I am firmly convinced that most of the problems facing humanity can be traced directly back to billionaires like him.
It’s quite simple: you can only become that rich if you are an utterly inhuman, unscrupulous monster. Unfortunately, it is precisely these monsters who rule the world, and they have created systems that require you to be a monster in order to succeed.
A healthy society does not have billionares, indeed.
I don’t care at all about how they acquired their wealth.
Its just not in anyone’s best interest to have so much wealth horded and controlled by one person.
He’s using that money to influence social norms and political outcomes. It means he’s pretty much the unelected supreme leader of the terran empire.
I am firmly convinced that most of the problems facing humanity can be traced directly back to billionaires like him
No doubt about it.
It’s quite simple: you can only become that rich if you are an utterly inhuman, unscrupulous monster
Unfortunately, it is precisely these monsters who rule the world, and they have created systems that require you to be a monster in order to succeed.
As for a solution…
For him, giving someone enough money to become a multi millionaire on the spot takes as much money relatively as handing some change to a beggar does for me. He could hand out $100,000,000 every single day (!!!) and even if he doesn’t gain wealth in any other way, it’d take him almost 22 years to run out of money. Or he could pay 400,000 people $100,000 a year to just go around and tell everyone how great he and everything he does is and the money would last 20 years.
Wealth like that is a serious threat to society, probably even the most serious threat.
Having power and wealth destroys empathy for less powerful people on a physiological level. That allows them to exploit people harder to get more wealth and power.
Taxing they wealth away doesn’t work. Maybe just put people in jail for every year they have x amount of dollar. You can be free or wealthy, not both.
Just an FYI, that goes all the way down the power chain. We tend to have less (instinctive) empathy for people below us. It’s not we actively want to do them harm, but that we just don’t think about them at all.
E.g. when did you last take proactive action to help the exploited workers harvesting chocolate? You likely never even thought about them.
The problem is that people like musk look down on us the same way. We get smashed by their indifference.
The best long term solution is a tax system aimed at “regression to the mean”. I.e. exceptional people can get rich. However rich, “average” people will regress back towards average income and savings. Conversely, an averagely capable poor person should easily climb back up to average income levels.
Basically change the graph from a hump to a bathtub shape.
Your system has a flaw from my perspective. It ignores the effect of wealth on capability, especially in youth. People who are already less “exceptional” - say, mentally challenged - would stay poor through factors outside of their control. On the other side, people who are “exceptional” are most commonly so because of the benefits wealth brings, so the way i understand your system, it will cement the status quo - the rich stay rich because of virtue of being rich, the poor and uneducated stay poor because they are poor and unremarkable.
It’s not perfect, but no system is. The goal is to keep a level of equibility, while also allowing the good to benefit from their own efforts.
If the rich invest in their children, and make them exceptional, that’s fine. Trying to get parents not to do that goes against extremely strong instincts. The goal is to make climbing the wall harder, not impossible. If the child buckles down and takes advantage that’s fine. If they slack off and coast, they will coast back towards the mean income level. They won’t get the run away effect that happens currently.
A lot more can be done at the bottom. Giving poorer children the education and support facilities needed to reach their potential would make a huge difference, for a relatively small investment from society.
It’s also worth noting that I’m also an advocate for UBI. There should be a floor on how poor people can be. As a society, we can afford to support that.
That’s what I keep saying about Taylor Swift, but people just tell me that I’m a crotchety old man.
I work with a Swift fan. They’ll cut you if you talk smack, lol. I don’t get her appeal but the observation of her fans is real.
This is an oversimplification.
He ALSO stopped us from having good public transportation, built a dangerous deathtrap maze of underground tunnels, built cars that straight up murdered people, and blew up billions in taxpayer dollars multiple times.
He also funded a cannibal pedophile ring
Wood chipper?
I hardly know her!
He can die tho.
It’s important to note that even with all that money he still is far less happy than the average American. Imagine having so much wealth, not knowing what to do with it, having spent it on a botched penis enlargement and now no amount of money can fix even that.
Not to mention that by now the list of failures and broken promises is getting very long: hyperloops to prevent investment into rail, colonies on mars to avoid deal with all the shit he’s help wrong on earth, full self driving if you don’t mention that full doesn’t mean full and the cemeteries full of people who have died believing it did mean that, and how could I forget
Lying about Epstein and rigging the presidential election so a childfucker can destroy the country you weren’t even born in and barely pay any taxes for.
There was a 2010 study showing that money was correlated with happiness up to about $75k, then plateaued. The expectation was that once you could afford your needs and didn’t have to worry about the basics, the rest of happiness would come from the life you built.
Then a few years ago, all the headlines were screaming that it was debunked and money did in fact buy happiness. However, in true news media form, they screeched about the wrong thing - there was still a plateau, but it occurred past 100k. This isn’t really surprising - the cost of living certainly rose in the 13 years between the two studies. Inflation went nuts in the COVID era, and we definitely never deflated back.
But it does suggest how truly miserable some billionaires must be inside when they can’t find happiness with 10,000x more money than the average person’s threshold to find their joy.
It makes it a little better. I appreciate the analysis. It’s always good to get in something like “This too, shall pass.”
Maybe he could try ending world hunger. Maybe that would make him happy. It would make other people happy at least
I hate people writing about his “worth”. He’s worth shit. He robbed 800 billion from us.
Literally yeah exactly how it works. He skims the value created by labour and free gifts of nature and magazines pretend like it’s a good thing.
It’s like imagine if this world is an all you can eat buffet, riches and bounty overflowing — enough for all. Then this asshole shows up and claims a whole row.
Not how it should work.
deleted by creator
His value is inflated speculation bs. I think investors are overleveraged on Elon’s meme stocks and are keeping those stocks inflated.
Ha, I was a Trillionaire last week. It’s over-rated. I went back.
investors are overleveraged on Elon’s meme stocks and are keeping those stocks inflated
True. However, since the overleveraged investors include almost all of the people effectively CONTROLLING the whole already inherently corrupt system that is the stock market, it has tons of EXTRA insurance against the bubble bursting.
Whether that’s enough to protect his meme stocks from any semblance of objective valuation forever remains to be seen, but for now, it’s holding steady 😮💨
Is there no way for us all to just decide something else is wealth overnight rendering his billions obsolete?
Crypto tried
oh no wait he has that too lol
Yeah Dogecoin, he only wanted one small enough to manipulate all day.
Yeah as soon as there was a glimmer of that tech being useful to turn a profit, all the rich funds just peeled off a few million from their “fun money” or risky investment accounts and took the whole space over.
It was doomed as a viable currency from the start.
Not overnight. And in the time it takes society to change to a new store of value, he’ll pay shills to say it’s bad while he stocks up on it himself.
That would be amazing, but unfortunately we handed over our freedoms to the government that will still want taxes in the ‘official’ currency regardless of the will of the people. The government also really really wants to be able to print as much money as they want to in order to control the economy (for the better or for the worse, depends on who you ask). Also, an even more pressing problem is that we handed over the means of production to corporations, so we wouldn’t be able to survive by just trading with other people… (some would be able to, but we wouldn’t be able to produce enough food for everyone, moreover think healthcare, basically a lot of people would die in result). The only way for your idea to happen in reality is to dismantle the system, effectively reducing the trust in official currency to nil, and that has happened a lot of times in the history of the world, so we just need to damage the system first and the currency shift will happen naturally.
worlds biggest cancer cell continues growing
Literally discovered an infinite money glitch that admins refuse to patch, despite severe balance issues
Wealth hoarding is a psychological illness and shouldn’t be allowed in society
i just wish we had some kind of functional safety net for retirement such that individuals weren’t forced to hoard wealth out of fear like they are now.
Hoarding wealth with good reason is fine but someone like Musk isn’t doing it out of fear. He has more money than he can possibly use and could give away like 90% and still be safe. What even motivates him? It’s pure selfishness
He could give away 99% and have more than 99% of the population
It’s a mix of sciopathy and narcissism–sadly two traits most common among leaders.
Excessive wealth is 100% an unstudied mental health issue
Value is subjective. I know a lot of folk who think he’s worthless.
We’ll only really know if we auction him.
He won’t be the last Trillionaire, and then then they’ll start heading for Quadrillionaire status.
At some point, they will form alliances, fund a private military, take over a landmass, and establish their own nation, and start causing some real trouble.
God wanted him to be kingThe invisible hand selected the king
In reality when that happens, the other monkeys beat the hoarding monkey to death and redistribute the hoarded food. (by redistrubute i mean have a feas and no more hoarding asshole)
If only we could really get back to our roots and be more natural
Correction: capitalism is better than socialism because our taxes pay for one person to have a trillion dollars instead of everyone having health care.
“Man”
The house of Saud is worth $1.4 trillion. 🤷♂️
Atleast it’s not one guy
We’re destroying the wrong country in the Middle East.
After 9/11 I was shocked that everyone else didn’t reach this obvious conclusion.
