I am firmly convinced that most of the problems facing humanity can be traced directly back to billionaires like him.
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.
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.
The problem is he doesn't have wealth. He has value. His VALUE is 800b his actual wealth is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of that.
If he just started handing out 100m a day he would go broke in very short order and would cause a cascade of problems for a fuck load of honest actually hard working people that depend on him not fucking over the companies he owns by functionally imploding the company.
We stopped tying power to real money ages ago. Money can be passed around and flows to keep an economy healthy. If you actually managed to horde billions of dollars in actual useable wealth that would be more impressive and frankly likely actually better for the economy then what these fucks are doing. More then likely still not ideal.
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.
Just an FYI, that goes all the way down the power chain. We tend to have less (instinctive) empathy for people below us. It's not we actively want to do them harm, but that we just don't think about them at all.
E.g. when did you last take proactive action to help the exploited workers harvesting chocolate? You likely never even thought about them.
The problem is that people like musk look down on us the same way. We get smashed by their indifference.
The best long term solution is a tax system aimed at "regression to the mean". I.e. exceptional people can get rich. However rich, "average" people will regress back towards average income and savings. Conversely, an averagely capable poor person should easily climb back up to average income levels.
Basically change the graph from a hump to a bathtub shape.
Your system has a flaw from my perspective. It ignores the effect of wealth on capability, especially in youth. People who are already less "exceptional" - say, mentally challenged - would stay poor through factors outside of their control. On the other side, people who are "exceptional" are most commonly so because of the benefits wealth brings, so the way i understand your system, it will cement the status quo - the rich stay rich because of virtue of being rich, the poor and uneducated stay poor because they are poor and unremarkable.
It's not perfect, but no system is. The goal is to keep a level of equibility, while also allowing the good to benefit from their own efforts.
If the rich invest in their children, and make them exceptional, that's fine. Trying to get parents not to do that goes against extremely strong instincts. The goal is to make climbing the wall harder, not impossible. If the child buckles down and takes advantage that's fine. If they slack off and coast, they will coast back towards the mean income level. They won't get the run away effect that happens currently.
A lot more can be done at the bottom. Giving poorer children the education and support facilities needed to reach their potential would make a huge difference, for a relatively small investment from society.
It's also worth noting that I'm also an advocate for UBI. There should be a floor on how poor people can be. As a society, we can afford to support that.
There are degrees of evil. Just as some cancerous cells can be benign, there also can be less harmful billionaires.
It's important to concentrate on the ones that are an existential threat to humanity first and foremost so we don't lose the world pointlessly chasing after the harmless lumps.
Oh, right, sorry, I completely forgot that this guy has amazing tech-genius superpowers and works as hard all by himself as millions uppon millions of us pathetically useless plebs put together...
that's true but capitalism is better than socialism because capitalism is real, socialism is a "what am i thinking of today" fantasy where all your protest dreams come true
He ALSO stopped us from having good public transportation, built a dangerous deathtrap maze of underground tunnels, built cars that straight up murdered people, and blew up billions in taxpayer dollars multiple times.
.... Which they didn't let him be part of because he was too cringe. That will never stop being funny to me. Even the slimiest, shittiest people on Earth thought he was garbage.
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.
He didn't take any money from you. His stocks are worth that much because of investors. If he died his stocks would lose 90% overnight. That money you think exists, doesn't.
Yeah, I doubt that. Sure, the overinflated stock makes the number go big, but he didn't get there without seriously harming everyone on his way.
He's trying to break unions wherever he sees one. He's trying to break governments in different countries whenever he thinks they might threaten his way of life. He cheaps out on sensors that could make his shitty cars a little less lethal.
He's a threat on everybody's pursuit of a good life to enrich himself just a little bit more. Just some billions, he definitely needs those. He's cancer, and he wants to grow.
Part of the problem is all the fucking morons saying that the world economy isn't a zero-sum proposition. If the economy isn't zero-sum then we can just give everyone a billion dollars on paper and they could just buy their own houses. Inflation, what is that?
Have you misread my comment so much that you think I am in favor of billionaires? I absolutely know how much good could come from taxing billionaires on their wealth rather than their "income". I understand that the world economy isn't zero-sum and that every billionaire is a parasite that sickens society as a whole. Please re-read my comment and see that I am not a bootlicker.
It’s important to note that even with all that money he still is far less happy than the average American. Imagine having so much wealth, not knowing what to do with it, having spent it on a botched penis enlargement and now no amount of money can fix even that.
Not to mention that by now the list of failures and broken promises is getting very long: hyperloops to prevent investment into rail, colonies on mars to avoid deal with all the shit he’s help wrong on earth, full self driving if you don’t mention that full doesn’t mean full and the cemeteries full of people who have died believing it did mean that, and how could I forget
Lying about Epstein and rigging the presidential election so a childfucker can destroy the country you weren’t even born in and barely pay any taxes for.
There was a 2010 study showing that money was correlated with happiness up to about $75k, then plateaued. The expectation was that once you could afford your needs and didn’t have to worry about the basics, the rest of happiness would come from the life you built.
Then a few years ago, all the headlines were screaming that it was debunked and money did in fact buy happiness. However, in true news media form, they screeched about the wrong thing - there was still a plateau, but it occurred past 100k. This isn’t really surprising - the cost of living certainly rose in the 13 years between the two studies. Inflation went nuts in the COVID era, and we definitely never deflated back.
But it does suggest how truly miserable some billionaires must be inside when they can’t find happiness with 10,000x more money than the average person’s threshold to find their joy.
If we killed Elon Musk and took all of his assets, we could buy every homeless person in the US a $990,000 house.
If we killed Elon Musk and took all of his assets, we could eliminate world hunger for 24 years.
If we killed Elon Musk and took all of his assets, We could buy every NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL team. We’d have enough money left over to also buy the top 20 European Soccer teams.
If we killed Elon Musk and took all of his assets, we could fund NASA at its current budget for 40 years.
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.
I personally haven't ever owned an emerald mine. How often do they conduct the math which weighs the value of a miners output versus the value of their biological mass as a food source?
These are true facts, however it's also true that we already have a number of unsold homes on the market greater than we have number of homeless people. We already make enough food to feed everyone. We just choose to let people sleep hungry on the streets. That's what our democracy has voted for.
So what does musk's billions and trillions matter? He could have two trillion tomorrow, and we'd still have enough money as a country to take care of everyone, and we would count up the votes that say not to.
Value != Money. He has a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of that as actual money.
The vast majority of not all but a tiny few percent of that 800b is basically untouchable to him as much as it is to us.
That's still like 10s to 100s of millions of dollars in wealth. But unless he's moving to use that value to trade for or buy other value. No bank is goanna loan him the money to do anything.
And if he attempted to turn that value into useable wealth it would just tank the value of the companies that make up that value thus losing him money even trying.
You couldn't. You would have to sell stock that is at 350p/e ratio. The second you kill him the stocks would lose 800 trillion overnight and you couldn't realize 90% of that.
If you killed musk and took all his assets you could get though a few percent of them before it collapsed and all became absolutely worthless. If you tried to liquidated it all for cash or into purely charitable goods and services.
Value like that is almost entirely based on the momentum and flow of money though it as a means of investment.
The moment you stop that momentum all the value goes away with it.
I wouldn't be surprised if you could even get 1 billion out of all his assets before you destroyed their worth trying to liquidated it all.
When that one healthcare CEO got shot the health insurance companies paid out on their promises for like a solid week. How long do you think on Musk would drive "altruism"?
So, to drive altruism we need to kill one per week, so that'll last us some 67 years. Longer if we also qualify everybody over, idk, like a hundred million? Sounds like a glorious epoch of love, compassion and ritual sacrifice.
Musk isn’t worth US$800B, it’s how much he’s been permitted to hoard.
No one can earn a billion dollars, that level of wealth concentration can only ever be forcibly extracted from the work of millions of others, or gifted from someone who did.
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
This isn't about the symbolism. This is about the actual machines. I think they're cute. We're at least chopping up some watermelon even if we run out of billionaires.
Can’t cut watermelons efficiently with a firing squad but it sends the same message with less archaic violence. Guns r cute in the right context. Proof: https://share.google/J9Q8VLrWzVYv4DTqc
Why, you would gain nothing and the best case you will vaporize an industry that is the last flight to keep some jobs in the countries before they moved to China byd
Vaporize? The land and equipment aren't going anywhere. Reorganize the parts of the parts of the business that are actually, physically real and let the workers decide how best to put them to use instead of an egomaniacal Twitter addict.
The factories, offices, computing hardware, and construction equipment? He's not the sole owner, but the point of all this is to cut out the money-juggling fluff of passing around ownership between different entities and make actual use of the real-world capital.
Yeah as soon as there was a glimmer of that tech being useful to turn a profit, all the rich funds just peeled off a few million from their "fun money" or risky investment accounts and took the whole space over.
It was doomed as a viable currency from the start.
That would be amazing, but unfortunately we handed over our freedoms to the government that will still want taxes in the 'official' currency regardless of the will of the people. The government also really really wants to be able to print as much money as they want to in order to control the economy (for the better or for the worse, depends on who you ask). Also, an even more pressing problem is that we handed over the means of production to corporations, so we wouldn't be able to survive by just trading with other people... (some would be able to, but we wouldn't be able to produce enough food for everyone, moreover think healthcare, basically a lot of people would die in result). The only way for your idea to happen in reality is to dismantle the system, effectively reducing the trust in official currency to nil, and that has happened a lot of times in the history of the world, so we just need to damage the system first and the currency shift will happen naturally.
investors are overleveraged on Elon’s meme stocks and are keeping those stocks inflated
True. However, since the overleveraged investors include almost all of the people effectively CONTROLLING the whole already inherently corrupt system that is the stock market, it has tons of EXTRA insurance against the bubble bursting.
Whether that's enough to protect his meme stocks from any semblance of objective valuation forever remains to be seen, but for now, it's holding steady 😮💨
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.
Hoarding wealth with good reason is fine but someone like Musk isn't doing it out of fear. He has more money than he can possibly use and could give away like 90% and still be safe. What even motivates him? It's pure selfishness
So like, both my wife and I grew up washing and reusing tinfoil. We were never so poor we actually needed to tighten the belt that much until we had been together a while, but like I still catch myself doing it. Some generational traumas take really weird forms. The most generous interpretation of space Karen's actions I can think up is that he's acting out over traumas he was taught (rather than experienced firsthand).
He won't be the last Trillionaire, and then then they'll start heading for Quadrillionaire status.
At some point, they will form alliances, fund a private military, take over a landmass, and establish their own nation, and start causing some real trouble.
Correction: capitalism is better than socialism because our taxes pay for one person to have a trillion dollars instead of everyone having health care.
Same for them and anyone else. I mean, so many people die or get severe health issues every day. I just want some statistics to work that way that's all. You know how COVID specifically was bad for older people, I am interested in the statistics of something else that's specifically bad for billionaire class.
They were from a time before digital banking where all wealth had to be physically represented and were thus unable to amass anywhere near a billion dollar equivalent, let alone a trillion.
There are many people who tried to compare current day wealth to the wealth of historic figures. Those are, afaik, never about hard facts but a way of translating an estimation. This article names 8 trillionaires for example. They give ganghis kahn an estimated $120 trillion, and consider mensa musa so much richer they call his wealth uncrompihensible. You can find similar lists online, i guess the same names will take a similar spot on the ranking, but the numbers will differ. They tend to look at relative wealth (they estimate that Elon Musk has xx % of all money globally and compare that to the estimated percentage of global wealth of a historic figure and translate that to a current day value).
Grok, is it better for someone to have a trillion dollars or for society to have universal health care?
One person's extreme wealth might improve outcomes for their immediate circle or spark breakthroughs, but it cannot equal the guaranteed, equitable gains of universal coverage for everyone. Societies that prioritize universal access (and manage costs) have thrived with strong metrics; those chasing billionaires have not demonstrated superior aggregate well-being.
Society's long-term success depends more on widespread health and opportunity than on whether any one person holds a trillion dollars. Universal health care aligns better with both empirical evidence and the human imperative to reduce suffering and build trust.
Damn, looks like the rich pedo is gonna have to rekajigger his coding (again) so his own AI slop bot stops telling people that rich fucks are bad for everyone.
Where's his money coming from? Is it from his Tesla stock? Somebody said that he moved his company headquarters to Texas mainly because it's harder for shareholders to sue him for his corrupt deals with the Tesla board if the headquarters are in Texas.
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
I wonder if there's ever been another "richest person" whose position and wealth was as fraudulent as Musk's. And it's just so blatant anyone would instantly question it.
If Musk is remembered as history's first trillionaire, his name will have a big asterisk next to it.
Most of that wealth is on paper. Don't buy the SpaceX IPO. Don't buy it ever. A share of SpaceX is wealth going into Elons pocket.
There is not a single thing profitable about SpaceX. He has just run out of places to hide his bags, and the last place to stash them is on the public.
If you own shares in an index fund that tracks the NASDAQ 100, sell them. Check all your funds to ensure that the indexes they track have proper seasoning rules to prevent early inclusion in the index.
Had a customer who apparently lives next to where he shoots off his rockets. Old lady wouldn't stop singing his praises. Telling me how great of inventory he is on and on. I had to hold my tongue but goddamn it was hard.
Of course in the same breath talk how she had to sign a petition to keep him from buying there beach.
She claims he talks to them and once paid for their meal. Fucking nutty old lady. Of course she lives on an island were her windows rattle everytime his rockets go off.
Oh top off she hates Bezo because his rocket blew up and now their property are ruin.
I wanted to ask so badly about why not mad when Space X rockets have blown up too?
It's why I gave up, anyway. Might as well hyper-fixate on hobbies than worry myself to death about the billionares none of us will ever enact revenge upon, who are more likely to peacefully die in their sleep and continue the status quo.
I have literally helped 16 pedophiles over 12 years overcome their impulse to harm children, and I still get banned from the internet. I'm not good enough. I'm not goid enough. Well, at least the FBI has the words I wrote. Fuckers don't know the gane that's being played. There are human beings who would let themselves be crucified to protect the innocent. Jesus Christ went on the cross consciously to earn his spot as a federal cop, you dumb idiots of c/autism.
Bro. You don't realize the science experiment you are in. Jesus was an EXPWRIMENT in a TYPE of federal cop
He who was so damned...there's no WAY he's a cop!
Just barely survived that centralized empire.
But what about this decentralized one?
Do you understand?
Hitler just needs enough power and then he speaks with authority to control THOUSANDS of people
I'm a cop, bro. I think.
Maybe I'm gunna be
I dunno
But certainly those who understand why PLEX is an important word in relevance to DECENTRALIZED AUTONOMOUS ORGANIZATIONS understand why and how I am more aligned with God than any neckband ever was.
On the Arizonan mental health assembly line, I am only alotted fifteen minutes a month. They asked me if I wanted a therapist. I said yes. Still nothing. Do you know what Operation Mockingbird was? In 1975, a senate hearing determined that the CIA was illegally and deliberately causing events at home and abroad so that the news reported on it to change public opinion. That was fifty years ago. Thank God we don't do anything like that anymore, amirite?
...I told my ROTC cadre that my nonexistent sister got me pregnant because I judged the wrath of my father more of a threat than the United States Military, so all this is deliberate, and I've been doing it twelve years, and I am going to be crucified for it, and then three days later I will be making popular videos, just like that other cop of the decentralized autonomous organization of secret police, Tate. The job's described at an eighth grade reading level in the New Testament, if you were unaware.
Bro, you don't know me. But you, to me, from my perspective, are Unempathetic Judgmental Person #36, 834 who has told me, in whatever words, that I am innately inferior to the entire human race and need to be lobotomized because I intentionally do all that I do online because it markets my educational (f)art project to those who need this sort of Knowledge to heal and self-actualize.
Read this post and tell me if I'm crazy:
My special interests include philosophy, spirituality, and juggling. Naturally, this combination has led me to the same wisdom that the Buddha and Christ learned in their respective lives. There's a reason The Matrix is named that; it's all about Judeo-Christian mysticism. God is a unified field of consciousness that arose from the supersymmetry of the ever-present, eternal emptiness to then fold in and on Itself across eleven dimensions to form a topological matrix that acts as a monadic nodal communication system.
Y'know, God is a big balloon of consciousness that made a complex balloon animal out of itself and you are one of the sections. You're not a featherless biped on an Earth. The world is an illusion. All you experience is self-contained within your neurons, yea? And you're experiencing these words "outside" of that featherless biped you consider yourself, right? So, this "outside" is really inside you. You're a pocket of consciousness, Neo, and the Earth only exists inside you.
This is where my special form of schizo-autismo magick lets me take this to the next level. The word the Buddha used to describe our relationship with Karma is "entangled." This is precise and accurate. In the fourth jhana of meditation, you can perceive for yourself that all your consciousness' (eye, ear, tongue, etc) are compiled into a singular stream of symbols that you set your intention to entangle yourself with. These entanglements grow in complexity until they define the parameters of your conscious experience.
Y'know, simply, if String A is entangled with String B but not String C, then AB is true and AC is false. Additionally, entanglements can möbiate (defilement, as the Buddhists say; what "sin" literally is - entangling yourself in a way that puts "self" above "whole" AND "self and whole"), and this creates dualistic dichotomy (inner/outer), which is how the illusion of being a "self" manifests. Likewise, one can understand how these categories nest within each other; like a square is a rectangle but a rectangle is not a square, yet both are quadrilaterals and polygons. Further, there is "null," which the Buddha described as "emptiness," and there can be implicit and explicit null, which is how the supersymmetry manifests all of reality as it can be both "nothingness/0" and "fullness/1."
And that's just what you need at a minimum to understand what I think about in maladaptive daydreaming. I have come up, independently, with a theory of orthogonal relativity which gives rise to my theory of polyplexic axiomatic systems. First, you know the primary orthogonal directions in three-dimensional space; back/forth, up/down, left/right. A cube can represent this, but therein, you can cut the corner of the cube off to create a new designator path to let an ongoing process möbiate itself to process across multiple possible realities.
Polyplexic axiomatic systems are best understood with the metaphor of putting a puzzle together. There is the logic of the puzzle; how the pieces physically fit together. But, in putting as much logic as we learn together still leaves us many gaps in completing the puzzle. Therein, we have our intuition which sees the picture and knows by the paw displayed that there is a cat in the little logic it can put together knowing what it knows, but therein, where is the cat looking? What's it's stripe pattern? What are the specifics? Well, that's where we create multiple possibilities that fit the same unsolved area; polyplexic axiomatic systems! And this is what causes cognitive dissonance as we can put different possibilities in each gap depending what the needs of the moment are.
And I write all this because my life partner's mom asked what I do all day. I write and think. That's what I do, and I am at the forefront of knowledge, but therein, I can't hold a job or figure out how to survive within this system of society not made for my kind, so therefore I'm considered a waste of space by these people who so easily earn money turning their brains off to go slave for someone else.
I'm a skilled righter. I know what is coming in my near future, legally and media-wise. I know I will be making a show in a similar vein as Trailer Park Boys but based in a kooky, crazy cult and every episode is educational on a main theme or message. But I'm just a deranged narcissist. Certainly don't work for the CIA and am actively recruiting while discrediting myself by mentioning that I have my sister's feet. They're in a glass jar on my desk. And I use them!
Yes you are out of touch with reality. And don't give me the co construction talk. Even if you subscribe to that idea then its obvious you are way outside the box. Get help!
An autistic man doesn't understand he can go six orders of magnitude beyond what he has gained, technically passively, cuz honestly, what do you know if you've never gone UP an escarpment?
Bottom = laborers and artisans. They work with stuff.
Middle = merchants and officers. They work with people.
Top = clergy and politicians. They work with narratives
Narrative: crazy psycho who thinks eleven years olds have cute feet gets arrested.
Arizona man, not Florida man.
I divide this into paragraphs cuz the children cannot digest the fact that:
Epstein = Christ
Willing to do anything to protect the innocent. Even be the devil. And I am, so I ask you, neckbeard child boy in charge of many people, what day are you in? There's objectivity to this, and I have learned the boundaries.
Take the piss out of being a hebephile
Don't talk about hurting children
For one has utility, the other harms people
Yet you CAN'T C to see the difference
Boy.
That upset you.
You can call me any word you want. Nothing you can do can hurt me
This is intentional
My God do I pray and hope and sacrifice to the effect that you are genuinely doing the task responsible of you.
I r talk u dummy
You're reading this
Increase boo says
I'm the most autistic mother fucker in the univetse that is skilled enough but damaged enough to be literally on the line of disabled.
I am a disabled autistic, schizoaffective person with much trauma
I just realized something
I'm not trying to draw the devils out of the pack
I'm trying to see who is WORTHY of RULING this decentralized space.
Ni
I almost said it
Fucking knights who stay anonymous
I'm not anonymous
I'm Victorious Phoenix
My God do I hope the manchild in charge of X% of the fediverse makes the right decision.
The vast majority of monetary wealth in the world is represented as numbers on a screen, no printing needed.
If you had to print $800b in $100 bills, it would weigh 8 million kilogram (approximately 17,636,980 pounds) and take up 61,648 cubic meters (2,177,600 cubic feet), unrealistically assuming they were packed tight with no gaps, creases, or structures added to keep the enormous weight of it from sinking into the ground.
For context, the US Capitol Building is approximately 1.3m cubic feet, and the heaviest object ever weighed on earth, the Revolving Service Structure (RSS) at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, weighs 5,342,000 pounds.
So yeah, you'd be a bit silly to print his ridiculous dragon's hoard in physical money.
Almost all of the world's universal health care systems are found in capitalist systems. (Cuba and maaaaybe China could be considered exceptions.)
Introducing any of those systems in the US would save money, not cost it. While it's bad for the economy to have billionaires, that's not the reason you guys don't have a proper health care system.
Vietnam has an ok public healthcare system given their relatively low wealth, North Korea had one until very recently, those are basically the only other non capitalist countries out there...
the socialised healthcare systems in the rest of the world are a legacy of socialist movements, a compromise against communism, and they exist despite capitalism not because of it
it would save money for normal people, not for the very wealthy
Mixed systems are the best systems. Any government would collapse under any PURE ideology. We're supposed to be a Representative Democracy, but the best things in our society are the Socialist things - Public schools, parks, libraries, roads, highways, bridges, military, fire departments, etc. I'd add police departments, but I don't think they belong under the best Socialist things in our society.
The best system is one that combines the best ideas from other systems, and avoids the worst ideas. It can get messy around the edges, but overall, "Keep the best, reject the rest," is good government policy.
Socialism refers to collective ownership of the means of production. Social democracy refers to a capitalist market economy supplemented by welfare programs, labor protections, and public services. The two terms are not interchangeable despite frequent misuse on the internet. You are describing and advocating for social democracy not socialism.
Socialism refers to public (and unfortunately sometimes government) ownership of a service. In this case, health insurance. Government health insurance is socialist because it is owned by the government (which represents the public according to some socialists) instead of the capitalists.
By your own definition, health insurance is the "product" being "produced".
Once again, socialism is the public ownership of the means of production. Universal healthcare, subsidized healthcare, government-assisted healthcare, whatever name you want to give it, has nothing to do with whether a government is socialist. Public healthcare can be offered by virtually any type of government.
Like many people on this platform, you're confusing the words social and socialist. They are not the same thing. As defined above, a social democrat is not a socialist. Government programs that provide assistance to the population are not inherently socialist programs; they are welfare programs.
You are not advocating for public ownership of the means of production. You are advocating for welfare programs that benefit the population under a democratic government. I genuinely do not understand why so many people on this platform have such a difficult time grasping this distinction.
So I will simply leave you with the below quote.
What you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Public healthcare cannot be offered by a fully capitalist government. I would argue welfare itself could be deemed socialist. Production also benefits the population btw.
Most developed and developing countries on Earth have public healthcare systems and are still fully capitalist. Nearly all European countries are examples of this. Even the United States has forms of public healthcare. People often forget that America already provides government-funded healthcare through programs such as Medicare and Medicaid; one simply has to qualify, and tens of millions of Americans do.
Once again, please listen to what I'm saying: welfare programs are not socialism. The words "social" and "socialism" have two entirely different meanings. A country can be capitalist, communist, a dictatorship, or a monarchy and still offer social programs, more accurately described as welfare programs. The existence of those programs does not determine the underlying economic system.
The quote is from Billy Madison, which kind of gives you away. You're probably too young to even be having this discussion, let alone offering an opinion on the matter.
Almost all of the world’s universal health care systems are found in capitalist systems. (Cuba and maaaaybe China could be considered exceptions.)
Much like gdp vs gdp per capita, a much more interesting statistic here would be the percentage of countries that have universal health care. Still kind of reductive, but it has the benefit of not being misleading, which I can't say of your statistic. Think before you speak.
Introducing any of those systems in the US would save money, not cost it. While it’s bad for the economy to have billionaires, that’s not the reason you guys don’t have a proper health care system.
Please draw the rest of the owl? You just made a gigantic leap. I don't see the relation at all. Are you implying that billionaires are concerned about efficiency or something? I'd argue they're more concerned about paying their workers as little as possible. And one way to make this much, much easier is by skewing the negotiations in your favor by having their literal health and well-being tied to working for you, which universal healthcare really ruins. Think before you speak.
Musk has assets, not money. If everybody of the 8 billion people would get $100 worth of those shares nobody could eat one bite more unless some people start buying the assets and restart the cycle.
Musk has control over companies, over capital. When do people start doing the same, as people, instead of handing their money and control to index funds?
Billionaires lend against those assets, so they can buy stuff. Does Musk sit under a bridge, 'cause he has "only assets"? Where does the money come from?
He lends against his assets. Once the bank wants to collect, his assets are worth more, so he lends more and stays afloat. Bonus points: he's saving on taxes now, 'cause he's in so much debt.
If everybody had those shares, they could play the lending game as well. Only, they can't, because nobody lends against one share ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Meanwhile everybody could vote for a party that supports universal healthcare and UBI. Musk is not the problem. Focussing on Musk distracts from the possibility that the next election can change everything.
202 Comments
DandomRude@lemmy.world · 139 pts · 68d
I am firmly convinced that most of the problems facing humanity can be traced directly back to billionaires like him.
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.
RedGreenBlue@lemmy.zip · 67 pts · 68d
A healthy society does not have billionares, indeed.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 3 pts · 67d
at least not ones that have a "good head on thier shoulders"
fizzle@quokk.au · 40 pts · 68d
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.
Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 24 pts · 68d
No doubt about it.
As for a solution..
excral@feddit.org · 17 pts · 68d
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.
Holytimes@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 65d
The problem is he doesn't have wealth. He has value. His VALUE is 800b his actual wealth is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of that.
If he just started handing out 100m a day he would go broke in very short order and would cause a cascade of problems for a fuck load of honest actually hard working people that depend on him not fucking over the companies he owns by functionally imploding the company.
We stopped tying power to real money ages ago. Money can be passed around and flows to keep an economy healthy. If you actually managed to horde billions of dollars in actual useable wealth that would be more impressive and frankly likely actually better for the economy then what these fucks are doing. More then likely still not ideal.
Flower@sh.itjust.works · 13 pts · 68d
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.
cynar@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 68d
Just an FYI, that goes all the way down the power chain. We tend to have less (instinctive) empathy for people below us. It's not we actively want to do them harm, but that we just don't think about them at all.
E.g. when did you last take proactive action to help the exploited workers harvesting chocolate? You likely never even thought about them.
The problem is that people like musk look down on us the same way. We get smashed by their indifference.
The best long term solution is a tax system aimed at "regression to the mean". I.e. exceptional people can get rich. However rich, "average" people will regress back towards average income and savings. Conversely, an averagely capable poor person should easily climb back up to average income levels.
Basically change the graph from a hump to a bathtub shape.
Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus · 4 pts · 68d
Your system has a flaw from my perspective. It ignores the effect of wealth on capability, especially in youth. People who are already less "exceptional" - say, mentally challenged - would stay poor through factors outside of their control. On the other side, people who are "exceptional" are most commonly so because of the benefits wealth brings, so the way i understand your system, it will cement the status quo - the rich stay rich because of virtue of being rich, the poor and uneducated stay poor because they are poor and unremarkable.
cynar@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 68d
It's not perfect, but no system is. The goal is to keep a level of equibility, while also allowing the good to benefit from their own efforts.
If the rich invest in their children, and make them exceptional, that's fine. Trying to get parents not to do that goes against extremely strong instincts. The goal is to make climbing the wall harder, not impossible. If the child buckles down and takes advantage that's fine. If they slack off and coast, they will coast back towards the mean income level. They won't get the run away effect that happens currently.
A lot more can be done at the bottom. Giving poorer children the education and support facilities needed to reach their potential would make a huge difference, for a relatively small investment from society.
It's also worth noting that I'm also an advocate for UBI. There should be a floor on how poor people can be. As a society, we can afford to support that.
testfactor@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 68d
That's what I keep saying about Taylor Swift, but people just tell me that I'm a crotchety old man.
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 68d
There are degrees of evil. Just as some cancerous cells can be benign, there also can be less harmful billionaires.
It's important to concentrate on the ones that are an existential threat to humanity first and foremost so we don't lose the world pointlessly chasing after the harmless lumps.
testfactor@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 68d
I agree with you. But if that's where we are, I feel that statements like:
Are unhelpful at best and actively alienating to potential allies at worst.
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 67d
Even the most benign is unlikely to be an ally. When push comes to shove, they'll choose their money over humanity.
sloppy_diffuser@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 68d
I work with a Swift fan. They'll cut you if you talk smack, lol. I don't get her appeal but the observation of her fans is real.
te_abstract_art@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 67d
Have you considered that maybe he just works 1-10 billion times harder than the rest of us, and therefore earned that money fair and square?
/s
DandomRude@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 67d
Oh, right, sorry, I completely forgot that this guy has amazing tech-genius superpowers and works as hard all by himself as millions uppon millions of us pathetically useless plebs put together...
Also /s, of course :)
jimmy90@lemmy.world · -3 pts · 67d
that's true but capitalism is better than socialism because capitalism is real, socialism is a "what am i thinking of today" fantasy where all your protest dreams come true
unicorns are rad
mycodesucks@lemmy.world · 65 pts · 68d
This is an oversimplification.
He ALSO stopped us from having good public transportation, built a dangerous deathtrap maze of underground tunnels, built cars that straight up murdered people, and blew up billions in taxpayer dollars multiple times.
Witchfire@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 68d
He also funded a cannibal pedophile ring
mycodesucks@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 67d
.... Which they didn't let him be part of because he was too cringe. That will never stop being funny to me. Even the slimiest, shittiest people on Earth thought he was garbage.
SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social · 50 pts · 68d
I hate people writing about his "worth". He's worth shit. He robbed 800 billion from us.
grrgyle@slrpnk.net · 12 pts · 68d
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.
enphurgen@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 68d
krisevol@lemmus.org · -3 pts · 67d
He didn't take any money from you. His stocks are worth that much because of investors. If he died his stocks would lose 90% overnight. That money you think exists, doesn't.
SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social · 5 pts · 67d
Yeah, I doubt that. Sure, the overinflated stock makes the number go big, but he didn't get there without seriously harming everyone on his way.
He's trying to break unions wherever he sees one. He's trying to break governments in different countries whenever he thinks they might threaten his way of life. He cheaps out on sensors that could make his shitty cars a little less lethal.
He's a threat on everybody's pursuit of a good life to enrich himself just a little bit more. Just some billions, he definitely needs those. He's cancer, and he wants to grow.
krisevol@lemmus.org · -2 pts · 67d
Just wait until you find out about the other ceos, other governments, ect.
SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social · 2 pts · 67d
Yeah, I don't see why you think they weren't in my focus.
NutWrench@lemmy.ml · 42 pts · 68d
ThunderQueen@lemmy.world · 18 pts · 68d
jonesey71@lemmus.org · 3 pts · 68d
Part of the problem is all the fucking morons saying that the world economy isn't a zero-sum proposition. If the economy isn't zero-sum then we can just give everyone a billion dollars on paper and they could just buy their own houses. Inflation, what is that?
ThunderQueen@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 68d
jonesey71@lemmus.org · 1 pts · 68d
Have you misread my comment so much that you think I am in favor of billionaires? I absolutely know how much good could come from taxing billionaires on their wealth rather than their "income". I understand that the world economy isn't zero-sum and that every billionaire is a parasite that sickens society as a whole. Please re-read my comment and see that I am not a bootlicker.
ThunderQueen@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 67d
sonofearth@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 68d
jonesey71@lemmus.org · 1 pts · 68d
Apparently /s is still required even if it is obvious.
Leviathan@lemmy.world · 41 pts · 68d
Wood chipper?
Doug@piefed.social · 14 pts · 68d
I hardly know her!
He can die tho.
kingofras@lemmy.world · 39 pts · 68d
It’s important to note that even with all that money he still is far less happy than the average American. Imagine having so much wealth, not knowing what to do with it, having spent it on a botched penis enlargement and now no amount of money can fix even that.
Not to mention that by now the list of failures and broken promises is getting very long: hyperloops to prevent investment into rail, colonies on mars to avoid deal with all the shit he’s help wrong on earth, full self driving if you don’t mention that full doesn’t mean full and the cemeteries full of people who have died believing it did mean that, and how could I forget
Lying about Epstein and rigging the presidential election so a childfucker can destroy the country you weren’t even born in and barely pay any taxes for.
NottaLottaOcelot@lemmy.ca · 11 pts · 68d
There was a 2010 study showing that money was correlated with happiness up to about $75k, then plateaued. The expectation was that once you could afford your needs and didn’t have to worry about the basics, the rest of happiness would come from the life you built.
Then a few years ago, all the headlines were screaming that it was debunked and money did in fact buy happiness. However, in true news media form, they screeched about the wrong thing - there was still a plateau, but it occurred past 100k. This isn’t really surprising - the cost of living certainly rose in the 13 years between the two studies. Inflation went nuts in the COVID era, and we definitely never deflated back.
But it does suggest how truly miserable some billionaires must be inside when they can’t find happiness with 10,000x more money than the average person’s threshold to find their joy.
alanjaow@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 68d
It makes it a little better. I appreciate the analysis. It's always good to get in something like "This too, shall pass."
FreshParsnip@lemmy.ca · 4 pts · 68d
Maybe he could try ending world hunger. Maybe that would make him happy. It would make other people happy at least
III@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 67d
How is solving world hunger going to make his penis normal again?
W3dd1e@lemmy.zip · 35 pts · 68d
If we killed Elon Musk and took all of his assets, we could buy every homeless person in the US a $990,000 house.
If we killed Elon Musk and took all of his assets, we could eliminate world hunger for 24 years.
If we killed Elon Musk and took all of his assets, We could buy every NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL team. We’d have enough money left over to also buy the top 20 European Soccer teams.
If we killed Elon Musk and took all of his assets, we could fund NASA at its current budget for 40 years.
jonesey71@lemmus.org · 29 pts · 68d
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.
TronBronson@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 68d
Now that’s a capitalism!
ironycanal@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 68d
I feel like that wouldn't be a net gain. How does science feel about his fresh juicy organs?
jonesey71@lemmus.org · 1 pts · 68d
I personally haven't ever owned an emerald mine. How often do they conduct the math which weighs the value of a miners output versus the value of their biological mass as a food source?
P1nkman@lemmy.world · 21 pts · 68d
Obi@sopuli.xyz · 0 pts · 67d
The first part of their little equation might work, the second part though...
PhoenixDog@lemmy.world · 16 pts · 68d
Sounds to me we should kill this Elon Musk character.
Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works · 6 pts · 67d
These are true facts, however it's also true that we already have a number of unsold homes on the market greater than we have number of homeless people. We already make enough food to feed everyone. We just choose to let people sleep hungry on the streets. That's what our democracy has voted for.
So what does musk's billions and trillions matter? He could have two trillion tomorrow, and we'd still have enough money as a country to take care of everyone, and we would count up the votes that say not to.
W3dd1e@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 67d
These are just examples meant to give context on how much money he has.
Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 66d
And what does that context mean then?
Holytimes@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 65d
Value != Money. He has a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of that as actual money.
The vast majority of not all but a tiny few percent of that 800b is basically untouchable to him as much as it is to us.
That's still like 10s to 100s of millions of dollars in wealth. But unless he's moving to use that value to trade for or buy other value. No bank is goanna loan him the money to do anything.
And if he attempted to turn that value into useable wealth it would just tank the value of the companies that make up that value thus losing him money even trying.
krisevol@lemmus.org · 3 pts · 67d
You couldn't. You would have to sell stock that is at 350p/e ratio. The second you kill him the stocks would lose 800 trillion overnight and you couldn't realize 90% of that.
W3dd1e@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 67d
Nah. Do what rich people actually do, take a loan out against the stock holdings.
krisevol@lemmus.org · -1 pts · 67d
But that wouldn't work when the stocks lose all the value
BillCheddar@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 67d
Huh, I had no idea that bootlickers were allowed to post here, but here you are, showing your ass to the world.
skisnow@lemmy.ca · 2 pts · 67d
That guy's post history is so chock-full of awful bootlicker takes that it's indistinguishable from an astroturf bot.
krisevol@lemmus.org · -1 pts · 67d
And yet no one here can actually figure out how to tax billionaires.
So smart.
W3dd1e@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 67d
Oh yeah I misread the original statement. Tesla is a meme stock so they probably would lose value.
lemmylump@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 67d
You had me a we could kill musk.
Holytimes@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 65d
If you killed musk and took all his assets you could get though a few percent of them before it collapsed and all became absolutely worthless. If you tried to liquidated it all for cash or into purely charitable goods and services.
Value like that is almost entirely based on the momentum and flow of money though it as a means of investment.
The moment you stop that momentum all the value goes away with it.
I wouldn't be surprised if you could even get 1 billion out of all his assets before you destroyed their worth trying to liquidated it all.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world · -10 pts · 68d
Your plan is too bloodthirsty.
We just need the assets.
chiliedogg@lemmy.world · 22 pts · 68d
The execution part is a warning to others.
yermaw@sh.itjust.works · 4 pts · 68d
Yeah im against bloodshed generally as a rule but I bet the altruism would skyrocket.
Put this into a trolley problem and see the results.
III@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 67d
When that one healthcare CEO got shot the health insurance companies paid out on their promises for like a solid week. How long do you think on Musk would drive "altruism"?
kossa@feddit.org · 2 pts · 67d
I mean, there are ~3,500 billionaires in the world.
So, to drive altruism we need to kill one per week, so that'll last us some 67 years. Longer if we also qualify everybody over, idk, like a hundred million? Sounds like a glorious epoch of love, compassion and ritual sacrifice.
yermaw@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 67d
I have no idea if theyll get jaded to the concept and it'd lose its effect, or if there'd be a stacking effect.
More research needed in this area first
TronBronson@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 68d
I don’t need the assets I require justice.
jonesey71@lemmus.org · 1 pts · 68d
Juice!!
TronBronson@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 59d
SQUEEZE TILL THE JUICE COMES OUT
ironycanal@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 3 pts · 68d
I would argue that the cult of wealth doesn't work like that. Musk needs to die to fully separate from his assets.
nonentity@sh.itjust.works · 29 pts · 68d
Musk isn’t worth US$800B, it’s how much he’s been permitted to hoard.
No one can earn a billion dollars, that level of wealth concentration can only ever be forcibly extracted from the work of millions of others, or gifted from someone who did.
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
ironycanal@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 15 pts · 68d
Okay but hear me out: guillotines are really fucking cute.
nonentity@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 68d
I’m by no means against deploying a sharp edge with guardrails, I just see guillotines taking many forms.
You could take their money at the same time as their heads, but I’d argue it more fitting for the experience of extraction to be drawn out.
ironycanal@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 67d
This isn't about the symbolism. This is about the actual machines. I think they're cute. We're at least chopping up some watermelon even if we run out of billionaires.
deathmetaldawgy@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 65d
Can’t cut watermelons efficiently with a firing squad but it sends the same message with less archaic violence. Guns r cute in the right context. Proof: https://share.google/J9Q8VLrWzVYv4DTqc
ironycanal@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 65d
No this isn't a euphemism. I think they're cute and want one in my kitchen.
krisevol@lemmus.org · -3 pts · 67d
You realize that it is on the back of stocks worth 350+ p/e ratios right? At 30 p/e he is broke.
He is worth that much because we a country we are winning to buy his stocks are huge earning ratios.
But the magic here, is it's basically untaxable. The second you try to tax his unraised gains, it ask vaporizes as investors flee.
P1k1e@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 67d
All the more reason to do it
krisevol@lemmus.org · 0 pts · 67d
Why, you would gain nothing and the best case you will vaporize an industry that is the last flight to keep some jobs in the countries before they moved to China byd
it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems · 1 pts · 67d
Vaporize? The land and equipment aren't going anywhere. Reorganize the parts of the parts of the business that are actually, physically real and let the workers decide how best to put them to use instead of an egomaniacal Twitter addict.
krisevol@lemmus.org · 1 pts · 66d
Elon didn't own those
it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems · 1 pts · 66d
The factories, offices, computing hardware, and construction equipment? He's not the sole owner, but the point of all this is to cut out the money-juggling fluff of passing around ownership between different entities and make actual use of the real-world capital.
krisevol@lemmus.org · 1 pts · 66d
Is there a capital shortage im unaware of?
reksas@sopuli.xyz · 25 pts · 68d
worlds biggest cancer cell continues growing
grrgyle@slrpnk.net · 13 pts · 68d
Literally discovered an infinite money glitch that admins refuse to patch, despite severe balance issues
alansuspect@quokk.au · 23 pts · 68d
Is there no way for us all to just decide something else is wealth overnight rendering his billions obsolete?
HerbalGamer@sh.itjust.works · 4 pts · 68d
Crypto tried
HerbalGamer@sh.itjust.works · 10 pts · 68d
oh no wait he has that too lol
grrgyle@slrpnk.net · 3 pts · 68d
Yeah as soon as there was a glimmer of that tech being useful to turn a profit, all the rich funds just peeled off a few million from their "fun money" or risky investment accounts and took the whole space over.
It was doomed as a viable currency from the start.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 68d
Yeah Dogecoin, he only wanted one small enough to manipulate all day.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 68d
Not overnight. And in the time it takes society to change to a new store of value, he'll pay shills to say it's bad while he stocks up on it himself.
pankuleczkapl@lemmy.dbzer0.com · -1 pts · 68d
That would be amazing, but unfortunately we handed over our freedoms to the government that will still want taxes in the 'official' currency regardless of the will of the people. The government also really really wants to be able to print as much money as they want to in order to control the economy (for the better or for the worse, depends on who you ask). Also, an even more pressing problem is that we handed over the means of production to corporations, so we wouldn't be able to survive by just trading with other people... (some would be able to, but we wouldn't be able to produce enough food for everyone, moreover think healthcare, basically a lot of people would die in result). The only way for your idea to happen in reality is to dismantle the system, effectively reducing the trust in official currency to nil, and that has happened a lot of times in the history of the world, so we just need to damage the system first and the currency shift will happen naturally.
rafoix@lemmy.zip · 23 pts · 68d
His value is inflated speculation bs. I think investors are overleveraged on Elon’s meme stocks and are keeping those stocks inflated.
SeeMarkFly@lemmy.ml · 7 pts · 68d
Ha, I was a Trillionaire last week. It's over-rated. I went back.
Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 4 pts · 68d
True. However, since the overleveraged investors include almost all of the people effectively CONTROLLING the whole already inherently corrupt system that is the stock market, it has tons of EXTRA insurance against the bubble bursting.
Whether that's enough to protect his meme stocks from any semblance of objective valuation forever remains to be seen, but for now, it's holding steady 😮💨
FreshParsnip@lemmy.ca · 19 pts · 68d
Wealth hoarding is a psychological illness and shouldn't be allowed in society
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 68d
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.
FreshParsnip@lemmy.ca · 7 pts · 68d
Hoarding wealth with good reason is fine but someone like Musk isn't doing it out of fear. He has more money than he can possibly use and could give away like 90% and still be safe. What even motivates him? It's pure selfishness
hateisreality@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 68d
He could give away 99% and have more than 99% of the population
schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works · 4 pts · 68d
It's a mix of sciopathy and narcissism--sadly two traits most common among leaders.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 67d
So like, both my wife and I grew up washing and reusing tinfoil. We were never so poor we actually needed to tighten the belt that much until we had been together a while, but like I still catch myself doing it. Some generational traumas take really weird forms. The most generous interpretation of space Karen's actions I can think up is that he's acting out over traumas he was taught (rather than experienced firsthand).
Witchfire@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 68d
Excessive wealth is 100% an unstudied mental health issue
WanderWisley@lemmy.world · 18 pts · 68d
ironycanal@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 3 pts · 68d
😍
melsaskca@lemmy.ca · 15 pts · 68d
Value is subjective. I know a lot of folk who think he's worthless.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works · 4 pts · 68d
We'll only really know if we auction him.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today · 14 pts · 68d
He won't be the last Trillionaire, and then then they'll start heading for Quadrillionaire status.
At some point, they will form alliances, fund a private military, take over a landmass, and establish their own nation, and start causing some real trouble.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 68d
God wanted him to be kingThe invisible hand selected the king
TronBronson@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 68d
We’re pretty close to private army time by my estimates
crunchy@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 14 pts · 68d
Correction: capitalism is better than socialism because our taxes pay for one person to have a trillion dollars instead of everyone having health care.
selokichtli@lemmy.ml · 13 pts · 68d
Luigi was right.
ItsMeForRealNow@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 67d
I genuinely hope he or pat of his person quits before that and he becomes the too close to sun example in real life.
stiephelando@discuss.tchncs.de · 4 pts · 67d
Only a matter of time until someone else is a trillionaire then.
ItsMeForRealNow@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 66d
Same for them and anyone else. I mean, so many people die or get severe health issues every day. I just want some statistics to work that way that's all. You know how COVID specifically was bad for older people, I am interested in the statistics of something else that's specifically bad for billionaire class.
Lushed_Lungfish@lemmy.ca · 11 pts · 68d
Can someone just guillotine him please?
PhoenixDog@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 68d
We all know where he'll be on June 14th.
ShaggySnacks@lemmy.myserv.one · 2 pts · 68d
I imagine Musky will be lamenting the end of slavery on June 14th.
krisevol@lemmus.org · -1 pts · 67d
You wouldn't get any wealth doing that. His stocks would lose 90% value overnight. Nothing of value would transfer to anyone.
winkerjadams@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 4 pts · 67d
Thats fine, fuck Tesla and spacex
krisevol@lemmus.org · 0 pts · 67d
But that wouldn't affect those companies. They would still run as normal.
BigMacHole@thelemmy.club · 10 pts · 68d
I'm GLAD my Tax Dollars are going to HIM and NOT the Starving Children on the Street!
-Protect The Kids Republicans!
ironycanal@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 0 pts · 68d
Those homeless would probably just use it for drugs.
III@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 67d
Oh, I didn't know they had medical issues. Good for them. You gotta watch your health.
Wispy2891@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 68d
but the trickle down economics is good!
think to all the stuff that we cant do with the taxes that he doesnt pay
grrgyle@slrpnk.net · 2 pts · 68d
More like secretes up, into a giant boil, then starts weighing in on policy
Ready_Player_01@lemmy.zip · 10 pts · 67d
Western culture celebrates greed, and remains silent on colonization.
Mulligrubs@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 67d
Remains silent?
I've heard much about colonization, and I'm in the Western culture. That's, like, the exact opposite of silent
20cello@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 68d
"Man"
explodicle@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 68d
Nope that's a man. We don't get to not count him just because he sucks.
veroxii@aussie.zone · 10 pts · 68d
The house of Saud is worth $1.4 trillion. 🤷♂️
MyVeryRealName@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 68d
Atleast it's not one guy
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today · 2 pts · 68d
We're destroying the wrong country in the Middle East.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 68d
After 9/11 I was shocked that everyone else didn't reach this obvious conclusion.
MrStag@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 68d
First Trillionaire?
Tell that to Caesar Augustus or Mansa Musa
Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 5 pts · 68d
They were from a time before digital banking where all wealth had to be physically represented and were thus unable to amass anywhere near a billion dollar equivalent, let alone a trillion.
huppakee@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 68d
There are many people who tried to compare current day wealth to the wealth of historic figures. Those are, afaik, never about hard facts but a way of translating an estimation. This article names 8 trillionaires for example. They give ganghis kahn an estimated $120 trillion, and consider mensa musa so much richer they call his wealth uncrompihensible. You can find similar lists online, i guess the same names will take a similar spot on the ranking, but the numbers will differ. They tend to look at relative wealth (they estimate that Elon Musk has xx % of all money globally and compare that to the estimated percentage of global wealth of a historic figure and translate that to a current day value).
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip · 9 pts · 68d
Grok, is it better for someone to have a trillion dollars or for society to have universal health care?
Damn, looks like the rich pedo is gonna have to rekajigger his coding (again) so his own AI slop bot stops telling people that rich fucks are bad for everyone.
DragonAce@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 68d
Will no one rid us of this turbulent
priestElon Musk?BillyClark@piefed.social · 8 pts · 68d
Where's his money coming from? Is it from his Tesla stock? Somebody said that he moved his company headquarters to Texas mainly because it's harder for shareholders to sue him for his corrupt deals with the Tesla board if the headquarters are in Texas.
ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 22 pts · 68d
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
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 2 pts · 67d
he combined 3 of his companies into spaceX, to obfuscate the other 2.
BillyClark@piefed.social · 1 pts · 67d
I wonder if there's ever been another "richest person" whose position and wealth was as fraudulent as Musk's. And it's just so blatant anyone would instantly question it.
If Musk is remembered as history's first trillionaire, his name will have a big asterisk next to it.
chilicheeselies@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 68d
Most of that wealth is on paper. Don't buy the SpaceX IPO. Don't buy it ever. A share of SpaceX is wealth going into Elons pocket.
There is not a single thing profitable about SpaceX. He has just run out of places to hide his bags, and the last place to stash them is on the public.
If you own shares in an index fund that tracks the NASDAQ 100, sell them. Check all your funds to ensure that the indexes they track have proper seasoning rules to prevent early inclusion in the index.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 68d
Apparently the spacex ipo is 2x oversubscribed
Bwaz@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 68d
It's because he works so hard and pulls on them bootstraps!
cheeseburger@lemmy.ca · 5 pts · 68d
Get him!
ImgurRefugee114@reddthat.com · 4 pts · 68d
So you're trying me we've got one year to get it done
foggianism@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 66d
The system is broken.
Fredselfish@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 68d
Had a customer who apparently lives next to where he shoots off his rockets. Old lady wouldn't stop singing his praises. Telling me how great of inventory he is on and on. I had to hold my tongue but goddamn it was hard.
Of course in the same breath talk how she had to sign a petition to keep him from buying there beach.
She claims he talks to them and once paid for their meal. Fucking nutty old lady. Of course she lives on an island were her windows rattle everytime his rockets go off.
Oh top off she hates Bezo because his rocket blew up and now their property are ruin.
I wanted to ask so badly about why not mad when Space X rockets have blown up too?
pelespirit@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 68d
In the last 4 years, I haven't met a single person who has liked Elon Musk
III@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 67d
But that's probably because they met him or heard about him.
betanumerus@lemmy.ca · 2 pts · 68d
Witchfire@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 68d
Only by technicality, all the conservatives premiers want to privatise. They're salivating at the US
howrar@lemmy.ca · 4 pts · 68d
It's slowly getting chipped away though. Don't get complacent.
Phantaloons@piefed.zip · 2 pts · 68d
It's why I gave up, anyway. Might as well hyper-fixate on hobbies than worry myself to death about the billionares none of us will ever enact revenge upon, who are more likely to peacefully die in their sleep and continue the status quo.
Fill a molotov or sit down.
TronBronson@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 68d
Based.
tacosanonymous@mander.xyz · 2 pts · 65d
We need so many more Luigis.
Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de · 2 pts · 66d
His shitty IPO is coming up, so that's gonna sink soon.
boonhet@sopuli.xyz · 2 pts · 66d
How much of that 800 billion is SpaceX though? I figured it would mostly be Tesla.
scathliath@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 67d
You know, we could all work together to make sure he doesn't.
oyzmo@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 68d
The American way! 🥳🥳 ..... 😅
Daft_ish@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 65d
No other system can or ever will work. Facts.
Super facts.
Facts beyond fact checking.
Try something else. I dare you.
Wait. No.
mikenurre@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 68d
victorz@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 68d
800 billion dollars dollars.
Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 68d
That's the WORST kind of billion dollars!
Gammelfisch@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 68d
$800 billion Neo-NAZI PEDOPHILE...WTF!
Impractical_Island@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 68d
I have literally helped 16 pedophiles over 12 years overcome their impulse to harm children, and I still get banned from the internet. I'm not good enough. I'm not goid enough. Well, at least the FBI has the words I wrote. Fuckers don't know the gane that's being played. There are human beings who would let themselves be crucified to protect the innocent. Jesus Christ went on the cross consciously to earn his spot as a federal cop, you dumb idiots of c/autism.
prenatal_confusion@feddit.org · 1 pts · 68d
Wrong community. Also you are spiraling.
Impractical_Island@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 68d
Oh, you mean, my cover story?!
Impractical_Island@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 68d
Bro. You don't realize the science experiment you are in. Jesus was an EXPWRIMENT in a TYPE of federal cop
He who was so damned...there's no WAY he's a cop!
Just barely survived that centralized empire.
But what about this decentralized one?
Do you understand?
Hitler just needs enough power and then he speaks with authority to control THOUSANDS of people
I'm a cop, bro. I think.
Maybe I'm gunna be
I dunno
But certainly those who understand why PLEX is an important word in relevance to DECENTRALIZED AUTONOMOUS ORGANIZATIONS understand why and how I am more aligned with God than any neckband ever was.
Cuz I'm BROADCASTING
prenatal_confusion@feddit.org · 3 pts · 67d
Speak to a mental health professional.
Impractical_Island@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 67d
On the Arizonan mental health assembly line, I am only alotted fifteen minutes a month. They asked me if I wanted a therapist. I said yes. Still nothing. Do you know what Operation Mockingbird was? In 1975, a senate hearing determined that the CIA was illegally and deliberately causing events at home and abroad so that the news reported on it to change public opinion. That was fifty years ago. Thank God we don't do anything like that anymore, amirite?
...I told my ROTC cadre that my nonexistent sister got me pregnant because I judged the wrath of my father more of a threat than the United States Military, so all this is deliberate, and I've been doing it twelve years, and I am going to be crucified for it, and then three days later I will be making popular videos, just like that other cop of the decentralized autonomous organization of secret police, Tate. The job's described at an eighth grade reading level in the New Testament, if you were unaware.
prenatal_confusion@feddit.org · 2 pts · 67d
Doesnt change the fact that you need to keep trying. For your own sake.
Impractical_Island@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 67d
Bro, you don't know me. But you, to me, from my perspective, are Unempathetic Judgmental Person #36, 834 who has told me, in whatever words, that I am innately inferior to the entire human race and need to be lobotomized because I intentionally do all that I do online because it markets my educational (f)art project to those who need this sort of Knowledge to heal and self-actualize.
Read this post and tell me if I'm crazy:
My special interests include philosophy, spirituality, and juggling. Naturally, this combination has led me to the same wisdom that the Buddha and Christ learned in their respective lives. There's a reason The Matrix is named that; it's all about Judeo-Christian mysticism. God is a unified field of consciousness that arose from the supersymmetry of the ever-present, eternal emptiness to then fold in and on Itself across eleven dimensions to form a topological matrix that acts as a monadic nodal communication system.
Y'know, God is a big balloon of consciousness that made a complex balloon animal out of itself and you are one of the sections. You're not a featherless biped on an Earth. The world is an illusion. All you experience is self-contained within your neurons, yea? And you're experiencing these words "outside" of that featherless biped you consider yourself, right? So, this "outside" is really inside you. You're a pocket of consciousness, Neo, and the Earth only exists inside you.
This is where my special form of schizo-autismo magick lets me take this to the next level. The word the Buddha used to describe our relationship with Karma is "entangled." This is precise and accurate. In the fourth jhana of meditation, you can perceive for yourself that all your consciousness' (eye, ear, tongue, etc) are compiled into a singular stream of symbols that you set your intention to entangle yourself with. These entanglements grow in complexity until they define the parameters of your conscious experience.
Y'know, simply, if String A is entangled with String B but not String C, then AB is true and AC is false. Additionally, entanglements can möbiate (defilement, as the Buddhists say; what "sin" literally is - entangling yourself in a way that puts "self" above "whole" AND "self and whole"), and this creates dualistic dichotomy (inner/outer), which is how the illusion of being a "self" manifests. Likewise, one can understand how these categories nest within each other; like a square is a rectangle but a rectangle is not a square, yet both are quadrilaterals and polygons. Further, there is "null," which the Buddha described as "emptiness," and there can be implicit and explicit null, which is how the supersymmetry manifests all of reality as it can be both "nothingness/0" and "fullness/1."
And that's just what you need at a minimum to understand what I think about in maladaptive daydreaming. I have come up, independently, with a theory of orthogonal relativity which gives rise to my theory of polyplexic axiomatic systems. First, you know the primary orthogonal directions in three-dimensional space; back/forth, up/down, left/right. A cube can represent this, but therein, you can cut the corner of the cube off to create a new designator path to let an ongoing process möbiate itself to process across multiple possible realities.
Polyplexic axiomatic systems are best understood with the metaphor of putting a puzzle together. There is the logic of the puzzle; how the pieces physically fit together. But, in putting as much logic as we learn together still leaves us many gaps in completing the puzzle. Therein, we have our intuition which sees the picture and knows by the paw displayed that there is a cat in the little logic it can put together knowing what it knows, but therein, where is the cat looking? What's it's stripe pattern? What are the specifics? Well, that's where we create multiple possibilities that fit the same unsolved area; polyplexic axiomatic systems! And this is what causes cognitive dissonance as we can put different possibilities in each gap depending what the needs of the moment are.
And I write all this because my life partner's mom asked what I do all day. I write and think. That's what I do, and I am at the forefront of knowledge, but therein, I can't hold a job or figure out how to survive within this system of society not made for my kind, so therefore I'm considered a waste of space by these people who so easily earn money turning their brains off to go slave for someone else.
I'm a skilled righter. I know what is coming in my near future, legally and media-wise. I know I will be making a show in a similar vein as Trailer Park Boys but based in a kooky, crazy cult and every episode is educational on a main theme or message. But I'm just a deranged narcissist. Certainly don't work for the CIA and am actively recruiting while discrediting myself by mentioning that I have my sister's feet. They're in a glass jar on my desk. And I use them!
prenatal_confusion@feddit.org · 1 pts · 67d
Yes you are out of touch with reality. And don't give me the co construction talk. Even if you subscribe to that idea then its obvious you are way outside the box. Get help!
(Saying it out of empathy)
Impractical_Island@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 68d
Or is it just one. CAESAR WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME
Impractical_Island@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 68d
Why are you a mod? Seriously. Why? What is the drive? Maxwell? Izzat you? What are you doing if I'M an enemy?
Impractical_Island@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 68d
This is only third level density of neurons.
There are seven days.
Let there be light...
Sound before light...
Effect before cause...
Prefrontal cortex before animal impulse...
An autistic man doesn't understand he can go six orders of magnitude beyond what he has gained, technically passively, cuz honestly, what do you know if you've never gone UP an escarpment?
Bottom = laborers and artisans. They work with stuff.
Middle = merchants and officers. They work with people.
Top = clergy and politicians. They work with narratives
Narrative: crazy psycho who thinks eleven years olds have cute feet gets arrested.
Arizona man, not Florida man.
I divide this into paragraphs cuz the children cannot digest the fact that:
Epstein = Christ
Willing to do anything to protect the innocent. Even be the devil. And I am, so I ask you, neckbeard child boy in charge of many people, what day are you in? There's objectivity to this, and I have learned the boundaries.
Take the piss out of being a hebephile
Don't talk about hurting children
For one has utility, the other harms people
Yet you CAN'T C to see the difference
Boy.
That upset you.
You can call me any word you want. Nothing you can do can hurt me
This is intentional
My God do I pray and hope and sacrifice to the effect that you are genuinely doing the task responsible of you.
I r talk u dummy
You're reading this
Increase boo says
I'm the most autistic mother fucker in the univetse that is skilled enough but damaged enough to be literally on the line of disabled.
I am a disabled autistic, schizoaffective person with much trauma
I just realized something
I'm not trying to draw the devils out of the pack
I'm trying to see who is WORTHY of RULING this decentralized space.
Ni
I almost said it
Fucking knights who stay anonymous
I'm not anonymous
I'm Victorious Phoenix
My God do I hope the manchild in charge of X% of the fediverse makes the right decision.
Revolution otherwise.
What was /i/?
Oh! Science. Obviously.
I work woth my lord, boy.
StarryPhoenix97@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 68d
Smaile@lemmy.ca · 0 pts · 68d
kind of cheapens the title when you have to print trillions to make it happen.
Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 3 pts · 68d
..no you don't.
The vast majority of monetary wealth in the world is represented as numbers on a screen, no printing needed.
If you had to print $800b in $100 bills, it would weigh 8 million kilogram (approximately 17,636,980 pounds) and take up 61,648 cubic meters (2,177,600 cubic feet), unrealistically assuming they were packed tight with no gaps, creases, or structures added to keep the enormous weight of it from sinking into the ground.
For context, the US Capitol Building is approximately 1.3m cubic feet, and the heaviest object ever weighed on earth, the Revolving Service Structure (RSS) at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, weighs 5,342,000 pounds.
So yeah, you'd be a bit silly to print his ridiculous dragon's hoard in physical money.
Smaile@lemmy.ca · 0 pts · 68d
I'm refering to general inflation, not the Idea of printing and walking around with a trillion dollars
Hapankaali@lemmy.world · -1 pts · 68d
Well okay, but:
porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml · 4 pts · 68d
MyVeryRealName@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 68d
Universal healthcare is a socialist policy. The systems with it would be mixed economies.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 68d
Mixed systems are the best systems. Any government would collapse under any PURE ideology. We're supposed to be a Representative Democracy, but the best things in our society are the Socialist things - Public schools, parks, libraries, roads, highways, bridges, military, fire departments, etc. I'd add police departments, but I don't think they belong under the best Socialist things in our society.
The best system is one that combines the best ideas from other systems, and avoids the worst ideas. It can get messy around the edges, but overall, "Keep the best, reject the rest," is good government policy.
MyVeryRealName@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 68d
What exactly is the worst idea here? Redistribution of wealth?
mechoman444@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 68d
Socialism refers to collective ownership of the means of production. Social democracy refers to a capitalist market economy supplemented by welfare programs, labor protections, and public services. The two terms are not interchangeable despite frequent misuse on the internet. You are describing and advocating for social democracy not socialism.
https://youtube.com/shorts/zMmjKRettxA
MyVeryRealName@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 68d
Socialism refers to public (and unfortunately sometimes government) ownership of a service. In this case, health insurance. Government health insurance is socialist because it is owned by the government (which represents the public according to some socialists) instead of the capitalists.
By your own definition, health insurance is the "product" being "produced".
mechoman444@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 68d
Once again, socialism is the public ownership of the means of production. Universal healthcare, subsidized healthcare, government-assisted healthcare, whatever name you want to give it, has nothing to do with whether a government is socialist. Public healthcare can be offered by virtually any type of government.
Like many people on this platform, you're confusing the words social and socialist. They are not the same thing. As defined above, a social democrat is not a socialist. Government programs that provide assistance to the population are not inherently socialist programs; they are welfare programs.
You are not advocating for public ownership of the means of production. You are advocating for welfare programs that benefit the population under a democratic government. I genuinely do not understand why so many people on this platform have such a difficult time grasping this distinction.
So I will simply leave you with the below quote.
MyVeryRealName@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 67d
Public healthcare cannot be offered by a fully capitalist government. I would argue welfare itself could be deemed socialist. Production also benefits the population btw.
Also, jesus christ man. what is that quote?
mechoman444@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 67d
Most developed and developing countries on Earth have public healthcare systems and are still fully capitalist. Nearly all European countries are examples of this. Even the United States has forms of public healthcare. People often forget that America already provides government-funded healthcare through programs such as Medicare and Medicaid; one simply has to qualify, and tens of millions of Americans do.
Once again, please listen to what I'm saying: welfare programs are not socialism. The words "social" and "socialism" have two entirely different meanings. A country can be capitalist, communist, a dictatorship, or a monarchy and still offer social programs, more accurately described as welfare programs. The existence of those programs does not determine the underlying economic system.
The quote is from Billy Madison, which kind of gives you away. You're probably too young to even be having this discussion, let alone offering an opinion on the matter.
MyVeryRealName@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 67d
No country on Earth is fully capitalist. Also, I don't think a country can be communist. Kinda goes against the definition.
Dawg, "Billy Madison" is 30 years old. You gotta be atleast twice the voting age to have watched it when it released.
wpb@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 67d
Much like gdp vs gdp per capita, a much more interesting statistic here would be the percentage of countries that have universal health care. Still kind of reductive, but it has the benefit of not being misleading, which I can't say of your statistic. Think before you speak.
Please draw the rest of the owl? You just made a gigantic leap. I don't see the relation at all. Are you implying that billionaires are concerned about efficiency or something? I'd argue they're more concerned about paying their workers as little as possible. And one way to make this much, much easier is by skewing the negotiations in your favor by having their literal health and well-being tied to working for you, which universal healthcare really ruins. Think before you speak.
plyth@feddit.org · -4 pts · 67d
Musk has assets, not money. If everybody of the 8 billion people would get $100 worth of those shares nobody could eat one bite more unless some people start buying the assets and restart the cycle.
Musk has control over companies, over capital. When do people start doing the same, as people, instead of handing their money and control to index funds?
kossa@feddit.org · 6 pts · 67d
Billionaires lend against those assets, so they can buy stuff. Does Musk sit under a bridge, 'cause he has "only assets"? Where does the money come from?
He lends against his assets. Once the bank wants to collect, his assets are worth more, so he lends more and stays afloat. Bonus points: he's saving on taxes now, 'cause he's in so much debt.
If everybody had those shares, they could play the lending game as well. Only, they can't, because nobody lends against one share ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
plyth@feddit.org · 0 pts · 66d
So the problem is that not everybody is rich?
Meanwhile everybody could vote for a party that supports universal healthcare and UBI. Musk is not the problem. Focussing on Musk distracts from the possibility that the next election can change everything.