Imagine how different the world would be if billionaires competed to solve problems instead of competing to become richer. What a world that would be!
To be honest, I think the billionaires think they are solving problems. I also think that they believe if they had the money they could do more good with it. They are obviously wrong.
I would be ok to rent my RAM to this guy. Of course it would have a price. We are in a democracy and market is free… Right?!
Not when you use Chrome.
I knew there’d be folks in here claiming it’s “fake money.” They can liquidate when they want to, it’s not “fake.”
Not only is it real money when its invested, typically the rich can just borrow against those shares instead of having to liquidate anything to pay for things.
For example when they need $40b to purchase a website or media corp to use so they can have better control of the narrative, they just get a loan because everyone knows they’ll be able to make the payments, instead of selling enough shares to tank the thing that inflates their networth beyond all reason.
They can liquidate part of it. If they liquidate all of it then most will disappear into thin air.
If you’re Elon Musk and own a large part of Tesla and SpaceX and you sell all your shares, both companies crater HARD.
Just remove stock from anyone who owns over 1% of any publicly traded company and nationalize all index funds’ assets (yes, that includes retirement funds). Problem solved.
Or just cap total wealth at ~5 mill, indexed to the median income so there’s no need for legislation like with minimum wage.
They don’t even need to liquidate. They can just take a loan against it like they already do.
💯 ☝️
That’s the thing; the billions don’t sit in a bank account but in the
stockbetting market. They would be heavily taxed otherwise.Just tax unrealised capital gain then. A progressive tax too so small investors wouldn’t really be penalized much.
Correct (when it comes to billionaires; Sam Altman and his ilk intentionally caused the RAM shortage by buying RAM their companies are not using and should be held accountable).
Billionaires would be impossible in a properly civilised society, which would implement progressive taxes so that anyone with a wealth above, say, ten times the median wealth of the population or 25 times the wealth of the poorest person (citizen or not) in the nation (whichever’s lowest at the time) are taxed to the point that their wealth can increase no further, with the resulting income being invested on public services so that personal wealth is irrelevant except for luxury items.
Quit making perfect sense. You’re making the capitalists nervous and ruining the hopes and dreams of all the Questrader’s out there. /s
I think we should extract the water from Sam Altman’s body and use it to cool a datacenter
The blood could also replace the motor oil in my car. Use all parts of the Sam Altman.
Use all parts of the Sam Altman.
The purpose of the Nose-to-Tail approach is to show respect to the animal. Are you trying to show respect to Sam Altman?
Eat the rich.
It’s not underused if they’re running windows with a few tabs open in chrome with sites that have similar ram usage to chatgpt… 😅
Wasted in terms of bloat maybe in some cases, but it is being “used” 😅
That’s not how net worth works. Being a billionaire != having billion $ in a bank account.
They’re still financially obese parasites whose wealth should be taxed until it doesn’t exceed a reasonable amount (say, ten times the median or 25 times the lowest, whichever comes first), though.
the lowest is zero, or very close to it.
OK, so tax anyone with more wealth than that (exponentially proportionally to the difference) and invest in services and UBI and whatnot until it raises.
the lowest will always be zero, do not doubt the capacity of individuals to become statistical outliers and spend all their money. It might be a little bit reasonable if it was set to 100x-10000x the wealth of the 99.99th percentile
Yeah, most of it is all smoke and mirrors but they all own media companies which make it seem more than it actually is.
It doesn’t state that it’s in one person’s bank account.
Why do billionaires despise efficient uses of money?
they like to hoard it, and use other peoples money thats why. thier net worth is actually in thier stocks/investments for the most part.
If their money is in stocks and investments, that means they are investing in companies which employ people. Lol at calling that “hoarding” let alone that its their own money to spend it on solid gold rocket cars if they wanted. A man making a product that a billion people choose to buy for $1 each, is not the reason you are poor.
A man cannot develop and maintain a product that made a billion. He has to employ people. And if he does not exploit them for their surplus labor value, he CANNOT become a millionaire
To become a millionaire, you need to exploit your workers for their surplus labor value ie. be a thief.
No, unless a company releases new stock options that are diluting the value of the current shareholders, the money doesn’t go to the company, it goes to the shareholders that sell the shares. Their money doesn’t create employment, it realises the capital gain of other investors. And companies don’t want to dilute the shares as their sole purpose is to increase shareholder value. And even though they sometimes do, it’s pale in comparison to stock buybacks which are exactly the opposites, removing money that could be used for R&D or for workers and raising the imaginary value of their company by inflating investors shares.
It’s not their money. These people have 5 aces in their hand. They cheat and then instead of golden rocket cars, they buy the media, our politicians, and secret compounds where they brainstorm how to dismantle democracy and start cults.
It’s just that the cheaters that top the leaderboard also know how to play the game, so they overlap legitimate investors and business owners. Musk and friends don’t need to cheat every hand because the deck is already stacked in their favor.
2/10 trolling; nobody is this stupid.
I accept your resignation from the debate.
Dealing with investments and the stock market is like going to a casino. Unless they inherited legacy accounts, they made their money gambling.
Cuban is probably the most obvious example. The man placed a risky bet on shorts and won. Gallway, for all his faults, discusses the luck factor that he stumbled into based on someone else’s gambling failures.
Because they think they know better than us hoi polloi. Seriously. There’s a psych term that escapes me, but once a person gains wealth and power, they think they know better than the rest of us and the rules don’t apply to them.
One of the most horrifying things I know about humans is that almost all of us are susceptible to this and it’s not simply a matter of people kissing their ass, though that certainly “helps”.
Rich people are generally better than poor people. They even have all these copium theories to explain it “poverty causes crime!” Etc rather than both poverty and crime being caused by low IQ. The myth of “the noble poor and the evil rich” comes from Christianity because Christianity is about how a homeless dude was God.
poverty does cause theft. Frater, examine yourself and improve
Imagine having an iq of only 105, bragging about it, and spouting iq-justified nazi shit
Troll account.
Okay you have to be a troll, but just in case you aren’t: If poverty was caused by “low IQ” (which btw IQ is correlated with education so that’s a circular argument even if true) rich people who are dumb wouldn’t exist.
“low IQ”
Read their username. They’re obviously a troll, probably piloted by an LLM.
Nothing in that reply us true or makes sense. First, no, low IQ is caused by a “bad education”. In fact, IQ test results are MORE accurate if taken at an early age before school could have any possible effect. IQ is also a better predictor of life outcomes than education is and even than what your parents’ outcomes are. Lastly, no, the fact that some dumb people manage to get rich wouldnt disprove the claim. Its like saying that height isnt a factor in the NBA because an average height guy is in the NBA. Of you look at rich people on average, they are smarter. Or vice versa, if you look at people with low IQ at age 7, they (as a group) will make less money.
sources?
Their fat ass
the IQ is not a valid test of mental aptitude just like the BMI is not a valid test of physical aptitude
Because they don’t actually have the money. The value of their holdings are used as collateral on loans. They use the loans to pay for their expenses and are just constantly in debt. This avoids all tax consequences for them. And it is fucking stupid.
i learned a new word kiting the other year, it sounds like thats why rich people do.
When oligarchs do kiting, it is called “circular financing”.
From resource allocation point both of those statements sounds truthful
I get what he’s saying, but billionaires don’t have “billions” in “banks”.
Just because it isn’t hundred dollar bills in their mattress doesn’t mean they don’t have it. They can leverage what they own in exchange for goods and services equivalent to the value of their holdings, the exact mechanism doesn’t really matter.
We just watched musky light $500,000,000 on fire last month they clearly got the liquidity.
he also spent an additional 1bn to stop the documentary from being released, now ellison holding the rights.
The crazy part is, thats the equivalent of me buying a combo at Wendy’s.
No, it’s that they invest their money so it makes more money. They leverage the wealth being liquid to make more. It’s the real dividing line between wealth and not.
You can’t really invest $200 in your bank account and expect anything. First of, you need that to spend to live.
The only actual cash billionaire I can think of is the guy that created and sold Minecraft. That dude has billions in the bank. Or at least he did for a minute or two before I’m sure he invested a ton of it. All the other billionaires just own billions worth of stuff for the most part. Banks don’t even leave money in banks. They invest or loan out all of it and keep the returns. That’s the scam, same as it ever was.
It’s not really a scam to move your cash into non liquid assets for financial security. How you got there could be a product of a scam but (going off of a previous comment I made a few days ago about how they buy assets and hold their money in those) typically, after you have a certain amount of money, one can only figure boredom kicks in and that in-turn, would most likely create a sense of frivolous spending or seeing what you can hold in forever items with absurd values.
Paintings, Collectable Cars, Mid-Century Clothing, Collectable Foods (ikr), Historical Properties (that sometimes get sold and then they re-coup losses through making the historical property profitable…sigh, creating a historical society with the goal of recouping losses). …
Whoever downvoted this: For example, if you purchased a… Idfk a Rolex watch and it gained value over 40 year and you kept it pristine condition and never wore it and sold it at auction, is that a scam or just market fluctuations? Is it a scam that someone would pay twice as much at auction for a watch that due to others opinions gains market value or just ridiculous?
It’s no one’s fault or a scam that an item in the future gains value. Is it a scam that a video game system can become more valuable in 20 years or just a product of opionated market value?
It’s not fucked up to have nice things of value. People put payment plans on nice things that they may choose to keep in pristine quality for decades before it gains value and sell it at auction, is the person who did a payment plan for the item and has an item of value that gains value over time more fucked up than the person who can buy the same item outright to do the same?
It’s the fact that people who are stupid rich do it but if I, a person in financial poverty does the same, through a payment plan I’m a fucking idiot for not saving money.
So when does it become okay to buy nice things at a ridiculous value to have financial security in non-liquid assets? When, in your opinion does it become okay to buy a nice piece of jewelry or a nice painting and storing those away properly until they gain more value?
I mean shit people collect baseball cards and wait until they gain value. It’s such a normal thing, to hold value in assets.
People have this contrary view that billionaires actually have all this liquid wealth, yet that same money living in the stock market is fake. And this causes no cognitive dissonance.
It’s not “fake”. They can liquidate. Bezos liquidated 10 billion in stock to push his cock-rocket vanity project over the finish line. They can do it when they want to. The same way they can do it to pay taxes, if we make them. No, it’s not “fake money”.
This is patently untrue.
Billionaires have myriad investments because, unlike us non-wealthy plebs, they have a critical mass of wealth that can easily make greater wealth by flinging it around. They rarely keep all that much in cash because cash is static and stupid to them. It’s the only money that isn’t working for them to make more.
Which is why they look down on us for chasing money needed to live and survive. Because we have to use silly pleb levels of money that we can’t even invest.
Billionaires have myriad investments because,
no they do it for the tax deductibles.
Both. It’s tax free and earns then more tax-free money.
All the incentives are there.
Salaries are for suckers is the phrase.
I disagree. No person needs so much surface to leave, people to care for their need, exceptions to the basic rules of leaving together. They can keep the money but leave in 100m2 max, buy your food, take the f…king bus.
You’re saying you disagree with what billionaires do, and not the factual statement of what they do and how they talk about us being foolish non-billionaires, right?
They are human beings. No human is an enterprise nir need so much. I’m not against who they are, I am against what they think they are.
