[saulpw]

There's rich, and then there's 10x rich, and 100x rich, and 1000x rich, and 10000x rich, and now even 100000x rich. Millionaires are fine, billionaires are bad, and hectobillionaires are supremely terrible.

I think once someone gets to a billion dollars net worth, they should get an AmEx black card, and 99% of their assets moved into a sovereign public wealth fund. They can have anything they want, they lose the power of extreme asset allocation, and if they just like competing, they can start over and try to ring the bell again (and can give the second AmEx black card to a person of their choosing).

[lotsofpulp]

So if your business is extremely successful, your reward is losing control if it?

To who, politicians?

Leaving the large business intact and just changing the leader doesn’t seem like it changes anything.

[palata]

> your reward is losing control if it?

That's not what I understand from the GP. What they say is taht if your business is extremely successful, it can keep being extremely successful and you can keep control over it.

You just cannot accumulate more money for yourself. Like if the highest amount of money in a video game was 1 billion. Once you reach it, you don't go back to 0, you just can't go higher.

Makes sense to me.

[philsnow]

I'm reminded of Nethack, which keeps track of your score as a 32-bit* signed int, and so some people have perfected making sure that they have MAX_INT when they win.. and then it becomes a game of trying to do as much as you can in the game without going over MAX_INT.

* though I guess newer builds are defaulting to 64-bit signed ints?

[BrenBarn]

>What they say is taht if your business is extremely successful, it can keep being extremely successful and you can keep control over it.

> You just cannot accumulate more money for yourself.

If that's what it means, I don't think it makes sense, because the point of taking away the money was to reduce the ability of the rich to unduly control and influence others. If they can still do that via their company that they still control, it doesn't much matter whether they have money or not.

[palata]

> If they can still do that via their company that they still control, it doesn't much matter whether they have money or not.

Of course it does. It's very different to be the head of a company and to privately have more money than an entire country.

[Workaccount2]

I face palm through the back of my skull when people think billionaires have billions of dollars. Virtually none of them do.

[palata]

I talk about the ultra-rich as "they have waaaaay too much money". I do understand that this is not exactly big purse with a lot of cash that they carry everywhere with them. Still, it's way too much.

[Workaccount2]

They have tons of assets and not much money. That's part of why the problem is so intractable.

People put limits on what they should be able to own, but if we extend that idea globally (i.e. don't discriminate based on simply where you were born), then most of us in the first world would also be liable to give up our TVs, cars, latops, houses etc. And then suddenly seizing assets is bad...

The problem is not simple or straightforward. It's mostly people who want more complaining about those who also want more.

[palata]

> The problem is not simple or straightforward

Nobody says it's simple or straightforward. I personally just admitted that there is an amount of wealth that is too much.

You sound like you're telling me that because it's a hard problem to solve, I should just shut up.

[mxkopy]

You should be forced to invest into all aspects of the social fabric that makes your success possible. Your reward is being able to be a successful philanthropist

[Workaccount2]

Your 401k is their social fabric contribution.

[mxkopy]

You misunderstand. From a billionaire’s POV a real contribution looks like taking some responsibility for the average person’s wellbeing even if it has nothing to do with their business interests, simply because they have the power to do this. The 401k is us benefitting from their selfishness, I ask that they stop being selfish

[p_j_w]

How does a 5 year old use their 401k to increase the quality of their education?

[Workaccount2]

Probably should allow parents to open college investment accounts for kids at birth. Even $5k invested at birth would be $50k at 25, enough to mostly pay off a state school degree.

So yeah, generally I think that would be a good idea.

[p_j_w]

Suppose I’m a 5 year old born to poor parents. Should I have just made better life choices?

[naniwaduni]

We do have, like, four versions of that in the US alone, yes, starting with 529 plans.

[nielsbot]

Taxation = losing control of your business? Sounds a little hyperbolic. But explain more what you mean?

[blargey]

They're pointing to the fact that most of a given billion+aire's net worth is ownership of a highly valued company (stock). Their billions are literally just the market-assigned value of the control itself, so it falls upon people suggesting a wealth cap to come up with an arrangement that can divest them of that value without divesting them of the ownership/control rights that said value is being derived from.

Of course, control of a very large company is itself the sort of power that wealth caps are supposed to curb, like when people buy newspapers / social media platforms / etc - so you could also just proclaim it a feature instead of a bug, but it still warrants a defense.

[account42]

Yes, if your business gets to societal scale then the rest of society gets to have a say.

[JKCalhoun]

Society?