A healthy society does not have billionares, indeed.

I don't care at all about how they acquired their wealth.

Its just not in anyone's best interest to have so much wealth horded and controlled by one person.

He's using that money to influence social norms and political outcomes. It means he's pretty much the unelected supreme leader of the terran empire.

I am firmly convinced that most of the problems facing humanity can be traced directly back to billionaires like him

No doubt about it.

It’s quite simple: you can only become that rich if you are an utterly inhuman, unscrupulous monster

Unfortunately, it is precisely these monsters who rule the world, and they have created systems that require you to be a monster in order to succeed.

As for a solution..

For him, giving someone enough money to become a multi millionaire on the spot takes as much money relatively as handing some change to a beggar does for me. He could hand out $100,000,000 every single day (!!!) and even if he doesn't gain wealth in any other way, it'd take him almost 22 years to run out of money. Or he could pay 400,000 people $100,000 a year to just go around and tell everyone how great he and everything he does is and the money would last 20 years.

Wealth like that is a serious threat to society, probably even the most serious threat.

Having power and wealth destroys empathy for less powerful people on a physiological level. That allows them to exploit people harder to get more wealth and power.

Taxing they wealth away doesn't work. Maybe just put people in jail for every year they have x amount of dollar. You can be free or wealthy, not both.

That's what I keep saying about Taylor Swift, but people just tell me that I'm a crotchety old man.

Literally yeah exactly how it works. He skims the value created by labour and free gifts of nature and magazines pretend like it's a good thing.

It's like imagine if this world is an all you can eat buffet, riches and bounty overflowing — enough for all. Then this asshole shows up and claims a whole row.

Not how it should work.

I hardly know her!

He can die tho.

Alternatively if we just took all his assets and didn't kill him we could put Elon Musk to work in an emerald mine in South Africa and get some added value.

Sounds to me we should kill this Elon Musk character.

Okay but hear me out: guillotines are really fucking cute.

Literally discovered an infinite money glitch that admins refuse to patch, despite severe balance issues

Ha, I was a Trillionaire last week. It's over-rated. I went back.

i just wish we had some kind of functional safety net for retirement such that individuals weren't forced to hoard wealth out of fear like they are now.

Atleast it's not one guy

It’s largely theoretical money based on obscene overvaluations of his companies. Thus the title “paper billionaire”

Teslas market cap, for example, was 1.46 trillion dollars in 2024. This is more than the valuation of the next thirty five largest automakers combined. One could possibly argue a slight increase in valuation based on the IP held and the future moving towards battery powered cars (and basically everything) but to argue that this makes them more valuable than Toyota, GM, Honda, ford, Hyundai, Kia, etc all combined? Asinine.

Basically the stock exploded years ago on hype that Tesla would be a pioneer in many key domains: battery storage, electric vehicles, autonomous driving, AI, etc and blew up based on the hype that in 10 years time at least some of that would come to fruition and result in a company with insane revenues. The future is here now though and we see the reality: significant competition in all those areas that almost always outshines teslas offerings. There are better players in AI and autonomous driving (Waymo simply works better and a number of Chinese options like Baidu are the same). There are better electric cars that are better built and more affordable (the Hyundai ioniq is a better bang for buck in America, BYD destroys Tesla across the spectrum from cheap to insane hyper car prices). Tesla does have an edge in battery technology in capacity but in manufacturing both China and Korea destroy them, and China is quickly catching up in terms of capacity (and leads exponentially in patents). On top of this, declining sales year after year now that musk is toxic and people realize teslas are built like shit

This is why the government steps in to protect tesla. If BYD was available domestically Tesla would eat shit assuming BYD priced aggressively. The BYD seal is beaten by the model 3 in key factors like range (quite a bit) and efficiency (barely) but overall has a significantly higher build quality, more amenities, and a better warranty. Tesla wins on the supercharger but BYD has actually implemented battery exchange stations in China, which Tesla had looked at much earlier on, and are significantly faster than charging stations. Pricing is the key metric and a weird one: in Europe the seal is actually a bit more than the model 3 (~6k euro more) but in Asia it is anywhere from 20-50% less than the model 3 depending on trim level (though the 50% comes with worsening specs).

But Teslas protectionism comes from idiotic institutional investors and its listing in the s&p 500. They know it’s grossly overvalued, yet they hold almost 50% of available shares. If you have a 401k, pension, or an index fund you almost certainly have exposure to Tesla stock. So the valuation is propped up because if comes crashing down suddenly everyone’s retirement is notably impacted and exposes the piss poor state of the nationalized pension.

This is repeating several times over as well. With musk specifically the upcoming spacex listing is already widely regarded as grossly overvalued and it hasn’t even occurred yet. OpenAI and Anthropic will likely be the same story. Even with existing stocks: Microsoft, palantir, nvidia, etc, the same story has played out over and over

Fake billionaires that will inevitably crash the entire economy in a way that hasn’t been seen in a century because of their hubris. They bank on China never catching up (even though they’re making strides every day) and even if China does catch up having the government bar them from entering the market. But this only works as long as the captive audience of the us population has money to pour into their valuations; as the world shifts away from US products and into Chinese ones the squeeze will only get worse and eventually it will pop