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This article misses the point. The reason there are no good billionaires isn’t that they change their politics and morality to whatever drives profits. It’s because they have amassed more wealth than they can ever possibly need, while others suffer and die who could be saved by that wealth. If you have billions of dollars that you could have given to the needy and instead you’re sitting on your hoard like a fucking dragon, you have failed morally. tldr: billionaires are dragons and we need more dragonslayers
Forbes sometimes publishes lists of good billionaires:
Billionaire is a pathology as far as I’m concerned.
Billionaires should not exist
But I do think there is at least one who did more good than harm and maybe a handful who have made mistakes but are doing better in the present.
Anyone who accrues enough money to be a billionaire should be contributing enough back to the society they’re strip mining that they shouldn’t be billionaires. Anyone who doesn’t should be turned into BBQ.
That definition is lenient enough to forgive anybody who signed the Bill Gates giving pledge, which the other commenters here clearly disagree with.
I do think it is important to not give away our empathy for normal human beings when the real solution is a system that taxes the rich.
Billionaires shouldn’t exist.
Soon to be trillionaires…
ABAB
All Billionaires Are Bastards
Millionaires too
You can easily burn through a million in ten years of medical care with certain conditions (certainly in the US). Yes that needs to be fixed, but people with a million dollars for their retirement after working 50 years, they are not the problem with society.
They are definitely a problem.
How exactly is someone a problem if they worked for 50 years and managed to save around 1 million in that time?
People are starving bud. Having a million dollars while people starve is fucking insane
This feels a bit like the oxygen masks in an airplane. Take care of your own basic needs first and then focus on others around you. Who is going to take care of me when I’m no longer earning if I gave all my money away to the more needy when I was earning? Or should I just die?
Billionaires. Not millionaire.
You might want to reread those last 3 comments in the chain.
Fill in the blanks:
A ______ billionaire is a good billionaire.
Former
Expropriated
Removed by mod
B
A million seconds is 11.5 days. A billion seconds is 31.7 years.
Just a good way to ground an unimaginable number in something more familiar and drive home how ridiculous having a billion dollars is. I hear we’re on track for our first batch of trillionaires this decade.
A trillion seconds is 31,688 years.
I hear we’re on track for our first batch of trillionaires this decade.
Unless we do something about the wealth, this is kinda expected eventually. Give it another decade after that and it would be wholly expected to have our first multi trillionaire, and honestly they wouldn’t even need to do anything to make that happen, they’d just need to invest in a board market ETF.
I’m not saying this is good, but this was inevitable due to how the markets and inflation work.
Edit: Also it will probably happen sooner than anyone realizes when you take into account private unmeasurable wealth like Saudi royalty.
This is actually great! Welcoming your example to my now collection of two, alongside Wealth, shown to scale.
And then there’s that Tom Scott video
Another gem, thanks for sharing. God damn.
I like to think there may be, and could be… But I have never seen a great example.
Yes there is Luigi showed us the way.
Or just fucking stop consuming like idiots and assholes. You really think shooting CEOs in the street is going to change anything for the better without changing the bad behaviour that those CEOs are still salivating and precumming at the thought of exploiting??
In America, people may have to pay over $1000 a month for health insurance, which may or may not even cover all their medical needs. People still need Bank accounts; cities are built without public transportation so vehicles are required just for the ability to feed and clothe yourself. This isn’t a “consumer” issue, this is a systemic structures of our civilization issue, where the needs of the many are less of a concern to politicians than the loudest voices of the few.
Nevermind lobbyists writing laws wholesale; supply chain management systems owned end to end by single companies; and Wall Street / vulture capitalists destroying companies (and lately hospitals!?!) to extract their wealth.
We need to structure civilization so that Money isn’t the only, single end goal of all endeavors; and we need to ensure that Greed is kept in check.
Poverty exists not because we can’t feed the poor, but because we can’t satisfy the rich.
Brian Thompson was just a poor millionaire though. Perhaps one of the reasons why he was so easy to get.
Any individual that wants to horde so much money and wealth that could satisfy the lives of millions of people is not a good person.
It’s like having a million sandwiches and thousands of hungry people around you … but you’d rather keep all your sandwiches and screw everyone else, even though you will never be able to physically eat all the sandwiches you have in a lifetime.
Being a billionaire is not a sign of intelligence, it’s a mental disorder and a person who lacks human empathy.
Modern age dragons, sitting on their hoards while occasionally burning a peasant village to keep those dirty plebs in line.
You know… you don’t really need the qualifier “modern age”. There weren’t dragons in the middle ages or at any period in human history.
Sorry to be that guy, I guess I’m that guy… 🫤
Well, you know what to do with dragons
Sir/ma’am/other, you are on the internet. There are many responses to that.
Donkey_from_shrek.gif
There are many responses. Not all of them are right
No, they are right.
All the many responses.
Just not right -in this circumstance-
Will someone stop this man from yelling “dragon”?
Hoarding is hoarding
If a little old lady hoards 20 cats we call her crazy … a man hoards $400 billion dollars and we call them a genius
Not to be that person, but most people forget that the net worth oft these people is not liquid. They can not just wave a magic wand and give people money.
It’s usually in shares of their very highly valued company which they can’t give up because they wouldl give up control. Billionaires are not about money, they are about power.
What keeps you in power does not align with doing good. Thus the giving pledge exists, it allows giving away the money while you don’t lose control in your lifetime.
Most billionaires do some kind of philanthropy. Gotta control where the money they would pay in taxes ends up. Even this is about power.
Their survival bias makes them believe that they know best what’s good for the world. Taxing them would just increase their philanthropy, which is a good thing even though not perfect. Let’s start somewhere.
It’s usually in shares of their very highly valued company which they can’t give up because they wouldl give up control.
To be that guy, they still can access the wealth provided by those shares without liquidating them. That’s exactly what they do too. They use shares as leverage to obtain loans, and then they spend the loan money. It’s called the “buy borrow die” strategy and they also use it to avoid taxes because loans aren’t considered income.
That is the fallacious paper millionaire argument. They have more than enough liquidity, can take loans against their “non-liquid” wealth, and are anyway working with multi-year plans to sell assets and have enough liquidity. I believe this is also explained in https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/ and there they also explain that the US market cap is bigger than their stocks and so. So they could sell a lot in one go, of course losing “efficiency”, but the market would be able to cope without any issue.
I think we are on the same side here judging from the rest of your comment, but I find it important to refute this typical argument, because it does not help that there is some sort of billionaire apologism by saying that they “don’t actually have this money in their bank account to spend”.
If a company is set up right from the start, you could have voting shares that aren’t stock based, and that can be a way to maintain control of your company without hoarding the wealth via stock, but if it’s not like that from the start, it would be very hard to make that change after the fact.
It’d probably be better if that was more common, but I still don’t think they’d give up their shares worth money on the market, and then I still think these types of shares would have off market value?
You do know that billionaires don’t actually have billions of dollars in a vault in a Scrooge McDuck fashion, right?
I’d like to know why all of these billionaire fellating people are on decentralized social media. Go on back to one of the corporate garbage platforms run by the broligarchs if you think this is such a great way to run society.
A billion dollars distributed to 1,000,000 people is $1000.
All the wealth billionaires in the US hold is not enough to pay for the government to run for one year.
Let’s not pretend giving away all their wealth would fix all of our problems.
Youre not talking about running the government, which isnt really expensive, youre talking about the whole country. “10 people cant pay for a whole country of 340,000,000 including all of its infrastructure and industry, they dont have that much money”.
Can you reflect on how fucking ridiculous this statement is?
Whats next? “Elon Musk cant even buy a planet, hes not that rich”
There are about 800 billionaires
“800 people cant pay for a whole country of 340,000,000 including all of its infrastructure and industry, they dont have that much money”, better?
That’s exactly the point. Why should 800 fucking guys have a mountain of wealth when working people have to be on welfare to make ends meet?
What makes more sense in a society? One person who controls a billion dollars or a thousand people with million dollars?
The billionaire locks up all that wealth and it doesn’t do anything for anyone … sure it might make someone even more money but it essentially locks away that potential wealth from a larger group of people.
If you had 1,000 millionaires, then they would all go out to perform all kinds of other activities and businesses that would be smaller but at least benefit even more people.
Driving wealth to smaller and smaller groups of people only drives more and more wealth to fewer people while everyone else suffers.
Redistributing millions or billions of dollars might not change much … but at the very least it would be a hell of a lot better than what we have now.
The billionaires have their wealth in businesses, it’s not locked up. People don’t just put a billion in a savings account
Yes but we are letting the companies get this big. But competition whatever. So we could split them back up. And Elon WHY is Tesla stock do high. There isn’t a reason.
I have no problem with splitting up Microsoft or Google, but the founders would still get shares in both companies. Ideally those companies wouldn’t lose value after being split
If the people saying “kill all ceos” understood the basics of how a world worked or were past their edgy teens, they would also be smart enough not to grab for violence against entire groups as a first resort. Yes suck, hitlermelon, mexican currency and everyone running the american health insurance companies are not good people, obviously. That means society and laws must change to treat them as equals and to tax ultra rich more while removing money as a tool of influence from politics. I can’t see anyone not getting behind that.
But idunno, I see people going “all ceos, landlords and rich are stinkin fukin evil, kill em all”. Idk seems kinda violent and totalitarian. Seems like theyd want me dead too since I dont like them killing people they define as needing to be killed. Idunno, makes me not want to respect any of them or their political beliefs or their side.
Y’all see how you are actively giving fuel for the right? And now looking at the centrist threads, driving away people who dont like extremes by labling them as the enemy?
Your argument lacks credibility. If people didn’t like extremes then we’d have similar outrage from those centrists when Elon Musk throws a Nazi salute or when people hurt cops and storm the Capitol building. Instead we get apologists and excuses. Meanwhile protestors of injustice are treated as if they’ve committed genocide caused they hurt a Walmart and people actually committing genocide get excused.
People don’t worry about extremes. They worry about change of the status quo.
Also, the systemic issues within our country and the ability to ignore the system as a whole by the privileged is what gives you the power to say something like “reeorting to violence as a first resort” as if we haven’t had ample evidence of attempts to bring accountability and change to the system that just gets ignored. Not only is it not a first resort but to the people who are suffering daily… Why should they care what level of resort it is? We excuse businesses for doing whatever it takes because “shareholder value” but when it comes to the poor and suffering they just follow the exact letter of the law and then some.
It’s not about extremes and never has been.
I think January 6th was a dangerous precedent to our democracy and Elon Musk is cringe (I’m not going to x anymore)
Am I the mythical centrist?
Let’s not pretend giving away all their wealth would fix all of our problems.
Let’s not pretend that assets work like cash.
Good Billionaire is Thousander.
Yup. Show me a billionaire who has paid their workers fairly from day one, followed every single law and regulation by the book, never spent a single dollar on lobbying Congress or contributing to political campaigns for quid pro quos, and never used underpaid contractors or foreign slave labor. You can’t, because there’s no such thing as a good billionaire.
The guy who founded Costco and was its CEO up until a few years ago is this, if not very close. A business lauded for both how it treated its workforce, and its customers. Basically no turnover unless someone retires.
Yes, even that one
And even then, if they managed to amass that kind of wealth, it had to come from somewhere, i.e. consumers paying enough for their product that it made them a billionaire, meaning all these people could have paid less and that billionaire could be a millionaire or just middle class and more people would be richer.
That is kind of true. But on the assumption that the corporation (in this case Costco) is doing more good than bad, like generating fair jobs, it would benefit most to see that business grow. If you dont generate profit because you distribute everything to your employees or customers, you will never be able to grow. So Costco will stay with 10 employees forever and only those businesses that exploit workers and customers can grow.
You could argue that there is really no need for businesses to grow as big ss many are today and I would completely agree, but that has to be regulated by law.
Non profits are a thing and they are able to grow, hell, you would expect them to grow more because less money goes to the pockets of a CEO and more goes to growing the company.
It can also make profit without billions going to the pockets of a single person, if that money was just redistributes to all employees the business would probably grow even faster because more qualified people would want to work there and would be happier working there.
Three scenarios:
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The company makes 100B in revenue, pays its employees a fair wage, distributes 5B to the C-suites and makes 50B in total profit
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The company makes 100B in revenues, pays its employees a fair wage, distributes 10M to the C-suites, distributes 4.99B in bonus to all employees and makes 50B in total profit
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The company reduces its prices, makes 95.01B in revenues, pays its employees a fair wage, gives 10M to the c-suites, makes 50B in total profit
What’s the difference?
Hint: there’s no difference except the number of people being treated better
NPOs have CEOs as well and many earn salaries in the millions. NPOs are the exact right example, though, but not for the reason you are talking about. Non-profit does not inherently mean lower-ranking employees get a bigger share.
The big difference is that NPOs dont have shareholders or owners, which is how billionaires become billionaires, by owning companies worth billions.
But you should know that most NPOs rely almost entirely on government grants and donations. They couldnt even survive a single year on their own revenues.
If you want to establish the NPO concept in the free market, you would need to ban private ownership of ocmpanies. It could work but there is no way it will ever be implemented.
I think you are ignoring his main question though. Are those not legitimately three different options companies have? Do they not have wildly different outcomes on the workers?
No, companies do not actually have the option to simply cut the upper managements salary by 99.8%. And even if they could, it would simply end in all management leaving the company the next day, the company going bankrupt and all of the empolyees losing their jobs.
Im not trying to defend management salaries in the millions. It is damn unnecessary and should be taxed appropriately. But simply denying that thats how the world works right now is bs.
And even if they could, it would simply end in all management leaving the company the next day, the company going bankrupt and all of the empolyees losing their jobs.
The management would all leave? I wonder how often that actually happens? I’d totally believe never. If you offered the management a lot less money, they could walk, but more likely, only some would walk. And in any case, then you could also promote employees from within the company. I bet there’s a department manager that wouldn’t mind the huge pay increase that comes with a c-level promotion, even if it does come with a million dollar bonus rather than a billion.
If you adjusted salaries slowly, say over the course of 5 years, managers could leave (if they really wanted to) gradually, you’d have time to replace people for a much smoother transition.
Funny how you ignored everything but the non profit bit. The reason they rely on donations and grants is because they’re mostly charities, there’s no reason a private company couldn’t reinvest 100% of its profits and try to adjust its prices to be closer to breaking even. Hell, life insurance for road users works exactly this way around here, prices are adjusted based on how much they need to pay for claims and we’re the place that pays the least for that type of insurance in North America, everything is paid for by car owners and it will covers anyone involved in an accident with a car, may they be in the car or riding a bike or walking on the sidewalk, it’s still cheaper than anywhere else for those who pay for it.
Tell me, from the companies’ perspective what the difference is between the three example I gave? You’re the one who said it’s not realistic to lower prices.
I think you are not familiar with how economy works. No offense, really, Im not an expert either but I dont really have the patience to go over everything in detail. Reinvesting profits is what ALL companies do. What youre suggesting was the opposite, you said profits should be distributed to employees or customers.
The difference between your examples is that 1 is a different company than 2 and 3. They are not different scenarios for the same company.
There are reasons why CEOs earn a lot and you cant change that by telling companies “but why not just give the money to your other employees, it would be better for them”. Thats not how economy works. Im not saying the way things are is good at all, but youre not offering an alternative. What youre suggesting would require that owners and shareholders would give a shit about the wellbeing of their employees and customers.
What a nice non answer that also ignores dividends and wealth accumulation and the fact that profits = revenues - spendings including wages :)
“ThEy’Re NoT tHe SaMe CoMpAnY!”
It’s what we call a thought experiment, the end result is the same, the difference is who gets to keep more money.
I’m done with people like you defending billionaires and being unable to think about alternatives, have a good life.
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I don’t have a problem with open lobbying per se. If it’s on behalf of all of the workers and customers as well and not just their own interests.
But can anyone identify such a billionaire?
And by definition that rules out any that step on their workers like bugs…
What about Warren Buffet? Out of genuine interest.
He disowned his granddaughter for having the temerity to appear in a Johnson&Johnson kid’s documentary about how the rich talk and act behind closed doors.
While he certainly comes across as one of the more virtuous billionaires, his company Berkshire Hathaway, has massive investments in some of the worst and most damaging industries in the world, in terms of labor exploitation and ongoing contributions to the climate disaster. For example, his company owns 6.6% of Chevron and 27.2% of Occidental Petroleum, two massive exploiters of fossil fuels. That’s no good in my book.
Gabe Newell. Costco guy. Im sure theres europeans as well.
Oh theres communist billionaires too, im sure stalin and lenin and chinese ones were wery respectful of the working class, never had a genocide where up to 20% of the population (that is one in every five. Every fifth post in this thread, gone) were killed for not being the right nationality. And they never exploited entire nations forcefully.
But its okay, fuck everyone in a certain group, dehumanize them and talk about violence against them because a few do bad things. Surely the solution is not to use it to fuel political anti campaign to swing the pendulum hard in the other way by limiting power rich can have in the us via providing the myriad of evidence we already have.
No instead sit on internet and make literal hitler speeches where you replace the word “jews” with “rich” and wonder why everyone thinks far left and right are the same Nazis
I really don’t know what to do with this response. You seem to have injected a bunch of stuff I didn’t say.
First, I’m a pacifist, always have been. I have never advocated for violence against anyone, even the worst people in the world. It’s one of my most deeply held beliefs.
Second, there are between three and four thousand billionaires in the world. That’s total. There are more than 8 billion people alive right now, and of that number there are between three and four thousand billionaires. If there was ever a group of people to lump together, billionaires are probably the only group I’m completely comfortable doing that with. As a whole, they have caused more damage to individual people, society, and the planet than any other group of people that have ever existed.
Thirdly, as a Jew whose family is much smaller than it should be because of the actual Nazis, I know what a Nazi is. I’m not sure how anyone could have read my comment as a “literal hitler speech,” but it’s possible I’ve completely misunderstood your characterization since I’ve had trouble parsing your comment.
Taylor Swift?
Nope. That amount of wealth is only generated via exploitation. Exploiting workers or exploiting customers, or cutting corners and skirting regulations, failing to internalize externalities. Mostly all of the above
I assume you have examples?
Some people think all profit is “stolen” labor value, and thus all wage labor is exploitation. I don’t think that’s true, but it is true that all for-profit firms have an incentive to pay their workers as little as possible, while getting as much productivity from them as possible, because that will maximize profits.
For-profit companies also have an incentive to cut other costs as much as possible, to maximize profits. This is why we see things like shrinkflation, planned obsolescence, or products just getting gradually crappier over time.
For-profit companies also have an incentive to externalize certain costs, like pollution, environmental destruction, or resource depletion, to, once again, maximize profits.
I love how swifties always say, “WhAt AbOuT tAyLoR?!”
And I say this as someone who loves her music.
She’s still a bad billionaire.
EVEN IF she paid everyone who works for her or her label above market rate, even if she charged her concert tickets below market value, even if she “goes green” with every CD, every piece of merchandise, the fact that she has more money than most people makes her a bad billionaire.
She could easily give half of her wealth away and still be okay.
She’s a bad billionaire.
Where do you think that wealth comes from? They don’t produce it. The workers create the value, which is stolen from them for the owners and shareholders.
To be fair to Taylor she is producing a show, but the wealth should be fairly distributed with the crew that make those performances possible
Where do you think that wealth comes from? They don’t produce it. The workers create the value
This is such a deeply unserious argument when used in this case. “I can’t wait to see the front of house guy!” say all the wine moms and 14-year-old girls waiting in line outside the stadium. “And the road manager too!”
Fuck it you’re right. She can lug her own shit around and set the stage and work the sound system. That’s why she earns billions!
Unless her financials are public, it’ll be hard to do but the general principle is that everyone’s labour is worth the same.
She’s able to get more money through manipulation, whether intending to or not, through her fans buying multiples of her merchandise, to playing her songs on Spotify non stop to boost her profits etc.
Applying this principle, she’s gaining profit from the work of her fans who aren’t getting any compensation for their labour, resulting in millions of dollars.
So the defining factor is her work, not her staff. Her staff doing the same work at another place wouldn’t generate the same profit. And if you think listening to songs on Spotify is work…
General strike is the best and most effective means we have. If we wait for AI and robots to replace you, you loose your bargaining power.
Crash the fake economy. Your fucked either way might as well go down swinging and on your terms.
When you do it, I’ll do it. But I’m not wasting my life if it’s not a community effort.
Been on strike since the election. Come join me!
It’s not just me, there are others.
My industry doesn’t strike. It wouldn’t work. BUT I hope that all works out for you.
However, striking only works for so long. And, with Trump as president, I doubt there will be much striking allowed once he changes those laws or just replaces you with people from the concentration camp.
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That wealth is the spilled blood of the working class
money is both power and violence
