https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Billionaires
(“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it”)
I guess that's where it ends for me.
Can't read any following twitter thread (if there is one).
Is there any indication what he thinks more billionaires should be doing that they are not already doing?
Onecounter-framing is that entepreneurs keep 2.2% of the value that their workers create.
I would have to say that his resulting 45:1 ratio would be the maximum upside, and only achievable if every billionaire dollar was earned through innovative creation of value.
As we know, very few things are 100% efficient, plus unfortunately sometimes financial efforts can balance more toward innovative destruction of value, so that does need to be taken into consideration.
I like his optimism though.
They capture far more value from their employees than any of their employees do. If you have 5 ticks on your leg, which one skeeves you the most? The one that's sucked the most blood.
So assume a hypothetical case where there is a runaway inflation. Everyday things start costing thousands of dollars and buying stuff need cash to be shoved around on wheel barrows (this has actually happened in many places). Wages also inflate similarly.
What if the government decides to create a larger value currency denomination - say a 'Mega dollar' - and declare it (ie, a 'mega') as the new base denomination? Why wouldn't this work? (I presume it doesn't work, because I haven't seen it applied in practice.)
The ongoing harm from hyper-inflation is mostly: unpredictability ie you have to negotiate with your boss every week what your paycheck is based on subjective perception of inflation, the time-value of payments suddenly becomes critical, and you can no longer store money effectively in the actual currency. Everybody else realizes this and pulls out, as they have no confidence in your economy since you can't get this under control. These makes commerce really really painful and wrecks the economy.
The actual bills is not really a huge problem. Zeroes are very easy to cram on, and the 'megadollar' technique is not infrequently deployed, sometimes simultaneously with some kind of gesture to hopefully convince people it is a turning point.
If you redistributed Bill Gates' Microsoft stock across the population, wouldn't that cause a commensurate rise in inflation as everyone uses their portion on things that they need? (Bill Gates has 500,000 times the median US net worth, but doesn't eat 500,000 times more bread or wear 500,000 times more kilograms of cotton than the average person).
In terms of actual physical things the ultra-rich don't really have that much comparatively than the regular person. Maybe they have a few mansions, yachts, helicopters - but given that there are many, many more poor and middle-income people than the rich, only a small percentage of the population could benefit (how many people can actually fit on Bezos' yacht, how many apartments could those mansions be easily converted into?).
There's probably an economic benefit from redirecting labour from things that the rich like but again, we're not quite at Ancient Egypt levels of large portions of the population building useless things for the super-rich, if you're a billionaire your workforce is probably working on something that makes money from people poorer than you. If you make the firms that build mansions pivot to building normal houses for ordinary people, I don't think that would result in all that many more houses being built.
That's not to say that there wouldn't be other benefits like removing their ability to influence public opinion through their money (although even without rich people there would still be individuals with disproportionate media influence), but wealth redistribution isn't the panacea that people claim it to be.
1. Give 99% of his billions to everyone.
2. Let anyone invest with VCs in private deals (remove the accreditation requirement)
He won't do any of that.
quantified•4h ago