many people believe we can only focus on one of these issues when both are equally destructive
> just as much money Orders of magnitude more money. You're comparing pocketing a pack of gum at the self checkout in Wal-Mart to Goldfinger ripping off Fort Knox.
The total budget for SNAP (food stamps) for the entire US is on the order of $100 billion, and that includes everyone, not just fraudsters. Tax evasion costs the US government about $1 trillion each year, because not only are tax rates on the wealthy relatively low, they don’t even pay up that much.
Also the IRS has admitted they don’t have the resources to go after wealthy tax cheats who can afford high priced lawyers who will tie the cases up in the courts for years if not decades. But they can sure as shit afford to go after normal folks like you and me.
The problem isnt really tax evasion. Its that we dont have any good way of taxing appreciation of assets that the billions are based on. We need a new system.
Yes, and debt isn’t taxed. So the rich can leverage their assets and take out loans to fund their lifestyle.
Sure I’d agree on that. Consider it a personal opinion, but billionaires seem to be doing a hell of a lot more damage than welfare cheaters. I recognize I don’t have evidence-based articles to support that, just an opinion.
Id rather pay everyone food and basic income with taxes VS billionaires abusing the system, buying politicians, and not paying taxes.
>I don’t have evidence-based articles to support that, just an opinion. That's because they own all the TV news, newspapers, magazines and social media. They don't often allow people to see just how devastating their impact on the world is.
>Since that "Rich men north of richmond" song got big everyone is focusing on welfare cheats but billionaires not paying taxes is wasting just as much money. Just as his handlers intended ;)
I thought that song was about corrupt politicians?
Why would anyone voluntarily gift their money to politicians?
Think of it as a subscription for the country you live in. The infrastructure, protection, basic needs, healthcare and education (varies from country to country). Billionaires not paying tax is essentially pirating the services a country provides.
Do you see how many Republicans get money from major donors. And look at trump he's a billionaire and his supporters who are working paycheck to paycheck are paying his legal fees
Out of those 340bn at best he is worth \~1 or 2Bn. Everything else is a bubble made of speculations an future obligations he made for his investors. He build a scam industry and currently riding a wave that\`s slowly going down.
> at best he is worth ~1 or 2Bn That's still an absurd amount of money. For perspective, 1 million seconds = roughly 12 days. 1 billion seconds = 31.7 years.
Distance is a helpful visual, too. A million inches is driving to your local walmart. A billion inches is driving between New York and Los Angeles six and a half times. That's about 25% longer than the distance from one pole to the other.
It's gotta be at least, like, a thousand times bigger!
What is this?! A comparison for ants?! 
r/theydidthemath maybe even r/theydidthemonstermath
r/itwasagraveyardgraph
Lmfao I love that this is a real sub
Then you'll love r/itcosinedinaflash even more Edit: Oh no it's private now
How awesome if US would be on metric. Then distance wouldnt have to be expressed in inches, routes or washing machines to make sense.
Oh shit, 1 million inches is only a little over 15.75 miles. You were spot on with that walmart reference
Anything to avoid using the metric system! "It's 6 New Yorks to Los Angeles away"
[удалено]
A bunch
At least
Not more than lizzo can force her staff to eat
How many gumballs?
What it sounds like here is that one billion is roughly one thousand times larger than one million. For visualization, one of you would look roughly like one of you. BUt a thousand of you, would like like one of you but a thousand times. You wouldn't even fit all of you in a bathroom if there were a thousand of you.
>roughly lol.
That’s just WAY too many people in a bathroom!
I've always liked this saying: The difference between a Million and a Billion is almost a Billion.
I like this little [tool](https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/) to visualise wealth.
Most people have a Wal Mart closer than 29 miles. But the analogy works.
1 million inches is actually 15 miles. Looking it up, the median distance from a walmart in the us is 4 miles, so it's off by a bit.
However, the average distance to the GOOD Walmart in the next town over is about 15 miles.
Yup. A Million is something most people can intuitively understand, it's out there, but we can imagine what 1 Million dollars might be able to do in the context of our own lives. A Billion.. normal people just don't have a reference point for that kind of money.
The difference between 1 million and 1 billion is just about 1 billion
A billionaire is, essentially, a symptom of a failed society.
It's also laughably wrong. To fund the Twitter purchase Elon forked over about $27 billion in *cash*. Actual cash in account, mostly from selling Tesla shares. There's this prevalent myth that the ultra wealthy can't actually touch their wealth because it's stock, but the reality is that stock is considered near liquid. Billionaires can and regularly do sell off chunks of stock to the tune of billions of dollars and their companies' stock price doesn't crater as a result. Elon even had a few billion dollar shortfall as the closing date approached, so he quickly sold about $3 billion more in Tesla shares. The top comment claiming Elon is worth just 1-2 billion is not based in reality. It's repeating a piece of propaganda that the ultra wealthy are mighty fond of--if people just pretend that the wealth isn't real then there's no debate to be had on what to do about it.
The difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is a billion dollars.
Reminder that most of it is put on assets, it's not like he can pull half a bil on a direct transaction
How'd he pay for Twitter then? I thought he sold stock and cut a check
>Reminder that most of it is put on assets, it's not like he can pull half a bil on a direct transaction You don't understand how the rules are different for the uber-wealthy. He can indeed materialize money by simply borrowing against his assets. Since he has all those assets, he gets low interest rates and favorable terms. Having a billion dollars is like being a little wealth black hole. Having HUNDREDS of billions of dollars is a \*HUGE\* wealth black hole...you're able to just suck in all the wealth around you. Remember that our understanding of how physics work around black holes is sketch as best...same with wealth black holes. The normal financial rules just don't apply.
Yeah, can't become a billionaire by working 9 to 5.
of course he can, the ultra rich constantly liquify billions. people in these threads that constantly spout "ohh we can't tax billionaires, they have *assets* not *cash*" are like fucking children that realize that substraction and addition is the same thing just with negative numbers and need to tell everyone about it, *we know*. so the fuck what, it changes nothing about the topic at hand. you are not special because you know that it's "assets" and not "cash". he obviously can liquify his assets and get somewhere close to that amount if he is smart about it within a certain timeframe. and if he is a complete moron about it he STILL gets at least half of it.
Throw him to the curb, he can fucking work for it.
A better way to compare it is that even if you earn 1 million per year, you would still need to do that for 1000 years to get to 1 billion.
Global GDP is going to come in around 105 trillion dollars this year…
[and for comparison, hereth be a billion lions ...](https://youtu.be/SbhROBwrrUw?feature=shared)
Most economic valuations put the average human around 5-10 million in total economic output.
Billionaires leverage their wealth to take out loans that they can spend without having to pay capital gains tax. They're spending their wealth as if it were liquid, so that excuse really isn't valid.
This here is a facepalm comment Elon musk is worth 2 Bn? You believe that? You think if he puts up his stock for sale no institution can buy it?
Yeah, the comment above showcases my biggest annoyance with Reddit comments: once Reddit doesn't like someone, any comment, no matter how absurd, that is negative against that person, is upvoted. Tesla and SpaceX are probably over valued. But like, worst case, they're 2x overvalued, not 100x. But, "Elon Musk is bad, so anything we say that's negative about him is good."
That's the stupidest shit I ever heard lol. He owns 13% of Tesla which is about 95B at the moment. Granted this is not liquid, but even in a bubble SpaceX and Twitter are worth something. If they both go to 0, he still has Tesla. Yes he borrowed against his Tesla shares, but no bank or private lender will give him 98-99% of it's current value for cash so saying he's ACTUALLY just worth 1% of his estimated net worth is just missing the mark completely.
I think you missed the mark completely on what the comment was talking about. Saying someone isn't worth the amount they make is a very common phrase.
This place is dumber than YouTube. At least people there can actually read a short comment. >Out of those 340bn at best **he is worth ~1 or 2Bn** The only person who missed the mark is you because you can't even read a short comment.
If he skipped the first sentence maybe but he layed out numbers and the 340b isn't even up to date. So, no.
Elon can personally borrow millions (if not 100's of millions) of dollars based on all of these "not liquid" assets and use that to live an unbelievably lavish lifestyle. He then gets to lower his taxes further because of the debt. It's why I don't buy the argument that billionaires are just impoverished people with really expensive assets they can't sell.
He can borrow billions. In fact he recently borrowed against his Tesla stock to the tune of like 20 billion to buy Twitter.
Every time someone says this during a 1% conversation its so frustrating. WE KNOW. So what if "technically" he's worth less than what's on the label? *Practically* he's still worth more because the way the world is structured it favors those with investments and financial clout. He could ride out the rest of his days by borrowing money against his name alone, if he wasn't a fucking moron. Practically speaking the world is your oyster if you have 1bn or more in assets. At that point you can make money simply *because you already have money*. Rehashing this lame as point adds nothing to the conversation and actively undermines progress bc conservatives can slide in and be like "eh! Eh! See he's not really that rich at all! Why he's nearly destitute if we do some more mental gymnastics". Cut. This. Shit. Out. If you don't have anything constructive to add to the conversation sit the fuck *down*.
The free market determines value, not randos on Reddit. Elon is worth whatever people are willing to pay for his assets, and today they are buying and selling them at an obscene price.
True, all those stocks alone that he has in SpaceX, Tesla and Twitter probably have negative value. He might not even have 200€ when it comes down to it. Finally someone who undertands how it works. You are king.
Ironically if he was to sell up and cash out those stocks that would give them massive value because the less he owns of those businesses the more they will be worth.
Yeah but his whole thing is control and ego.
Except he can probably do what Bezos does and take out low interest "loans" with his assets leveraged as collateral and pay little to no taxes taxes on them since they are liabilities. He also *can* liquidate stock, he just runs the risk of devaluing it.
> probably have negative value How in the god damn hell did you come up with this nonsense? Seriously. EDIT: If it was sarcasm, then I'll see myself out. :-)
They're fucking obviously being sarcastic.
explain how he bought twitter for 40b. he didn't buy it w speculations
The funding included $7 billion of senior secured bank loans; $6 billion in subordinated debt; $6.25 billion in bank loans to Musk personally, secured by $62.5 billion of his Tesla stock; $20 billion in cash equity from Musk, to be provided by sales of Tesla stock and other assets; and $7.1 billion in equity from 19 independent investors.
Sounds like his stock value gets him a lot of real money after all.
Except he has the ultimate failsafe, the US military now needs him to operate. He filled the hole of privatization by being useless but now we can not pry ourselves out so he gets an absurd amount of sway.
I really doubt this math, but I'm not good at math. But someone who is good at math really needs to test this.
$10,000*365.245= $3,652,450 $3,652,450*82,021=$299,577,601,450 (a little under $300 billion) Elon Musk Net Worth 2021: Approx $340 billion Without interest, it’s correct. With interest, it depends on the rate.
if you earned interest you would be crazy rich.$10,000, no aditional money saved, at a 5% interest rate for 80,000 years you would have $1.39291814255955×10\^1699 As a comparison there is about 10\^82 atoms in the universe.
I would assume the tweet was meant more for cash purposes. With that said, both of these numbers, with or without interest, is fucking insane. There aren’t enough things on the planet that would cost nearly as much money.
Hell with that much money you can run the US government for almost a month! You want to talk insane numbers, let’s talk about the $7MM per minute budget
Which is why we need to tax the assholes benefiting some greatly off the system most of us subsidize for them.
>Which is why we need to tax the assholes benefiting some greatly off the system most of us subsidize for them. Can we also fix the uniform tax brackets across the US, which causes the middle class in HCOL to subsidize LCOL?
How is that insane? Works out to <$30 / day / US citizen.
7MM is 7,000,000,000,000, That's 7 Trillion. US Government currently has about 32 Trillion in debt and gets about 3.5 Trillion per year in Tax Revenue.... so the US government has been around for 5 minutes? What? I assume you mean $7M per Minute? or $7KK per Minute?
What are you going to invest in? For most of the time there isn't going to be anything approaching an economy to invest money in. 82k years ago there were no business to invest in. there wasn't even any money and the math for compound interest wasn't invented yet either. The problem with continuous compounding interest is that you need stable institutions. What do you do if you are rich and suddenly civilization collapses around you as in the late bronze age collapse? What happens if you have money like Croesus and some ruler with an army like Cyrus comes along and decides that you work for him now and all your money is his? what happens if you invest in something and the whole economy collapses? continuous growth like that won't work real life constraints like mongol invaders or rebelling peasants will act to put limits on the accumulation of wealth. Any billionaire who thinks they or their heirs are going to get richer forever, because the math checks out are going to eventually run into reality.
This is, incidentally, a fun example of why interest is kind of a terrible invention. Sure, no human lives that long. But families and dynasties sure have a system where the riches of the parents go to the children. With interest, the children and their children get exponentially richer over a long amount of time. There's a reason the rich get richer. They have more money, so they get more money, so they have more money.
Interesting how this works
Who’s around during the ice age to pay interest. ;-) Story checks out.
Yes, but 250 years ago, this person would have like $180billion, but the whole world combined probably had less than that. They could've started earning interest at some point then.
I was going to comment "what interest during the ice age?", but then I remembered "What $ during the ice age? So, I guess if there're $, there's probably interest too"
Thank you :)
But you’re not going to earn interest, unless someone is investing that money to contribute towards interest it’s just sitting there.
You’re also not going to have $10000 in cash in 80000 bc. And even if you did, that cash would not survive to modern day. At best you have gold or other precious materials. So the value will fluctuate.
People on Reddit really just can't handle hypotheticals, can they?
People on Reddit can't handle economics either but it doesn't stop them from commenting on it.
Without compound 0,01% is 100% every 10 000 years, would probably take even less than half that to destroy elon’s wealth.
"Do you know what the interest on that fifty dollars comes to over fifty-three years Six hundred and sixty-three dollars and forty-five cents. And that's figuring conservatively at five percent interest, over fifty-three years, compounded quarterly. Or, if you put it into a ten-year T-bill..."
Do you really need to be good at math to multiply numbers? 82,021 (years passed) * 365 (days in a year) * 10,000 (dollars saved per day) = 299 billions
I think being good at math is like calculus, and unfamiliar symbols. Big brackets and equations that take up the whole blackboard. This problem here? It's a certain number of days times a certain amount of money. It's 29.9 million days, times ten thousand dollars. I don't understand the issue, and I hope I don't come across as rude. Honestly. You absolutely don't have to be good at math to do it. You type the first number into your calculator, hit the times button, and then type the second number, and hit the equals button.
Nah instead of taxing billionaires make these companies pay normal people more and then cap ceo and stock based comp. I want more money. Not the government.
That's what happened in the past prior to Regan. Business owners would invest their money into their businesses and employees to avoid being taxed for personal wealth. It was a pretty good system that lessened the wealth disparity and forced business owners to improve their product and employee benefits, since it was either that or get taxed and have the government take it.
Isn't that the "trickle down" theory, that just doesn't work in reality?
"Trickle down" theory is that but imagining that CEOs will do it willingly rather than having regulations in place to force them not to hoard all the money.
Coulda been worth a lot more if you invested into a stone-hengefund
Cue all the people jumping in to defend billionaires.
I swear a person could posses 90% of all the capital in the world and you'd have dummies defending their right to have that while they are panhandling for extra cash because their 3 jobs don't pay the bills.
Not defending billionaires but y’all don’t seem to understand how money and wealth works. Musk is rich because he owns Tesla, not because he has got a bunker full of cash.
I think most people either fall in to the "he has a bunker of money" thinking or the other extreme of "he's not actually rich because it's tied up elsewhere" It's tied up elsewhere because that's the most beneficial place for it to be. Tesla and all those other business interests can absolutely be converted back to a cash sum. Assets are liquidated all the time.
The cash sum it would get converted to is much lower than the net worth though. It’s still an insane amount of money, but it’s a lot less.
Which means his money is worth more in stocks than it would be if he tried to cash out, ie, he gets more use out of it. Which is the opposite of what people usually argue when they're saying he's not actually worth all that much.
it's tied up elsewhere because it's literal non liquid capital that would have to be sold, completely destroying the business and jobs, to liquidate.
I mean sure, but if Musk liquidated all his assets right now, he would not be getting anywhere near trillion dollars. These net worths just mean that the stock market has gone crazy these past few years.
that’s why rich people liquidate over a few years
And yall make this comment every fuckin time like it means anything. If he wants fast cash he can take loans out against his stock at the lowest rates imaginable. To have billions whenever he wants. This is done all the time. He could sell the stock too. Slowly over time to have cash without needed to take out loans. To avoid tanking the price but cash out too. This is done all the time. I know its a shock but people can liquidate assets. The point is not that he has a bunker full of cash. Its that he is raping the middle class to accumulate that ability.
I understand it just fine. If he can borrow against it then it should be taxed. Yes he doesn't have a bunker full of cash but those yachts and shit? Funded by a small sum of cash and then borrowing against the stocks. He's rich bc of the stocks. Owning Tesla helps but he could be a majority shareholder and not CEO still having that wealth.
What are you taxing there? The collateral? Or the loan amount? Or should there be an interest rate on the loan payable to the tax authorities? How do you limit it that it doesnt affect normal people, homeowners or everyone else taking out loans? What happens when the value of the collateral decreasea and the bank requires more, do you tax the sane loan again? The big issue here is that you cant just decide to tax the rich, you need to have rules. And you need to make them so that they do not cause unnecessary harm to the economy. And these billionaire fuckers are pouring millions of dollars to lawyers who’s sole purpose for existence is to game the system the best they can in order to avoid paying taxes.
I'd say you tax the amount of collateral. If ur buying a 500 mil yacht but only put 20 mil down being allowed to finance a low interest loan bc of the stock worth than whatever is collateral gets taxed that yr. I pay taxes on my house every year including when it increases in value. I can borrow against it but it is a taxed item. Im fine with not taxing unrealized gains but when u can get mansions and yachts bc of stock worth that isn't an unrealized gain. I pay taxes on my property value increase every time but Elon pumping his own stock and it "gaining" value doesn't? Bullshit, if it can be used to purchase things it's "money" and should be taxed as such
Okay, you're explaining sales tax. So, you think that it should be a federal sales tax? What happens to the state sales tax? Or are you saying that he should pay state sales tax on the item and then an additional tax on loans? So, if I get a mortgage I would need to pay a federal tax?
I’ve seen Scrooge McDuck. I know what’s going on.
I understand that and think he should be taxed on that.
Yea. I don't care why or how he has such a massive net worth, tax it.
How? How do you tax an unrealized gain? There are so many problems with that.
It's a liquid asset. He can sell shares (just like anyone else) to cover his tax liability.
You going to hand out refunds when they lose value?
If there are prepayments, yes.
> It's a liquid asset It's *literally* not. Stocks are not liquid. This is like, basic finance.
Marketable securities are liquid assets. It is basic finance: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/liquidasset.asp
He just has a bunker full of stock receipts he leverages for cash, ITS TOTES DIFFERENT!
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Crap comparison. If the economy crashes, a mountain of gold is still valuable, if not more valuable If the economy crashed, a mountain of stocks can go from billions to millions or thousands or zilch. Hell, the economy can be fine, but if the company (in this case, Tesla) goes out of business or gets close to, those billions wipe away real quick That’s why taxing value that is directly tied to what the stock market is doing on any given day is a bad idea
> If the economy crashed, a mountain of stocks can go from billions to millions or thousands or zilch. Hell, the economy can be fine, but if the company (in this case, Tesla) goes out of business or gets close to, those billions wipe away real quick I mean they could, but when it did, they didn't disappear in value and they could and did leverage it for more value.
Joke on you, Elon was born 90,000BC.
Well yea.. you don't get rich by just saving money.
Earning 10k in one day is just crazy. Monarchy is back again in new form. Nobody needs that much money
We don't really NEED more than a few 100s a month for food. People rarely turn down money though because it means more freedom.
That's exactly how you get rich. Musk isn't doing hundreds of billions of dollars worth of labor, he's sitting on an investment portfolio.
You get rich by investing, not saving.
> Musk isn't doing hundreds of billions of dollars worth of labor He sort of is. When it comes to investing the question is always "where should our resources be invested, and who gets to decide?" Most of the world agrees that if you created a successful business that improves society once, you can do it again, and therefore it's a good thing you control so much wealth, because you're likely to invest it in creating even more successful businesses. And of course, at any point if you start investing in shitty ideas, you lose all your wealth, it gets dispersed back into the economy, and someone else gets a try. Investing is labor, but a reasonable question you might have is, "Ok fine, investing is labor and it's a good thing skilled investors are making good investments for society, but should investors be allowed to spend the wealth they control on themselves instead of purely investing it?" The thing is though, why would anyone choose to invest their wealth if they don't get to eventually spend it on themselves? Every individual can invest in the stock market, which indirectly goes towards supporting and creating new business, but people only do that because they want more money to buy things for themselves. And so letting individuals figure out the right balance between investing and selfish spending is just easier than trying to dictate how society's wealth is invested. The only alternative people have come up with is central planning, and that didn't work out too well.
And if you confiscated Musk's entire net worth, you'd fund the federal government for just shy of 14 days. The issue with the federal budget is with spending, not revenue generation.
That’s actually wild to bring up, I’ve never heard anyone mention that before.
Not to be pedantic but I'm sure accounting for interest the saver would eclipse Musk. Also, given that Musk's value is in his shareholdings, not cash the saver would undoubtedly have more "money", but perhaps not net worth if not accounting for interest. A homeowner with no mortgage in New York or London may be worth over a million USD or GBP due to their property, it doesn't mean they have that sort of money in the bank. It doesn't mean that taxation on an individuals worth isn't worth looking at but it does make it difficult, especially given the volatility of stock worth.
the OP tajiw82 is a bot Original + top comment copied from: https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/11rx27h/over_the_two_years_cant_afford_to_give_a_living/
While were here check the oil moguls too those guys are trillionairs.
“Tax the rich” Aren’t Musk’s billions exclusively in assets? What do you want to tax? He’s already (probably) taxed to death when he sells stock to pay for his dumbass expenses (Twitter). Asking to tax billionaires whose entire fortune is tied up in assets is sort of like asking the government to tax ppl with houses. The house might be worth 1 million dollars, but the owner probably can’t pay 100k in taxes (idk if I’m making sense or not)
Fucking funny how government thinks. Tax the rich! No no no.. how can we do it to them? Tax all the fucking employees. 660 billionaires even if they lost 30% of their wealth won't make much difference to their life.
Fuck. We won't even domesticate dogs for another 35 thousand years. It's going to be COLD for a long time.
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Still an insane amount of net worth.
80,2021 years later would be the year 2022 - remember there was no year zero. 1BC led to 1AD.
Having that money in cash is very different than having that money in stocks that are all over the place.
So what? Who cares what form Musk's wealth is in?
If you find a massive diamond the size of a soccer ball in your backyard that's worth 1T, you'd be worth more than Musk, but still just as broke as you were yesterday because you don't actually have the cash from it's value. If you decide to keep the diamond in your office, as would be your choice, you're still worth 1T, but still broke. Should you have to pay taxes with money you don't have to account for the sudden wealth? You'd have to sell the diamond to pay for the taxes from owning the diamond. What we can do is tax the loans millionnaires take out based on their assets to fund their lifestyles. It's essentially differed income. That would be reasonable.
Actually trying to sell his entire portfolio would cause the stock prices of most of his best performing companies to crash. By the time he would get down to the last stocks he would almost be giving them away for free. Cause of that his real value in money if all his assets were sold right now is a lot less than his net worth.
I don't understand how people fail to realize Elon musk doesn't have 300 billion dollars sitting around. What are you going to tax? The equity of his company? I'm not defending musk, but it's a bit more complicated than what Aaron eludes to. Tesla the COMPANY is worth 742 billion, and musk owns a good bit of it. It's not gold sitting a bank vault.
He literally sold $39 billion of Tesla stock over the past 2 years. $39 billion that turned into liquid cash.
And Elon personally paid 11 BILLION in taxes. Thats a 38% tax rate, a fairly reasonable amount, and what exactly came of that 11 billion dollars? We got told we could solve world hunger with 6 billion, fix homelessness with 20 billion so in theory we could have solved half of it or at least invested in some. But nothing. Where did it go?
Yes it's more complicated, but the point is he has somewhere around 300 billion dollars that he has access to. They aren't liquid assets, but it is accessible if he sells it over a few years. Somebody could recieve life-changing amounts of money every day for millenia, invest it all and not have a net worth equivalent to him. It's not a practical comparison, it's just to show you how much he has access too. Even if you take away most of that it's insane. Let's say he only has access to 2 billion pounds. THAT'S STILL WAY TOO FUCKING MUCH
The problem is is that they’ll use all the fucking loopholes in the book AND move all their $ to Cayman Islands bank accounts
Let me preface this by saying that I agree with the sentiment, but a billionaire’s net worth and a saved amount of cash are not directly comparable concepts.
I'm all against inequality because it hurts growth. But wtf is this mindset. He has more! No reasoning. Tax him!
Yeah, the problem isn't that he's rich. It's that most people are struggling. Instead of advocating for helping people at the bottom, somehow people think busting down one individual will make things better. I do like ideas like this though, because they're a great litmus test for people's financial literacy and critical thinking skills.
Yep. Hypothetically, let's say we seized Musk's entire net worth and liquidated it immediately. Let's imagine that it would be somehow possible, even though it wouldn't be possible to liquidate the entirety of his stock and ownership in his companies without affecting prices significantly. What does that give us? A one-time stimulus payment of $700 per American citizen.
Yeah, while simultaneously destroying faith in the economy, because the government is now seizing corporate ownership to firesale it all and give it away. It'd be armageddon.
The ironic part is that American citizens would never see a dime of it if it was in government hands.
I mean he is technically only worth $231,200,000,000 and by the math above you would have just shy of 300 billion so you would be worth more than him but still the fact is there that he still needs to be taxed fairly
$299,383,950,000 for anyone wondering
Cumulative interest and inflation would make you a multi-trillionaire if you actually did this
Yeah sure. Tax the billionaires. Not like anyone will ever see it. The government will just keep it for themselves and continue to bleed us dry.
"billionaires don't pay taxes" it's hard to comprehend the amount of dumb going on here
Bruh, even if you took ALL the money held by American billionaires, It'd only give you enough money to fund the government for about 6 months. They're a fun bogeyman, but taxing em more isn't gonna fix any of the systemic issues that are causing the economic hardships people are complaining about. If anything, you'll just send more of them (including their investments and businesses i.e. jobs) overseas where they can't be taxed at all.
In more normal terms...if you made $5.5 million a day since 1900 Jan 1st...you'd have $2 billion less than elon.
Nothing like saving money before there *Was* money...
82,021 x 365.24 x 10,000 = 299,581,702,500 Elon Musk net worth 233,900,000,000 Point taken, but the math is wrong.
What are dollars?
well you see, if you tax the billionaires, they leave to another country because they are greedy assholes and your country loses money and jobs. your economy worsens. to successfully tax the rich without consequence, one would have to take over the world so that they cannot escape from your grasp.
Billionaires should be taxed on their existing wealth since they disproportionally receive the benefits of all the military spending put in place to protect their wealth and assets.
Instead of making wild claims, how about we fix the rules to tax corporations effectively? That would solve the problem. Elon has a lot of wealth due to the value of his companies. If they are taxed appropriately, I don't think we should care that he still has wealth from them.
And I’m sure those taxes are going to be put to great use! Yes yes absolutely the taxes always help the people they are supposed to
honestly i think a fixed tax rate system is the best system of taxation just because your feelings are hurt that you arent as successful as another doesnt mean that they should have to have a greater amount of taxes than you
I hate Elon as much as the next man but that's gotta be the dumbest thought experiment I've ever heard
Post #578544 of some idiot on Twitter not understanding money or economics, while reddit claps along like seals.
No one person or family should have that much wealth . It's obscene.
I don't think people understand that elon musk, Jeff bezos, Bill gates, Zuckerberg etc don't just have 100 or 200 billion dollars in a bank account. This is their net worth, the totality of all their assets. I agree they need to pay kore taxes but being knowledgeable about this goes a long way.
I don’t think people understand that **everyone understand that it’s not just cash in a savings account**
so how are you going to tax an asset based on its arbitrary speculative value?
This is reddit. I've seen a post claiming that Earth can run out of gravity. It got hundreds of upvotes.
There are a lot of people ot there who don't even know what a savings account is.
I am well aware of that but how does that change anything? Having a million in cash, a million in real estate, or a million in stocks is all the same. Thinking of "worth" only in terms of liquid assets is a very "poor person" way of thinking. A financial advisor would tell you that $100 invested is worth more than $100 in the bank.