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.
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. :/
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.
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.
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.
It’s why we invented the gulliotine
Billionaires as individuals are just humans with all the good and the bad coming from that fact. Acting against them as individuals is pointless. We need to establish a system where becoming a billionaire is impossible in the first place.
At least in most democratic countries you can’t just bribe the politicians legally. That helps a lot.
We should probably deal with them sooner rather than later
Depose.
Tax, kill, eat. In that order.
they’re by definition a cancer in society
They would serve a greater use to humanity as compost
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.
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.
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.
There should be a hard upper limit on wealth somewhere around the $100 million mark.
An amount where you can still invest your money risk-free at ~1% above inflation and live a life of plenty without lifting a finger, forever.
Any property, company, or thing in general worth more than $100 million should never be owned by one person alone.- I think wealth should be capped at a few million or tens of millions. Too much wealth hoarding keeps money out of circulation at the consumer spending level, which is bad for the economy in general, especially lower income people.
- Without knowing anything about a person and how they became a billionaire, I have no opinion on them individually. Jumping to conclusions about someone based on the group they belong to (like say, a black guy walking down the street) is bigoted thinking, no matter who the target is.
I’ve always liked the idea of you can get $999,999,999.99 after that 100% tax rate and you get a plaque that says “Congratulations, you won capitalism”
I feel that eventually somebody will crack the problem of how to reward people for beating capitalism. Various zillionaires have said that at some point money ceases to be a motivating factor. They’re driven by other things, and by the time they personally become super wealthy they’ve already achieved all the things that are going to benefit society. Further wealth accumulation beyond that point wasn’t their goal, and I really don’t think a wealth cap would deter those people or deprive the world of their achievements at all.
I’m hungry.
Tax them.
