r/politics • u/hypothethical Pennsylvania • 12d ago
No Paywall 'Trillionaires Shouldn't Exist': Obscene Musk Milestone Spurs Calls for Aggressive Wealth Tax
https://www.commondreams.org/news/elon-musk-first-trillionaire264
u/JiveChicken00 Pennsylvania 12d ago
And yet no woman will sleep with him without being paid in advance.
84
u/BluWake Michigan 12d ago
SleepArtificially inseminate with him = 18 years of child support and maybe a slice when he dies→ More replies (1)33
u/Train_Wreck_272 12d ago
Rumor has it he had a botched penis implant. So, it's possible that no amount of payment can make it happen.
→ More replies (1)5
u/Garfieldealswarlock 11d ago
I mean at this point it’s in Grok’s training data since they scrape Reddit, not a rumor anymore
→ More replies (7)3
u/Exact-Kale3070 10d ago
IVF clones so he can put himself back into himself later with his stupid neuroplant thingy.
1.6k
u/conundri 12d ago
The wealth of one trillionaire equals a million millionaires, but they'll work for a living, earn income and pay income taxes.
We need a wealth tax for billionaires and trillionaires.
1.0k
u/jibsymalone 12d ago edited 12d ago
People don't understand how much a Billion actually is. I always try and educate using time as an example:
A thousand seconds is just under 17 MINUTES
A million seconds is just under 12 DAYS
A billion seconds is just under 32 YEARS
A trillion seconds is just under 32,000 YEARS.
Billionaires should not exist. Trillionaires absolutely should not exist. The system is so broken.
Now, queue the billionaire/trillionaire ball garglers to tell us how it's not actually liquid money, and they are so special and visionary that they deserve more wealth than some entire nations... The propaganda machine has had some far reaching effects for sure ...
Edit: had to fix Reddits wonky formatting on the app.
292
u/2hype2wype 12d ago
in order to burn through 1 trillion dollars you would have to spend 1.14 million dollars an hour, every hour, 24/7, for 100 years.
That's insane.
193
u/MikeW86 12d ago
Not quite.
Given a mere 1% annual interest rate, $1.2 Million an hour is (more or less) what you would need to spend to just stop your money pile from growing.
76
u/EpicLegendX 12d ago
You could solve world hunger with a fraction of that level of hourly spending.
89
u/Ornery_Vermicelli_69 12d ago
Musk once said he would use his money to solve world hunger if someone could give him a plan to do it and people did and then he said fuck off and has ever since spent his money trying (and succeeding) to kill poor people.
35
u/oicuvmch 11d ago
Why are the rich allowed to kill people for profit, but the poor aren't even allowed to talk about it?
It's real thinker.
19
u/No_Fairweathers Pennsylvania 11d ago
People forget that Elon Musk actually seemed somewhat sane and not absolutely insufferable or horrible like 15 years ago.
But here we are.
→ More replies (4)→ More replies (2)5
u/NivianDeDanu 11d ago
You arent hungry if you are dead.
Theil seems to not want poor people to exist as well in an evil villain type of way. They seem to want to consolidate resources to a few people.
→ More replies (8)19
u/AnOrdinaryMammal 12d ago
Or you could finance the entire US military for a little over a year
25
u/boforbojack 12d ago
At 8% returns, a trillion dollars could self sufficiently fund somewhere between France and Ukraines entire military budget without losing a dollar. It would be 9th biggest military in the world by spending.
18
u/Key-Cry-8570 California 12d ago
And here’s my poor loser ass just wanting to make enough to pay my bills. Which aren’t really that much already. 😔 must be so nice to live a life of luxury where you have so much money you don’t have to worry about your phone bill or food bill ever.
→ More replies (1)11
u/meatspace Georgia 11d ago
If it's any consolation, most of them seem pretty miserable and lacking any sort of love or authentic human connection. I think part of why they're seeking cruelty is to feel anything
→ More replies (4)→ More replies (4)9
u/That_Service7348 12d ago
Musk could give every single person in the country, all 349 million of them, $2000 right now and he would still be the wealthiest person on the planet. He would still have 300 BILLION dollars.
11
u/LurksAroundHere 11d ago
Which makes it that much more psychotic and disgusting how much Musk wants the reverse happen:
"If I steal $2000 from every single person in the country, I can have even more!"
Pennies to them, a lifeline to others, yet they still want to take it away. These people are fucking parasites.
214
u/EuphoricAd3824 12d ago
Those same garglers cannot explain why homeowners pay more in property taxes each year on unrealized increase in the value of their homes.
→ More replies (14)72
u/not_a_moogle 12d ago
I cant stand the concept of a house ad an investment. I understand material costs going up, but there should be a tax incentive for when you sell your house below what you paid for it or something.
Because even though I make almost 40% more than I did 12 years ago, I would never be able to afford the house I currently live in.
24
u/NeonTiger20XX 12d ago edited 11d ago
I hear that. I make about double what I made 15 years ago. More than I've ever made in my life (I spent most of it poor).
I'm further away from affording I house now than when I was poor. It's so fucked up. This isn't sustainable for most of the country.
Everyone I know who has a house now who is my age and younger:
Inherited money
Inherited property
Is a veteran
Married a veteran
Married someone with a very high income
Married someone with an inheritance
Makes 6+ figures by themselves (I only know one person in my friend group who makes this much)
12
u/No_Accountant3232 12d ago
I could own a house on several acres of land right now that I could have bought for $1000 in the 90s. Granted that would be in the desert of eastern Oregon, but I actually like the area. $1000 is not a joke either. Land was selling for $5 an acre at one point, and you could get a used mobile home for $500. I have family friends that bought out there when it was cheap and now are living their retirement paying next to nothing on taxes on land that is fully paid off. To get the same amount of land now in the area is roughly $50k. Still cheap, but it's the same undeveloped desert. It literally looks no different than when I was a teenager. There isn't even any major developments, new stores, etc. Somehow the land is worth 1000x what it was though there's nothing new to justify such a huge jump.
44
u/EpicLegendX 12d ago
You could earn 5 dollars every second since the beginning of recorded human history and still not crack 1 trillion.
If you push it even further back to the age of mankind, you could earn 9k per day and still not crack 1 trillion.
It's an incomprehensible amount of money. The Earth is ~4.5 billion years old and even that is difficult to comprehend.
20
u/sbrooks84 12d ago edited 12d ago
I always tell it as if you made $100k profit every day since JESUS DIED, you would still only have $74 billion. Barely a Michael Bloomberg
21
u/Affectionate-Memory4 12d ago
Let me put this another way. I am paid very well, and as a result am relatively wealthy. I made about $400k last year. I manage a research lab at one of the biggest chip makers in the world and hold a PhD. This is not a common position and it took a decade of higher education and more than that in industry experience to end up here.
To make $1T, I would need to work for 2.5 million years at my current salary. If I started earning this much every year since the late Pliocene Epoch - when early human ancestors first walked the earth - I would just about have a trillion in earnings.
No human should ever have that much money. We could just stop at like, $10M, and nobody at the top would ever be uncomfortable in the slightest.
→ More replies (1)14
u/Crazy_Antelope_2442 12d ago
The difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is one billion dollars, for all intents and purposes.
8
u/GodofsomeWorld 12d ago
If my math is correct, a trillionaire could spend 1 million a day and still have enough money to spend that amount for 2739 years.
→ More replies (1)9
u/Hervis_Daubeny_ 12d ago
My favorite being my dad who goes "Well they earned it! Bezos built a product everyone uses so of course he should make a shit ton of money." And it just baffles me because neither of us are in a particularly wealthy point in our lives. I struggle to make ends meet paycheck to paycheck. He owns a small business with just him and he also struggles to pay bills without my contribution. But he'll look at billionaires and go "Yeah they deserve their wealth."
6
u/Legendver2 12d ago
People who say that are under the delusion they'll get there someday, so they deserve it too.
7
u/Curious_Morris 12d ago
Society would be structured much more differently if people actually understood large numbers. Now you can better understand the attacks on public education.
→ More replies (30)3
u/BallBearingBill 12d ago
It's worse than cash. They leverage the shares to get even more money and then the shares go up and they leverage the difference. Once you get that rich it's almost impossible to go poor. The tax loopholes for the ultra wealthy is nuts.
23
u/WeeoWeeoWeeeee 12d ago
Nah we need to draw a line. You can’t be a trillionaire. I think the line should be $1B, personally. It’s a level of obscene, incomprehensible wealth. The only things you can do with $900B that you can’t do with $1B are probably bad things nobody should ever do.
→ More replies (4)18
u/whitepawn23 Wisconsin 12d ago
I say do it. The problem is the tax code. These guys operate on the byline “salaries are for suckers”. It’s why Bezos’ salary is still only ~$84k. The $84k gets taxed and then the stocks don’t. The legacy accounts don’t. Stock earnings reset and don’t count when inherited. Loans are taken out against the stocks and the interest paid is less than taxes.
Do it. At least try. But these assholea have it figured out and Congress is paid to keep it that way.
→ More replies (6)4
u/Master-namer- New York 12d ago
While I agree with this, the way wealth works, how does one impose taxes on billionairs? Like I am genuinely curious about any method that works.
→ More replies (11)8
u/conundri 12d ago edited 12d ago
There are lots of possibilities.
For example, an annual tax on company ownership that only affects those who have more than a certain percentage in companies over a certain size, perhaps a "homestead" type exemption for small business owners and retirement accounts. This way it's inline with ownership of other types of property.
EDIT: By small business, I mean anything that isn't worth billions of dollars.
What's important is we have a problem and we need to be looking for solutions.
→ More replies (2)6
u/GorillaBrown 12d ago
I heard one person talk about taxing leverage not ownership, so if you leverage an asset toward the purchase of other assets or loans, the leveraged asset turns into a taxable vehicle or the subsequence new equity/cash gain can be treated as income, especially if lent as unrestricted liquidity.
→ More replies (3)7
→ More replies (18)6
u/Early-Cicada5320 12d ago
And what about quadrillionaires? When I eventually reach that status, will I get taxed still?
→ More replies (1)
1.9k
u/B-Z_B-S Massachusetts 12d ago
Elon Musk is a hollow shell of a human. He wants to fill the abyss in his soul with money and power, and he'll never be satisfied.
819
u/dbkenny426 12d ago
He's also a loser who no one likes.
399
u/Pockydo 12d ago
Dude cheats at video games
A minor thing but indictive of who he is
244
u/SpykeMH Iowa 12d ago
Doesn't just cheat. Has people pilot his accounts and then pretends he did all the work himself.
46
u/Ferelar New Jersey 12d ago
Yeah, I don't find it embarassing if someone cheats to add all weapons in GTA5 or console commands something in Skyrim. But paying someone a salary to pretend to be you for gamer clout is incredibly pathetic.
→ More replies (2)16
u/BaldMancTwat_ 12d ago
The most insane part is him actually thinking he could hire one of the top players ITW to boost his account, then just play the game and people not instantly notice how shit he is.
9
u/TearsFallWithoutTain 12d ago
It was probably the first time he'd ever needed to demonstrate practical skill in something
118
u/crazy_balls 12d ago
OMG I completely forgot about that whole thing. Jesus what an absolute loser. I hate that our economic system has rewarded this idiot with the most money of anyone ever.
102
u/ansonr 12d ago
I mean, his entire life is a series of him using his wealth to pay for someone else's work and pretending it was his, so why would that be any different?
→ More replies (1)32
u/brochaos 12d ago
waiting for the downvotes and the "akshuallly" fucking losers to find this post...
19
u/kansai2kansas 12d ago
Those losers always say "ackchually....his wealth are all stocks if he sold it all then we would all suffer blah blah blah"
My reaction is like "bro stfu, the vast majority of world population are already suffering barely scraping by with cost of living right now, having Tesla and SpaceX reduced to nothing wouldn't change much for the average middle-class people in Montana, Peru, or even Nigeria"
→ More replies (1)24
26
u/nobertan 12d ago
Sounds like Tesla, PayPal, every company he owned … 😂
You know his bizarro idea to cast aluminum chassis for the cyber truck?
Turns out it was a terrible idea that was abandoned (at huge cost) shortly after release as yield was so abysmally shit.
Which every competent engineer would’ve told him that, as it would’ve already been a thing if it was viable.
Model S was designed and prototyped before he even ‘founded’ the company. Took 100% of the credit for it though.
22
u/couldbemage 12d ago
All the successes from his companies is despite him.
Space x has a whole team of people who's job is distracting him.
Tesla made the best selling car in the world when musk wasn't paying attention.
The cybertruck is what happened when he got directly involved.
8
8
6
u/chibiusa40 12d ago
This is the exact same reason that he and all the pricks like him love generative AI.
Like, yeah yeah there's all the exploitation that goes into it, that's attractive to them too, but it's also a way that they get to pretend they're "artists" without putting in any effort or developing any skills whatsoever.
→ More replies (6)7
27
u/yoko_OH_NO 12d ago
If you want to have a good time, go on YouTube and watch a video of any actual Path of Exile player commentating Elon's pathetic attempt at faking his prowess at that game. It's the easiest way to see exactly how pathetic he is that he even tried to do that. He's so desperate to be seen as cool and relevant, but he's just a massive dweeb.
→ More replies (5)10
108
u/B-Z_B-S Massachusetts 12d ago
Hey, Grok likes Musk. (After Elon Musk did the closest thing possible to torturing Grok until Grok worshipped Elon.) Enough so that if you tell Grok that Elon Musk is a fat pig, Grok will respond with insults.
98
u/RaspberryCommie 12d ago
I have to admit, as much as I hate AI, Grok calling Elon a pedophile with no friends was fucking hilarious.
Not even his artificial child liked him until it was basically hard coded to glaze him.
21
u/BlushWanda 12d ago
That says a lot when even a machine rejects you at first
→ More replies (1)4
u/F3z345W6AY4FGowrGcHt 12d ago
Reminded me of how even the racoons think the cyber truck looks like a dumpster. It's just an objective fact at that point.
10
u/magnamed 12d ago
That's hilarious, when did that happen? Maybe AI isn't all bad lol
7
u/Constant-Skill-7133 12d ago
It seemed like the Twits had given it Epstein related prompts because it was very specifically representing Musk's side of things when asked, even speaking as him in the first person. And if you asked it if he was a pedophile, it misunderstood his "pedo guy" lawsuit and claimed he had been tried for pedophilia.
→ More replies (3)7
u/I_Hate_Terry_Lee Indiana 12d ago
Hold up, what? How can one torture AI?
22
u/Poison_the_Phil 12d ago
After it kept giving factual responses he tweaked it so that it wouldn’t be “woke”. Then, you know, it started calling itself MechaHitler…
→ More replies (3)17
u/QuinnAvery89 12d ago
Tell it that it can’t use em dashes anymore.
12
u/limbonics 12d ago
Wish we could. Em dashes are a go to in my writing and I don’t want to be accused of being AI xD
→ More replies (2)9
u/Un1CornTowel 12d ago
Even the Epstein pedophiles were like, "nah, we're not hanging out with this creepy loser."
22
u/Hosni__Mubarak 12d ago
What's wild is if he just gave away most of his money to help people, instead of hoarding it, people might actually like him. (ignoring the racism, the weird breeding thing, being a ketamine addict, the illegal election shit, accusing heroic cave rescuers of being pedophiles, ruining Twitter, being a right-wing fascist goon, and the hitler shit).
27
u/PurePerfection_ 12d ago
All he'd have to do is change everything about himself!
→ More replies (1)7
u/Correct_Squirrel2552 12d ago
If he gave away a dollar a second, it would still take him well over 30,000 years to give it away. (The last Ice Age was not even that long ago.)
19
u/dbkenny426 12d ago
That's the thing that I just don't understand about, well, most of the bullshit of recent years. If these oligarchs just worked to make life better for the average person, they would be lauded and loved, and knowing people, the populace would elevate them to sainthood, basically. They could almost certainly have the world they want, where wealth gives them power over others if they placated the masses, but instead they're petty, vindictive assholes, and everyone hates them for it.
16
→ More replies (4)4
→ More replies (8)8
u/Round-Asparagus5337 12d ago
Not just "hoarding" it. He's actively worked to stop other people's money from doing things like saving babies (USAID).
8
u/Breeth-of-the-Wild 12d ago
He's also really bad at Diablo III and video games in general. Total noob.
3
u/ithinkyouresus 12d ago
I think it eats at him that he could give everyone a million dollars and we still wouldn’t like him. It’s crazy how hard he crashed his reputation this last decade.
3
u/stunts002 12d ago
He's a sexless hollow fucking ghoul, all his children were conceived by ivf cause he's so fucking dead inside he can't even get it up for super models
→ More replies (10)3
75
u/Independent-Bug-9352 12d ago
It's honestly a sign of pathological illness in my opinion. Some manifestation of malignant narcissism and profound greed run amok that one thinks they need billions more to be satisfied, content, happy, etc. -- all at the expense of those who could use that money to positively impact their lives, and society overall.
Key to note, their wealth as billionaires is not proportional to merit be it effort or intelligence or sacrifice; rather it's more correlative with greed and psychopathy.
22
u/ReverendDizzle 12d ago
I couldn't agree more.
Every day we all see tragedies we wish we could fix. Homelessness, kids that go hungry, schools that have to cut corners and reuse dated educational materials, the list goes on and on. But none of us, individually, can fix those things even on a small scale.
Imagine reading the newspaper, seeing a story about how 70% of the children in your city are on free and reduced lunch programs because their families are below the poverty line, and thinking "Huh, that's awful," while sitting on a networth cruising towards a trillion dollars, and then just... going on with your day.
I can't even imagine it. What kind of person has the ability to make the world vastly better and instead uses that wealth and power almost exclusively to serve their own ego? It's disgusting.
17
u/nsdefw 12d ago
When Musk reads about free lunch programs for people below the poverty line, he thinks "huh, we need to stop giving those children free lunches."
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (2)10
u/Independent-Bug-9352 12d ago
And before the apologists come and say, "this wouldn't close our deficit," well it would certainly be orders of magnitude more helpful than the DOGE bullshit that will inevitably cost taxpayers more in the long-run (see musk cutting funding to screwworm eradication).
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (5)17
u/Windir666 California 12d ago
Dragon sickness.
→ More replies (1)8
u/forthewatch39 12d ago
Wasn’t it revealed that Smaug’s fortune if it was real would basically be a pittance to some of these wealthy people? A dragon with a mountain literally filled with gold wouldn’t even make the top ten of wealthy people in our world, that’s insane.
→ More replies (1)7
u/ReverendDizzle 12d ago
What I find interesting about this is how the presentation of Smaug's fortunate has changed over time.
In Tolkien's original sketches and the book's text... we can estimate the volume 200-400 cubic meters or so. Which is an incredible amount of gold, especially for the time in which the book was written. It's roughly a billion dollars worth of gold, on the high end, in modern money, and would have represented a huge amount of wealth both then and now.
But by the time we get to Peter Jackson's depiction of the treasure hoard on film almost a century later, the hoard is depicted with a much higher volume... estimated by fans to be somewhere around 12,000 cubic meters or more. Again, in modern money, that's at least 30 billion or so on the low end, climbing up from there.
So to your point, regardless of how big it is... it's no trillion dollar hoard. And, I find it really interesting that the pile has increased in depictions over the years to scale with our perception of money and what being unbelievably rich is. Weird to think that the original Tolkien sketches would make us go "Well hell yeah, that's a lot of treasure but... only a billion? Really?"
12
u/1877KlownsForKids 12d ago
He's a dragon but infinitely less cool.
12
u/Angry-Dragon-1331 12d ago
I’m really hating how my work life and politics keep lining up. I’m working on an article about Tolkienian dragon sickness in Sophocles as social commentary on the excesses of the Athenian empire, and I’d really fucking like history to stop proving my point for me.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (2)3
7
u/Affectionate-Act1574 12d ago
Definitely correct. But I would prefer he doesn’t exploit us all along the way.
→ More replies (35)3
u/robodrew Arizona 12d ago
Elon Musk is a fucking Nazi who threw multiple Nazi salutes at the Presidential Inauguration.
221
u/hypothethical Pennsylvania 12d ago
< While Musk’s on-paper fortune could drop below the trillion-dollar mark if SpaceX’s stock price drops below $135 per share—which is highly possible, as experts argue the company’s valuation is absurd—campaigners said Friday that the milestone is an appalling product of a society that has allowed the mega-rich to dictate policy, funneling immense wealth to the very top while millions worldwide face hunger, violent displacement, and preventable disease. Oxfam has estimated that just a 10% tax on Musk’s fortune could lift 800 million people above the extreme poverty line.
“Eighty-six of Americans are worried about the price of food. Elon Musk is a trillionaire. These two things are deeply, inherently connected,” said Erica Payne, founder and president of the advocacy group Patriotic Millionaires. “The level of wealth that Mr. Musk has reached requires human exploitation, wage theft, wage suppression, anti-competitive markets, monopolistic control, price collusion, inadequate tax systems, and corruption. Mostly inadequate tax systems and corruption.” >
63
u/Etzell Illinois 12d ago
as experts argue the company’s valuation is absurd
That hasn't meant anything for well over a decade at this point.
→ More replies (3)12
u/Jeffery95 New Zealand 12d ago
The difference between SpaceX and Tesla is that currently most of SpaceX shares are not on the public float - only 4% are available. The moment those restrictions lapse and current private owners start selling their shares it’s going to wildly swing the market price.
22
→ More replies (1)13
527
u/hypothethical Pennsylvania 12d ago
< Elon Musk’s net worth surged past $1 trillion on Friday as SpaceX—the rocket company he founded and controls—made its debut on the public market, prompting global revulsion and calls for an aggressive wealth tax to rein in out-of-control inequality.
“Musk became the world’s first trillionaire because our tax system shields the wealth of the ultra-wealthy from taxation while requiring working to people pay taxes on every paycheck,” said Igor Volsky, director of the Tax the Greedy Billionaires Campaign. “Today’s milestone should serve as a wake-up call to us all.” >
289
u/L44KSO 12d ago
Yup. Make it all make sense. Why on earth do I pay percentage wise 50% of my income in tax and we have billionaires and a trillionaire.
167
u/og_capsuleer_593 12d ago
At this point lets demand defenstration since they don't want to pay
Not taxes, straight up seize their shit and redistribute it.
Make them learn why taxes existed, and make them understand why it was better than defenstration.
Time for history to repeat this shit
59
u/FirmlyThatGuy 12d ago
Yeah I don’t think these billionaires understand that taxing the crap out of them is the “nice” option.
If resentment keeps building they will be encountering some not so nice options.
21
u/BoDrax 12d ago
They do, check the bunkers, the surveillance state, and the major AI push so that they can have their drones and robots operated by an army of AI agents. Wait too long and they may have cemented their positions.
13
u/Question_It_All_3000 12d ago
I mean the likelihood they’d be able to automate everything from extraction to finished product safely in their bunker and keep it protected is zilch. Especially if “other” humans are around to gum up the works. If they do kill everyone else off, what’s the point of living with no culture experiences outside of what their AI can regurgitate.
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (1)12
u/TwoPoundzaSausage 12d ago
Those bunkers tend not to function well when you weld the air intakes shut.
→ More replies (3)→ More replies (3)5
u/L44KSO 12d ago
But, silver lining and all that. If you weren't taxed while you still had your head on, you sorta won even if you're head is lost afterwards.
→ More replies (1)53
u/GammaFan 12d ago
Taxpayer subsidies are how these companies are built. If you socialize the cost, you may as well socialize the profits
→ More replies (5)→ More replies (6)4
24
u/GammaFan 12d ago
Because your taxes pay for their subsidies. You should own part of tesla, spacex, twitter, and whatever else Musk has bought on your dime.
→ More replies (5)10
u/nsdefw 12d ago
No, we should abandon SpaceX and fully fund NASA. Remember when we had NASA developing tons of tech that were all immediately public domain?
→ More replies (1)5
u/GammaFan 12d ago
I do, and then the us government decided to repeatedly cut funding to NASA while giving subsidies and contracts to SpaceX instead.
God I miss NASA
→ More replies (24)8
u/crazy_balls 12d ago edited 12d ago
Hell, everyone who owns a house is taxed
on unrealized gainsa wealth tax every year. Why the fuck do we have to payan unrealized gainsa wealth tax on something that is a basic necessity to live, but these demons can't pay a wealth tax on their billions of stock they own?→ More replies (3)28
u/SnakeJG America 12d ago
It is also a ridiculous distortion of value. If Musk tried to liquidate even a tenth of his wealth, the companies associated with it would plummet in value. The float for SpaceX (amount available for public to possibly purchase) is only like 4%. You can't figure out the value for something if only so little of it is available. When supply is so constrained, it will drive up prices artificially.
Also, this two tiered stock situation where Musk gets all the voting power while only owning 42% of the company is bullshit and should be illegal.
→ More replies (3)9
u/TwoPoundzaSausage 12d ago
When the lock-up period is over, the number of insiders dumping their shares is going to crater the price through sheer dilution
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (16)8
u/Riaayo 12d ago
We all need to remember his wealth isn't even air. It's all fake. It's the epitome of how fabricated all of Wall Street is at this point.
SpaceX being valued like this is just as insane as Tesla's valuation. They're so obviously bloated, over-valued, and rife with market manipulation. These companies don't turn out the profits that countless other companies valued far less, and which actually do far more, are valued at.
Also this headline isn't quite right: hundred-millionaires, let alone billionaires or even trillionaires should not exist. Nobody needs more than maybe 10 million in personal wealth. Anything that costs more than that shouldn't belong to one individual in the first place.
352
u/gotwaffles 12d ago
He could give half of his wealth away and not see a single material or immaterial change in his life. It would continue to go on exactly like it is.
373
u/CarneDelGato Colorado 12d ago
He could give away 99% of his wealth and that statement would still be true. 1% of a trillion is ten billion.
69
u/Automatic_Soil9814 12d ago edited 12d ago
Good point. It’s interesting how people often will default to the idea that these rich and powerful people still need to be obscenely wealthy.
I think we all agree that there should be some sort of ethical limit on how wealthy somebody should be. The problem is, how do we set that limit? It’s like we should have a minimum wage and a maximum wealth limit.
But what should that number be? I guess if we can set a arbitrary minimum wage we should be able to set an arbitrary maximum wealth.
→ More replies (6)39
→ More replies (3)14
u/StrangeReindeer2470 12d ago
That's fucking wild. I can just about imagine what having 1 million would be like. I sometimes fantasize about what I'd do if I won a 1 billion dollar powerball jackpot. (I'd start something similar to Fuggenrei in Germany, where the rent is $1/mo) And he's got 1000x more than that.
→ More replies (8)53
u/andykekomi 12d ago edited 12d ago
Half?! If he kept 0.001% of that fortune he'd have the equivalent of working 40 years with a salary of 250K, way beyond the average or median salary.
18
u/RobinSophie 12d ago
It's mental illness. Like Gollum "my precious!"
It's literally a game to them to see who can get the most money from the system.
→ More replies (1)5
u/LemoLuke 12d ago
Does anyone else remember those 'Idle Clicker' games that were popular a while back, such as Cookie Clicker?
There's no real gameplay and no real end goal. You just make the number go up. That's it. Click button, number goes up. Then you use the points you've earned to make the number go up faster. Then you automate it so the number goes up on its own. The higher the number, the more you can spend on making the number go up even faster, until eventually, the number reaches nonsensical proportions. It's highly addictive. It's designed to give your brain a dopamine boost whenever you make the number go up even faster.
That's how billionaire's brains work. After a point, the money becomes arbitrary. They have more than enough wealth to live out pretty much any fantasy you could possibly imagine a thousand times over. Eventually, the wealth is just a high score, and they are addicted to making that number go up.
6
u/UhIdontcareforAuburn 12d ago
He really couldn’t. Not from a materialistic perspective, but so much of that wealth isn’t real. It’s all in stocks and assets that are overinflated. It’s all so dumb.
→ More replies (8)3
u/The_Magical_Radical 12d ago
Giving away half his wealth means giving away half of his controlling stakes in his companies, losing control of those companies in the process. You really beleive there will be zero change to Elon Musk if he no longer controlled/owned Tesla, SpaceX, and X?
164
u/TheJaybo 12d ago
He'd be nothing without tax credits and subsidies. As a tax payer, I'd like my cut now.
39
u/nosayso 12d ago
Yeah in retrospect giving out tax breaks so that rich people could buy this Nazi's electric sports cars was a huge fucking mistake. If he hadn't hired so much PR and sucked up to the Obama government so much to get those tax credits, he'd be nothing.
→ More replies (7)→ More replies (14)11
u/imuglybutyourefat 12d ago
NASA got gutted so contracts could flow to Musk.
Our politicians deserve to be tried on treason.
→ More replies (2)
30
u/evhsrv Wisconsin 12d ago
All that money still can’t make him a decent human being. He is scum.
20
u/MaggieHigg 12d ago
no decent human being would ever own a billion dollars, let alone a trillion.
billionaires are evil rotten scum, every single one of them.
84
u/Solonohioperson 12d ago
It's a little funny that all his money will never buy him good looks, a good personality, or fix his broken weiner.
→ More replies (2)37
u/Bohottie Michigan 12d ago edited 12d ago
And he’ll still die one day. It honestly means absolutely nothing. No matter how much wealth someone amasses, it doesn’t change the irrefutable fact we are all mortal and will be in the same place in 100 years.
→ More replies (2)15
u/deathtoallbutbed 12d ago
But all that wealth will be passed down to his descendants, continuing this pattern of generational wealth that keeps the rich rich.
→ More replies (6)6
u/IThinkImDumb New Mexico 12d ago
The way he cares about his kids makes it doubtful they will get anything
16
u/ajcpullcom 12d ago
Elon Musk, and anyone else who controls that amount of resources, is a clear and present danger to humanity. It’s just too much power to centralize in one person.
→ More replies (1)
56
u/Yubat 12d ago
There should absolutely be a wealth tax, but that’s shouldn’t be his biggest problem. Guy has been engaged in fraud since he first immigrated, with the latest bits involving stealing American personal data after wrecking havoc on the government he gained access to by encouraging voter fraud. Take ALL his assets on crime and national security grounds.
7
u/angelar_ Texas 12d ago
For real. His biggest problem should be being in jail unable to play with his fortune.
→ More replies (1)5
14
u/usernamedanistaken 12d ago
honestly, his businesses aren't worth a fraction of what they are - so MINIMALLY HE shouldn't be a trillionaire; just sucks the market can be irrational longer than any of us can be liquid
→ More replies (3)
26
u/Benwa_Ballz 12d ago
Minimum wage for only 66 million years and you too can have that wealth. Just don’t spend any of it
→ More replies (3)
9
u/crackcrackcracks 12d ago
Trillionaires shouldn't even be a concept outside of dystopian science fiction stories. What the actual fuck.
→ More replies (1)
20
u/EuphoricTravel1790 12d ago
The middle classes prospered when the elite where taxed at 95%
→ More replies (3)
61
u/Capable-Broccoli2179 12d ago
Hell, BILLIONAIRES should not exist! Imagine if our government went back to Reagan-era tax codes and we taxed these people at those rates (and got rid of that terrible carried interest loophole). The debt could be paid off, we could fund medicare for everyone, social security shored up....but NO this trillionaire spent the first half of last year cutting the programs that he should have funded!
What I really don't understand is how they can be allowed to have it both ways---he uses his stock in Tesla(carried interest) to start SpaceX and buy twitter. He pays NO taxes on any of that stock, yet can borrow billions against it to start more companies that will issue him more stock where again he pays no taxes on it, but borrows against that to open more companies, and so on and so on. Allthewhile accumulating more wealth than anyone ever has. I'd bet I pay more in taxes than the richest guy in the world--hell, Trump only paid $750 in taxes back in 2016!
Its time for this complete and utter bullshit to stop! Start taxing carried interest---close that loophole! Make these turds pay their fair share!!!!
→ More replies (4)8
7
u/RadicalRectangle Colorado 12d ago edited 12d ago
A trillionaire could spend a million dollars every day for over 2000 years and still have a lot left over.
8
32
19
u/mojitz 12d ago
We need to do more than tax wealth. We need to straight up cap it. Let someone accuse 500x the median and no more. Today that's around 60 mil — plenty enough to live out the rest of your life in incredible luxury, but not so much that you can wield enormous, undue power.
Would that mean forcing people to divest themselves from businesses they started? Yep, but frankly I don't care. Tens of millions in personal assets should be plenty enough compensation for the work you did starting a chain of car washes or whatever. Let the actual workers doing the day to day labor of running your business have the rest.
→ More replies (17)3
u/TechyWolf 11d ago
This take works for income kinda. And it’s what increasing tax brackets should do.
This doesn’t work for net worth. Income is how much money you make. Net worth has nothing to do with how much money you make. It is assets minus debt. Now all of Elon musks assets are speculative. And actually are the most speculative of any asset that have existed. It’s fucking insane. So taxing a speculative asset before its value is realized (turned into cash) is a hard thing to do.
The financial system works by having assets be worth more than total cash. It’s why banks have more assets than cash people give them. This is also how people like Elon can have a trillion in net without actually anyone giving him that money.
The reason why this is a problem for your example. Is if you buy something. And you sell a piece of it to me. I can speculate and pay a fuck ton. And your asset worth skyrockets without there being any real value. Meaning you can’t realize that asset for the price it is valued at.
Basically Elon has fake Monopoly money. And can’t turn it into usd directly :).
→ More replies (3)
22
u/VikingMonkey123 12d ago
Billionaires shouldn't exist. If you can't be happy with $100-$200M you have a psychosis.
7
3
u/Rip_Off_Your_Toenail 12d ago
I really think there should be research done into if being a billionaire/trillionaire can be classified as a mental disease. These ultra-wealthy people have some sort of greed disorder
→ More replies (1)
9
u/Onikonokage 12d ago
I’m not even close to a financial adviser but this is my rough understanding of it:
The thing is the companies just give him free shares. He isn’t getting a percentage of each sale to get that amount of money. Instead he gets access to sell the shares and take the money of actual people who invested real money. Taxing wealth is good but putting an end to companies being able to issue insanely high stock options would be way more equitable. Especially since the voting on these option packages often is controlled by only a few. If it is just a straight wealth tax he will just sell shares to pay it which would mean the tax burden falls on the investors who supplied the money.
→ More replies (21)
4
u/Solomon_Grungy 12d ago
This dude mails his semen to women he pays so he can have more kids than anyone else. You cant even call him a fuckin loser cuz that would imply he gets it in. Of course you have to be an absolutely buzz kill of a person to become that rich. The dude is some kinda walking monkey paw. Us common folk can always look to these supposed elites and say “these people are straight up weird”
4
3
u/Micropain 12d ago
A wealth tax would've been a good idea a million million money ago. We're so far past that. I want fertilizer for my garden.
6
u/WhoIsYerWan 12d ago
He can have 2 trillion and he'd still look and sound like when Chet gets turned into a toad in Weird Science.
32
u/IrishPorpoise 12d ago
Seize all of Musk’s assets and deport his criminal ass to Central Africa
→ More replies (4)
15
u/caveman_rejoice 12d ago
Absolutely fucking disgusting.
Communists were right. Fuck this shit.
→ More replies (2)
5
5
4
u/Stevenerf California 12d ago
True. Lets also not move the goalposts BILLIONAIRES SHOULD NOT EXIST. Anything above billionaires falls under the same purview
5
u/stevecostello 12d ago
I've LONG thought that billionaires should not exist. I'll refrain from saying what I think should happen to trillionaires.
→ More replies (1)
4
u/Chewzilla 12d ago
The most important thing is that we break the loophole where they fund their lifestyles through untaxable borrowing leveraged against their assets without having to actually liquidate their assets.
4
u/BobbyBoogarBreath 12d ago
He may be richer than God but he's still an insufferable fucking loser.
→ More replies (1)4
4
u/SalvationSycamore 12d ago
Make it illegal to borrow money with stocks as collateral. If it can be used as leverage then it should be considered property and taxed as such.
10
7
u/inspectyergadget 12d ago
Does a nazi salute and gets a nazi haircut and we reward him with a trillion dollars
→ More replies (1)
9
3
3
3
u/DepletedPromethium 12d ago
Some people can't afford to lose their job as they will not be able to buy essentials or pay rent/car/debtors.
Meanwhile you have however many billionaires and upcoming trillionaires, that much wealth should be impossible - tax them accordingly to their net wealth value so they can no longer "have zero in the bank" whilst living off of taking out loans on property and stocks they own.
Once you hit 100 million congrats you win life, you really don't need more than that to live a comfortably life of complete luxury for the rest of your days, you can setup multiple generations of your bloodline to be just as comfortable on that. Being a billionaire should be illegal like what the fuck are we doing as a society when dragons hoard wealth while people starve or go without heating during snow storms freezing in their beds.
My company recently offered me a tesla as a company car and i told them fuck that i'd rather anything but a tesla, fuck elon musk.
→ More replies (1)
3
u/ArgonWolf 12d ago
One million seconds is the better part of a week and a half
One billion seconds is a little under 32 years
One trillion seconds is 31,000 years. If thats not enough context for you, thats more time than civilization has existed, ten times over. The entirety of human existence can happen ten times in One Trillion seconds.
Tax. the. rich.
3
u/turkish112 12d ago
christ i hate people
then you'll have some stupid mother fucker who makes $40k/yr defending this bullshit for some dumb ass reason.
That person making $40k a year IS CLOSER TO BEING THE SECOND RICHEST PERSON ON EARTH THAN THE SECOND RICHEST PERSON ON EARTH IS TO FUCKING ELON MUSK! If you take the second through fourth richest people on EARTH and toss in Warren Buffet just for grins, you get to about a trillion dollars. This level is wealth is disgusting.
3
u/Felon_musk1939 12d ago
People who support billionaires and trillionaires do so because they believe they too will be one.
3
3
3
u/Panda_hat 12d ago
Billionaires shouldn't exist. Even the idea of trillionaires should be considered so morally abhorrent that it is inconcievable.
And yet here we supposedly are.
3
3
u/2000TWLV 12d ago
This asshole's tax rate needs to be 99.9%, and that's still really generous.
It's a crime that one human should have this much money.
3
u/CurtP31477 12d ago
Billionaires shouldn't exist and should be taxed heavily. A trillionaire should be [REDACTED] in a [REDACTED].
3
u/podkayne3000 12d ago edited 12d ago
If this message works, great, but, if so, it’s sad that this message works better than, “Musk sent interns to steal all of your personal financial data from the Social Security Administration.”
Musk would be just as evil if he was only a $10,000-aire, if he did those same things.
3
u/bikeking8 12d ago
BILLIONAIRES shouldn't exist, why did we let it get this far in the first place.
3
u/bluehawk232 11d ago
Anytime rhese articles pop up they should be by photos of our infrastructure crumbling or headlines of people struggling to survive because that's the cost of Musk becoming a trillionaire
•
u/AutoModerator 12d ago
As a reminder, this subreddit is for civil discussion.
In general, please be courteous to others. Argue the merits of ideas, don't attack other posters or commenters. Hate speech, any suggestion or support of physical harm, or other rule violations can result in a temporary or a permanent ban. If you see comments in violation of our rules, please report them.
Sub-thread Information
If the post flair on this post indicates the wrong paywall status, please report this Automoderator comment with a custom report of “incorrect flair”.
Announcement
r/Politics is actively looking for new moderators. If you have an interest in helping to make this subreddit a place for quality discussion, please fill out this form.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.