[chungy]

I dare you to come up with a single example of someone that has a billion dollars in liquid assets. They probably don't exist: "billionaries" are worth billions on paper, thanks to stocks, investments, real estate holdings, etc.

All in all, billionaires are a bad example of holding legal tender, because that just doesn't happen.

[tonyhart7]

"I dare you to come up with a single example of someone that has a billion dollars in liquid assets."

royal family kingdom of saudi arabia

[ethbr1]

Yeah, but they accumulate dollars for a lot of very specific reasons.

[ralusek]

I think they were making a joke about "liquid" assets, i.e. oil is liquid.

[thinkski]

Warren Buffett. Berkshire Hathaway has over $300B in cash reserves, Buffett owns 15% of Berkshire and directs investments — he chose to park all that value in cash reserves, roughly $50B of that is his share.

[nosefurhairdo]

> While Buffett has stated that Berkshire Hathaway will maintain a permanent cash reserve of about $30 billion to fund potential insurance payouts, Bloomstran takes a more conservative approach and adds about $50 billion to that reserve level to account for a full year's worth of potential insurance losses.

From this article in 2024: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/warren-buffe...

There is additional context there explaining why Berkshire holding cash reserves is unique to their needs, and historically has only represented 17.5% of their total assets.

Billionaires and large firms are not sitting on piles of cash Scrooge McDuck style, because holding cash is costly.

[nicbou]

That's still shares of a company, isn't it?

[brokenmachine]

The way I understand it, billionaires would hold it if they could, but then they'd actually have to pay tax when they spent it.

This way, they get to control unlimited assets without paying any tax.

Personally, I don't think that's so great "for the economy", because I actually don't care about the economy...

I care about people, and having 500 billionaires owning everything and charging everyone to use it is not the economy I want for people.

I'd rather that everyone pays tax, especially the super-rich.

[XorNot]

No it's that billionaires mostly aren't worth their estimated net worth in actual cash.

If Elon Musk wanted to turn his Tesla holdings into cash, then his estimated net worth of $436 billion dollars would very rapidly not be worth anywhere near that much (i.e. probably by at least an order of magnitude).

[positr0n]

Are you claiming TSLA is fundamentally worth less than $43.6B, and the mere fact that Elon owns 23% of TSLA shares is worth four hundred billion dollars?

I know that selling 23% of a company in one go would move the market, but a 90% haircut would be bonkers.

Or are you claiming TSLA is special, and the haircut would be 90% just for Elon and just for TSLA because that particular stock is super overvalued due to his celebrity and reality distortion field? That seems a little more believable, but this was a discussion on net worth of generic billionaires to start.

[thinkski]

Why not work to become a billionaire, then donate your wealth? Or begin donating your earnings today? I would guess most people on Hacker News are in the upper decile of wealth globally — there are still billions of people living poverty. Feels like a fairer way to help people than trying to do it with other people’s wealth — the latter feels like hypocrisy.

[brokenmachine]

>fairer way to help people than trying to do it with other people’s wealth

That "other people's wealth" you're talking about is everyone's wealth.

Billionaires stole the profits of our work from us, and they didn't do it fairly.

I feel you underestimate how much a billion dollars is.

https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/

Nobody in history has ever worked hard enough to earn a billion dollars fairly.

It's crazy to me that you'd defend these people who have corrupted and degraded the entire system - the government, the finance sector, the media - to only favor holding everyone else to ransom. Not producing but holding. Societal wealth stolen without paying tax to benefit society. People didn't choose this.

I'm not starving, sure. And I'd be absolutely fine paying significantly more tax than I am now.

But I'm not about to voluntarily donate while I am still forced to work towards retirement, and there are people controlling literally 10,000 times more assets than I am that pay zero tax.

Do you not see the inevitable outcome of that?

You and your children, and their children, will own nothing because the super-rich will outbid you and everyone else for everything.

Food, houses, cars, travel, hotels, healthcare, medicine. EVERYTHING.

You will be poor. The rich is a tiny club and you're not in it.

Everyone, even the wealthy ones here on hn will eventually succumb. You will be outbid for everything.

You will have to sell your house to afford necessities while all your work goes towards luxuries for oligarchs.

There must be some mechanism to limit wealth or that is the inevitable outcome.

Here's a little thought experiment...

It's a hot day and everyone's thirsty. You have $9. There's a bottle of water on the table that you want to buy and the price on it is $10.

I give you $1. You can almost feel your thirst satiated.

Then I give the person next to you $1,000. How do you feel now?

Well our current system is like that, but multiplied by 100.

I do not agree that society should exist solely for the benefit of a handful of super-rich freeloaders.

On the desert island, they would starve and/or be eaten. That's not my definition of a useful member of society.

[robertlagrant]

> Billionaires stole the profits of our work from us

This seems like a very skewed perspective. You work for a salary, I imagine, and you freely agreed to take that job and in return get a salary, even if the company was losing money or its share price was plummeting. I.e. taking a salary because of the security of payments.

Lots of people who invest in businesses lose all their money. You can't point at the very very peak performers who a) didn't lose their money and b) made a really valuable company instead, and decide that they owe you something other than what you agreed you would work for. That's just not how agreements work, and it's also the apex fallacy[0].

[0] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Apex_fallacy

[brokenmachine]

That's a good point and I do agree in principle.

But there still needs to be some mechanism to limit wealth inequality or we still get the inevitable conclusion.

The US minimum wage hasn't changed in 16 years!

Which means many of these peak performers are built on the back of poverty, people who don't have the luxury of "freely agreeing" to take their labor elsewhere.

It's just not fair at all. Governments are funneling money to the rich hand over fist. It's obvious who they represent and who they don't.

You have to agree that trickle down is not trickling down.

[robertlagrant]

> The US minimum wage hasn't changed in 16 years!

I don't mind this, because minimum wage is a national minimum. States (and even more fine-grained than that) need to have contextualised minimum wage, or it's just silly. That's why it hasn't changed. Minimum wage increases wages at the expense of reducing employment, for any job that isn't worth that wage. You can't increase the national US minimum wage to what would get you an apartment in California and expect jobs to exist in Appalachia.

Honestly, the national minimum wage seems almost pointless. States should handle it, as they can contextualise at least a bit better.

And it not changing isn't evidence of anything when state-level minimum wages exist.

> Which means many of these peak performers are built on the back of poverty, people who don't have the luxury of "freely agreeing" to take their labor elsewhere.

Thus I don't think it means that. And also - your false dichotomy of you're either a wealthy business owner or you're on national minimum wage is not helpful either. People are paid what they can negotiate. Companies pay what they can negotiate. Companies exist if they charge a low enough price for their level of service or product. It's a tri-party system. The existence of other companies in in-demand businesses is what drives up wages, as if you don't like your job you can move, and people do. That's why I would say where possible, things that stop new companies springing up should be removed. Thinking it's all about national minimum wage is honestly the wrong approach, in my opinion.

> You have to agree that trickle down is not trickling down.

I don't know what this means. I didn't mention anything trickling down.

[heurist]

There are early bitcoin holders who are now billionaires continuing to hold their highly liquid bitcoin.

[JumpCrisscross]

> a single example of someone that has a billion dollars in liquid assets

Lots of billionaires manage their portfolios conservatively. Your equating currency with liquid assets is unnecessary and tanks your argument. Almost nobody holds billions of dollars in legal tender other than those who have to, e.g. sanctioned countries and criminals.