[bentruyman]

There really aren't that many billionaires. Most of what we refer to as billionaires are people who have a large equity stake in companies they run. So are we saying once your equity becomes to large you have to start selling shares?

People who say this stuff usually have zero clue how money works.

[nix0n]

> once your equity becomes to large you have to start selling shares?

Yes. If you own over $1B of corporations, you have too much power.

[xur17]

Even if you created that corporation yourself?

And if so, who should we hand over the power to? If we tax assets, it will be given to the government, which historically hasn't been all that great at allocating capital.

[bentruyman]

These people say they don't want all this power centralized to certain individuals, will in the next breath claim that government should seize assets after a certain amount. They want centralized control, they just want their preferred political party to be the ones with it.

[nix0n]

> Even if you created that corporation yourself?

Yes.

> who should we hand over the power to?

The shares are sold to whoever's buying, so the billionaire can pay the wealth tax, to the government.

This would essentially be the same as when someone wins a car on a game show. The car is taxable income, which means that they sometimes have to sell the car to pay that tax.

> the government, which historically hasn't been all that great at allocating capital

The only way anyone gets to be a billionaire is by hoarding wealth. It's a catastrophically bad allocation of capital.

[nickpp]

Do you realize the billionaire has no saying in how much money he “has”? He just owns stock in a company he built from ground up. It’s us saying that that stock has a certain value. It’s us saying the owner is a billionaire. We are the ones making him a billionaire.

[nix0n]

You could make the same argument about landlords, but we still tax the value of a building.

[nickpp]

And that, together with heavy regulation, is why we have the present situation where young people can't stat families because they can't afford a home. Not the example I would like to follow anywhere else.

[marnett]

I’m interested why you think most of global billionaires are people with large equity stakes in companies?

People who often focus in on just the capitalist entrepreneur sect of the billionaire class often have zero clue how global Class Systems work, and just how many billionaires there are that have never worked an honest day in their lives.

[lkbm]

Do you know of a place with a breakdown?

Skimming through the Forbes list, the top ones are pretty much ones I recognize as having been founders, CEOs, and/or early employees of large corporations. As I scroll down the list, there are a lot more that I don't know or believe are merely decedents of those such people, but I still see plenty I recognize as founders or as still running companies. Is it 10%? 50%? 80%?

Don't just assert we're clueless without providing some source to show us that we're wrong. Far too often such assertions aren't actually based on anything but vibes, so "just trust me" isn't much good.