One astounding thing I realized the other day - if you made $10,000 an hour continuously since the year 0, you still would be about 70 billion dollars off of Elon's estimated wealth.<p>That said, I don't think people like Elon are <i>actually</i> worth 250 billion or whatever the estimate is, but at that level of wealth, it almost doesn't even matter.
I thought having a hundred billion dollars was basically unfathomable just a few years ago.<p>Now I'm pretty sure we will see the first trillionaire in the next decade
I look at that graph and think that on the one hand Musk must feel pretty good being on top. On the other hand, though, most of his wealth is tied up in an single incredibly overvalued stock and when the market corrects that interpretation he won't be anywhere even approaching the top. I'd feel much more comfortable being someone like Gates or the Waltons.
Mayan economy: Sacrifice your K wealthiest individuals yearly to ensure prosperity of your economy on the years to come. Those sacrificed must give away 90% of their money.
It occurs to me that if you charted a distribution of political power (pick your metric for that…) it’d look about the same.<p>A few thousand state and federal officials, rich businessmen with influence, lobbyists, union leaders, …<p>At the far right you’d have governors of large states, Supreme Court justices, Congressional committee chairs, the President.<p>Nobody seems to get too worked up over this, it’s the system we’ve chosen. But as a group the folks on the far right of that distribution exercise and have exercised way more critical leverage over the state of my life—during Covid, say—than Larry Ellison and the Walmart heirs.
Anyone have a proper solution to the issue of wealth re-distribution? This is a fairly novel problem, and I think the government is neither equipped nor competent enough to handle hundreds of billions of dollars in new tax revenue (as some propose) while at the same time, why should we be comfortable with private actors deploying this kind of capital at this scale
The linear scaling is valid to show how strictly L-shaped the curve is but a log scaling would show more detail in the middle and an income histogram would show how much each percentile of the population has in aggregate.<p>Would also be interesting to compare to other countries maybe Norway one of the most egaliterian and a poor country like Sudan.
Could the richest people liquidate holdings for the value Forbes estimates their worth at? I doubt it.<p>Is it possible that the people figuring up "wealth" for these articles have multiple reasons to exaggerate the totals? Perhaps outweighing their impulses towards scientific and journalistic credibility?
The amazing thing is that a dollar is only worth what all those millions of people agree it is. A few people having infinitely more wealth than everyone else is a very precarious position.
“Wealth” as a static number is extremely fickle and tells you nothing about reality<p>The Waltons have a completely different kind of wealth than Musk - In many practical and theoretical ways.<p>So even within this subset of insane wealth hoarders, there is a difference in kind, type legal structure, ability to liquidate, etc…<p>We have thousands of examples where someone’s “wealth” disappears overnight because a handful of “analysts” downgrade future expectations of what their percentage of equity is worth in a secondary market. That’s not really going to happen with Buffet, Gates but very possible with Musk and similar.<p>On the flipside arguably Musk has the most political influence within the right wing (See: recent Trump stuff) compared to for example, the relative influence of the Waltons on the “liberal” wing.<p>Similarly I could point to a ton of people who aren’t on on this list but fall into the >500M$ category who have a lot more influence on power and economics than some of the people in the top of this list.<p>The fact that this is not calculated within this framework, means that this ranking is pure vanity and says nothing about economic, power, political power, or anything other than an arbitrary, monetary leaderboard.
I have so much trouble understanding the people that come to these types of posts and defend these sociopathic money hoarders. "Uh, you guys don't understand that they can't just liquidate their wealth..." "If they sold all their stock, the stock would crash", and so on. Just amazing.
The neoliberal program initiated in the 1970s is to blame, and the conditions for that program were set by the gross expenditures of the Vietnam War, whose origins date back to Truman's decision to support French recolonization of Indochina after WWII.<p>The fundamental goal of neoliberalism is to place all capital in private hands and eliminate any governmental control over capital - and that means eliminating the middle class and creating a two-tiered society of serfs and aristocrats, as existed in 19th century Russia, Britain and Germany.<p>The methodology is roughly threefold - (1) destroy domestic unions by exporting all well-paid unionized manufacturing jobs in the USA to sweatshop zones in offshore client states, and (2) import as much cheap labor as possible to fill jobs that cannot be exported (construction, services, agribusiness etc), ideally undocumented so that any unionization efforts can be resisted by deporting union leaders and organizers at will. This ensures starvation wages for the serf class. (3) Establish large homeless and prison populations as a constant threat to the serf class - no matter how bad your situation is, it could be worse!
Yeah, it <i>looks</i> bad, but only if you pretend that the <i>ideas</i> these visionaries pioneered were worthless. To take a single example, it might <i>seem</i> obscene that Bezos' net worth would take 32 million years of continuous work for the average Amazon warehouse worker to accrue, but without him who would have come up with the idea of using a computer to buy things on the internet?
The value of the super wealthy’s net worth is paper. It only has value because we all agree it has value. If you started to seize their paper wealth and give it to everyone else, the value of that paper would immediately fall, not just from the threat of seizing it but their lack of ownership and stewardship would make it crumble.<p>When someone actually uses their money, like to buy a mansion, we do indeed tax the shit out of it. We tax the corporation, we tax the dividends, we tax the gains, we tax the seller of the property and we make the buyer pay various fees. We tax the property yearly, and we increase the assessed value of it upwards to get more tax every year. Tax tax tax.<p>The only place to get more tax is to just seize the paper straight. And I think that’s a terrible idea.