The comments here miss the point. Sure you can’t cash out all your stock at once without serious effects.
There is no need to sell any stock though to access insane wealth. I racked up a bill on that site worth 5% of Elon’s value and went pretty wild. Elon could easily tap into that wealth tomorrow with a loan from a bank backed by collateral from his stock without selling a thing. So he maintains control of his companies, doesn’t pay taxes (as he sold nothing), and can literally buy anything he could ever imagine without having any serious effect on his net worth
Presumably the loan period is quite long, and someone has some amount of income, so monthly payments are tiny. You can keep refinancing indefinitely until you die, after which your descendants can do a one-time liquidation (paying no cap gains tax) to pay off the balance.
You never have to pay back the loan yourself. Just make small monthly payments and refinance until death. This is actually a pretty widely-exploited part of our tax system, for very high net worth people.
What prevents you from taking a loan out on your shares, buying more shares, then taking a loan of the same amount out on the shares you just bought, and do it again, and repeat it forever?
Agreed. It doesn't mean buying things, it means exercising disproportionate influence and solidifying a dangerous concentration of power. But the ability to secure countless of dollars in government subsidies - over and over again at every level of government - is pretty hard to illustrate. Let's hope this person's next project does a better job at capturing what being a billionaire means.
What disproportionate influence or dangerous concentration of power does Elon represent other than the power he has to motivate his employees to build rockets and cars?
I guess all I can do is grant you the fact that political science has had a difficult time proving the impact of money on policy in representative democracies.
But I also know it is not an accident that someone as wealthy as Elon Musk paid no federal income taxes in 2018 and pays very little in many years. As wealthy people concentrate more power, they bend the system to their favor - distorting both social systems and the markets.
Exactly. This is how the system works. It is not an accident that someone can accumulate wealth and find ways not evade taxation through measures not available to other people in society. Even if you consider Musk's "effective tax rate," it's a pittance.
Every single metric shows that the wealthy are increasingly effective at concentrating their wealth. This has been the trend in the United States since the mid-20th century. It's undeniable that they are deliberately and effectively doing this. The only question is whether or not this concentration of wealth is good for society or bad for society. Due to the complexity of societies, this is difficult to demonstrate empirically. I grant you this.
If you think that these conditions haven't generally lead to the formation of strong kleptocracies throughout history... well I guess we'll simply disagree.
Of course he couldn't dump all his stock at it's current share price, the sudden arrival of that many shares would drive the price down -- but these things aren't really about facts and more about driving an agenda
There is no need to sell any stock though to access insane wealth. I racked up a bill on that site worth 5% of Elon’s value and went pretty wild. Elon could easily tap into that wealth tomorrow with a loan from a bank backed by collateral from his stock without selling a thing. So he maintains control of his companies, doesn’t pay taxes (as he sold nothing), and can literally buy anything he could ever imagine without having any serious effect on his net worth