The right frame of comparison is not towards average Joe, but towards governments. Billionaires, for better or worse, are independent power sources, which IMO in grand scheme of things are useful.
I think the problem with modern world is not that some people have lots of money, but that we allowed money to buy pretty much everything else.
I heard a while back that the average person will see about a million of their currency over their lifetime. So we can take a million dollars to be about 1 lifetime's worth of money. Elon is currently sitting on 817,000 lifetimes worth of money.
I feel like we could have like a >95% income tax when you are worth more than like $20 million and it wouldnt actually matter too much to the people who would cap it out? Of course, its a 4000x decrease in wealth for some people, but at that level, when you're getting over 10 million, its basically infinite money anyway. There is no real gain from having 800 billion over having 20 million. What are you going to do with 800 billion dollars? Buy a thousand mega-mansions?
To me it all comes down to time. If you have money to cover your needs, you functionally have control over your time. And your time is more or less the closest analogue to your actual life.
The tragedy of course is that the vast majority of people have no real control over their time, and the free time they do have is aggressively fought over by media corporations and advertisers convincing them they need to work more to buy more.
> I feel like we could have like a >95% income tax when you are worth more than like $20 million and it wouldnt actually matter too much to the people who would cap it out?
It wouldn't matter, because the ultra-wealthy generally don't have much income relative to their wealth. Elon Musk (in the article listed at $817B of wealth) was reported to have had $1.52B of net income between 2014 and 2018, and had no taxable income in 2018. 95% of $0 is still $0.
The ultra-wealthy's wealth doesn't grow because of income (as the tax code defines it). Trying to tax income to redistribute their wealth (or even just slow its growth) is not going to address wealth inequality.
Human being, with very few exceptions, is corrupted by power. And a billion dollars is immense amount power.
You can make your opponent's life a living hell with a hundred thousand and buy or figure out a way to frame extortion material from almost any decision maker with a million.
See how wars are being started tweeting from the toilet seat by a man who has never known anything but power to harm others.
See the many "formerly normal" people ending on a private island, doing horrendous things to children.
We tried to figure out examples of people with power who weren't corrupted by it, at least to some extent, and came up with very few.
It's a human trait we know very well, but do very little about.
> See how wars are being started tweeting from the toilet seat by a man who has never known anything but power to harm others.
To be fair: it is not Trump only who is addicted to warfare. You have a whole industry that benefits from war and thus wants warfare. Trump is just, in addition to being corrupt, really really not that clever. And now he is old and has dementia - amazing how the USA can so easily become subverted by Russia here. The KGB won.
But at what point does marginal private incentive stop helping innovation and start damaging democracy? For sure risk-taking deserves reward but the size of the reward matters
But when they fail, they fail upwards. These risks are always on the backs of everyone else.
For example, they take risks by using chemicals (that they know) can kill people, by the time people get cancer they are retired, there are no claw-backs.
More recently you commit actual fraud, get convicted but then get a pardon and somehow end up with money again running the next "scam".
These people never take real risks.
DOGE resulted in the death of over 100k people [1] and will result in many people dying of Ebola. It was a huge failure yet the "risk" Elon took is not his.
Totally. Those conversations often also overlook the fact that some people are just driven and curious and risk taking by personality (especially after they’ve made it to adulthood and have entrenched work habits that may have been partly the result of economic incentives along the way). Even if you start having diminishing (personal financial) returns on added effort at some point, or even hit a ceiling, there are plenty of people who will keep pushing just because it’s all they know how to/want to do. Or because they get a thrill out of knowing that they’re on top of a still growing product (how much bigger can I make this?). Or because they are vying for non-financial social status.
Exactly. Many people - e.g., founders, scientists and artists - keep pushing because of curiosity and mission.
Money matters, especially early, but after some extreme level it is hard to believe that the next $50B - just to say a number - is what causes the useful work to happen.
What's ironic about your statement is that it's this exact belief--that founders should remain in control--that has led to the widespread adoption of dual class shares, in which founders maintain control while ceding a majority of equity.
And the irony here is, by that same token, founders could maintain in control while not having such large equity stakes, and not becoming so rich.
So I do not think this is an argument for billionaires.
In the times of metacrisis and power concentrated in the hands of few who actively try to fry the world I think what we need is the exact opposite of that.
That is what we've had mostly for the last fifty years and look where it has gotten us? And US. I'm not from US
Money pays the bills, not ambition and competition. Every freaking thing out there uses money to keep score. There's no reason we should not use money to keep score of the people hoarding more and more of the money bags, and actively using their money towards leaving the rest fighting over am ever shrinking pot.
I was just gathering a list of global top hundred with their influence relevant spending and boy that was not a pretty sight. At least in terms of normal people.
> Surely there has to be some number that pushes individual wealth from a net benefit for the country to a net detriment? Surely we are seeing lots of data and examples right now where we can start to come up with that line as a society? Surely it’s very reasonable that we might want to develop policy to make it hard for an individual to end up with more than, say, ten billion dollars1. That doesn’t seem very controversial to me.
This seems very controversial to me. Why does increasing wealth eventually cause negative outcomes? What do you mean by “make it hard”?
This article skips over justifying its argument. I don’t think, for example, that someone should have come along to Warren Buffett in the late 80s and said: “Your company is too successful, you can’t be the full owner of it anymore”
Individual, founder-led companies are a good thing, especially if the companies are very successful. You’re more likely to force these companies into being led by investors and private equity if you don’t let the founders lead them.
The issue is not the money, the issue is massive wealth imbalance which is best reflected in the $ class owning the current political players. In other words, oligarchy must be stopped, and democracy defended.
Every conversation about the existence of billionaires misses the point: Its not about whether or not billionaires should exist. Its about whether they should exist at the same moment in time when there are people cannot get healthcare or have a decent roof over their head, or a number of other basic things.
If we eliminated billionaires would everyone have healthcare, a decent roof over their head, and other basic things?
I generally believe that to not be the case. The government misspends (to an extent) the money it has now. So the solution is to give them more money to misspend?
It seems to me that even here on HN, way too many people think in the binary "rich-poor" schemes.
Ironically, what produces billionaires quite reliably, is precisely the growing global middle class, which is now estimated to number around four billion. If 4 billion people can spend, say, 200 USD a month on various non-necessities, much of that enormous stream of cash will naturally flow to some big corporations producing universally demanded services and will make their main shareholders billionaires.
If Africa ever gets to the living standards of Asia, expect even more billionaires. Etc.
Sure. Having billionaires allocate their own capital driven by profit motive and market feedback results in more efficient allocation than having some random bureaucrats do it. That's what it's really about. For example, Elon Musk probably doesn't personally consume much more than the average American. He perhaps consumes 10x or 100x more, whereas his net worth is actually 5,000,000x. There are likely millionaires who live more lavish lives than him. The bulk of his fortune is actually just resources allocated in the economy.
It's very unlikely any mainstream political class is going to take serious action anywhere to forbid them, but a few take action to limit them. Too few I think.
The (mis-attributed to Lenin and Stalin) quote "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." is quite big in this. A little humility and a lot more tax-paying could save the trillionaire classes from the tumbrils but they lack the emotional intelligence to see it and as long as they make a few thousand millionaires below them they have useful idiots to decry any changes.
On the plus side, workers are in short supply. The future needs more people who can do things other than thinkers, and robots (bless their hearts) don't spend money as consumers so the other side of the billionaire equation demands new people to come into spending class: this means Africa, Asia and South America levelling up.
"Ok how about this: No more billionaires. None. After you reach $999 million, every red cent goes to schools and health care. You get a trophy that says, “I won capitalism” and we name a dog park after you."
If there isn't the political will to ramp up taxes on extreme wealth, I'd be interested to know how much effort there is in pitching legacy projects (more exciting than dog parks) to those with the means to execute them. Like crowd-funding, but for major developments and with further tax incentives if necessary.
It wasn't pitched to him, but in Australia, a wealthy individual put Hobart (more) on the map with a now famous contemporary art gallery complex which is an excellent drawcard for the state.
He's a contrarian and it's gambling money not tech bro entrepreneur. Mind you MONA is fantastic. Two time visitor and hope to be there within a year or two again.
> A little humility and a lot more tax-paying could save the trillionaire classes from the tumbrils but they lack the emotional intelligence to see it
I think there is some research which shows that as you get rich, you lose emotional intelligence (empathy towards others). So maybe we should consider being rich a health hazard.
I don't necessarily intrinsically have a dislike against
billionaires per se. However had, if you look at the USA,
where basically billionaires are dictating policies (Elon
mass-firing people at DOGE, showing a chainsaw and right-arm
gesture antics) - this simply undermines and cripples
democracy. This, in addition to it being unfair that they
aren't really contributing their due share to society usually;
and no, creating a legal foundation to avoid paying taxes,
including "Bill Gates Foundation" (see the benefits it has)
when you avoided paying taxes before, does not fix anything
at all. The model that is currently used, is broken by default.
The ancient greek did not have this problem. Modern democracy
does. And let's not even get into the issue of Putin-Trump
being suspiciously a corrupt tandem team, just as Yuri
predicted in the 1980s (!!!!!) already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9apDnRRSOCk
(Flood the zone with shit is based on an older KGB strategy,
and the chinese had this under an even older stratagem name,
though not necessarily based on information-overload; I'd
call the KGB strategy primarily information-overload. The
chinese stratagems are named a bit differently, e. g.
holding the dagger under the cloak, or attack west while
convincing the enemy you would attack east; sun tsu also
built on the older chinese stratagems.)
Billionaire's always influenced policy. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford and Morgan were much more powerful than Egon, Bezos or Gates.
In Ancient Greece you had a larger gap between rich and power. Landowners vs farmer. In the early 6th century BC, inequality was so extreme that poor farmers regularly sold themselves or their families into slavery just to pay off debts and survive.
If we only learned more about history we might be more thankful for where we really are.
Controversially, yes.
The right frame of comparison is not towards average Joe, but towards governments. Billionaires, for better or worse, are independent power sources, which IMO in grand scheme of things are useful.
I think the problem with modern world is not that some people have lots of money, but that we allowed money to buy pretty much everything else.
I heard a while back that the average person will see about a million of their currency over their lifetime. So we can take a million dollars to be about 1 lifetime's worth of money. Elon is currently sitting on 817,000 lifetimes worth of money.
I feel like we could have like a >95% income tax when you are worth more than like $20 million and it wouldnt actually matter too much to the people who would cap it out? Of course, its a 4000x decrease in wealth for some people, but at that level, when you're getting over 10 million, its basically infinite money anyway. There is no real gain from having 800 billion over having 20 million. What are you going to do with 800 billion dollars? Buy a thousand mega-mansions?
To me it all comes down to time. If you have money to cover your needs, you functionally have control over your time. And your time is more or less the closest analogue to your actual life.
The tragedy of course is that the vast majority of people have no real control over their time, and the free time they do have is aggressively fought over by media corporations and advertisers convincing them they need to work more to buy more.
They own stock in the company they founded.
So, you force the founder to sell 95% of the stock they own in the company.
Is this a good idea for the stock price of that company as well as the for the ability of that company to raise cash?
> I feel like we could have like a >95% income tax when you are worth more than like $20 million and it wouldnt actually matter too much to the people who would cap it out?
It wouldn't matter, because the ultra-wealthy generally don't have much income relative to their wealth. Elon Musk (in the article listed at $817B of wealth) was reported to have had $1.52B of net income between 2014 and 2018, and had no taxable income in 2018. 95% of $0 is still $0.
The ultra-wealthy's wealth doesn't grow because of income (as the tax code defines it). Trying to tax income to redistribute their wealth (or even just slow its growth) is not going to address wealth inequality.
Power and influence.
Human being, with very few exceptions, is corrupted by power. And a billion dollars is immense amount power.
You can make your opponent's life a living hell with a hundred thousand and buy or figure out a way to frame extortion material from almost any decision maker with a million.
See how wars are being started tweeting from the toilet seat by a man who has never known anything but power to harm others.
See the many "formerly normal" people ending on a private island, doing horrendous things to children.
We tried to figure out examples of people with power who weren't corrupted by it, at least to some extent, and came up with very few.
It's a human trait we know very well, but do very little about.
> See how wars are being started tweeting from the toilet seat by a man who has never known anything but power to harm others.
To be fair: it is not Trump only who is addicted to warfare. You have a whole industry that benefits from war and thus wants warfare. Trump is just, in addition to being corrupt, really really not that clever. And now he is old and has dementia - amazing how the USA can so easily become subverted by Russia here. The KGB won.
> risk-takers who are badly needed
But at what point does marginal private incentive stop helping innovation and start damaging democracy? For sure risk-taking deserves reward but the size of the reward matters
But when they fail, they fail upwards. These risks are always on the backs of everyone else.
For example, they take risks by using chemicals (that they know) can kill people, by the time people get cancer they are retired, there are no claw-backs.
More recently you commit actual fraud, get convicted but then get a pardon and somehow end up with money again running the next "scam".
These people never take real risks.
DOGE resulted in the death of over 100k people [1] and will result in many people dying of Ebola. It was a huge failure yet the "risk" Elon took is not his.
[1] https://healthpolicy-watch.news/the-human-cost-one-year-afte...
100% see this times article about how musk only hit 19% of his targets on time:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/06/02/technology/el...
Totally. Those conversations often also overlook the fact that some people are just driven and curious and risk taking by personality (especially after they’ve made it to adulthood and have entrenched work habits that may have been partly the result of economic incentives along the way). Even if you start having diminishing (personal financial) returns on added effort at some point, or even hit a ceiling, there are plenty of people who will keep pushing just because it’s all they know how to/want to do. Or because they get a thrill out of knowing that they’re on top of a still growing product (how much bigger can I make this?). Or because they are vying for non-financial social status.
Exactly. Many people - e.g., founders, scientists and artists - keep pushing because of curiosity and mission.
Money matters, especially early, but after some extreme level it is hard to believe that the next $50B - just to say a number - is what causes the useful work to happen.
We need competent people to remain in control of companies they have created.
What's ironic about your statement is that it's this exact belief--that founders should remain in control--that has led to the widespread adoption of dual class shares, in which founders maintain control while ceding a majority of equity.
And the irony here is, by that same token, founders could maintain in control while not having such large equity stakes, and not becoming so rich.
So I do not think this is an argument for billionaires.
Lots of companies are controlled by shareholders.
The book "Limitarianism" seems relevant: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/jan/21/limitarianism-...
We need intensely ambitious and competitive people. We shouldn't use money to keep score.
In the times of metacrisis and power concentrated in the hands of few who actively try to fry the world I think what we need is the exact opposite of that.
That is what we've had mostly for the last fifty years and look where it has gotten us? And US. I'm not from US
Money pays the bills, not ambition and competition. Every freaking thing out there uses money to keep score. There's no reason we should not use money to keep score of the people hoarding more and more of the money bags, and actively using their money towards leaving the rest fighting over am ever shrinking pot.
Capping it makes sense but should also be quite high.
1B actually seems good...congrats you've won capitalism but that's enough for one person
I was just gathering a list of global top hundred with their influence relevant spending and boy that was not a pretty sight. At least in terms of normal people.
> Surely there has to be some number that pushes individual wealth from a net benefit for the country to a net detriment? Surely we are seeing lots of data and examples right now where we can start to come up with that line as a society? Surely it’s very reasonable that we might want to develop policy to make it hard for an individual to end up with more than, say, ten billion dollars1. That doesn’t seem very controversial to me.
This seems very controversial to me. Why does increasing wealth eventually cause negative outcomes? What do you mean by “make it hard”?
This article skips over justifying its argument. I don’t think, for example, that someone should have come along to Warren Buffett in the late 80s and said: “Your company is too successful, you can’t be the full owner of it anymore”
Individual, founder-led companies are a good thing, especially if the companies are very successful. You’re more likely to force these companies into being led by investors and private equity if you don’t let the founders lead them.
The issue is not the money, the issue is massive wealth imbalance which is best reflected in the $ class owning the current political players. In other words, oligarchy must be stopped, and democracy defended.
Every conversation about the existence of billionaires misses the point: Its not about whether or not billionaires should exist. Its about whether they should exist at the same moment in time when there are people cannot get healthcare or have a decent roof over their head, or a number of other basic things.
I think this misses the point as well.
If we eliminated billionaires would everyone have healthcare, a decent roof over their head, and other basic things?
I generally believe that to not be the case. The government misspends (to an extent) the money it has now. So the solution is to give them more money to misspend?
No.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
Correct once again it seems.
It seems to me that even here on HN, way too many people think in the binary "rich-poor" schemes.
Ironically, what produces billionaires quite reliably, is precisely the growing global middle class, which is now estimated to number around four billion. If 4 billion people can spend, say, 200 USD a month on various non-necessities, much of that enormous stream of cash will naturally flow to some big corporations producing universally demanded services and will make their main shareholders billionaires.
If Africa ever gets to the living standards of Asia, expect even more billionaires. Etc.
Sure. Having billionaires allocate their own capital driven by profit motive and market feedback results in more efficient allocation than having some random bureaucrats do it. That's what it's really about. For example, Elon Musk probably doesn't personally consume much more than the average American. He perhaps consumes 10x or 100x more, whereas his net worth is actually 5,000,000x. There are likely millionaires who live more lavish lives than him. The bulk of his fortune is actually just resources allocated in the economy.
It's very unlikely any mainstream political class is going to take serious action anywhere to forbid them, but a few take action to limit them. Too few I think.
The (mis-attributed to Lenin and Stalin) quote "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." is quite big in this. A little humility and a lot more tax-paying could save the trillionaire classes from the tumbrils but they lack the emotional intelligence to see it and as long as they make a few thousand millionaires below them they have useful idiots to decry any changes.
On the plus side, workers are in short supply. The future needs more people who can do things other than thinkers, and robots (bless their hearts) don't spend money as consumers so the other side of the billionaire equation demands new people to come into spending class: this means Africa, Asia and South America levelling up.
Many people would've seen the tweet:
"Ok how about this: No more billionaires. None. After you reach $999 million, every red cent goes to schools and health care. You get a trophy that says, “I won capitalism” and we name a dog park after you."
If there isn't the political will to ramp up taxes on extreme wealth, I'd be interested to know how much effort there is in pitching legacy projects (more exciting than dog parks) to those with the means to execute them. Like crowd-funding, but for major developments and with further tax incentives if necessary.
It wasn't pitched to him, but in Australia, a wealthy individual put Hobart (more) on the map with a now famous contemporary art gallery complex which is an excellent drawcard for the state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Old_and_New_Art
That is an extraordinary development for sub-$100m. Supposedly Australia has 150+ billionaires. Build us some crazy things.
He's a contrarian and it's gambling money not tech bro entrepreneur. Mind you MONA is fantastic. Two time visitor and hope to be there within a year or two again.
I know you meant it as a joke, but a regional mayor of Bucharest, Romania is currently pushing to have a Trump park.
> A little humility and a lot more tax-paying could save the trillionaire classes from the tumbrils but they lack the emotional intelligence to see it
I think there is some research which shows that as you get rich, you lose emotional intelligence (empathy towards others). So maybe we should consider being rich a health hazard.
I don't necessarily intrinsically have a dislike against billionaires per se. However had, if you look at the USA, where basically billionaires are dictating policies (Elon mass-firing people at DOGE, showing a chainsaw and right-arm gesture antics) - this simply undermines and cripples democracy. This, in addition to it being unfair that they aren't really contributing their due share to society usually; and no, creating a legal foundation to avoid paying taxes, including "Bill Gates Foundation" (see the benefits it has) when you avoided paying taxes before, does not fix anything at all. The model that is currently used, is broken by default.
The ancient greek did not have this problem. Modern democracy does. And let's not even get into the issue of Putin-Trump being suspiciously a corrupt tandem team, just as Yuri predicted in the 1980s (!!!!!) already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9apDnRRSOCk
(Flood the zone with shit is based on an older KGB strategy, and the chinese had this under an even older stratagem name, though not necessarily based on information-overload; I'd call the KGB strategy primarily information-overload. The chinese stratagems are named a bit differently, e. g. holding the dagger under the cloak, or attack west while convincing the enemy you would attack east; sun tsu also built on the older chinese stratagems.)
Billionaire's always influenced policy. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford and Morgan were much more powerful than Egon, Bezos or Gates.
In Ancient Greece you had a larger gap between rich and power. Landowners vs farmer. In the early 6th century BC, inequality was so extreme that poor farmers regularly sold themselves or their families into slavery just to pay off debts and survive.
If we only learned more about history we might be more thankful for where we really are.
"The problem isn't that we have billionaires but that the system doesn't make more millionaires and billionaires"
Discuss?