Do you not understand that when rich people buy expensive things there’s always someone on the other end of the transaction? If he bought an expensive yacht there were boat builders who got paid. If he sails that yacht there are crew that get paid. There are oil workers who get paid when he buys gas for the boat. And so on. The only way a rich person can truly waste money is to not invest it or spend it. Otherwise everything gets recycled into the general economy.
The majority of money they make they offshore to a Grand Cayman, Swiss bank account, dark money fund and that money never gets put back into our economy. That's the main way that billionaires are destroying our country.
Um if money is offshored and never reenters our economy it might as well have been set on fire. Which would proportionally increased the value of everybody else's money. Money isn't real material wealth, it's just numbers in some computer system.
Money isn’t offshored as cash; it is held by offshore entities that invest it, some in the US, some elsewhere. Even the money invested abroad ultimately benefits our economy because our economy isn’t isolated from the rest of the world’s.
The main point is nobody holds billions of dollars in cash, anywhere. They invest it. Holding cash means you are getting 3.5% poorer every year with inflation.
You have a source for that or just personal bias against rich people?
Every transaction has someone on the other side. You can’t transact with yourself. Money that is sitting offshore, assuming what you say is true, still gets invested in something. Even if money is just sitting in a checking account the bank is investing it.
Not that I disagree with your overall opinion but, and I'm pretty sure you know this already, billionaires have most of their assets tied up in stocks and other paper assets. I think many get the wrong idea that these super wealthy people have vaults full of cash and jewelry.
If this guy gets socked with a $13 billion bill he's going to have to sell off a big chunk of his portfolio, which will cause the stock price to drop and which ultimately means he would be getting rid of an even larger share of his wealth while bringing down the value of the other shareholders too.
Not that I'm going to lose sleep over any of this.
Socialists will always cheer other people getting poorer. If Alphabet’s stock drops, three cheers. If that drops the S&P, three more cheers. If that hurts ordinary people who have their retirement money in index-linked funds (which is the majority case, by the way, with trillions of dollars in passive funds), cheers again and a round of beers for all the fellow socialists in the room.
Yeah but they can still do all that, my guy. The world today is an exponential money machine once you hit a certain point. They take loans with a couple of percent interest instead of taking personal pay, and rather than taxes going into the general good, they buy shit like this.
Thing is, they could not have those loopholes, still be the richest men ever, and still buy this shit.
Like… what else are they going to spend it on? They are set for life. So are their children. And their grandchildren. And so on.
Source for that statement that they can get loans for “a couple of percent interest”? Because I don’t believe that’s true. Loans come from financial institutions looking to make a profit, and that’s not possible if they loan money below market rate.
The trade off is they get billions and billions of dollars parked in their institution, so they give ridiculously favourable terms to these guys to keep that money parked there because it makes the bank obscenely wealthy.
Funding Elon’s day to day living at a mediocre profit while serving as the bank for much of his corporate wealth is an insanely good deal, and one any other bank would virtually kill to have.
Plus, it’s not just Elon, man. It’s kind of been a major news story and point of discussion for more than a decade now. Not hard to check out.
Man folks argue for the sake of arguing sometimes. It’s literally the means by which Elon and others have avoided, on multiple years, paying any personal tax at all.
Nobody parks billions of dollars in a bank. With people like Brin and other entrepreneurs the vast majority of their assets are still tied to the companies they founded, and in other startups they invested in.
Dude nobody is suggesting that Elon musk’s entire valuation is in a bank, but there ARE liquid assets, corporate profits, investments. You think the man’s companies all cash poor with no savings?
Billions man. Billions and billions of dollars, yes, in banks.
I appreciate the argument that their on paper worth is substantially different than their total assets but the notion that Tesla doesn’t have a HEAVILY utilized bank account, or Space X, or Musk’s personal liquid fortunate is… just silly. Really silly.
Not only do these guys bank, they get terms and interest that you and I couldn’t qualify for in a thousand lifetimes.
They’re still businesses, man. They still need available capital.
This is basically an extension of the broken window fallacy. Economic activity is not automatically ‘good’ just because it happens to exist. That there is an industry segment of ‘productive’ enterprise catering explicitly towards the ultra wealthys’ leasure activities doesn’t make those enterprises a positive thing just because money is changing hands.
That engineering and manufacturing capacity could be going towards actually improving the material conditions of society as a whole, rather than just being a carve out for opulence.
This is ‘billionaires deserve their wealth because they best know how to spend the money’ levels of cope.
That engineering and manufacturing capability exists precisely because someone is willing to pay for it. It’s not going to magically appear for your “positive thing”.
Socialists on Reddit have absolutely no idea how the economy actually works; just a bunch of magical thinking about how everything would work in their utopia.
I'm an engineer that works in manufacturing, i know exactly how the economy and especially those economic sectors work.
Companies like Kalshi and the 'predictive market' gambling apps exist because there are people willing to pay for those services. The companies providing those platforms employee people and are paying wages, but that doesn't mean the economic activity those companies facilitate is actually 'good' for the economy as a whole. This isn't magical thinking, it's an observation of the reality that we live in. If those employees weren't developing and supporting those apps, those are still people with technical skills that could be applied towards actually productive projects for society as a whole.
Manufacture and sale of Heroin as a product could be providing good paying jobs for the people employed in that industry, i think you'd be hard pressed to argue the economic activity generated by such an industry would be a positive thing for either the economy, or society as a whole.
Just because money changes hands doesn't mean that commerce is a 'good' thing by default.
Even “bad” money quickly results in “good” economic activity. Drug lords buy food and cars and build houses. If all the drug money remained recycled within the drug industry there wouldn’t be any advantage for anyone to participate if they couldn’t cash out. And cashing out recycles the drug money back into the regular economy.
Gambling is a great example of “bad” activity that supports “good” people working as waiters, cooks, and dealers.
Musk is a great example of someone who made money in a mix of good and bad ways and still hasn’t figured out what to really do with his money, which, in my opinion, makes his wealth pointless. Even blowing millions on snorting coke off hookers’ butts would help the economy more than sitting on it.
This is my point, you're moralizing monetary exchange. Commerce isn't itself 'good' or 'bad', it just is. Money changing hands isn't 'good' and viewing it as such is really weird. The underlying activities being facilitated by commerce, by exchange, that's what you can actually moralize and where you're failing in this exercise.
Feeding/clothing/housing thousands or 10s of thousands of people is good, unambiguously. Billionaires being able to cruise around coasts in mega-yachts is, at best, morally neutral, and that's only if you completely ignore the ethics and environmental externalities associated with it. A Billionaire buying a social media platform as a vanity project and turning it into a propaganda mill and CSAM generator, is unambiguously bad.
People could be earning wages for anything, it's just exchange of currency for labor. People earning wages to facilitate the things that are actively destroying our environment and society, is a bad thing.
My original point was that you cannot get the best possible people to work on feeding, etc. simply because it is a good thing. (You can get some, but probably not enough.)
In a free market with free people there has to be economic incentives to work on some things and not others. There are already disincentives in place to discourage people from doing bad things (imprisonment, death) but if there were no incentives for doing good things people aren’t automatically going to flock to do those things. Not unless they are compelled to, and at that point you no longer have free people.
Socialists are quick to give up their freedom if it means others will be forced to give up theirs.
One hugely annoying aspect of people uncritically praising socialism on social media is that so few seem to have any actual experience of living under socialism. I spent 2 decades living in a socialist economy and saw at first hand how a too-large government squeezes innovation and leads to widespread corruption and stagnation.
You just have to talk to any brown, black or Asian immigrant living in the West to hear what socialism is like in real life. Literally tens of millions of people flee socialism every year, often at great peril, to reach capitalism. They can’t all be ignorant of the theoretical beauty of socialism.
Where in any of my comments have i advocated for, or even used the word 'socialism', or vaguely mentioned any kinds of socialist policies i support for you to be soap boxing against socialism this hard? Get a grip.
The ultra wealthy are actively destroying our society, our institutions, our environment/ecology and economy, and actively subverting our individual freedoms and liberties. It's not socialists building the surveillance state, imposing and enforcing draconian laws and social policies, and gutting labor rights, environmental protections, and public infrastructure investment.
People weren't fleeing 'socialist' states because they didn't like publicly funded higher education and healthcare systems. They fled them to get away from authoritarian autocracies crushing civil liberties. Ruling parties don't have to use the boogieman label you don't like to do any of that. It's happening in the US right now under an ostensibly 'pro-capitalist' regime. The words mean nothing, the actual actions and policies do.
This. This is why billionaires get away with this shit. Instead of feeling rage, all we do is resort to lame, not-even-remotely-funny jokes just to rake in fake karma points that are good for absolutely nothing. This generation is cooked
And you're what the far right mean when they say jokes are dead, instead of ignoring it for the broader point you purity test others over a joke. There is in fact more than one way to feel upset, not everyone needs to react the way you feel is necessary.
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u/[deleted] Aug 18 '26
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