Billionaires shouldn't exist.
this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
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All Billionaires Are Bastards
Bill Gates? Mark Cuban? (Although I can’t remember if he is a billionaire or not)
I’d argue they’re “less worse” but the fact remains that no one becomes a billionaire without exploitation. Bill Gates owned a monopoly and I’m honestly not sure what Mark Cuban did. At some point and time you must exploit a system and it’s people to amass that much wealth.
Cuban is what would have happened to Musk if he basically just took his money and walked away after Paypal. Cuban sold a website to Yahoo and the deal is arguably the worst deal (for Yahoo) of the dot-com bubble.
I like to think there may be, and could be... But I have never seen a great example.
Fill in the blanks:
A ______ billionaire is a good billionaire.
Luigi'd
B
A million seconds is 11.5 days. A billion seconds is 31.7 years.
Just a good way to ground an unimaginable number in something more familiar and drive home how ridiculous having a billion dollars is. I hear we're on track for our first batch of trillionaires this decade.
A trillion seconds is 31,688 years.
I hear we’re on track for our first batch of trillionaires this decade.
Unless we do something about the wealth, this is kinda expected eventually. Give it another decade after that and it would be wholly expected to have our first multi trillionaire, and honestly they wouldn't even need to do anything to make that happen, they'd just need to invest in a board market ETF.
I'm not saying this is good, but this was inevitable due to how the markets and inflation work.
Edit: Also it will probably happen sooner than anyone realizes when you take into account private unmeasurable wealth like Saudi royalty.
This is actually great! Welcoming your example to my now collection of two, alongside Wealth, shown to scale.
Yes there is Luigi showed us the way.
Brian Thompson was just a poor millionaire though. Perhaps one of the reasons why he was so easy to get.
Good Billionaire is Thousander.
While, Brian Thompson may be the exception, after The-Man-Luigi-is-taking-a-fall-for was done with him of course.
Any individual that wants to horde so much money and wealth that could satisfy the lives of millions of people is not a good person.
It's like having a million sandwiches and thousands of hungry people around you .... but you'd rather keep all your sandwiches and screw everyone else, even though you will never be able to physically eat all the sandwiches you have in a lifetime.
Being a billionaire is not a sign of intelligence, it's a mental disorder and a person who lacks human empathy.
Not to be that person, but most people forget that the net worth oft these people is not liquid. They can not just wave a magic wand and give people money.
It's usually in shares of their very highly valued company which they can't give up because they wouldl give up control. Billionaires are not about money, they are about power.
What keeps you in power does not align with doing good. Thus the giving pledge exists, it allows giving away the money while you don't lose control in your lifetime.
Most billionaires do some kind of philanthropy. Gotta control where the money they would pay in taxes ends up. Even this is about power.
Their survival bias makes them believe that they know best what's good for the world. Taxing them would just increase their philanthropy, which is a good thing even though not perfect. Let's start somewhere.
That is the fallacious paper millionaire argument. They have more than enough liquidity, can take loans against their "non-liquid" wealth, and are anyway working with multi-year plans to sell assets and have enough liquidity. I believe this is also explained in https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/ and there they also explain that the US market cap is bigger than their stocks and so. So they could sell a lot in one go, of course losing "efficiency", but the market would be able to cope without any issue.
I think we are on the same side here judging from the rest of your comment, but I find it important to refute this typical argument, because it does not help that there is some sort of billionaire apologism by saying that they "don't actually have this money in their bank account to spend".
If a company is set up right from the start, you could have voting shares that aren't stock based, and that can be a way to maintain control of your company without hoarding the wealth via stock, but if it's not like that from the start, it would be very hard to make that change after the fact.
It'd probably be better if that was more common, but I still don't think they'd give up their shares worth money on the market, and then I still think these types of shares would have off market value?
Modern age dragons, sitting on their hoards while occasionally burning a peasant village to keep those dirty plebs in line.
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Yup. Show me a billionaire who has paid their workers fairly from day one, followed every single law and regulation by the book, never spent a single dollar on lobbying Congress or contributing to political campaigns for quid pro quos, and never used underpaid contractors or foreign slave labor. You can’t, because there’s no such thing as a good billionaire.
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