| Billionaires are characterized as such due to their net wealth.
They don't actually have that amount in cash silently rotting in bank accounts. What wealthy people, and people more generally, do have is ownership of assets and debts, where the grand sum >= +1B$. Case in point, Elon owns significant portions of valuable companies. Patent nonsense such as > So we can take a million dollars to be about 1 lifetime's worth of money. Elon is currently sitting on 817,000 lifetimes worth of money. belies a gross misunderstanding of these valuations. No, Elon is not sitting on whatever money. He might only have 1Ks or 10Ks splashed throughout several accounts. If he is mid-transaction, then that figure may come into play, but only briefly. Some billionaires, sure, they may actually have cash of that magnitude on hand ready for deployment. For plenty of even more down-to-earth wealthy folk, even 2K burns a hole in their pocket because they haven't found where to invest it yet. And so what is Elon and others like him supposed to do? Divest his "money" to the general population in search of equal outcome (and not equal opportunity)? We need a few people to rise to pinnacles, this is one effective path to creation of markets. Allowing them to concentrate such power and wealth unchecked, though, is a great mistake. And that's on us, the people. |
That needs to change. They need to feel the same taxation everyone else has, it makes it harder to survive and they need to live by the same sword