[bayarearefugee]

> I hope the lawnmower goes bankrupt with this and the hostile WB take over.

Unfortunately there is no chance of that happening.

At his level of personal wealth there is no realistic scenario that leads to personal bankruptcy. In our current capitalist society once you're into the billions you're "too big to fail" and you have unlocked the infinite money glitch.

The only consolation is the lawnmower is 81 and thus is going to be dead soon (even the mega-wealthy can't plastic surgery themselves out of this outcome, at least not yet) and he can't take any of it with him. But all indications point to his progeny having aspirations to be even more damaging to society than he has been.

[yunnpp]

> The only consolation is the lawnmower is 81 and thus is going to be dead soon

Reminder to lay up your treasures in heaven.

[fragmede]

> The only consolation is the lawnmower is 81 and thus is going to be dead soon (even the mega-wealthy can't plastic surgery themselves out of this outcome, at least not yet)

Haven't been following Bryan Johnson, eh?

[mikkupikku]

Not only will he die, he is obsessed with his mortality and thinks about death every day. That's no way to spend your life. He's a massive fool.

[bayarearefugee]

> Haven't been following Bryan Johnson, eh?

he's gonna die just like the rest of us, just with a slightly odder uncanny valley look for himself when he goes.

[mi_lk]

Willing to bet good money he won’t outlive someone’s grandpa who smokes two times a day

[gruez]

> In our current capitalist society once you're into the billions you're "too big to fail" and you have unlocked the infinite money glitch.

That's not how any of this works. "Too big to fail" can be applied to companies, but I don't know of any examples of it being applied to people.

[perfmode]

Thomas Piketty would love to have a word.

Piketty’s central argument is that when the rate of return on capital (r) exceeds the rate of economic growth (g), wealth concentrates over time into fewer and fewer hands. This is his now-famous r > g inequality.

The implication is that capitalism, left to its own devices, doesn’t naturally spread wealth around. It does the opposite. The relatively egalitarian period of the mid-20th century (roughly 1930s-1970s) was the historical exception, driven by two world wars, the Great Depression, and deliberate policy choices like progressive taxation. The longer historical pattern, which Piketty traces with extensive data going back to the 18th century, is one of increasing concentration.

His practical prescription is a global progressive tax on wealth (not just income) to counteract this tendency. He acknowledges this is politically difficult but argues it’s the most straightforward mechanism to prevent a return to the kind of patrimonial capitalism that defined the Gilded Age and the Belle Époque, where inherited wealth dominated and social mobility was minimal.

The book’s real contribution was less the theoretical claim (which economists had gestured at before) and more the empirical work. Piketty and his collaborators assembled an unprecedented dataset on wealth and income distribution across multiple countries and centuries, which gave the argument a weight that prior discussions lacked.

[kortilla]

None of that applies to individually wealthy people, who have a long history of going bankrupt.

[fzeroracer]

Which ones? The Sacklers are a prime example of how impossible it is to actually go bankrupt; considering they harmed millions of people, had the government step in and still remain one of the wealthiest families in the US.

[linkregister]

x=1 when n=1, therefore all x=n

[overfeed]

Who was the last billionaire that went bankrupt, involuntarily?

[linkregister]

this is so trivial to find that the first web search hits are pop news listicles. Here's the first result.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/10-billionaires-went-broke-15...

[jiggawatts]

"Filed for bankruptcy" != "out of money" in the ordinary plebeian sense.

These are the kind of criminals where the judges will let them stay under home arrest in their twenty-bedroom mansion, have their chauffeur drive them around in a car worth more than my entire life savings, etc... because it would be "unconscionable" for them to lose the life that they're accustomed to. I.e.: Affluenza.

Just look at Prince Andrew or whatever he's called now. He raped children and his rightful punishment would be to sit in a jail cell with no access to anything even resembling his lavish digs, instead he's luxuriating in a lifestyle you and I would envy.

I can list far, far more examples of billionaires or mere hundred-millionaires living luxuriously after committing capital crimes or "going bankrupt" than not.

Find me an ex-billionaire living out of a motor home, then I'll cede your point.

[overfeed]

On the list: people who were convicted of crimes[1], and were barely billionaires (not worth tens or hundreds of billions).

1. Against rich/powerful people

[gruez]

>The book’s real contribution was less the theoretical claim (which economists had gestured at before) and more the empirical work.

Empirical work... like conveniently ignoring the fact that there's far less old money billionaires than we'd expect?

>For these lucky people, the experience of the Vanderbilts and their contemporaries offers a cautionary tale. At the turn of the 20th century, America’s census recorded about 4,000 millionaires, note Victor Haghani and James White, two wealth managers, in their book, “The Missing Billionaires”. Suppose a quarter of them had at least $5m (the richest had hundreds) and had invested it in America’s stockmarket. Had they then procreated at the average rate, paid their taxes and spent 2% of their capital each year, their descendants today would include nearly 16,000 old-money billionaires. In reality, it is a struggle to find a single one who traces their fortune back to the first Gilded Age.

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/06/12/h...

[jrflowers]

> In reality, it is a struggle to find a single one who traces their fortune back to the first Gilded Age.

This is a good point because there are no oil billionaires and things like trusts, family offices, offshoring etc. actually pose no challenge to accurately numerating and identifying people that ‘have’ or effectively control over a billion dollars at their discretion because they all just sign up for the list.

Of course there’s the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers but that doesn

[cogman10]

There's 100+ people the FBI had tabs on for sex trafficking related to Epstein.

So far the only individual that has been meaningfully punished has been Ghislaine Maxwell.

This seems like a prime example of being too big to fail. The FBI puts on kid gloves whenever a rich person is accused of wrong doing.

[gruez]

>There's 100+ people the FBI had tabs on for sex trafficking related to Epstein.

>So far the only individual that has been meaningfully punished has been Ghislaine Maxwell.

That factoid is meaningless without the rate of prosecutions/convictions for people that FBI "had tabs on".

[cogman10]

What rate are you looking for?

With J6, in the matter of 2 or so years the FBI has secured over 1000 convictions.

When it wants to, the FBI can move very quickly.

[TurdF3rguson]

They also had all those guys on camera doing crimes in Washington DC and bragging about it on Twitter.

[watwut]

FBI was literally sitting on Epstein files for years. They have chosen not to prosecute. When the state tried to investigate Epstein, FBI came in, took control over with claim they will share investigation results ... and then did nothing.

[threwawew]

What do you think Epstein was doing, if not recording people on cameras?

[ternaryoperator]

J6 is not a strong counterexample, IMHO. Part of the problem with Epstein is "proof beyond a reasonable doubt," for which evidence is needed--and, it appears, hard to come by. Whereas with J6, there were thousands of hours of footage showing the crimes being committed (and in many cases bragged about), which made prosecutions much easier.

[gruez]

>With J6, in the matter of 2 or so years the FBI has secured over 1000 convictions.

Again, large numbers, but no context. How many people did you think were at the riots? 10k? 50k?

Moreover, Jan 6th was an event that definitely happened. The same can't be said for whatever happened at Epstein's island. The island exists, Epstein's a convicted sex offender, and people flew there, but associating with sex offenders isn't a crime, no matter how despicable it might seem.

[mikkupikku]

It's sexism in action; the woman gets punished while "boys will be boys." Prove me wrong. Epstein himself is probably still alive in Tel Aviv anyway.

[azan_]

> It's sexism in action; the woman gets punished while "boys will be boys." Prove me wrong.

Epstein died in his cell. If Maxwell preferred death to punishment she could've also killed herself. Also it's well documented that women receive less harsh punishment in court vs men for the same crimes, so yeah, it's sexism but not in the way you insinuate.

> Epstein himself is probably still alive in Tel Aviv anyway.

Yes, and it's Maxwell's lookalike that's serving the sentence, while she's enjoying herself in Argentina. See how quickly you can derails discussion with such absurd claims without any substance?

[blitzar]

The "all in podcast"

[bayarearefugee]

Please provide a list of all multi-billionaires who have somehow managed to lose any significant portion of their wealth outside of a divorce combined with bad marriage planning. And even in those rare cases, they don't approach bankruptcy.

It isn't that they get bailed out by the government (like the banks in 2008), it is that at the scale of their wealth there is no realistic way to lose it fast enough to make any significant negative difference when the neutral state of wealth at that scale is to snowball ever larger (mostly because we refuse to tax it appropriately).

[gruez]

Your original comment involved claims of "infinite money glitch". Now you're walking it back to "rich people are rich"?

[ojbyrne]

In the ballpark ($2-4 billion in the 1970s): https://priceonomics.com/how-the-hunt-brothers-cornered-the-...

[linkregister]

Ten Billionaires Who Went Broke

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/10-billionaires-went-broke-15...

[Aurornis]

> At his level of personal wealth there is no realistic scenario that leads to personal bankruptcy. In our current capitalist society once you're into the billions you're "too big to fail" and you have unlocked the infinite money glitch.

This is plainly false. There are plenty of example, even recently, of billionaires losing their fortunes or going bankrupt. Often they come with criminal prosecution because they get desperate and try illegal ways to hang on to their wealth. Sam Bankman-Fried, Elizabeth Holmes, and several other examples come to mind.

There are a lot of stories of billionaires getting too risky with their investments or too concentrated in businesses and losing the majority of their wealth. The Barclay story, Jim Justice, the old Peloton CEO.

It’s not a common outcome because you have to try hard to screw up that badly when you have over a billion dollars in wealth. Parking it anywhere in common investments would leave you and your ancestors set forever.

[dragonwriter]

> There are plenty of example, even recently, of billionaires losing their fortunes

Billionaires aren't on the same level of wealth as hectobillionaires, just like decamillionaires aren't on the same level of wealth as billionaires.

[bayarearefugee]

> Sam Bankman-Fried, Elizabeth Holmes, and several other examples come to mind.

Billionaires that were dumb enough to attempt to screw even bigger billionaires. Sure you can find exceptions to the rules, but Ellison isn't going to be one of those.