On Elon Musk, it's funny because he never put a profit, like tesla isn't the biggest, X is draining money, his robotics shits are just that: shit, only spacex is relatively successfull, but it's not on the same level of half trillion dollars.
There isn't much that he's done, all of his companies are making less profits (or losing more money if i'm being correct), he is just a jake paul that fakes being a fake intelligent person.
Yeah, its ironic. The richest man in the world doesn't have a single* truly profit-making venture under him.
How the bubble around him hasn't burst yet I don't know, but it would certainly be a feast for sore eyes.
*Edit: Forgot about SpaceX, which actually has made itself a decent chunk of money - about $15.5 billion in 2025 - but I doubt that alone is capable of propping up his nearly $500 billion personal valuation.
SpaceX has been phenomenally successful. I don't think he can be attributed to much of that success. The Falcon 9 handled 95% of launches in 2024. SpaceX has went from non existant to a near monopoly in 23 years while competing against some of the most powerfully connected companies in the world.
I'm not a SpaceX fanboy (I'm a space fanboy). They have done a lot of good for the space industry, while also causing a lot of harm to the scientific space community (earth based observations). I just don't think you can make an argument that SpaceX is not a successful company.
Not just earth based observations, they’ve pretty much guaranteed we’re have no hope in another space race versus China, or even just in general for the next decade at a minimum.
I doubt spacex is profitable. The ipo is so they raise cash. They probably burned it all up with the starship failures.
I'm sure on paper it will look profitable same as Tesla looks profitable from certain angles but is actually propped up by the ability to create more shares. He'll do the same with spacex. Bleed it for his own gains.
I don't think he actually cares about any of this tech. It's the only explanation for how he keeps wasting first mover advantage.
The weird thing is that these people don't think they're rich enough and want to extract more money from government and the people, and they simultaneously think that the government gives too much money to poor people.
To these people, there's no such thing as "enough". Contentment is not a concept that exists within their minds, only a sociopathic urge to acquire more.
Imagine how rich we'd all be if all the suppressed emancipatory technologies got availed to each and all. No more impoverishment by rents. Free energy. Negligible cost of travel. All space opened to us each and all.
Damn, when I read this statistic the other day I took it as 'the bottom half has less then the 3 richest persons', but in fact, it is 'three people each have more than the bottom half' holy shit.
We already have Musk acting like his own personal country, making personal deals with world leaders that benefit only himself over other nations. Others are probably doing it, too, but we haven't heard about it.
Now these Sociopathic Oligarchs are heading to trillionaire status, and they WILL be founding their own Corporo-Nations, which will require private armies for security. Eventually, these Corporo-Nations will combine to form their own alliance, combine their armies, and start throwing their weight around militarily, as well as economically.
This is all just a matter of time, and then we're going to wonder as a planet, Why we didn't stop those guys back when we had a chance?
I have no doubt at all that ALL of them have violated many laws, in many sectors, to get as rich as they are. Investigate them deeply, prosecute them for their crimes, and confiscate their entire fortunes. If we don't do that, it is absolutely certain that we will come to regret it.
Alien only demonstrates the penultimate world government organization, before they each Psychopathic Oligarch decides they have to be sole King of the World, and they go to war genociding each other, with only one left standing.
It's hard to believe, but Ellison is worse than Musk. Musk is a lot like Trump, he wants love and respect, even though they are far too psychopathic to really understand what those things are, and they think that having money and acting tough will make people love and respect them.
Ellison doesn't seem to care about that. He's a mean, cruel person, who seems to enjoy being that way, and like Fred Trump, he raised his son to be as much a psychopath as he is.
Musk is dangerous, but he is too stupid and impulsive, and it blunts his impact. Ellison is far smarter, and far more effective. He's not quite as rich as the rest, but at a certain level, who can really tell? It's all just wretched excess after about $100 bill anyway. But even so, now that he owns CBS and Paramount, and is trying a poison pill takeover of Warner Discovery, he'll be in the upper reaches very soon, jockeying for position at in the top rankings
And I doubt he will stop at CBS/ Paramount and Warner. Larry Ellison is going to control a massive amount of the media in the this country, and he is a massive MAGA, of the worst kind. There are supposed to be government controlled limits on media ownership, but all rules are elastic under MAGA, and he'll be allowed to own anything he wants. Don't be surprised if he ends up owning all broadcast TV, and then he controls the narrative for all political campaigns, election results, news programs, debates, etc. No candidate gets promoted on TV unless MAGA allows it.
Don't forget the bankers who do not appear on such rich lists.
... How much did the Rothschilds have at the start of last century? Enough to own how many nations? All of them?! Oh, maybe they just magically got poor since then, huh? XD
It has always been a thing with America. The debt has been astronomical for many decades. I know its easy to believe its something new, but it really isnt. My entire life, America has been like this.
Im not too interested in the why, but I have glanced articles explaining why this is actually ok because of their position in the world, the world currency being the dollar, and other factors. Its very boring for me but you can find info about it.
Every time I see these guys’ faces I cringe so hard. It’s frankly embarrassing working in the tech industry when most people think of them whenever anyone mentions it.
Now, I might be misreading this data, but from what it looks like either one of these billionaires by themselves have more wealth than the bottom 50% of Americans, right?
Yeah, this is phrased like those three just slightly edge out the bottom 50, as opposed to each individually owning significantly greater than the bottom 50. I'm going to assume these three own more than the "bottom" like 85%.
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
If these billionaires started feeling just a little less safe out in public with the rifraf ... Rather than being worshiped - I imagine we'd see them at least hesitate when improving the efficiency of the orphan crushing machine.
I'm on mobile and can't find the exact timestamp but this interview with Bernie Sanders delves perfectly into why america and more broadly - the world is starting to implode as a result of these lizards in skinsuits.
Vote out every single Republican or whatever right-wing/far-right party you have in your country. Shift the Overton window each time a seat gets flipped.
478 billion for Musk. Happily he found a way to destroy money as effectively as possible by building the biggest rockets ever and let them explode over and over again.
In the past, the owners and/or aristocracy, lived in the general area of workers. Not the case anymore. I would love it if people started Luigi-ing aggressively.
Roughly speaking, if you murdered and seized their wealth by liquidating their assets at current value, that's like... 6k donation to half of the US.
That's assuming 50% of about 340m people with big economic assumptions that won't hold up, but fun to think about. It's not a ton of money even then, but it'd probably do more for everyone than under some dragon. Course, we could also just tax them a large amount like we used to, which accomplishes the same thing without the murder.
That's not liquid money though. For each one, the figures mostly represent stock in their own companies which they couldn't pull out without crashing the value. Musk's wealth in particular is mostly air. At least the other two have profitable companies that actually function. In any case, much of it's not real money we could pull out of the bank and spread around. (But we could tax the fucking snot out of them and spread that around!)
But even if they were "only" worth a few 10's of billions, the real issue is that they own the government. And Zuckerberg and Musk own a monster chunk of our social media, control our opinions.
tl;dr: It's not real money and the problem is influence, not total wealth.
When it comes to measuring their wealth it's not real money.
But when it comes to calculating GDP and growth and other economic metrics these are still included. Make up your mind, either equities are real money or GDP is made up nonsense.
When it comes to measuring their wealth it’s not real money.
This is not entirely correct.
As in: it's technically correct, but practically they just use their equity as leverage for loans, turning them into cash without actually touching them. Oh, and since they took on debt, now they get to report that as a loss and get tax breaks. They can pay off the interest from whatever actual money they're earning.
But when it comes to calculating GDP and growth and other economic metrics these are still included
I'm not sure what you mean here. GDP is total money spent and as such would not include equity.
Tho GDP is real, or at least as any metric and proxy we use for measurement.
When it comes to measuring their wealth it's not real money.
This bit is kinda true. Its not money until its sold. I would include being leverage into a loan to count similarly and should be taxed as capital gain (this is a current loophole)
Is the money earned by hedge funds and investment banks part of the GDP calculations or not ?
Edit: Example if Elon Musk takes out a loan with his tesla stocks as collateral, will the financial transaction that have taken place, be part of GDP calculations or not ?
Example if Elon Musk takes out a loan with his tesla stocks as collateral, will the financial transaction that have taken place, be part of GDP calculations or not ?
No, but the things he buys with said loans will.
The standard understanding of how GDP is calculated is: GDP = Consumption (C) + Investment (I) + Government Spending (G) + Net Exports (NX).
The investment must be spent that year and most of the net worth that is being discussed here was accumulated over previous years. Said net worth is not real money until it is sold (or tax side stepped with loans on assets). To be a bit more clear this is money spent by investors on securities and such that is counted; not the revenue of the brokers. Also this could just include office space and equipment.
I think in your wanting to make capitalism immoral, which it is, you are holding a private definition of these things. It is also confusing as these definitions can be somewhat similar to each other and used interchangeably (like mass and wight, have you ever said something weighs 10kgs?).
The point I am trying to make here is the equities act like real money. They can be traded, and profits can be generated by said trades and deals (the profits are part of the GDP calculations). Which means that for all practical purposes equities are equivalent to real money.
Now we can debate what actually constitutes real money, and whether the definition ends at dollars or all global currencies or government bonds or assets like gold etc etc.
. Which means that for all practical purposes equities are equivalent to real money.
I mean, all money is a social contract, but still; equities being close to cash is not the same as being cash. Similar idea to holding a collectable item with some value. Until you sell or use it as collateral the value is hypothetical.
But when it comes to measuring the success of any country’s economy, we don’t caveat it with something similar.
Except that we do caveat. The ultimate question is how healthy is the economy or how insert question is the economy; which is non-trivial, mostly because things that we agree should be measured cannot be, so we take a proxy. At this point its worth pointing out that metrics that are used as targets stop being useful metrics.
Part of how we might agree to measure the economy is by items made; which is hard without considering all the intermittent steps. So the final amount bought by consumers (which could be people, business, foreigners, or the government). Some caveats here are that the data is not normalized by currency, costs of living, people that are served by said economy, velocity of money (search this one as it is somewhat relevant to what you might be asking), and so on. Keep in mind we did not mesure economic health or performance, just something we might find easier to tabulate which may help us infer other things. When making an inference it is important to list out assumptions made about the dataset.
Still, this is a different topic from "is billionaire wealth real".
The success of American economy is heavily reliant on these unrealised gains compared
I mean I am not even sure what this means. It just reads like a non-statment that sounds good. Having better banking and financing will be better for an economy. Like there is a reason why we moved away from cash/gold to keep things going. Think of how long it might take to buy a house if you are going cash. It is faster to just get a loan. And everyone in that chain can spend their money sooner (velocity of money I said earlier).
Does China have a less developed equity market? Maybe, but that does not mean that they are a weaker economy. Just that some transactions might take more time.
Remember we cannot actually measure some questions we have, just take a proxy measurement. Take for example brain damage from football or boxing. As of this writing we cannot see the CTE, but we can take symptoms to build a case that someone might have CTE. We can build a similar story for how resilient or not any given economy in the world might be. So yeah we do caveat quite a lot.
Thanks for the detailed response, I'll probably need to Google a bunch if stuff in here which I will.
But to the point that didn't make sense to you: The american economy is considered to be big/high growth simply because it's financial sector is so big. And yes this could mean it's markets are efficient, but efficient at what? Often it's trading stocks or debt instruments or some obscure financial instruments, and if that's the case then the size of the economy seems quite made up just like Elon's wealth.
And my second issue is that when it comes to personal wealth of billionaires we always caveat it with 'it's not real money'.
.
But when it comes to measuring the success of any country's economy, we don't caveat it with something similar. Countries like Singapore or even US make a lot of money from financial services. The success of American economy is heavily reliant on these unrealised gains compared to China for example where I am guessing it will be a smaller proportion of the total economy.
So then forcibly nationalize their companies if they won’t share the equity in their companies with the workers who built it. Fuck your stupid argument that defends oligarchs
This place makes me feel like I'm surrounded by angry teenagers. I merely explained that their wealth isn't liquid, and that is a cold stone fact. I also explained that the money isn't the issue in and of itself. The issue is that they can purchase influence enough to run the country.
Of course what you said is accurate. But you’re missing the point. The point is that there is a systemic issue wherein a business owner can capture equity and keep it from their workers.
Neolibs hate this because they’re like b-b-but what if I start a small business?? Or what if I finally get that promotion into the c suite?? I need to be able to extract wealth from the peons!!
In a just society there would be Amazon but jeff bezos would be far less wealthy because the average Amazon worker would have a significant amount of shares in the company, since without them the company wouldn’t exist. But instead will live in a society that serves oligarchs and allows the overwhelming majority of those workers to be paid essentially nothing while a small portion of people at the top of the hierarchy not only get reimbursed in exponentially more money, but equity shares as well.
When you point out they can buy influence without addressing the systemic issues it’s like you’re saying “oh hey it’s not like they actually have the money. They just have this influence.” But you don’t connect a to b and it’s like are you fucking dumb? The have that influence because we give it to them. Thus, bootlicker
You'd think that, but go research or watch a video and get informed on how these bimbos use their networth (stocks) as collateral for bank loans of still more money than we will ever see in our life times (that they never really pay back btw).
Of course. Never said that those are 100% stocks. They have massive expenses to cover and they use the stock value as leverage. The banks giving out loans are creating the bubble.
The only peaceful way I see wealth being redistributed is if Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg were to use regulatory capture to reform government in order to raise their own taxes. Such a scale of philanthropy hasn't been seen since the robber barons Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller donated to build libraries and improve public education. Had those Guilded Age monopolists also used their wealth to compel the US's legislative branch to raise taxes, bolster anti-trust laws, and prevent the acceptance of consumer welfare doctrine over plain anti-monopoly policy, then I'd argue their donations to improve public education would have gone much farther.
That said, plenty of non-peaceful ways exist much like there are many ways for an iceberg to flip over.
Taking into consideration the large amount of credit card debt, student loans, mortgages, etc.? It's plausible. Someone who rents, is living paycheck-to-paycheck, and has maybe a few hundred dollars in credit card debt could be in the "negative"
Cannot wait for the next big solar flare that destroys all online servers of Fakebook and shAmazon. All this money will actually turn out to be a fake bubble...
We need to raise taxes until capital increases at a rate closer to wage gains. This is basically what Piketty talked about in Capital in the 21st Century.
The "money" used to buy bread is a very practical medium to exchange resources.
These figures with too many digits are not real: that "money" is a result of sums of products of virtual values based on credit and speculation.
The fact that the same symbol ($) is used for these two very different things sounds like a systemic bug.
Sure they can buy bread, but here's the catch: it's like going to the bakery, asking for free bread with the promise that you'll pay later because you can show 10 digit numbers, even if your pockets are actually empty.
So these people practically live on credit because the market value would crash if they sell.
At a macro level, 97 % of every dollar is actually debt (credit), mostly created by private banks to feed the system: https://econcurrents.com/2024/08/25/where-does-us-money-come-from-and-where-does-it-go/.
Can someone do the math for me... If theoretically that was all liquid and those 3 got Thanos snapped with the money redistributed, how much would each American get?
Why do we put up with this shit. We need a revolt but it won't happen as most people are not angry enough as they have their phone addiction. Beer and circuses.
On Elon Musk, it's funny because he never put a profit, like tesla isn't the biggest, X is draining money, his robotics shits are just that: shit, only spacex is relatively successfull, but it's not on the same level of half trillion dollars.
There isn't much that he's done, all of his companies are making less profits (or losing more money if i'm being correct), he is just a jake paul that fakes being a fake intelligent person.
Edit: Deleted my edit, i'm drunk
Yeah, its ironic. The richest man in the world doesn't have a single* truly profit-making venture under him.
How the bubble around him hasn't burst yet I don't know, but it would certainly be a feast for sore eyes.
*Edit: Forgot about SpaceX, which actually has made itself a decent chunk of money - about $15.5 billion in 2025 - but I doubt that alone is capable of propping up his nearly $500 billion personal valuation.
Corporate welfare.
SpaceX has been phenomenally successful. I don't think he can be attributed to much of that success. The Falcon 9 handled 95% of launches in 2024. SpaceX has went from non existant to a near monopoly in 23 years while competing against some of the most powerfully connected companies in the world.
I'm not a SpaceX fanboy (I'm a space fanboy). They have done a lot of good for the space industry, while also causing a lot of harm to the scientific space community (earth based observations). I just don't think you can make an argument that SpaceX is not a successful company.
I agree. Changed the text!
Not just earth based observations, they’ve pretty much guaranteed we’re have no hope in another space race versus China, or even just in general for the next decade at a minimum.
Go home drunk, I’m too Dad
Apartheid-man's basically a bubble unto himself.
Not exactly sure what you're trying to say here but spacex has tentative plans to ipo at a 1.5 trillion valuation.
Wallstreet is salivating over this because they know they get in first and will make bank when retail investor drive the price to ridiculous levels.
I'm saying that it isn't so profitable to make anywhere near that amount of money in decades.
I doubt spacex is profitable. The ipo is so they raise cash. They probably burned it all up with the starship failures.
I'm sure on paper it will look profitable same as Tesla looks profitable from certain angles but is actually propped up by the ability to create more shares. He'll do the same with spacex. Bleed it for his own gains.
I don't think he actually cares about any of this tech. It's the only explanation for how he keeps wasting first mover advantage.
Yeah, but its profits (for 2025 at least) are <1/100th of that - so that valuation is bound to collapse very quickly...
And of course it'll end up being the regular people who get screwed when that rug pulls.
Gov gotta have their corporate frontman. Keeps their hands clean.
Just like his paypal buddy, spinning the golden wool of palantir from the unwelcome rot of total information awareness.
And now no pesky joe-public to get in the way, since it's corporate, not public.
They're clever like that.
Three bullets could do so much for this country
Let's keep 'replacing' them until the replacements end
But that would require more than 3 bullets
All I'm hearing is how great this would be for the bullet industry.
Could you imagine how many jobs it would create
I'm okay with that.
We gotta start somewhere
And they are so cheap!
The weird thing is that these people don't think they're rich enough and want to extract more money from government and the people, and they simultaneously think that the government gives too much money to poor people.
They race to who will be the first trillionaire. It's disgusting. Meanwhile children are starving.
It's bound to happen soon.
And you know what they say, the difference between a trillion and a billion is about a trillion.
Surely someone's already there, quietly, long time ago.
... Who owns the debt?
To these people, there's no such thing as "enough". Contentment is not a concept that exists within their minds, only a sociopathic urge to acquire more.
Imagine how rich we'd all be if all the suppressed emancipatory technologies got availed to each and all. No more impoverishment by rents. Free energy. Negligible cost of travel. All space opened to us each and all.
You've put your finger on it there.
The french really did have a solid way of reminding the upper crust that they were vastly outnumbered by the people they were standing upon...
Remind me. Why are the worlds billionaires all building bunkers? A true mystery.
Honestly stop being poor dudes, just ask your father for some millions to get started and start exploiting people, easy
Just a small multi million dollar loan, Dad
Ask for several thousand dollars and go to a third world country where people only earn hundreds per year. Turn those thousands into millions. Easy.
Most Westerners can play Musk's game in a third world country.
Any place that allows this to happen is a bad place.
Eat the rich.
People really should pay their bottoms more.
(sorry)
Damn, when I read this statistic the other day I took it as 'the bottom half has less then the 3 richest persons', but in fact, it is 'three people each have more than the bottom half' holy shit.
We already have Musk acting like his own personal country, making personal deals with world leaders that benefit only himself over other nations. Others are probably doing it, too, but we haven't heard about it.
Now these Sociopathic Oligarchs are heading to trillionaire status, and they WILL be founding their own Corporo-Nations, which will require private armies for security. Eventually, these Corporo-Nations will combine to form their own alliance, combine their armies, and start throwing their weight around militarily, as well as economically.
This is all just a matter of time, and then we're going to wonder as a planet, Why we didn't stop those guys back when we had a chance?
I have no doubt at all that ALL of them have violated many laws, in many sectors, to get as rich as they are. Investigate them deeply, prosecute them for their crimes, and confiscate their entire fortunes. If we don't do that, it is absolutely certain that we will come to regret it.
Alien only demonstrates the penultimate world government organization, before they each Psychopathic Oligarch decides they have to be sole King of the World, and they go to war genociding each other, with only one left standing.
Then it's BuynLarge from Wall-E.
The age of kings returns.
As per, the only thing that trickles down is shit, vomit and piss.
Don't forget that shithead larry Ellison. He's worth 200b right now.
It's hard to believe, but Ellison is worse than Musk. Musk is a lot like Trump, he wants love and respect, even though they are far too psychopathic to really understand what those things are, and they think that having money and acting tough will make people love and respect them.
Ellison doesn't seem to care about that. He's a mean, cruel person, who seems to enjoy being that way, and like Fred Trump, he raised his son to be as much a psychopath as he is.
Musk is dangerous, but he is too stupid and impulsive, and it blunts his impact. Ellison is far smarter, and far more effective. He's not quite as rich as the rest, but at a certain level, who can really tell? It's all just wretched excess after about $100 bill anyway. But even so, now that he owns CBS and Paramount, and is trying a poison pill takeover of Warner Discovery, he'll be in the upper reaches very soon, jockeying for position at in the top rankings
And I doubt he will stop at CBS/ Paramount and Warner. Larry Ellison is going to control a massive amount of the media in the this country, and he is a massive MAGA, of the worst kind. There are supposed to be government controlled limits on media ownership, but all rules are elastic under MAGA, and he'll be allowed to own anything he wants. Don't be surprised if he ends up owning all broadcast TV, and then he controls the narrative for all political campaigns, election results, news programs, debates, etc. No candidate gets promoted on TV unless MAGA allows it.
So Larry Ellison is essentially Mr Potter from it's wonderful Life
No, Mr. Potter was a sweet old man in comparison.
That's fair I guess. Maybe the worst villain we could come up with back then is positively tamed by comparison today
Don't forget the bankers who do not appear on such rich lists.
... How much did the Rothschilds have at the start of last century? Enough to own how many nations? All of them?! Oh, maybe they just magically got poor since then, huh? XD
USA at again, isn't it? The country with trillion debt, that's about to blow.
It has always been a thing with America. The debt has been astronomical for many decades. I know its easy to believe its something new, but it really isnt. My entire life, America has been like this.
Im not too interested in the why, but I have glanced articles explaining why this is actually ok because of their position in the world, the world currency being the dollar, and other factors. Its very boring for me but you can find info about it.
Every time I see these guys’ faces I cringe so hard. It’s frankly embarrassing working in the tech industry when most people think of them whenever anyone mentions it.
Now, I might be misreading this data, but from what it looks like either one of these billionaires by themselves have more wealth than the bottom 50% of Americans, right?
More like one Billionaire own 5.6 times the wealth of the bottom 50%
Yeah, this is phrased like those three just slightly edge out the bottom 50, as opposed to each individually owning significantly greater than the bottom 50. I'm going to assume these three own more than the "bottom" like 85%.
Top two are richer than the 3rd + the 50%
Cuckerburg
"own more" is putting it lightly, they literally own 10 times more than bottom 170 mil people combined
money is a meaningless construct. Eat the rich.
No, no. A little while yet.
They've got to get enough to cover
https://www.usdebtclock.org/
first. THEN it'll trickle down. For super super sure.
Trust them. Maybe they care.
Brother, those are treasuries. Nobody is trying to "pay back all the treasuries" except a dozen or so crank libertarianism obsessed with Free Banking.
We've never missed a treasury payment in large part because we can't miss a payment (unwillingly) when we print our own money.
Anyone who claims we can't pay back the National Debt is either ignorant or lying
That was intended whimsically.
But also,
The FED's federal in name only.
The debt of the nations are the assets and income of the rich. They don't want that to disappear. Not until they de-invested at least.
The economy is set to take off any time now Charlie Brown.
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
Elon is not an American.
He builds fireworks that's pretty American tbh.
What’s about the other twelve multi-billionaires that are worth more than $85B? Why were they left out?
It's the "that guy wants your cookie" meme, but billionaires ranked 4th and lower are pointing at these 3.
there are way more of us than there are of them.
Yeah, but to them it's super cheap to buy and arm enough of us for their protection.
I read a thing earlier where Musk was complaining about not feeling safe to go out in public since Kirk was shot. So there's that.
Love that for him. I hope he never feels safe.
He also has a financial interest in other rich assholes being afraid.
He started a high-dollar personal security company for right-wing billionaires called Foundation Security.
Why just leave it a fear?
Dragonslayer is an occupation that needs a comeback
If these billionaires started feeling just a little less safe out in public with the rifraf ... Rather than being worshiped - I imagine we'd see them at least hesitate when improving the efficiency of the orphan crushing machine.
America has spent decades brainwashing people the wealthy are special and you can be one also if you work hard.
Exactly. And who owns that media?
I'm on mobile and can't find the exact timestamp but this interview with Bernie Sanders delves perfectly into why america and more broadly - the world is starting to implode as a result of these lizards in skinsuits.
I wonder if they mean that 4th place has less
Like "there are 3 people who each have more than..."
Sadly no, you’d have to go allllll the way down to the 15th richest American to get to $80ish billion https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/
Musk alone prolly has more than the bottom 70%ish of Americans.
https://theyrule.net/
The only way it trickles down is the way Charlie Kirk showed us
Vote out every single Republican or whatever right-wing/far-right party you have in your country. Shift the Overton window each time a seat gets flipped.
And don't forget to get rid of the Dems who have been there. Replace them with actual leftists.
This is so disgusting.
478 billion for Musk. Happily he found a way to destroy money as effectively as possible by building the biggest rockets ever and let them explode over and over again.
We can of course fix this…just look at French history…
In the past, the owners and/or aristocracy, lived in the general area of workers. Not the case anymore. I would love it if people started Luigi-ing aggressively.
Roughly speaking, if you murdered and seized their wealth by liquidating their assets at current value, that's like... 6k donation to half of the US.
That's assuming 50% of about 340m people with big economic assumptions that won't hold up, but fun to think about. It's not a ton of money even then, but it'd probably do more for everyone than under some dragon. Course, we could also just tax them a large amount like we used to, which accomplishes the same thing without the murder.
What people often forget about trickle-down economics is that wealth only trickles down to named beneficiaries
At first I thought it was combined. Not "individually each." And not by twice.
That's not liquid money though. For each one, the figures mostly represent stock in their own companies which they couldn't pull out without crashing the value. Musk's wealth in particular is mostly air. At least the other two have profitable companies that actually function. In any case, much of it's not real money we could pull out of the bank and spread around. (But we could tax the fucking snot out of them and spread that around!)
But even if they were "only" worth a few 10's of billions, the real issue is that they own the government. And Zuckerberg and Musk own a monster chunk of our social media, control our opinions.
tl;dr: It's not real money and the problem is influence, not total wealth.
This is bullshit.
When it comes to measuring their wealth it's not real money.
But when it comes to calculating GDP and growth and other economic metrics these are still included. Make up your mind, either equities are real money or GDP is made up nonsense.
This is not entirely correct.
As in: it's technically correct, but practically they just use their equity as leverage for loans, turning them into cash without actually touching them. Oh, and since they took on debt, now they get to report that as a loss and get tax breaks. They can pay off the interest from whatever actual money they're earning.
This is exactly my point, their equities act very similarly to our real money/assets. There is nothing unrealised about it
I'm not sure what you mean here. GDP is total money spent and as such would not include equity.
Tho GDP is real, or at least as any metric and proxy we use for measurement.
This bit is kinda true. Its not money until its sold. I would include being leverage into a loan to count similarly and should be taxed as capital gain (this is a current loophole)
Is the money earned by hedge funds and investment banks part of the GDP calculations or not ?
Edit: Example if Elon Musk takes out a loan with his tesla stocks as collateral, will the financial transaction that have taken place, be part of GDP calculations or not ?
No, but the things he buys with said loans will.
The standard understanding of how GDP is calculated is:
GDP = Consumption (C) + Investment (I) + Government Spending (G) + Net Exports (NX).The investment must be spent that year and most of the net worth that is being discussed here was accumulated over previous years. Said net worth is not real money until it is sold (or tax side stepped with loans on assets). To be a bit more clear this is money spent by investors on securities and such that is counted; not the revenue of the brokers. Also this could just include office space and equipment.
I think in your wanting to make capitalism immoral, which it is, you are holding a private definition of these things. It is also confusing as these definitions can be somewhat similar to each other and used interchangeably (like mass and wight, have you ever said something weighs 10kgs?).
The point I am trying to make here is the equities act like real money. They can be traded, and profits can be generated by said trades and deals (the profits are part of the GDP calculations). Which means that for all practical purposes equities are equivalent to real money.
Now we can debate what actually constitutes real money, and whether the definition ends at dollars or all global currencies or government bonds or assets like gold etc etc.
I mean, all money is a social contract, but still; equities being close to cash is not the same as being cash. Similar idea to holding a collectable item with some value. Until you sell or use it as collateral the value is hypothetical.
Except that we do caveat. The ultimate question is how healthy is the economy or how insert question is the economy; which is non-trivial, mostly because things that we agree should be measured cannot be, so we take a proxy. At this point its worth pointing out that metrics that are used as targets stop being useful metrics.
Part of how we might agree to measure the economy is by items made; which is hard without considering all the intermittent steps. So the final amount bought by consumers (which could be people, business, foreigners, or the government). Some caveats here are that the data is not normalized by currency, costs of living, people that are served by said economy, velocity of money (search this one as it is somewhat relevant to what you might be asking), and so on. Keep in mind we did not mesure economic health or performance, just something we might find easier to tabulate which may help us infer other things. When making an inference it is important to list out assumptions made about the dataset.
Still, this is a different topic from "is billionaire wealth real".
I mean I am not even sure what this means. It just reads like a non-statment that sounds good. Having better banking and financing will be better for an economy. Like there is a reason why we moved away from cash/gold to keep things going. Think of how long it might take to buy a house if you are going cash. It is faster to just get a loan. And everyone in that chain can spend their money sooner (velocity of money I said earlier).
Does China have a less developed equity market? Maybe, but that does not mean that they are a weaker economy. Just that some transactions might take more time.
Remember we cannot actually measure some questions we have, just take a proxy measurement. Take for example brain damage from football or boxing. As of this writing we cannot see the CTE, but we can take symptoms to build a case that someone might have CTE. We can build a similar story for how resilient or not any given economy in the world might be. So yeah we do caveat quite a lot.
Thanks for the detailed response, I'll probably need to Google a bunch if stuff in here which I will.
But to the point that didn't make sense to you: The american economy is considered to be big/high growth simply because it's financial sector is so big. And yes this could mean it's markets are efficient, but efficient at what? Often it's trading stocks or debt instruments or some obscure financial instruments, and if that's the case then the size of the economy seems quite made up just like Elon's wealth.
And my second issue is that when it comes to personal wealth of billionaires we always caveat it with 'it's not real money'. .
But when it comes to measuring the success of any country's economy, we don't caveat it with something similar. Countries like Singapore or even US make a lot of money from financial services. The success of American economy is heavily reliant on these unrealised gains compared to China for example where I am guessing it will be a smaller proportion of the total economy.
So then forcibly nationalize their companies if they won’t share the equity in their companies with the workers who built it. Fuck your stupid argument that defends oligarchs
This place makes me feel like I'm surrounded by angry teenagers. I merely explained that their wealth isn't liquid, and that is a cold stone fact. I also explained that the money isn't the issue in and of itself. The issue is that they can purchase influence enough to run the country.
Lemmy: "BOOTLICKER!"
Of course what you said is accurate. But you’re missing the point. The point is that there is a systemic issue wherein a business owner can capture equity and keep it from their workers.
Neolibs hate this because they’re like b-b-but what if I start a small business?? Or what if I finally get that promotion into the c suite?? I need to be able to extract wealth from the peons!!
In a just society there would be Amazon but jeff bezos would be far less wealthy because the average Amazon worker would have a significant amount of shares in the company, since without them the company wouldn’t exist. But instead will live in a society that serves oligarchs and allows the overwhelming majority of those workers to be paid essentially nothing while a small portion of people at the top of the hierarchy not only get reimbursed in exponentially more money, but equity shares as well.
When you point out they can buy influence without addressing the systemic issues it’s like you’re saying “oh hey it’s not like they actually have the money. They just have this influence.” But you don’t connect a to b and it’s like are you fucking dumb? The have that influence because we give it to them. Thus, bootlicker
robber barrons 2.0
Not to mention that the top owner owns more than the second and third combined...
Fuck trickle-down, time to implement the piñata economy.
Well, only on paper. Someone actually has to buy their shares first.
You'd think that, but go research or watch a video and get informed on how these bimbos use their networth (stocks) as collateral for bank loans of still more money than we will ever see in our life times (that they never really pay back btw).
They take out loans against their stock, kind of like a HELOC. So they get money without reporting any income too cuz it's a loan.
Of course. Never said that those are 100% stocks. They have massive expenses to cover and they use the stock value as leverage. The banks giving out loans are creating the bubble.
It never trickles down.
The only peaceful way I see wealth being redistributed is if Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg were to use regulatory capture to reform government in order to raise their own taxes. Such a scale of philanthropy hasn't been seen since the robber barons Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller donated to build libraries and improve public education. Had those Guilded Age monopolists also used their wealth to compel the US's legislative branch to raise taxes, bolster anti-trust laws, and prevent the acceptance of consumer welfare doctrine over plain anti-monopoly policy, then I'd argue their donations to improve public education would have gone much farther.
That said, plenty of non-peaceful ways exist much like there are many ways for an iceberg to flip over.
The bottom 50% of households have an average net worth of $629?
Most of America cannot absorb a sudden expense of 400-1000 dollars.
Taking into consideration the large amount of credit card debt, student loans, mortgages, etc.? It's plausible. Someone who rents, is living paycheck-to-paycheck, and has maybe a few hundred dollars in credit card debt could be in the "negative"
Cannot wait for the next big solar flare that destroys all online servers of Fakebook and shAmazon. All this money will actually turn out to be a fake bubble...
The Broligarchy https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQF5bjZAVkc/
And this graph is old, isn’t it? Their wealth is snowballing rapidly, hence Larry Ellison is at $250B now.
We need to raise taxes until capital increases at a rate closer to wage gains. This is basically what Piketty talked about in Capital in the 21st Century.
The "money" used to buy bread is a very practical medium to exchange resources. These figures with too many digits are not real: that "money" is a result of sums of products of virtual values based on credit and speculation. The fact that the same symbol ($) is used for these two very different things sounds like a systemic bug.
You say that but they can and do use that virtual value to buy bread.
Sure they can buy bread, but here's the catch: it's like going to the bakery, asking for free bread with the promise that you'll pay later because you can show 10 digit numbers, even if your pockets are actually empty. So these people practically live on credit because the market value would crash if they sell. At a macro level, 97 % of every dollar is actually debt (credit), mostly created by private banks to feed the system: https://econcurrents.com/2024/08/25/where-does-us-money-come-from-and-where-does-it-go/.
True, but if Elon gave you $1 million in Tesla stock you could still easily sell it, be taxed on it, and use the remainder to buy a lot of bread.
Can someone do the math for me... If theoretically that was all liquid and those 3 got Thanos snapped with the money redistributed, how much would each American get?
About $2500 per person
As in 1 trillion / 390 million population
Turns out that the golden stuff streaming down ain't Gold ...
this appears roughly 1/3 of the third richest person is more wealthy than the bottom 50%
Why do we put up with this shit. We need a revolt but it won't happen as most people are not angry enough as they have their phone addiction. Beer and circuses.
All imbalances will eventually be self-corrected. It's the law of the universe. Play with those rockets while you can, big boys.
Yeah, the karmic elastic always snaps back.
But not always cleanly. A lot of messy splashback and flailing around to harm others in the process.
May be better if we get a grip and ease things back, rather than waiting for things to get so far they have their calamitous resolve.
But how many people have to suffer while we wait for the universe to correct itself?
88 posts, and nobody actual does poop.
Now go tell an American to revolt, you’ll get billions of excuses.