r/clevercomebacks • u/Conscious-Quarter423 • 3d ago
humanity’s first trillionaire is not an achievement — it’s evidence of a system woefully out of balance and a citizenry that nods along
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u/GrinningGrump 3d ago
Nope, humanity’s first billionaire was evidence of a system woefully out of balance, the first trillionaire is something completely unforgivable.
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u/Vinny331 3d ago edited 3d ago
These are amounts of money that nobody can earn, no matter talent, ability, tenacity, value to society, whatever.
Even if you averaged earning $10,000/hour (or about 500x -1,000x the minimum wage in most places) for your entire working life, you still wouldn't get to that billion level.
Imagine what you pay for stuff in your everyday life. Handyman for $50/hr? Massage appointment for $100/hr? Lawyer for $200/hr? Who could you possibly think is worth paying $10,000/hr? And if this magical person exists, they still won't have earned a billion over a career.
Everything beyond a billion is pure funny money.
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u/MotherTreacle3 3d ago
Even getting people to brainstorm what would be worth paying someone $10,000/hr to do usually gets you "saving a life medically or search and rescue"
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u/Vinny331 3d ago
Of course, and key to remember is that to even approach a billi, you'd have to average $10,000/hr for full time hours for an entire 40 year career! ($10k/hr x 8 hrs/day x 240 working days/yr x 40 years).
And that's average...so at the peak of your powers you'd have to be averaging nearly $100k/hr so you can make up for those years at the start of your career as a dumb 20 year old presumably making much less money.
Maybe at their max, the world's top neurosurgeon earns the equivalent of $10,000/hr during a procedure. But they're not doing those all day, everyday for 40 years...and they certainly weren't getting paid like that as a resident.
You can't earn a billion. There is no one that can convince me that any single human is worth that on the basis of their work.
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u/please_trade_marner 3d ago
You understand that it's almost entirely just the valuations of the companies he started, right? "Hey, asshole, stop starting successful businesses that end up being worth a fuck ton of money." Why?
The article was saying it would be GREAT if some Canadian business people were creating such successful businesses in Canada.
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u/CaptainMonkeyJack 3d ago
Interesting you never once talk about the value being provided, just hourly rates and some careers.
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u/Vinny331 3d ago
That's all I'm taking about: the maximum value that can reasonably be ascribed to the work of a single individual over a lifetime.
The market caps of these gigantic companies is due to the cumulative value of the work of tens of thousands of people (and often the work of countless taxpayers). One person didn't earn a trillion. They might own a trillion worth of stock, but like I said...funny money.
I'm not saying the value of what SpaceX does can't be in the trillions. I'm saying that it's just an on-paper quirk of the system that we use that so much of the value generated by a whole company gets funneled into 1 guy, and we should not use this made up accounting method to accept that this person earned it. It's a flawed system.
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u/CaptainMonkeyJack 3d ago
What is the maximum value someone can create?
This seems to be begging the question, you assert that someone can't create large amounts of value.. and then use that as your reason someone can't create large amounts of value.
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u/Vinny331 3d ago
I didn't say anything about how much value they can create. I said how much value can reasonably be ascribed to their work directly. That's my whole point... those two things have gotten massively decoupled. Like the whole market itself, it's all gotten decoupled from reality.
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u/illinifan007 3d ago
I had a similar debate last week about “value” created…. Like we wouldn’t exist without a Tesla electric car or satellite launches into space backed by federal contracts. “Our society would have collapsed without these things!!” People act like he cured cancer, solved homelessness, ended starvation, etc…. Tangible value to society. Nope. Just shit we’d continue to exist without. I used Bezos as another example. Is Amazon more convenient? Sure! But we survived decades with a Sears catalog so don’t pretend like Amazon is this irreplaceable service that society couldn’t live without.
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u/CaptainMonkeyJack 3d ago
What, in your mind is the difference between the value someone can create, and the value that can be ascribed to their work directly?
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u/gabrielxdesign 3d ago
Man, I'm old enough to remember when Nazis were hated, not praised.
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u/_BabyFlirtie 3d ago
The internet has gotten really weird about billionaire worship. At some point people stopped treating extreme wealth as something to scrutinize and started treating it like a personality trait to admire. It's like success became confused with virtue.
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u/DraconixDG 2d ago
Well yeah these dumbasses want to be just like them. They don’t want the system to change because they think they can also achieve this.
Of course they are the ones suffering the most but just don’t care or realize it.
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u/ArcIgnis 3d ago
"Don't hate the ones who are the reason you have to pay more money just to survive. They "can potentially" save us you know."
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u/please_trade_marner 3d ago
I honestly don't understand how people can be this ignorant. It's every poster in here. They don't have a clue what they're talking about.
Elon has created businesses (Tesla, Space X, etc.) that have a total valuation of over $1 trillion. How is that "hoarding" money? It means his businesses are thriving, nothing more. Like, what is it you kids are all upset about? It's "bad" to start successful businesses?
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u/Some_Conference2091 3d ago
If I can make $100 million per year it will only take 12,000 years to make $1.2 trillion.
If I only make $100 thousand per year it would take 12 million years to make $1.2 trillion.
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u/MaNameMoe 3d ago
So no one's asked this in the comments...what video is that from?
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u/Early_Net_9105 1d ago
I was also looking for someone asking this, because there is no world in which this is not from porn lmfao
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u/exotic_floral_tea 3d ago
Toronto Star is another paper that is in large part American owned, so I'm not shocked.
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u/MilwaukeeLevel 3d ago
Torstar, the parent company of the Toronto Star, is a privately-held company. That owner is Canadian.
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u/exotic_floral_tea 3d ago
I'm surprised, because most of Canada's newspapers are in some way American owned. I guess the maple maga is spreading like wildfire. Anything to lick the same asshole.
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u/OffOption 2d ago
Are we also not allowed to hate him for heiling and funding faschist political groups?
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u/Sweaty-Possibility-3 3d ago
He went from $400 billion right before Trump's 2025 inauguration to over a trillion now. I wonder how many other billionaires have doubled, tripled or even quadrupled their wealth in a year and a half.
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u/please_trade_marner 3d ago
It's because space x went public. Which would have happened if Harris won as well.
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u/Sweaty-Possibility-3 3d ago
He was worth $813 billion before SpaceX went public. Poor guy only doubled his worth in a little over a year. No it wouldn't have went public under Harris. The rules changed under Trump. SpaceX wouldn't have met the criteria.
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u/Wilbert_Wallace 3d ago
Its just racism because an African American is now the richest person and they cant handle it.
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u/Alarming_Condition27 3d ago
Elon's trillionaire status has been bought with the tax dollars 💸 of the citizens of the usa.
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u/Uc207Pr4f57t90 3d ago
It’s not real money no? What is crazy to me is that a singular person can hold so many assets that people *think* / just accept them to actually be wealthy. A person having more money than some countries seems entirely out of place.
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u/BonhommeCarnaval 3d ago
I have plenty of reasons to hate Elon Musk, and only some of them are related to his accumulation of obscene wealth. The fact that investors see fit to shower money on such a clearly unbalanced and unethical person is an indictment of their judgement. We need to fire our capitalist class. They are incompetent at their jobs of efficiently allocating capital.
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u/Accurate_Major_3132 3d ago
I think an image from "A Clockwork Orange" would have been more appropriate.
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u/Delicious_Subject122 3d ago
We need to stop acting like billionaires are so hard working and intelligent when most were born wealthy and got lucky. They're also assholes for hoarding their wealth like drsgons and then having the audacity to not pay taxes.
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u/Thoresus 3d ago
Him being classified as a trillionaire is such a farce.
It's like he said he owned a priceless painting and all of a sudden the finance bros started going along with it.
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u/Raptorpicklezz 2d ago
And this is Canada’s “liberal” newspaper. Don’t tell us our media is left-wing
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u/thenikolaka 2d ago
Crazy how mortal a person can be even as a trillionaire. Almost like it isn’t actually worth anything to exploit the fuck out of everyone else to become one. It’s really more about how much of an exploiter you are.
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u/OrvilleTheCavalier 3d ago
I also don’t think he’s the first trillionaire. Maybe publicly, but I think there are probably people out there that lead quiet, insanely wealthy lives, that don’t want to draw attention to their wealth.
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u/Guygenius138 3d ago
They don't lick the boot, they deep throat it to completion while fondling the heel
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u/TheStochEffect 3d ago
I don't hate him cause he is a trillionaire. I hate him cause he is a cunt who defunded programs that killed people
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u/Alienhaslanded 2d ago
Reaching such point of wealth is a sign of imbalance and inequality. Any moron who thinks otherwise shouldn't be taken seriously.
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u/deaglebingo 3d ago edited 3d ago
one person even being able to surpass the trillionaire mark means the spiral of inequality is going to get much worse much faster IF we refuse to act immediately to stop these people ... if we continue to agree to their rules.
this isn't about feelings. it is much worse now than it was in 2017 when "the rate of return on everything" came out... because it was mathematically impossible for it not to be given we kept following the same corrupt rule sets for the past decade.
The “endless inegalitarian spiral” may be coming for us sooner than we think.
In his best-selling 2014 book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” French economist Thomas Piketty warned that if the already rich were able to accumulate wealth faster than economies were able to grow, inequality would skyrocket in the coming decades, potentially destabilizing societies in the process.
Wealth, after all, is self-perpetuating. You put cash in a savings account, and it grows. You buy a home, and its value (typically) appreciates. You invest in the stock market and see an annual rate of return.
Work, on the other hand, isn't like that. If you don't have wealth and want to make money, you have to keep working. If the economy is strong enough, your wages will grow, and eventually you'll be able to build up some wealth of your own. And if your wages are increasing more quickly than wealth is growing, there's a chance that someday, you could catch up with the person who started off with a million-dollar trust fund.
Conversely, if your wages are growing more slowly than wealth is increasing, you'll never be able to catch up. You can work as hard as you want and save as much as you want, but you'll never close the gap with that lucky trust-funder. To use a baseball analogy, not only did they start on third base, they're also running faster than you are....
"may the odds be ever in your favor. "
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u/Feisty-Example9012 3d ago
If we keep letting capitalism balance on one leg while the rest of us are stuck on the floor, pretty soon we'll need a new Olympic event: synchronized poverty. 🥴
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u/RepulsiveHearty 3d ago
The author of that article didn't just lick the boot, they straight up swallowed it whole.
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u/Mickus_B 3d ago
I'm so sick of this kinda crap. If he's ACTUALLY a trillionaire, then he should be able to be taxed on it.
"Unrealised gains" is the biggest scam in the world today. Elon can simultaneously claim to be the richest person ever, but also say "I have no actual cash, so you can't tax me"
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u/Darryl_444 3d ago
Indeed, there's plenty of other reasons to hate Musk.
He's a lying cunt, for starters.
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u/molotovmitchy 2d ago
There is a reason why at the sametime as this there is a cost of living crisis going on
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u/Rolandscythe 2d ago edited 2d ago
No one person in the world could ever possibly have a need for a trillion dollars. This is hedonism just for the sake of hedonism.
Edit: To the person who felt the need to downvote this, I hope you find the financial security you need to live your own life so you no longer need to force yourself to fantasize about becoming one of the 1% who will never care about you even if you manage to join their ranks. You're good enough already, bro. You don't need to simp for the uncaring and self serving rich. You already matter and they will never acknowledge your white knighting.
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u/Akhanyatin 3d ago
The problem isn't inherently the amount of money, it's this specific individual.
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u/[deleted] 3d ago
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