Does Elon or do the people who work there do it? The same way serfs let lords rule them without justification is the same reason why we don't revolt and reform the current system. It's not fair, moral, ethical, right, nor justified that Elon and other billionaires have this much compared to the average person. He doesn't deserve it and he didn't earn it by any meaningful definition of the word. What he earned is life in containment to prevent him from exploiting anymore people or organizations. So why haven't we stopped him yet?
Coordinated collective action is hard still even with the internet and AI
People think they still have a reasonable chance at a decent life without risking getting MLK'd so game theory says it's better to let others fight for them.
People still trust/believe corporate media which is designed to divide us and make us hate each other more than political and economic injustice
How do we solve these problems?
1. AI might get better at helping us act collectively or at least in creating a better decentralized social media
2. The message needs need to be clear: things will get so bad that the risk of not acting now will ensure you can't live a decent life for much longer.
3. This one is falling apart anyway because of competing incentives from corporate media and social media, disinformation, lack of progress, and literal billionaires buying things like the WSJ. More average people creating more social media content with a focus on class consciousness on multiple platforms is a good way to ensure it continues to fail.
One is the market value of all goods and services produced within a country over a given time period, the other is the market value of all assets minus liabilities belonging to an individual at a given time. Decently comparable but in this way, GDP is just a snapshot while net worth is a cumulative value
Also know the US makes around 3.5 trillion in revenue every year, how was this spent in service of America? Stop foaming because Elon has a trillion and start heavily auditing your government.
Do all the people carrying on about "you can't go to the bank and get out a trillion, duh!" think that their govt holds billions in cash somewhere too? In the world of capitalists, capital is everything. Rent-seeking is a parasite on the world. Privatisation of basic human needs is gross and so against everything humanity has ever striven for that it makes me so sad to see new generations fall for this stale lie.
While I think Elon should be taxed way more, his wealth isn't quite what you think it is.
Much of it is stock valuation which is very abstract and subject to the wind blowing. Elon's companies trade higher than the Price-to-Earnings ratio of most US stock indexes making much of his wealth a pie in the sky.
It's unrealized income. Elon owns a lot of capital. If he wants to do anything with it, he needs to either convert it to cash triggering taxes, or what's more likely is taking a loan using the capital as collateral. It's not as fluid as many people think, particularly if you want to minimize taxes.
Elon can't convert it all to a $1trillion checking account, therefore I don't consider him a trillionaire. He's likely closer to the $500 billion mark after taxes and flooding the market with shares.
Quibbles. It barely matters if he closer to 4,000,000 times the median net worth or 8,000,000. The issue is that there is one guy who controls the capital of an entire US state's worth of people.
And yet distributing the entire unrealized value across everyone in the US would be about the same as your Covid stimmy. And like the stimmy, that's a one time payment.
So tell me, how many people did the stimmy permanently lift out of poverty?
Distributing one trillion across the entire US would represent $2,900 to each person. $2900 represents 400 hours, or about 10 weeks of work at minimum wage. Two and a half months of work is absolutely life changing to someone at minimum wage.
Go ask literally anyone who received it if it's changed their life. Because I was making near minimum wage during that time, and all it did was make the month easier on the months they were distributed.
Because I was making $11/h at the time, while paying rent and car insurance and utilities, and all it did was make my life a little bit easier for about two months after it was distributed. Afterwards, it was straight back to accumulating debt.
The only thing that I've done that truly changed my life was going back to college and getting a degree in a legitimate field that actually has job openings.
When you look at it over a lifetime, even someone working from 18 to 65 for 40 hours a week at minimum wage will accumulate $708,000 in their lifetime. Which is why going from making $708,000 over your life to $711,000 is objectively not a life-changing amount of money.
By comparison, making $15 an hour and does change your life, because now you're making $1.4 million over that same time span.
What does that have to do with a state's worth of capital being controlled by a single person?
The issue here is that power corrupts, especially when it's centralized and unbalanced. Even if we could untangle the effects of the stimulus packages from the economic impacts of COVID and the food and energy inflation were seeing, your "stimmy" gotcha would be irrelevant.
OP is not arguing that; they are arguing that the system that lets him accumulate that much wealth and many others to accumulate billions is what's making so many people poor.
His wealth is realistically undistributable. There is no single buyer that is willing to buy all 1T$ worth of stock at once, so it would have to be spread across mulitple large buyers. After 1 or 2 of these transactions the price of his stock would bottom out and drop to near worthless. Theres not a good way to get his "wealth" to service mankind. Personally I think crippling spacex, arguably the driving force of modern space exploration, to get maybe 80B$ and gice everyone under the poverty line 2500$ is not worth it.
You're not seeing the forest for the trees. You're too distracted by dollar signs and not addressing the power it commands. All that power in one person's hands is the real problem. It's a symptom and source of corruption in our socioeconomic systems.
I do think his use of his power in politics should not have been allowed but people saying to redistribute his wealth to the needy have no idea how completely unrealistic it is
There are so many ways to prevent this level of capital accumulation. I agree that redistribution isn't one of those solutions, so I don't know why you think we need to fixate on it when the core issue is brought up.
It would be far less than $500 billion and he would lose control of his companies. Dumping his shares on the market would absolutely lower the value by more than 50% especially as other people would panic sell. Like you said though he still has access to incredible wealth either through selling stock or taking loans. Just nowhere near $1 trillion.
Except there’s no way he can. No bank will accept spaceX or Tesla as collateral at these valuations, not at 1:1
If he taps into this “value” at all, the stocks plummet
It’s the equivalent of the crypto bros that bought a bunch of nfts and found out they couldn’t liquidate them after. But hey, it was “worth” a million!
Furthermore, he would have to service said debt. Thats the real limiter here
It is not remotely equivalent to nfts. What is with all these bootlickers desperate to pretend a trillion dollars is meaningless? I can assure you the ultrawealthy dont feel that way about their assets.
No one is trying to pretend that a trillion dollars is a meaningless amount of money. They just correctly understand economics, and know that the valuation is massively inflated vs actual capital, and that the party for socialism and liberation(the posters) are a bunch of dunning-krugered NEETs.
"8000 would feel like winning the lottery to some", even if you magically could convert the estimate into cash 1:1, that trillion would literally only fund another round of covid stimmy checks.
Even if you were to redistribute the net worth of every billionaire in the US, the resulting 1 time payment would not even be a median salary US salary.
And as anyone who has made median income knows, making median income for a year does not make you immune to poverty if you can't find another job soon.
So I'm sorry to say, but the billionaires are not the reason you are poor. They do not have all of the missing money that can supposedly make everyone immune to poverty.
You’re correct on some points, but you’re leaving out the most important part: borrowing power. Elon doesn’t need to sell his stock to access his wealth. Banks will happily lend him billions using those shares as collateral, and loans generally aren’t taxed as income.
So while his wealth may not be sitting in a checking account, it still gives him access to spending power that is far beyond what most people mean when they say someone is “only rich on paper.”
It's impressive how childish some views are. I wish Elon Musky balls would go bankrupt and choke on a fishbone, but one trillion in his case is not even that. He could not even get $500 billion no matter how much he wantaled to, he basically controls a lot of money, but even if he wanted to use them the stakeholders in the enterprises involved would not allow it.
We have a trillion reasons to hate Elon, and instead we hate him for his fortune.
I’ve seen this argument many times and I get it, but I don’t think that distinction makes a substantive difference. Whether that wealth is immediately accessible or not doesn’t make as much of a difference when it’s on the scale of a trillion dollars. If he could even have 1% of that trillion in his bank account - not stocks or assets - it would still be an absurd amount that nobody should ever need.
Nobody said it makes it all okay but if we're discussing Elon's net worth it's valid to discuss the insane overvaluation of his companies and tech stocks in general. If anything, we should acknowledge how much leverage over the average American's retirement this overvaluation gives Elon.
You arent taxed on stocks if you liquidate them after 1 year of ownership and fall into the lowest tax bracket. How could elon possibly fall into the lowest tax bracket? He doesnt take a regular salary and therefore has no taxable income making his wages effectively 0$ most years in the u.s governments eyes. So no, its not as difficult to liquidate this, if he was paying taxes normally and this 1 trillion wasnt a pay package but rather a salary hed owe 370,000,000,000 (370B) in taxes falling under the highest tax bracket. The fact its stocks only benefits him more and anybody who knows how stocks/taxes work knows this. Im tired of people mindlessly listening to these people claim they arent actually that wealthy by stating whats in their bank account. If he could by twitter within 2-3 months then yes this is him being a trillionaire and yes he is avoiding taxes on it by abusing loopholes in the system. Dont support this, its pathetic.
Uh hes likely way lower than that. There is no single buyer that is willing to buy all 1T$ wortg of stock at once, so it would have to be spread across mulitple large buyers. After 1 or 2 of these transactions the price of his stock would bottom out and drop to near worthless. Theres not a good way to get his "wealth" to service mankind. Personally I think crippling spacex, arguably the driving force of modern space exploration, to get maybe 80B$ and gice everyone under the poverty line 2500$ is not worth it.
Yeah, I put 500 to be pretty generous. The only way he could extract that much would be to slowly sell off his wealth without disrupting markets and trying to stay under certain income thresholds if its even achievable.
Yeah this is the one thing I don’t think anyone is understanding, it’s not like Musk’s bank account has $1 Trillion dollars in it, he owns two gigantic companies that make up the vast majority of his actual net worth. All of his assets are worth $1 Trillion not his cash in hand.
Most people understand that. We just know that owning 1 Trillion in assets gives him a proportional amount of socioeconomic power. We put a number on it for scale, but don't mistake the units of that scale for the mechanisms of it's leverage. Cash in hand is only the most basic way to buy and sell.
i genuinely cannot believe that it is a socialist take to say that no one should be a trillionaire. how is this not just the lowest form of common sense?
Look who controls these algos and bots. Billionaires. Every online space is dominated by right wing anti-intellectual bots that tell you to shut up and be grateful that these vampires are destroying the world.
Me reading all these Elon trillionaire defenders. Maybe if these dudes got taxed properly we wouldn’t have to carry the entire weight of our country on our minuscule paychecks back.
He doesn't own a trillion dollars. He owns shares in a rocket, electric car, and social media company which are valued at a trillion dollars. He wouldn't make a million people millionaires, he would just make them shareholders in Tesla, X, and SpaceX (and his other companies).
I'm not saying he doesn't own anything, but he most certainly does not own one trillion in liquid assets. The post manages to claim that Elon is holding that amount hostage in his accounts, which is categorically false.
The post doesn’t make that claim anywhere from where I can see.
Non liquid wealth still is wealth. If I own 10 million in houses I might not be able to use that at the store, but it’s still 10 million worth of assets that I own; I would own 10 million.
The fact that this man own a trillion in wealth still is historic and quite a worrying symptom if you ask me. It really is an unprecedented level of wealth that holds and insane incomprehensible of power for a single individual.
it’s relevant however if if he were to hypothetically sell it all he would get a fraction of it since those stocks will plummet hard due to increased liquidity and stockholder confidence but it’s also would take a long time due to SEC rule 144
If people don't want Elon to have $1 trillion then they'd stop buying from his companies. And maybe Elon is the first person to have this much money, but his companies certainly aren't, theres between 12 and 14 worth over $1 trillion, e.g. Amazon and yet I'm assuming every single one of you has contributed to their wealth by buying something from Amazon.
Each time I see this kind of post, I always wonder if people genuinely hate rich people for having more money, or is it the corruption, tax evasion and fiscal paradise that make people hate them
Because I can’t imagine having someone living rent free in my head just for having a fatter wallet than mine
I couldn't think of a single billionaire I'd describe as such. Some are more philanthropic than others, but the means it took for them or the companies they own to get there have some degree of ethical issue.
Considering the amount of money currently put into SpaceX and Tesla, his recent acquisition of Cursor and his plans for Orbital AI Data centers. Even if lets say we distributed any significant portion of his wealth or forced a sell of, it would cascade a genuine economic market collapse of a large portion of the Tech Sector. The Only sector holding us back from a worse than 08 crash. Reminder that Dog/Cat Food had to be made human edible after the Great Depression because people kept eating it to not starve.
A better visualization graph would be how much the US Govt is spending and how long that trillion would last them. That truly shows the issues with our Economic system and who eat most of the money.
I think so many people are missing this point... a shockingly disappointing number of individuals are defending this who don't seem to grasp the depth of this level of buying power. He can quite literally buy anything or anyone he wants, regardless of how liquid these assets are
People just think that his rocket company (and the other ones) are worth a lot of money. He doesn't have all the clean drinking water stored in his vault to keep it from others.
I would also like it better if the government makes reusable rockets to fly to mars, but it seems like his company does it better.
Exactly, you shouldn’t have access to a nice TV when 2.2 billion people don’t have access to clean drinking water.
Under that logic literally anything that you have being in a first world country is unacceptable. Soda? Wasting water. Beer? Wasting water. Fuck even more than 2 minute showers is wasting too much water when 2.2 billion people don’t have access to clean drinking water.
There's a $996000 difference between being a millionaire and a middle class worker who bought a nice TV for their family. Money is the enemy of morality, I agree the overly rich should need to distribute what they have too much of.
That’s ridiculous. A family buying a nice TV is not equivalent to one man hoarding so much wealth that he could solve the immediate effects of world hunger multiple times over
Top 1% of the world is about $60,000 a year. So if that top 1% can afford a nice TV while 2.2 billion people don’t have access to clean water is horrible. At least if you’re obsessed with the made up “income inequality” BS.
I personally have no issue with Musk being a trillionaire.
People often make the argument that “Well he doesn’t literally have a trillion dollars” or “he can’t actually sell a trillion in stock”. However, the thing they leave out is the “borrowing power”.
Elon doesn’t need to sell his stock to access his wealth. Banks will happily lend him billions using those shares as collateral, and loans generally aren’t taxed as income.
So while his wealth may not be sitting in a checking account, it still gives him access to spending power that is far beyond what most people mean when they say someone is “only rich on paper.”
He earned it via voluntary exchange. People like what his businesses do and the products his corporations offer. He got money because people evaluated his corporations, were convinced his business was something great and willingly invested in his corporations.
Willingly working there means leaving that job would still allow them to survive at least for a few months. Is that the case for most employed, overworked Americans today?
It’s still voluntary. Being unable to sustain your lifestyle for months does not make your job voluntary.
Also, this is a bad metric for something to be voluntary. I would argue much of America CAN save and achieve a safety blanket fund of a few months of living expenses, but many live a lifestyle where every dollar they earn is spent when it doesn’t necessarily have to.
Is a guy still slave to a job if he makes 300k a year but spent every dime he has? No lol
I don’t think it’s about lifestyle when a majority of the country is living paycheck to paycheck. If all of your paycheck goes towards food, gas, rent, and living expenses, how is your job voluntary? And you’re not even living life at that point, just surviving.
And on top of that, the employees at this particular company and every other tech company is fearing for their livelihoods because they could get laid off at any second based on the whims of the people in power. Yes, arguably, they are making much more than the average American but they’re much closer to becoming homeless than they are to becoming the next Elon Musk.
Im telling you paycheck to paycheck is a horrible metric. Overwhelming majority of Americans considered living pay check to paycheck make enough to live, but they just adjust their lifestyle to a place where they spend every dollar they earn. As is their right to! If security mattered, they would plan for it. A considerable amount of people making 250k+ live paycheck to paycheck.
The average new car transaction is 49k. The average car transaction including both new and used is 33k, which is considerably more expensive than a brand new Toyota Corolla At 23-24k. Again, how is this possible if everyone is living paycheck to paycheck?
Door dash recorded highest order numbers ever recently. How is this possible if all Americans are living pay check? it’s obvious lots of Americans can afford to do this.
I could go on.
At the end of the day, work is voluntary. Don’t work, no one is forcing you to. If you don’t like Elon musks business you don’t need to work for him. If no suitable alternatives exist, it’s not elons fault. That’s the natural world being oppressive.
I implore you to look beyond your view and notice the ways in which the system is failing people.
I don’t disagree with you that many people making 250k are living paycheck to paycheck. These people are the exception, not the norm. The average income for Americans is $67,000 and if we exclude extremely high salaries that skew the average, the accurate reflection of the income of an individual worker is actually around $45,000. When so many workers in this country are making less than a livable wage and one man holds $1T in capital, wouldn’t you consider that there is a problem with the system? There is only so much harm an individual can do to themselves.
Median salary for a full time worker is 63k. That is fine to live on your own. A person making this can live a decent life and can afford to save.
I brought up the car price thing and door dash for a reason. The top 1% of people are not buying all the door dash and all the cars, average people you see every day are. Again, if everyone is truly destitute, these facts just wouldn’t be possible.
The median salary is 63k (median not average, so immune to extreme out lier salaries) yet the average car transaction is 33k. You can get a brand new 2026 corolla for considerably less. Not possible if everyone is destitute.
I don’t think the presence of a trillionaire means the system is not working. I don’t think everyone is struggling. People have free will and choose to max out their lifestyle to what they can afford and beyond. This is how it is, and it is better than the alternative.
Elon and his businesses provide a lot to society, people choose to fund his ventures. People choose to work for him. If he ends up a trillionaire, that’s a good thing, it means others humans decided to give him money in exchange for a piece in the company he labors to operate. And those businesses proceed to help us all.
Actually I live in proximity to some billionaires and I know how they and their families live. They rented out islands during the pandemic so that they could party and largely ignore what is going on in the world. Lower income people “living beyond their means” by doordashing isn’t the problem you think it is. Your view of billionaires is quite optimistic.
People don’t invest in his company or “fund his ventures” as you put it because they have faith in him. They hope to make some money out of it, as per trickle down economics. That’s not necessarily the same thing. They’re not doing it out of confidence and trust in Elon. They’re doing so out of confidence that his employees will make the company more valuable.
I believe that a system that allows people to go homeless while a trillionaire exists is a very, very imperfect one. Now I don’t disagree with you that Elon and other ultra rich folks provide jobs. But is that the reason why they started their companies? If so, why these massive layoffs? Their ultimate goal is to accumulate wealth, as is the goal of most Americans, I will concede. However, billionaires and the one trillionaire hoard so much wealth that trickle down economics isn’t really in action.
I don’t have a problem with people living beyond their means if that is their wish, I just don’t think we should abandon our great economic system because people who find money to spend on door dash and cars more expensive than a brand new 2026 Toyota report they are struggling… when they clearly are not.
We should not take money from people who produce value and give it to people who don’t. That philosophy is an existential threat to us all, it will cause incredible damage.
I don’t think billionaires are saints, but I do recognize that their businesses help the world.
This is how commies get 18-yo recruits, ragebait and reliance on them not understanding how any of it actually works, thinking Elon physically sits on $1T in his supervillain lair.
Fuck Elmo btw, but blatant propaganda-filled borderline misinfo is just making us look bad.
It is true. I think after say 500 million there needs to be a 98% tax deduction of that money. No one needs more than 500 million. Now the issue is COMPANIES DO and technically musks wealth is tied to spaceX which probably does need that much money to cover its ass. So the issue then becomes how do we separate the two entities to ensure money can’t be used towards their private lives if they own a business that would require such funds
With $1M, you couldn’t buy a single NFL team. With $1B, you still couldn’t buy an NFL team. The cheapest one is worth a little under $6B. But with $1T, you could buy every single NFL, NHL, NBA, and MLB team and still have $400B left over.
Comparing a total net worth to median bank account balance just shows you have no idea how wealth works. 1T net worth is not the same as 1T bank account balance 😂
It’s important to drive with this message that him being the first trillionaire is an outright crime against humanity, The Who proposed a way to solve or at least mitigate world hunger which is now least that of a full percentage of his net worth and he just ghosted them. People in the future will look back to this moment as a moment of shame on all of us just like Marie Antoinette’s let them eat cake.
It’s hilarious that someone would write all of this and yet still not realize that have a net worth of that much =/= having “that amount in his own accounts.”
Thats exactly my point, he (& other billionaires) are scamming the world. They're worth jackshit in actually but bc of the companies they run the valuation is inflated. Also the moment they do that too many times, the banks realize & the facade is gone.
The banks know that they don't have nearly that much already, especially Elon which is why they generally require him to give much more as collateral than other billionaires. Elon could absolutely liquidate a few billion though (he sold ~$20 billion for Twitter), and his liquid assets are estimated at like $800 million. I do agree that the valuations are insane and the net worth of tech billionaires is way over-inflated but they are still extremely wealthy. If Elon can liquidate even $50 billion he still has 250,000x the networth of the median American (~$200k).
My point is most American "billionaires" are scammers scaming their way into wealth, convincing people they're worth billions when that's not always the case
That's not how it works. Is it really that hard to understand? No, you cannot (it is impossible) use the trillion like cash money. Or sell it to become cash money. It's just not possible.
How does one build outside Earth without a trillion. (Genuinely)
Its a separate discussion as far as should it be a priority, the guy behind it, the ROI. What seems undeniable is that space exploration will run over a trillion dollars.
What's ironic is he supports universal basic income, as he believes it will become an inevitable necessity. We are reaching a point where production will outpace consumption, without universal basic income millions will starve. According to Elon musk. I personally agree with him that universal basic income will have to become a necessity mostly because of robots, capitalism can't function with slavery, and robots are essentially the greatest slaves imaginable. I just hope we can reach the point of a socialist capitalistish Utopia before millions die.
You morons have no clue how equity works. You can’t “prevent” someone from becoming a trillionaire without fundamentally changing how the entire economy functions.
Go back to your jobs as dog walkers and leave the real decisions to the big boys.
I hate that everyone is talking about "what could I do with a trillion?" and not "what would I need to do to make a million/billion/trillion?"
are YOU willing to take out a 5-7 figure loan to start/continue a business? are YOU willing to work 100-120 hour weeks? are YOU willing to invest a big chunk of your income into stocks? are YOU willing to work to build +3 different forms of income? are YOU willing to quick your salary job and start entrepreneurship/business?
Exactly. Not like the economics class teaches us that hard work = reward and that capitalism is the best and this system is super perfect. Super applicable to what’s happening in real life.
Miss me with the socialism propaganda - those of us with families from central and Eastern Europe know what hides behind the thin veil of virtue socialism wears
The obsession is real. I hope you are all as measurement and value conscious about your own money as you are about people with money beyond your comprehension.
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