https://fortune.com/2026/01/12/elon-musk-retirement-savings-...
Just a few hundred billion more
We’re so close to interplanetary civilisation bro
Just hundreds of billions more, just one last time
China is investing in infrastructure and making sure its citizens have enough to eat and a roof over their heads. The US is starving school children, unleashing its own Gestapo on its citizens, letting its citizens die, doing untold damage to every other country on Earth and letting our infrastructure rot so Jeff Bezos can buy a 4th megayacht.
Automation and AI could be a good thing for society. We could all enjoy the benefits by having to work less and having to less menial and/or dangerous work. But it won't work that here. It'll be used to displace workers, increase the wealth of th etop 0.01% and suppress the wages of reamining workers.
I'm unconvinced the trillions invested in AI will ever see a return. But even if it produces value in some way, will it even matter if nobody has any money to buy anything?
The anti-freeloader impulse is one of the easiest ways to spur people to action. Would that go away or be intensified under UBI?
would people cease to be charitable after a tragedy because they expect UBI to handle it?
With infinite welfare, the dominant culture will be the one that is able to reproduce as much as possible, perhaps through cloning? We are already seeing IVF, surrogate mothers and other sorts of cloning/eugenics sexual strategies emerge, just not on a dominant level yet.
If it wasn't for cloning, I would say it would look more like Calhoun's rat utopia due to sex-based competition.
>The anti-freeloader impulse is one of the easiest ways to spur people to action.
I would say this depends on culture. Only industrious countries tend to have culture with this impulse.
One of the benefits status being attached to money is that it tends to drive positive-sum productive behavior rather than zero-sum destructive behavior.
ravelantunes•1h ago
youngtaff•1h ago
VirusNewbie•58m ago
Bezos does not have a castle filled with a scrooge mcduck moneypool. There are not castles filled with grain that could otherwise be used to feed the starving peasants.
steveBK123•53m ago
luckylion•41m ago
steveBK123•34m ago
aswegs8•9m ago
If you have money you generally don't want it to sit around and depreciate instead of investing into real-estate, private equity, etc. directly or indirectly.
Pooge•47m ago
Corruption of politics would be much harder, too.
VirusNewbie•42m ago
What “money” velocity would be higher? Some of these companies have very little profit compared to wealth.
jandrewrogers•10m ago
class3shock•44m ago
As far as feeding people, he could single handidly fund SNAP for a year and still have 100 billion plus.
VirusNewbie•22m ago
Do you realize jeff bezos was a billionaire long before amazon recorded a profit? So quite literally no, this is not true.
throw__away7391•8m ago
If you actually introduced your wet dream billionaire wealth tax that's going to pay for everything forever, all these people would be forced to go to the market at the same time and sell their assets while every other billionaire is also going to be in the same position at the same time, so who are they selling to? The market would crash (also incidentally impacting all your middle class retirement plans) destroying billions upon billions of dollars in wealth. But OK, let's say you get this money now, let's pretend you could get enough, and the government starts spending it on entitlement programs--what you have just done is convert investment into consumption. What do you expect to happen in this case? I'd expect surging inflation.
Society effectively consumes everything that we produce. If we want to consume more, we need to produce more. The government can put their finger on the scale as to what is produced and who consumes it, the government can put policies in place that lead to additional production via removing obstacles from productive activities, introducing obstacles to unproductive activities, making investments or subsidies, etc. but all of this is more complicated and messy, it needs to be done intelligently and carries risk of distorting market realities leading to unintended consequences. This is called "governing" and it's what politicians are supposed to be doing. Outsiders who want power but can't effectively govern are always trying to sell people on these "one weird trick" narratives of easy fixes to hard problems.
Bezos has, I believe, two jets and three yachts along with a number a large homes with large household staff. A lot for a person to be sure, but most of his wealth is unrealized investment in a company that delivers goods to hundreds of millions of people's homes and powers countless tech companies that are used by billions of people. Taking his boats and planes away is just not going to move the needle, it's not going to make groceries cheaper or reduce the price of college tuition or add housing stock (aside from a handful of luxury homes in a couple of neighborhoods around the wold) or add any new doctors to the medical field. Certainly taxes can be increased, but no one should expect this to make a real dent in the budget. We got into this situation by decades of taking the easy route, so of course people are looking for easy solutions.
This is the exact same kind of magical thinking that the right uses to convince people that their life would be oh so much better if they just kicked out all the immigrants. There is no magic bullet, most spending by the government is on the middle class, most consumption is by the middle class (this is even more dramatic if you measure this in real world physical goods terms rather than including "luxury" markup on spending by the upper middle class). This is a huge group, hundreds of millions, that collectively consumes an unfathomable amount of resources, and moving some numbers around on a few computers in downtown Manhattan is not going to change this.
Mountain_Skies•56m ago
beeflet•32m ago
NortySpock•24m ago
beeflet•15m ago
croes•56m ago
Quite the opposite, capitalism even enforces useless work because it’s the main source of income.
That’s why all these AI bros dreams of AI benefits are BS unless they think they could get rid of capitalism
spwa4•51m ago
Perhaps surprisingly, humans don't object to that. Our human intelligence works by subtracting what we can predict from the inputs and then focusing on the portion that remains.
So if AI either prevents interactions with humans or makes them more predictable, then human minds just ... stop. Literally. Humans won't do anything anymore.
UBI will either fail, or it will succeed and humans will just stop.
xhkkffbf•39m ago
aleph_minus_one•38m ago
If the work was really so useless, companies would love to become leaner (i.e. fire the employees who do useless work). It's rather the government who by its control freakery introduces lots of red tape for companies.
xg15•9m ago
KingOfCoders•59m ago
Mountain_Skies•55m ago
analog31•40m ago
/s
steveBK123•29m ago
I am to the left politically, but I do not think UBI can work in practice for the majority of population due to human nature and the resulting lack of purpose. People do seem to have an innate need for purpose, and most people need one imposed on them by circumstances, it would seem.
The % of people who will flourish and pursue their passions, given the means to pursue any higher purpose.. is stunningly low. They are the same people that are high-agency, intelligent, driven and will hustle in any job anyway.
The best case outcome for the majority is sitting on their couch consuming AI slop entertainment infinitely, and I am not optimistic we'd even land there.
The COVID bubble was the closest we've come in the US in terms of people having more time on their hands with less financial concerns (stimulus checks, employers subsidized to make payroll, unemployment payment increases, unemployment expiration extensions, federal benefit income caps raised, increased healthcare subsidies, student loan payment pauses, eviction moratoriums, etc etc). Unfortunately it seemed the outcome was less of human flourishing and more an increase in general disorder & disaffection.
Likewise, after Capital having financed trillions in investment to deliver AGI is not going to hand over the money to find UBI willingly.
Even people in the middle seem to be easily swayed by allegations of waste/scams in government benefits programs.