A billion dollars is a hard sum of money to wrap your head around. There is basically no ethical way to make a billion dollars. If you have a billion dollars it’s because you’ve stiffed a lot of people a lot of the value they created and kept it for yourself.
This is exactly how I have always thought about it too. Pure greed. My father ran a company for 35 years and for 3 of those years he took either no payout or a very small payout so that he didn’t have to let anyone go. I asked him why he didn’t just downsize and he said that other people needed the money more than us. That’s how shit needs to be run. People centric not profit driven.
Unfortunately it is in human nature to compare oneself to other people, and becoming big in other people’s eyes is easiest when other people around you are already smaller than you.
This becomes truly predatory when you become the person deciding on other’s situation.
Do you know a single business where an employee makes more money than his boss? Because I sure know lots of businesses where employees posses much more knowledge or skill than their supervisor, yet none of them surpass them in earnings.
Though I have known business owners who have made less than their employees at times, it’s always been small 2-10 person businesses, and in a hard time when the owner was trying to weather the hard times with their own equity (ie paying the company to keep people employed). But that’s only a small amount of time, and never a business that the majority of people in the county knew the name.
As for businesses with shareholders. Hell no. Never would happen.
I’ve had one supervisor in a large enterprise company make less than me - and they were damn good at their job. I was also told at another job I applied for (different firm) that I couldn’t realistically request to make more than the manager.
Business owner here who’s best employees earn at least as much as me: an often overlooked fact is the risk of invested time without equal payout for founding a business and ally the time until it eventually all works out.
All the employees at my age bracket already bought a house, and although my business starts working out now, after 10 years invested, my kids don’t play in their own yard yet.
We need people creating ethical business and they need to earn quite a lot more money after all that first to catch up money wise and then to justify the risk. Of founding at all.
Most employees forget that for all their economic security there was somebody before them taking the risk and pay cuts to make that a possibility. Which is understandable, but sometimes a little sad. :/
Even if they earned it ethically, they literally can’t spend this much money. They can’t spend the money fast enough.
They hold on to this much money to keep score.
Forbes did the math once and determined that Smaug, a dragon embodied by greed and selfishness, is worth $62 billion. There are 17 people richer than him.
Smaug was shot in the heart and it was a morally good act.
I’d be willing to bet that Smaug caused less death and destruction than many (if not most) billionaires
Fyi that math was heavily contested, i agree with the sentiment but a literal mountain full of gold, assuming the market wouldnt crash, would make him the richest person on the planet.
We don’t actually know the size of the hoard, though. We know it’s big enough for him to sleep in it, and we know the Arkenstone was worth one share of it, but we don’t have specific numbers (at least, none I can see). Any valuation has to be an estimation, and any estimation will be contested.
Also, the value of gold today is 75 times that of what it was in the 1930s, which makes it even harder to put a price on Smaug’s hoard.
Regardless of the specific number, there is a certain level of wealth and greed that makes it morally good to shoot someone through the heart. Smaug is not the only one to have hit that threshold.
Bard the Bowman was to blame. He gave love a bad name.
We should probably deal with them sooner rather than later
Tax them. Kill them. Whatever order
Asking this on lemmy is like asking a pack of wolves if they enjoy the taste of lamb. You already know the answer you’re going to get…
Is ok to ask for an AMEN now and then.
Billionaires shouldn’t exist; no one needs that much money. They should be taxed until there are no more billionaires.
I’m hungry.
I think they’re bad for the economy. Money has to circulate. Every time a billionaire throws another million on the pile, they make things worse for everyone else.
This is a view we don’t see often enough. Everybody is into hating billionaires the way teenage girls hate the super-hot cheerleader. All they do is complain that it’s not “fair” for somebody to be so rich. There’s not enough discussion of the purely mechanical reasons extreme wealth is bad for the economy, not to mention the corruption opportunities it creates. The ultra-rich don’t spend their money, they just exchange it to trade big blocks of asset ownership back and forth. None of that money ever gets spent on a loaf of bread or a bus ticket, or a GI Joe with the kung fu grip. It essentially disappears from the economy. I don’t think most people even comprehend how that works - it involves more thought than reacting to memes.
They literally steal work out of the system like a parasite. As you say, we shouldn’t be envious, but fix the problem with the money leaking away.
Tax them.
I don’t support violence at all. But for every mentioned woodchipper, this scene from Tucker & Dale vs Evil is mandatory:
It’s why we invented the gulliotine
Billionaires are a crime against humanity.
If you invest in the sp500, you’ll have something around 8% return per year. This is highly variable year by year, of course, but in the long run, that’s what you can expect to average out. You can do better than the sp500, but generally not without accepting higher risk.
With those returns, you will double your money every 9 years. Roughly. It’s going to vary by decade. 2000-2010 was flat, while 2010-2020 was unusually good.
If you max out a 401k, HSA, and IRA on this strategy from a young age, you should have millions for retirement. If you’re a millennial or younger, you’re going to need a million or two (at least) to have a reasonable retirement.
How do you turn that into a billion? Doubling every 9 years won’t do it in your lifetime. Not unless you started life as a millionaire and never withdrew a dime until you were 90. Starting with $1000 and doubling every year for 20 years, consistently, would do it.
How do you double your money consistently for 20 years? Either extreme luck or doing something extremely shady. Probably both.
In other words, they are not the genius captains of industry that right-libertarians want you to believe. They got lucky or are deeply unethical or both, and they do not deserve your respect. Most likely, they deserve your disdain. Every one of them.
It’s not so much the money, the wealth in itself, that bothers me about them, it’s the mind boggling absolutely insane amount of power having that much wealth is capable of.
They literally buy elections, they buy media outlets, by their actions they buy the direction entire countries take. They use their money to fund the actions of others that work on their behalf. They can create a literal army of individuals to work for them towards whatever end they wish to achieve. That’s entirely way too much power for an individual or a family to have. Just imagine living next to someone who has a 500,000 strong army of militants just hanging out. Maybe theyre good, maybe they want to turn your neighborhood into a warzone for kicks, either way you would have no means to stop them.
Just look at smoething like the “tea party” movement in the US. Grassroots? No, try Koch brothers funded with the intent to install Koch approved representatives into the government.
In the words of the next post on my feed: Boil ‘em, mash ‘em, stick ‘em in a stew
Bill-ion-aires!
