| > afaik musk doesn't even own a house This trope is old, and was never really accurate. He was living in a $50M mansion at the time, mostly by himself. Flying back and forth between California and Texas almost daily, private. That the world's second or third richest person "doesn't even own a house" is something that beggars belief, made for a good soundbite. I'm sure he doesn't. I'm sure Elon Holdings VIII Inc. or similar owns plenty of property. Just like he "did everything possible to anonymize his private jet, so it was doxxing him to show its location"... when in reality it is registered to a company with a SpaceX-related name, whose company office is at 1 Space Drive in a city in California, whose address, when you enter it into Google says "Businesses associated with this address: Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company". Very anonymous indeed. > because how much would be left over for him? out of all the US, with all his wealth, would he buy tacoma and then be broke? because that's a pretty small influence if one of the wealthiest people in the world could only afford a city of 220k. I don't want to diminish Tacoma - I lived there once, but it is a city of 62 square miles and I really struggle to fathom the grandiosity you envision. What would be impressive to you? Seattle? Austin? Phoenix? Chicago? Presumably he wouldn't be broke, because being the landlord of all those structures would provide rather significant income, no? I got the data a few years ago, just from the City of Tacoma's tax records and assessed property values. |
and i think a city of a million would be impressive, i've lived in cities of 100k, 200k, ~6m, 30k, and 350k. even at a million, that's still only ~0.003% of the US population.
while the example makes for a nice way of measuring wealth-to-power, so kudos on that, realistically it makes for a bad investment. you'd get a lot in rent but you'd get crushed in repair fees, insurance, and property tax. plus if someone else really wants to buy that property (or they dislike whoever bought it), its probably cheaper for them to sponsor state-level politicians to raise property tax in some obscure way on only people who own 100+ properties. forcing you to dump everything at once, thereby decreasing prices in the area.