I can’t imagine receiving that amount of money and not turning around and giving almost all of it to my local community. Hell I could keep 50 or 60 million and live extremely wealthy for the rest of my life and never work again.
This is the answer to whether AI executives actually take their own rhetoric seriously. If they actually believed in things like UBI as a solution they’d be doing something besides this.
One of the perks of being at the top of the food chain is that you get to define what things mean. Just like the meaning of AGI has been redefined by the masters of the universe to resemble whatever the current state of AI is, so too will concepts like UBI if it ever approaches a state where it could one day impact their wallets.
Where proven anti-poverty initiatives have been kicked to the curb (legislation-wise) in favor of horseshit like "effective altruism", so too will UBI be one day bastardized into a system that requires people to live in company towns (with sub-residential tenant protections of course), be paid in company scrip, and be spent at company food stores - a final solution for the EBT/SNAP food assistance system.
That's enough to personally buy out every politician in certain places for decades.
Many shy back from thinking too hard about the riduculous wealth some accumulate, because then they would have to come to the realization that the reality they live in is fundementally fucked up. Living is just easier with a bit of intentional ignorance and apathy.
> Many shy back from thinking too hard about the riduculous wealth some accumulate
I disagree - the current levels of income disparity, then Meta and Zuckerberg’s general conduct along with the general sentiment make it extremely hard to say “attaboy” when reading a news like this. I might be saying this for most readers here.
There's a Board involved with deciding these things who has made the active decision that keeping those particular people in that place is worth it. Maybe the next "hot skill" is "corporate governance auditing" to start profiling the people that keep throwing passively invested funds at such small groups of people in such large amounts. Someone's making the decisions. Food for thought. Mayhaps it's time the rest of the folks in the States made a much bigger point of being on top of who is guiding their capital.
I don’t think that’s a fair expectation given the tremendous success they had with their Metaverse attempts, to the point they changed the company name for it.
I feel like we need a society where the amount of capital you get to keep is inversely proportional to how much you give back to society, on a percentage level. Have $100 billion dollars? Great. The more you give back in charity and community, the more you get to keep. Care more about "number go brrr" and less about your fellow man? We tax all kinds of personally harmful behavior like drinking and smoking. We should also tax anti-social behavior similarly. Someone like Musk with multiple hundreds of billions of dollars in capital should lose 75% of it unless you give back at least 25 or 30% of it, minimum. I'm not qualified to decide the exact percentage points. But we have to do something to keep the rich from vacuuming up almost every penny that exists.
Daily reminder that to this day, John Rockefeller is considered one of the wealthiest humans in history, despite the fact that today's billionaires dwarf his raw numbers.
Giving back to society means a very different thing to billionaires than it does to ordinary folk. They’d rather spend it on politicians to tear down the society they think is wrong rather than shore up the parts that are failing. I have always blamed the idea that seems to stem from liberal economics (not liberal in the American sense) that equates money with virtue, something that conservatives have taken on as a mantra.
So be careful what you wish for. Ordinary morality or virtue loses all meaning when the world becomes abstract due to your wealth.
Under my idea, spending on lobbying would affect the equation zero. Contribute to charity (which is still a wide range, Dolly Parton has done so much good through her works through self-initiated foundation that I would suggest she is the gold standard).
Give to existing charity. Create your own foundation (although our government should be watching like a hawk in such a scenario to make sure you're not just funneling money back to yourself).
There might be use in considering corporations "people". But that analogy only holds so far before it becomes worse than the disease it's trying to contain.
Is it just me or has money like this lost it's appeal and value? A billion dollars used to be unthinkable, now it's just some number. Companies valued at X doesn't even raise an eyebrow for me. It's like were playing with Monopoly money.
It’s because they’re playing with monopoly money. If you leverage all the money on itself repeatedly, you can make the numbers look insane. Then, you hand pieces of the leveraged money (stock options) to a bunch of executives who will be watched very closely. You don’t sell stock that’s going to go up in value, so they have to be very careful about when and how much they sell. If they sell too much, then the facade can break, and the leverage evaporates.
To be clear, there is real, underlying value & revenue. But there’s a lot of froth right now