[BizarroLand]

I'd like to think if I was a billionaire I would act the way that I think an ideal billionaire would, being shrewd with my money and making myself richer in an upright and respectable manner while also ensuring that the people who work with me get wealthy as well.

[dragontamer]

Proving to others that you can act like an 8th grader while pissing away $44 Billion (actually, closer to $33 Billion, maybe $24 Billion if we ignore the outside $9 Billion investors) on an asinine project and still living the life of private jets, and party yachts is the point.

Flaunting your wealth attracts supporters in this day and age. People *like* rich assholes. Its fashionable, or at least it was in the 2010s. The pendulum of society is finally swinging back and demonizing this outrageous display of wealth but we're still in an age where people literally worship wealth. Not the "figuratively literally", I mean literally literally worship as per the prosperity gospel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology).

Its not just Elon Musk, but also Arkk's Cathie Wood and Bill Hwang.

----------------

The outrageous displays of wealth is proof that you've achieved God's good graces. Its basically Mandate of Heaven (Chinese concept) except the American version of it.

[sbarre]

I read a comment somewhere a while back:

Once you make $999,999,999.99 dollars, congratulations you have won at life!

All future income you make beyond $1B goes to helping society.

You should probably get a say into where the money goes (so it aligns with your values, whatever those may be) but that's it. You are done enriching yourself personally.

I kind of like that (although I'm sure plenty of people hate it).

[LadyCailin]

Norway doesn’t have that, but it does have a wealth tax, which I like. If your net wealth sums to over 2mnok (approx $200k), you pay some percentage of tax on that wealth, every year. There are plenty of exemptions, your primary residence is only worth a quarter of assessed value, and of course this is net wealth, so mortgages and things subtract from this. But it does mean that if you’re just sitting on a horde of gold, you’ll anyways pay taxes, which makes sense to me. Just because you became wealthy enough to stop earning any income doesn’t mean you aren’t responsible for your share of keeping society running.

[Applejinx]

I've done some math on this. It's INSANE how tiny of a percentage you can usefully tax away and get enormous societal benefits. You really, really don't need to go all 'Beatles Taxman' on it and confiscate everything over X amount. You can take just 1% of the pool of wealth and come out with enormous funding by the standards of what we use social benefits for.

The play money is so many orders of magnitude beyond what's used to keep society creaking along, that it's positively silly. The tiniest of wealth tax percentages can amount to whole social services budgets. These social services stop people with pitchforks from going after the billionaires and each other.

[qwytw]

> It's INSANE how tiny of a percentage you can usefully tax away and get enormous societal benefits

The problem in Norway's case is that the a lot of the richest people just moved to Switzerland or wherever...

[datavirtue]

A though occurred to me the other day. Taxes have become the offset for the inefficiencies capitalism. Each entity is independent, and therefore has to reproduce common things that could have been shared if society was organized differently.

Rabid liberalism is expensive.

[tamrix]

Why would you do that when you can just hire PR to run a campaign about how great you are?