Nobody earns a billion dollars
Nobody earns a billion dollars
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I don’t think warren buffet belongs in this group, he has made almost all his money only via his investments in other companies. He hasn’t actively done anything to screw over others. And there are definitely a few other cases where someone has a high net worth and hasn’t really done anything wrong. Gabe Newell owns Valve and forbes estimate his net worth to be around $3-4bn but Valve is a private company that makes games and has a marketplace for other game makers. You could argue that Valve promotes gambling via cases in games but thats really the extent of the bad things Valve has done.
Simply having that amount of money is unethical. I even consider Gabe Newell unethical in this sense. There is absolutely zero reason to hoard that amount of wealth, even if you aren't using it directly in nefarious ways.
When you look at the number of people in poverty, and the median wages of laborers, and then you look at the wealth these people have, it's completely unacceptable. The only ethical way to use that absurd amount of wealth is by directly helping those without.
And even someone like Bill Gates who is ostensibly known for "philanthropy", is not excused here in any way. The amount he keeps for himself versus the amount he gives back is not an acceptable ratio.
Moreover, you claim that investing is ethical when compared to being a CEO and directly overseeing exploitation of workers. I disagree wholeheartedly. All investing is is acknowledging that, due to someone else taking advantage of workers, you have an opportunity to make money. That is, you're just one step removed, but your profit opportunities are due to the same exact exploitation as if you were zero steps removed. The fact that people can remove themselves one step and seemingly absolve themselves of guilt should not be a thing.
True, but also net worth isn’t somebody having money equivalent. I don’t really consider any net worth statistics to be reliable especially considering people who own private companies. There really is no way for them to gauge how much a privately owned company is worth and any attempts should be looked at with a very, very large grain of salt.
Obviously, the ideal situation for a platform like Steam (like pretty much everything else on the internet) is to be a big open source decentralised platform. But what we have now is really the second best thing you could ask for.
If Gabe Newell truly wanted to hoard wealth he could easily turn Valve into a publicly traded company and likely 10x his net worth in a matter of months and cash out. But he hasn’t (and this is speculation obviously) but I imagine it’s because he would rather keep his company and do what he loves than sell it and have even more money than someone could ever need across a thousand life times.
Any time someone mentions the net worth of someone who still actively runs a company like Mark Zuckerberg, it really quite annoys me because it is very very true that Billionaires have more money than is needed but it’s not like The Zuck just has $100bn in cash locked away in a safe, and it’s not like stock is completely useless pieces of paper that entitle people to have money. Taxation of wealth is a very difficult issue to solve and when you see sensationalist posts like this one it makes it look like a much simpler issue than it actually is.
There are lots of very, very smart people all across the world trying to find away to fairly tax billionaires and it is all well and good for us to comment about how something should be done. But, in my opinion, it’s like stating “look how many people die of heart disease every year! Why hasn’t someone stopped heart disease yet?”. Obviously it’s a bit of an exaggeration but taxation of wealth isn’t a trivial issue like many internet users would have you believe.
If I am wrong or you disagree with anything I have said here please please correct me, this is just my current knowledge and I am no expert and would very much like to learn if I have made any mistakes. Thank you :)
Obviously, the ideal situation for a platform like Steam (like pretty much everything else on the internet) is to be a big open source decentralized platform. But what we have now is really the second best thing you could ask for.
That doesn't even have to be the case. It could continue operating to make profit, it's just that Gabe shouldn't be made a billionaire on its back, it should be distributed more fairly to workers of Valve.
If Gabe Newell truly wanted to hoard wealth he could easily turn Valve into a publicly traded company and likely 10x his net worth in a matter of months and cash out. But he hasn’t (and this is speculation obviously) but I imagine it’s because he would rather keep his company and do what he loves than sell it and have even more money than someone could ever need across a thousand life times.
"He could always be worse" is in no way an excuse for being bad. He could stop being a billionaire (or not become one in the first place), and still "do what he loves". If he is doing it for the love of it, then the money shouldn't matter, anyway.
Any time someone mentions the net worth of someone who still actively runs a company like Mark Zuckerberg, it really quite annoys me because it is very very true that Billionaires have more money than is needed but it’s not like The Zuck just has $100bn in cash locked away in a safe, and it’s not like stock is completely useless pieces of paper that entitle people to have money.
This is beating a dead horse and talking in circles. We know it's not USD paper currency sitting in a safe, and yet nothing changes when you talk about what it actually is. As far as the point about "more money than is needed", how can you possibly not think that billions of dollars is "more money than is needed"? I'm not even going to speculate how you think someone "needs" that amount of money.
Taxation of wealth is a very difficult issue to solve and when you see sensationalist posts like this one it makes it look like a much simpler issue than it actually is.
It's not the simplest thing we've ever had to deal with, but it's also not nearly as complex as you're implying. It's certainly not so complex that we shouldn't make attempts. Somehow taxing already impoverished people is braindead-simple, yet taxing people with absurd amounts of wealth becomes some very complex issue. If we get it wrong by going "too hard" initially, they aren't going to be destroyed; the amount of wealth they have is enough to not be crippled by that, and we can course-correct however we see fit. Waiting until there's some perfect solution laid out on the table before making any attempt to address the issue only does a disservice to the needy, and greatly benefits the wealthy. Standing by idly works in their favor, not ours.
In general, your entire comment reads as flaky defense of the ultra-wealthy. You aren't hardline defending their right to be disgustingly wealthy, but you are parroting their lies that would have you believe that attempting to change the status quo would be a bad thing for the average person.
I didn’t say that billionaires don’t have enough money, in fact I said the opposite if you reread however it was poorly worded from me. Gabe Newell is a billionaire off the back of Valve in the sense that he owns Valve which is a billion dollar company. Our views will differ and that’s obviously ok, but really Valve is the best example for my POV because it’s a company with lots of profit and a very small staff which means it can much more easily pay its staff a more than reasonable salary for their work. You can obviously argue that valve’s profits should be distributed more among the employees but this really comes down to the fundamental difference between Socialism and Capitalism and is something more than I am capable of arguing against since I do not have a postgraduate degree in Economics.
I personally prefer the Capitalistic view of whoever puts up the most risk gets the most reward if they succeed. How well this is done in practise is a very different matter, the government should definitely let business fail more often than they do [with the exception of the G-SIBs].
But I definitely believe that we should be looking to an increasingly socialist system as technology advances and jobs become less available.
I really appreciate your response to my comment and whole heartedly thank you for sharing your views on the matter :)
You don’t need a degree in any sort of economics to recognize that unequal distribution of wealth is wrong. You don’t need to have completed postgraduate studies in order to recognize that business owners have risked little if anything and are being compensated far, far beyond what that risk would entail.
Warren Buffett absolutely belongs on this list. He gets a lot of goodwill for calling out to everyone's face the hypocrisy that he and so many others enjoy. But he got his money just the same as them. And isn't stopping. Berkshire Hathaway has been very cutthroat and hurt a lot of people in its quest for money. Buffett is no saint.