Nobody earns a billion dollars
Nobody earns a billion dollars
Hi comrades, I'm new here, how do we feel about posting Mastodon content on Lemmy?
The minimum wage is a complete joke. Tie it to median rental prices of the area. Tie it to inflation at the very least (after adjusting for the past decades of inflation). Tax capital and not labor. There is a lot that could be done, but we keep voting these geriatric vampires to DC and they can't seem to give a shit about most of the country.
Or the government could just set price controls on everything necessary for life. Already happened under Nixon
Nixon also passed a windfall tax on US corporations after the hyper-inflation of the 70's.
Not only nobody "earns" that much money, nobody should have the right to command the amount of influence that kind of money provides.
We are literally talking about FIVE people fucking with the lives of the entire planet.
Even if you add the active politicians of every country on earth, it would be a minuscule number of people controlling the lives of eight billion of us, and the most frustrating part of it is that vast majority of that eight billion thinks this is normal, or even should be encouraged.
Most of the eight billion don't think it's normal. Basically just the golden billion do (aka the West, Global North, Imperial Core, First World, etc.).
Most of the world thinks that the working people should control their own destinies.
Why increase salaries when you can provide employees with a credit line instead?
My work does this. At first glance, I thought it was a cool, quirky benefit. But, the more I thought about it, the more it just said to me, "We know we don't pay you shit, we know you're struggling, and we won't change that."
straight leeches man i tell u
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 :)
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.
Most of this wealth is in stocks, though. Their worth is based on the number of shares they own of these companies. For every share they sell the value of the other shares drops a bit. So if Musk or Bezos sold all their shares, to have this money in actual cash, not only would they probably bankrupt their company and crash the stock market, but the cash they got out of it would be only a fraction of what this shows on paper now.
You do a structured sale overtime and those do take place even in the billions of dollars without destroying the value of the stock. Also, they can borrow against the value of the stock, usually for extremely low interest rates, to quickly infuse cash. This argument is nonsense. The best recent example is elon buying Twitter. Yes it hurt tesla stock in the short term but it is almost back to the presale value with little impact on his overall networth. The wealth in stocks is very real.
Edit: The elon case isn't even a good example because he was forced to sell the stock much faster than normal.
Also it's not like most people's wealth (if they even have any) is liquid either. Most is probably tied up in retirement accounts, real estate, or funds for unforseen circumstances that you wouldn't touch for ordinary needs.
Elon buying Twitter is really an outlier to begin with, since otherwise there are basically no single expenses that would require that amount of funds to be liquid.
Especially with the mentioned loans, there really is more than enough liquidity available to buy anything you'd ever want.
“But billionaires’ cash isn’t liquid! They can’t access it until they need $44b to buy a social media company!”
The one good thing about Elon Musk is how he disproves the myths of capitalism like this and meritocracy.
For almost any company shares could hit $0 with no impact to day to day operations (until the shareholders revolted and demand action). The only effect of the share price on a company is that it would be a factor if they wanted to sell new shares of stock to raise funds, which virtually no company ever does. The share price is only important to the people gambling on it.
I’m not sure how to edit comments so I’m adding this… I agree with the sentiment and how insanely low the minimum wage is. But these billionaires don’t actually have the amount of money most people believe they have. Functionally, it’s nowhere close.
They do - this is a common misconception. If they have 1b, that means that any bank will loan them 1b, which they will use to purchase more businesses and then they have 2b so it means they can take out a loan of 2b - pay previous debt and purchase something else. Rinse repeat.
Of course this is an oversimplification - but having millions in stock is as good as having it in the bank.
I don't want to put words in your mouth, but are you saying that the workers who built these companies shouldn't be compensated through stock for their contributions? I've just heard your argument a lot and I think, OK, if they don't really control that much wealth, why not spread it around. They wouldn't be losing anything, or not much of value. Really need to have a tax on wealth, above a certain level, in my opinion at least.
Oh, and on the web version of Lemmy, there should be an
editbutton at the bottom of your post.If those numbers are even 1% in reality, they're still in possession of more money than you and your entire bloodline will ever see. You say Bezos doesn't have 149billion, so let's say he only has 1.5 billion, does that immediately make him wealthier than any man ever should?
"Most of this wealth is in stocks".
This argument has to be one of the worst, most ridiculous ones ever.
First of all, nobody would ever buy, sell or hold stock if it wasn't valuable.
Secondly, stock is directly and indirectly valuable. Aside from directly selling it, some companies provide dividends. People who own lots of stock can make a lot of money just from dividends. Also, they can use that as collateral and borrow from banks at good interest rates and live off of that.
My company gives us stock grants as bonuses. I'm paying a ton of money to remodel my house and the vast majority has come from cashing in stock. If me, with my modest stock grants, can cash in a few years worth of stock bonuses and basically pay to rebuild my house, these guys with assets in the 100's of billions can live off the interest of a few sales. They can borrow against their wealth. It's so awful and disingenuous to imply that they're not hoarding wealth because "most of it is stock".
If it's so worthless, give all of their options to their workers!