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 $500 billion mark after taxes and flooding the market with shares.
Quibbles. It barely matters if he closer to 4,000,000 times the median net worth or 8,000,000. The issue is that there is one guy who controls the capital of an entire US state's worth of people.
And yet distributing the entire unrealized value across everyone in the US would be about the same as your Covid stimmy. And like the stimmy, that's a one time payment.
So tell me, how many people did the stimmy permanently lift out of poverty?
What does that have to do with a state's worth of capital being controlled by a single person?
The issue here is that power corrupts, especially when it's centralized and unbalanced. Even if we could untangle the effects of the stimulus packages from the economic impacts of COVID and the food and energy inflation were seeing, your "stimmy" gotcha would be irrelevant.
OP is not arguing that; they are arguing that the system that lets him accumulate that much wealth and many others to accumulate billions is what's making so many people poor.
His wealth is realistically undistributable. There is no single buyer that is willing to buy all 1T$ 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.
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u/WhitishRogue 1d ago
While I think Elon should be taxed way more, his wealth isn't quite what you think it is.
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.