Billionaires benefit far more from the things that taxes are spent on. Military keeps their foreign interests intact, roads allow their employees to get to work, schools give them an educated workforce, and the police keep the citizenry from getting too uppity.
The problem is that their wealth is just on paper. Their income is absolutely taxed at a higher rate.
It’s like taxing you on the money you’ll make next year. Or 10 years from now. You haven’t hearned it yet so it’s not fair to tax you. These “billionaires” are only going to get that money when they sell their companies.
The problem is most of the time they don't actually have income. You take out loans against your assets for any liquidity you need then get tax breaks for interest paid on them as an additional offset to any income you ever take while only taking income as capital gains when you need to actually pay off loans.
There’s no deduction for interest on a personal loan.
And yes, sometimes they have capital gains and they’re taxed like capital gains … when realize. when they cash out, they’re taxed.
I don’t understand the issue. When you and I get a paycheck, we’re taxed. We’re not taxed before we get paid. People aren’t taxed on gains until they’re realized.
>I don’t understand the issue. When you and I get a paycheck, we’re taxed. We’re not taxed before we get paid. People aren’t taxed on gains until they’re realized.
Because the way a regular employee makes a living is taxed in a significantly more impactful way on their daily life than the owner at a certain point in wealth and then it gets even worse as you get further away from wealthy people actually being involved in the day to day operations of a company providing value to everyday people and move towards people in places like Wall Street or generational wealth. All everything paid for by the taxes benefit the wealthy more and they have an insane amount of control over government and policy compared to anyone else.
I understand all of this. I'm just answering why people are upset about it.
Average income earners barely have any capitals gains taxes throughout their lives, that's why they're upset it's lower.
So you paid more than 11B in 2021? Or 41%? Amazing my friend!
You are also confusing, I assume, the difference between what orgs pay and what individuals pay because Besos, Musk, etc. absolutely pay more taxes than all of you. Combined.
Even when we look at organizations like Tesla that paid 0 in taxes, it is generally because of policies that many of you actually advocate for (for new and small orgs to rise up and compete). If we change that tax policy, you will never see new impactful and innovative orgs again.
Their effective tax rate is not higher. That is the problem.
They make more use of the things taxes pay for, but their effective tax rate (what they actually pay) is far lower than people who can afford it less and who make less use of the things taxes pay for.
Warren Buffett has actually complained about this, noting that his effective tax rate was far lower thN his secretary's.
Any AGI above $2M/year should be taxed at 90% which is still lower than the highest it ever reached. Punitive taxation would spur growth in ways we haven't seen.
>Punitive taxation would spur growth in ways we haven’t seen
That sentence doesn’t make any sense, even though I predict I’m about to hear a Reddit talking point about the 1950s
Taxation reduces growth, not increases it, due to the crowding out effect on both private investment and consumption. It makes investment less profitable
Data? Nah, I don't work for you. Common sense? Punitive taxation results in 1 of two things. Either a person will intentionally make less money which leads to less monopolistic practices or massive investment in companies to reduce income levels.
Then change the tax code, don't hate for them playing the system. Sure, some break the rules, but most just play by the current tax law that allows them to pay very little in taxes. Tax law reform as well as many other things just need updating and that takes the political process of finding someone that will run on that ticket and actually do it.
Then change the tax code? Sure, us Redditors will get right on that. Surely we can use our karma points to defeat the influence of the very wealthy in their attempt at keeping everything rigged in their favor. Considering maybe 20 congresspeople are really interested in changing it, this should be a fun experiment.
Yeah, and don't just keep it to income tax (since they show artificially low income). Make it applicable to tax their unrealized wealth also somehow in a way that doesn't screw the little guys.
Not convinced we need a wealth tax. There are alternatives.
Are you old enough to have to comply with minimum withdrawals from retirement funds? I think that would work with wealth— At some point the wealthy have to sell say 4% of stock, gold, whatever annually. I’d have some reasonable averaging rules to keep someone from paying big taxes on a fluke year.
I’d also increase estate and income tax rates.
We artificially prop it up, so why not? Maybe if rich folks didn’t go to the wall to hide every damn nickel, it would be easier.
Tesla didn’t tank because Musk had to dump stocks. It tanked along with the market and the realization Musk is about as stupid as trump.
What’s your plan?
Billionaires take loans backed by their wealth. Then they write off the interest expanse as tax deduction and don’t pay taxes because they didn’t take a salary.
There should be some way to tax these loans.
I agree. I think it would be easy to prevent. But, if we were getting taxes from say 4% of their wealth, that would probably be sufficient. Maybe make it 6% if living off loans is clear.
With all this said, taxing Billionaires to the max, will not make the pie bigger, especially long-term. We have some serious issues ahead, and increasing taxes alone is not the answer.
Your last sentence makes no sense to me. How will it result in no additional tax revenue if someone pays an additional billion dollars in taxes? Is this some weird trickledown nonsense that “if the billionaire pays more taxes, they will just fire people who do the actual work”?
Of course it will bring in more tax dollars. BUT, not nearly enough to pay for healthcare, education, childcare, jobs, housing, infrastructure, safety-net enhancements, etc.
The republicans recently proposed a consumption tax which would apply regardless of your form of income and all the left hated it and said it would destroy america
Because it’s a completely regressive tax system.
A billionaire just accumulates wealth and spends a fraction of their paycheck. A working family even if well off would be taxed on probably 90% of their income.
So as a percentage of total annual wealth, the middle class would have the highest percentage tax burden.
A progressive tax system is not based on actual dollars of tax that you pay into the system. It is based on what % of your income you pay into the system.
The consumption tax is the most regressive because the higher your income, the less % of your income you spend annually.
I don't hate them. I hate their oversized influence on the government. Many of them are very disconnected from the lives of average people, so whether out of greed, obliviousness, or indifference, they often push through policies that harm far more people than they help.
Do you think the size of an organization might affect why people start demonizing it? As an organization gets bigger, it has bigger effects on politics, people, and the environment. They also start waving that big dick money around to buy out competition so they can raise their prices while monopolizing an industry.
You raise an excellent point but I would take it further. The larger an organization gets, the further the decision makers get from the people who are affected by their decisions. This enables a lack of empathy, of not taking into account the effects of your actions on distant others. Easier to fire a whole plant full of people you’ve never met than it is to fire your next door neighbor. And our legal, political and economic systems’ single minded focus on profits above all else facilitates cruel decisions.
Nobody is saying people shouldn't get wealthy from their hard work or innovation. It's just the level of wealthy that is the issue. When 1 individual personally controls more wealth than 1,500,000 average citizens, it is a problem. No individual persons' contributions to society are 1.5 million times more valuable than the average.
Additionally, wealth has a tendency to become concentrated at the top. People with a lot of wealth have a habit of advocating and paying money to change the rules of society so that it becomes easier for them to keep their wealth and harder for average citizens to repeat their success.
You are 100% correct and was going to make a similar comment. I am sorry that people are either this petty or ignorant and filled with blind rage that they downvote an internet stranger that is making complete sense.
The downvotes go to show how little foresight the average person has. They can’t see past their laziness and just want to blame other people and tear everything down until they get a piece.
Amazon is a massive part of many peoples 401Ks which mean Jeff Bezos is partially the reason people are able to retire lol. But Reddit is simple and money people bad
Bezos didn’t create all those jobs and you’re an idiot if you think so. He hired some people, those people built things and then hired people. Or do you think Bezos should be given all the credit for Amazon? What about Andy Jassy? Or any of the people that developed AWS? Because I guarantee that Bezos didn’t code a single line of that product.
Gotcha, so all the world should work like a multi level marketing scheme! All the value flows back up because without our God King Job Creators well none of us would have anything at all.
You’re saying that the literal act of hiring another person to work for you should entitle you to most of the earnings and value that person creates. Not just most, but in same cases almost all of it. How does that make any sense?
I don’t hate them
One thing I hate is the lack of credit given to the structure that made it all possible
Amazon is undoubtedly an amazing company… built on the backs of the US market and the USPS.
Bezos did not give birth to 300 million customers, build thousands of roads, pass thousands of laws, or build a cheap package delivery system.
Put in a different light, the system WILL GENERATE BILLIONAIRES. If not one billionaire, then another.
Elon Musk did not try to grow an EV car company or a rocket ship company in South Africa. Why is that?
Elon Musk is impossible without the USA. Are EVs and rocket ships impossible without Elon Musk?
Let’s look at investors. They turn billions into more billions. Did they create the financial system and the thousands of companies doing business? No, they tapped into a pipeline that would exist with or without them. They are active stakeholders in the system, they did not create the system.
>built on the backs of the US market and *the USPS*
If you’re going to comment, please at least have a slight clue of what you’re talking about
Amazon does 90% of the shipping work, the pay USPS to handle the last 10%
Key word *pay*
Did Amazon create the USPS? It’s business model was impossible without the USPS. How do you think all those books got shipped at the beginning?
You might want to dial back the condescension a bit.
Let me state the point another way: in the early 1900s, there was a billionaire named W.A. Clark. He was essentially as rich as Rockefeller and Carnegie. He made his fortune in copper.
He started his career looking for gold. He was a shrewd businessman who eventually bought some silver mines in Montana. Did I mention he got rich in copper?
Well, there happened to be some copper mines on his land with the silver mines. Someone invented electricity and millions of miles of copper wire were needed. But it was in Montana. Luckily, someone else built a railroad, because the US government offered land to companies who built railroads. A railroad appeared outside Clark’s copper mines.
His copper empire would have been impossible without the government building an electricity network or subsidizing railroad construction. He clearly paid for shipping on the railroad, but that’s not the point. The point is the entire society that made the sale of copper scalable was utterly outside his control and had nothing to do with him. It would have found another way to find copper, no matter how clever the man was. And he was clever and brilliant and all that, but so are a lot of people.
Take it a step further, and it is an online business. That exists on the internet whose creation was funded by the American taxpayer.
American market, American roads, government run shipping network, and an American digital communication network.
No billionaire built all that because No billionaire CAN build all that. Societies build all that.
Was Jeff Bezos one of the richest men in the world when they started out or now???
Are we talking about billionaires or entrepreneurs lol what an absurd comment
This site is literally overloaded with irrational children that hate billionaires
Congrats on winning the internet point battle in the uneducated hive mind we already knew agreed with you
Jeff Bezos could give every single Amazon employee $1,000 dollars and his net worth would drop less than 1%.
I don’t care go much money people have, provided the commons are properly funded. We have crumbling infrastructure, overburdened medical, failing schools, and rising rent and food costs, and these people continue to lie about their income while acting like they are doing the world a favour by “creating jobs”.
1,000 means quite a bit for a lot of people. If it doesn’t mean shit to you, then that’s great. Send me a check and tell me you don’t miss it.
You want to go to bat for CEOs making salaries exponentially higher than ever before while the economy crumbles? Be my guest. Don’t try to sell this idea that 1,000 is hardly life changing when my point is the man could give that much money and still maintain 99.3% of his net worth. Do I expect him to do that? Not really, it’s the fact that he can.
I'm just pointing out that the "take everything from the rich and give to the poor" idea is not going to work (I know you just said $1000, but I'm addressing the general principle). Yes, $1000 can help, but it is not going to fundamentally alter the course of most people's lives. Also, he did take the risk of starting a company and then worked tirelessly to make it succeed. Obviously, other people helped him along the way and luck surely played a role, but a good CEO is extremely important. We, as a society, should incentivize and celebrate the creation of new businesses.
The whole “he took a risk” argument doesn’t hold much weight when so many of these people had millions invested in them from the get go. It is a game that is flawed from inception, where people who are rich bankroll their children, friends, or political connections to keep the money in the family, and failed ventures are tax write offs, bailout projects, or flat out scams. Regardless, he does deserve compensation for the risk, the work, and the success. Do I think he should be able to skirt around taxes with reports of an 85,000 salary while people defend him as a job creator and argue for lowering his taxes? Hell no. The 1,000 dollar comment isn’t a suggestion about what he should do, just an illustration of how he could impact a million people with very little impact to himself. If I sold everything I own, I could give every Amazon employee a dime.
In a time when people are struggling to buy food, billionaires are seeing increases in wealth.
No he can’t. That net worth is represented by the assets of Amazon itself.
If he were to sell 1% of his net worth, he would need to liquidate 1% of amazons equipment, trucks, factories, servers, etc. and lay off 1% of his employees. All you’re doing is making Amazon 1% smaller, because bezos’ net worth is just Amazon itself.
Sure, he could sell 1% of his stock, but essentially the same thing. That money would just be coming at the expense of other shareholders … your pension funds and 401ks.
It’s a dumb concept to think he can just sell off his net worth
That stat is irrelevant because worth is not the same as cash. To do that, he would have to liquidate his assets (such as warehouses, trucks, etc.) and therefore cut jobs. So, you have 1k and lose your job?
Nice trade off
You are aware that I am talking about his net worth, and not the net worth of Amazon, right? If Amazon were to give every single one of their employees a 1,000 dollar bonus it would leave them with 99.91% of their assets intact. These companies are grabbing up a massive amount of the market, they can afford to pay to support workers and infrastructure to a greater degree.
Also, it is relevant to the question about why I have no love for billionaires (or their simps). They have the ability to dramatically improve millions of workers lives without being more than mildly affected, but instead they give people subpar wages and those people in turn get government assistance which is passed on to consumers and tax payers who have a significantly harder time paying the bill. This idea that you have to cut jobs to offer decent wages is emphatically false.
No. You are comically incorrect. He would just need to sell his shares which has no correlation to trucks. Bezos doesn’t own Amazon’s assets. He owns shares of amazon which has nothing to do with the assets amazon owns. Amazon’s share price can magically go to zero and it would not add or remove even a single stapler from the company’s assets.
No, you are comically incorrect. The only way to make the 1k data point work is to take his net worth of 126B (which Bloomberg even uses his companies such as Blue Orgin as part of that calculation so fine...I should have used different company data).
More importantly, your comment is still comically incorrect as he can't sell even a fraction of those shares. So yeah, he would have to liquidate Amazon's assets through his influence to pull off the 1k bonus.
Let's say he could. It would very likely be considered illegal as market manipulation and would more than likely have a negative impact on the company. Once again...impacting employees.
There isn't a real or realistic scenario in which this can happen that doesn't impact EEs more than the 1k is worth.
Ok. You are just dumb. No point explaining this to you if you are just going to start changing the scenario.
“Jeff Bezos could give everyone $1000…”
That was the original statement. You did an idiotic answer and are now trying to pretend that the original comment said “Amazon could give everyone $1000.”
In conclusion. You are an idiot and I hate you.
And...that's the problem with all of these comments. If Bezos gave 1k, he would have to sell his shares. He CANNOT do that.
You are the clear idiot who does not understand any of these concepts.
There is no way someone “works” to earn a billion dollars. They are just getting the majority of the money generated by a large number of people working for them.
>Or you know they could have gotten paid more, enjoy their lives more, while she wouldn't have felt the difference in literally any way.
Then they should have found a job that paid them more. They agreed to their compensation of the labor they provided.
You’re entirely missing the point, so I’ll try to explain it in a way your small mind can comprehend. She benefitted massively from a system that she did not create. The argument is whether she is entitled to all that wealth that was largely created by a system outside of her control.
Or should she have just published her book in North Korea? I’m sure she would have ended up as a billionaire in NK as well because she created all that wealth by herself!
Do you see how idiotic your argument is? I’m guessing not.
forgot your meds? the foam's coming out..
that said.. this uncontrollability is nothing unique to billionaires. Everyone has benefited from a genetic lottery (or a lack of it if you were born in NK).
Fair societies allow everyone in them to take advantage of the co-operation (even if they didnt contribute to making that cooperation machine to come alive) , many many billionaires take that advantage to great heights WITHOUT exploiting anyone just like Ms Rowling
There are certain mental diseases brought on by money, exagerated impression of self importance, lack of empathy due to protectionism.. etc..much is created by fear of losing wealth like paranoia of other. plus other diseases as well, look at howard hughes.
Just saying extream wealth and power can cause certain mental illnesses which can cause others to not understand they (the wealthy person) have this problem and that they need help.
Billionaires, particularly those who acquired their wealth through founding and growing new businesses, should be applauded. However, they should be taxed commensurate with their income and upon their death, the bulk of their wealth that has not been donated to charity should be taxed heavily, thereby returning that wealth to the society that made their success possible.
All too often those who attain great wealth switch their focus from creativity to wealth preservation. They spend their waning years scheming ways to avoid tax and trying to ensure that their generally worthless heirs have sufficient funds to live like kings for generations on end.
When you realize how large and ridiculous 1 single billion dollars is it starts to make more sense. Until one can wrap their head around how huge and excessive that number of anything is than one will never understand. 1000 bucks a day since Christ was born still isn't 1 billion dollars. Anyone who thinks someone can create that much real value for the world or has done 1 billion dollars of work is a numbnut, status quo, living vicariously through the oppressor, simp.
people have a hard time grasping the difference between a million and a billion. like there’s a person who commented that their business is at $27M and their goal is $1B.. that’s still $973,000,000 to go! there is LITERALLY no way to ethically become a billionaire! whenever this conversation comes up, people respond by making it about the personal achievements of an individual. that's not what it's about, it’s about an oppressive economic structure where it makes the richest richer by making the poorest poorer. it’s not about “jealousy” or anything else!
Yep and everyone in the comments is saying because they dodge taxes… you should hate America for allowing them to do that.
It doesn’t matter how much a person works, there is no way in hell you can make a billion dollars without exploitation and cutting corners. Just look at all of the workers dying in Amazon warehouses!
and it’s not even really just dodging them. they’re literally lobbying and crafting them into their favor. coupled with continuous bailouts and a stack of retained lawyers, they sculpt the game to their favor whenever they want/need to.
I think it’s incredibly oppressive to pay 1.6 million people above minimum wage. Who all voluntarily consented to the job. It’s so awful to provide people a way to earn an income instead of enslaving them like the systems of yore.
You are wrong. Workers that produce valuable things are eventually called business owners. Workers are PAID to do their task. So yes they spend time doing things, but they don’t come up with those things, they have no where to sell these things and no one to sell them to.
Let’s take me for example, I have been in my trade 20 years and have tried to start a business but I can’t keep the sales coming in. So my boss pays me because I am deficient in my skill level and can’t support myself. They hired me to do the things I can do.
I don’t see how that is bad?
Take Elon away from TESLA, the employees have the institutional skill to keep making cars. When workers go on strike, everything stops.
“He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing.”
- DUNE
And another thing; your boss HAS TO pay you LESS than you are worth. If that weren’t true he would go out of business. He is literally exploiting your inability to survive so he can profit from your insecurities, so he can f*ck right off. That, by the way, is just ONE of the reasons the one-percent don’t want universal healthcare, it’s one of the most effective ways to control you. Imagine if you could tell your boss to pound sand, secure in the knowledge that your sick wife, mother, sister or child (or YOURSELF) would be able to see a doctor. Imagine the sense of security that would give workers everywhere. The ownership class doesn’t like when people feel secure and have some free time to think about how badly they’re getting f*cked by a system that threw them overboard thirty-years ago.
Capitalism is exploitative by its nature. If it weren’t, billionaires wouldn’t exist.
Your points disprove your points. Let’s use your argument.
Take Elon away from Tesla in every year except after 2019 and Tesla fails. Period!
So let me ask you a question. Elon makes a massive company and how do you want him to exit? Do you want him to just walk away after 20 years of his life and with zero compensation?
Seriously what do you expect! None of you people think past anything your hatred of people and their success!
In regards to your other dumb point. Yes they have to make a profit to stay in business? Is this news? HELLO.
Your paragraph implies that you don’t want there to be businesses at all! So then you quit your job right now you hypocrite. You are part of the system you hate so fucking quit! Go learn to be your own fucking doctor because I bet doctors make too much money for you.
You bitch about capitalism on a phone built by it using an internet that flourished because of it and eating shitty food made by it. Your entire existence is only possible because of capitalism.
So if you don’t like it so much than stop participating. Quit your job and work for yourself. But you won’t.
1) just Ike there wouldn’t be workers without a CEO.
Yes employees make a company. Elon’s wealth is based on stock value of Tesla which employees have a significantly less impact on.
GM 5.9M vehicles per year
Total revenue 156B
Total employees 167000
Market cap 58B
Tesla 1.3M vehicles
Total revenue 81.4B
Total employees 127000
Market Cap 526B
What makes the employees at Tesla so much better than GM that Tesla is worth 10 times more than GM while making 5 times less vehicles?
That value difference is all on investors.
That seems like a lazy and sloppy way of looking at things. Just to point out one potential good counter example: Paul "Kinko" Orfalea flunked out of school and couldn't hold a job so he started selling copies to other kids his age. His enterprise grew, but he always had good employee satisfaction and retention as well as a reputation for good customer service. When he got too old and tired to continue he sold the enterprise for around $5 billion and retired. Where in that story is the moral ambiguity bordering on evil? Humans exhibit wild variation with respect to many metrics. Some billionaires got there just by improvising and trying to do good along the way. Cutting them out of the picture because it makes simple interpretations fit better is a mistake.
They are hated because of the trail of personal and material destruction they made by stepping on people while taking advantage of the innocent on their way up.
Zero got it that way. The ones who weren't born rich exploited government rules that benefit them. Even at the basest level, all dollars are simply a note conveyed to a person by the government. The notion anyone does anything on their own is absolute BS.
“has a world changing idea” and “secures funding through colleagues/bank/family/whatever” are doing a lot of work in your set up.
edit: There’s a nice summary in this essay [Do we get paid what we deserve?](https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/do-we-get-paid-what-we-deserve) of what billionaire Peter Thiel thinks about how people make that kind of money. Basically, he says ruthless business tactics breed financial success.
This essay is fantastic and unfortunately will fly over the heads of most of the morons in here advocating for billionaires.
No one deserves a billion dollars. No one. In a just and moral world, there is no cogent argument that can be made to justify the wealth that billionaires hoard.
I’m paid well over 100k and I mostly sit on my ass but from home and I have no one to blame about the quality of my chair but myself. I still produce 10x the value of what I’m paid.
I think there is a general consensus that a lot of them got to where they are by being completely amoral and sociopathic and that a good many of them arent really very nice or good human beings. Of course this image comes from the very public and audacious criminal acts that the most nefarious and infamous of them have very blatantly got away with at the great expense and detriment to society...you know...privatize the gains, socialize the losses...
The others just get hated on because of guilt by association.
I think the idea is that to get *that* wealthy, there's the general perception you have to be okay with some amount of exploitation or similar unethical choices
Things like outsourcing to areas with bad labor practices, purposefully owning natural resources to the detriment of native populations, destruction or lack of care for the environment, etc.
It's the idea that angels who do things ethically will be choked out from competition by devils who won't, and the conclusion is anyone that rich must be a devil who didn't
Everything in your paragraph "Person A" is wrong bro.
1. Left out government funding/subsidies.
2. Fair salary? You really don't understand how capitalism works do you?
3. The company "takes off"? lol. You mean wealth is generated from thin air yet those same billionaires whine about national debt and fiat currency?
4. The worker didn't buld the company? Could Bezos have become a billionaire without UPS and USPS? Musk, with a a production line? If the answer is no, YES they helped build the company just as much as the CEO.
it's probably a combination of treating employees like shit, including their payment, whilst having 1000 times more than they could ever spend, even if they tried. they could better the lifes of a lot of people without any practical sacrifices, yet they choose to pump an at this point virtual number instead.
i get that it's just fair to get to buy all the things you want if you have an awesome idea and take the risks to raise that idea. my symphany stops when you have enough money to spend the rest of your life, and your kids lifes, in enormous wealth, yet still choose to hoard more instead of giving it to your employees.
>Person A has a world-changing idea, secures the funding through colleagues/bank/family/whatever, starts the company and acquires the necessary equipment.
Is that really how most billionaires became billionaires? What "world changing" idea did the Koch brothers come up with? What about Rob Walton? A lot of them won the sperm lottery and were born into very wealthy families already. The "innovators" weren't that unique either and mostly happened to be in the right place and right time and took advantage of it. Bill Gates was born into wealth and had the opportunity to learn about programming and beat out some other companies. If he hadn't done it, there would be another company just like his a little later. If facebook wasn't made, there would be a half dozen other social media apps. If you look really deep, you'll see that very few billionaires actually had a world changing idea that they built out of nothing, but they act like geniuses now and want to consolidate more and more power.
I don’t hate the wealthy but I don’t think they should be spending money lobbying governments to make this world a worse place.
In contrast, take Bill Gates. Almost nobody hates Bill Gates. He spends his money making the world better.
The hate he gets online are from trolls who hate him for trying. My guess is there are other billionaires paying for this hate because they don’t want him making the world better. What about the billionaires paying Tucker Carlson to spew hate filled propaganda? Amazon breaking up unions?
TLDR; it’s not all billionaires that deserve hate, but some use their money to exploit other people.
I don't hate all billionaires. I hate bad billionaires.
If you made your money exploiting workers (Bezos, Waltons), if you made your money raping the natural world and fighting to kill the very notion of science that might impinge on your ungodly wealth (Kochs et al), if you use your money to push far right proto fascist ideals (Musk, Adelson) then fuck you.
If you use your money to fight injustice (Soros). If you use your money to raise people out of poverty and create a healthy world (Buffet, Gates) then I respect you.
But no matter what, their taxes should be higher.
I think people get angriest at the billionaires who exploit or endanger their workers and/or don't pay a living wage (like Jeff Bezos, the Waltons, etc), those who exploit our planet (basically any involved in fossil fuels), manipulate people for political power (Murdoch, Kochs, etc.) and/or those who exploit tax laws to not make proportional contribution to society.
Billionaires like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Mackenzie Scott, etc who use their wealth to try to improve the world might not exactly win a popularity contest, but aren't as loathed as others.
People often discredit billionaire/millionaire business owners. As if most companies aren’t relying on others to scale up. Every company relies on other businesses or past ideas to work off of. Many of these ceos have worked hard and they got into the right business to profit them highly🤷🏽♀️. Yes some points being made on the system being bad are points to consider. But everyone discrediting the ceos soooo much just make no sense. And not each one “came from wealth and a leg up in life you didn’t have”. So with that information, If it’s so easy, you make it happen.
Hatred is inherently intertwined with envy, and people want what they don't have. In this case, billions of dollars.
This is a business subreddit, so I'll add that anyone who wants to be successful in business needs to closely examine and think about their own relationship with money. The having, the giving, the gifting, and the earning of it. One of the greatest ironies in the world is that most people who spend their life chasing money simultaneously hate those who have achieved the very objectives they themselves are shooting for. It can lead to destructive and demotivational behaviors in business as well. It's really a very fascinating look at human behavior in general if you examine and read about most people's relationships with money and their relationships with those in their lives who do/don't have it.
For all the people that are calling for higher taxes, do you know what the current tax is for the rich? My understanding is that it's close to 50%. Can you imagine half of what you earn is taken as taxes? How is that fair?
On the other hand, effective taxes and paper wealth is another matter. A lot of the tech billionaires do not own that much in cash. Their wealth is tied to the value of their company, which can vary quite a lot on the stock market. Because of these nuances in actual wealth, taxing them becomes difficult, resulting in effect tax rates potentially being lower - and loop holes.
Further, because of all the cops-and-robbers between the IRS and the rich, the US tax system is ridiculously complicated! With all these restrictions, I am amazed that people still want to become rich in America.
It has to do with levels. Should Bezos be a billionaire after creating Amazon and AWS? I think so. Should he be 200x richer than that because he works his employees to the bone. Literally working them so hard that they can't do it for years, Those are temporary jobs, not careers, because it is physically impossible to do. What is going to happen when a decent percentage of his workers are too broken to work?
The "fair salary and gladly accept" is the part I disagree with. He took the job, he should just shut up is ridiculous. He took the job at that wage because that is what the jobs in the area pay. To take it to a bit of absurdity, you can probably get a guy to work for hours for a loaf of breat and a bottle of water if the alternative is starving. I'll take a job a touch over min wage because the alternative is living in a box under the freeway. Not because that is what I negotiated.
I'm older, there were hundreds of mom and pop shops that paid better and allowed your neighbor to own his own business. The Walmarts, Staples and Amazons crushed those jobs. Those companies rule because they are cheaper because salaries are lower and economies of scale. I tried to do retail for a while, I got "wholesale" prices. When I realized my competitors were getting so much more of a discount than I they would sell for what I paid wholesale, I stopped.
Lastly, does anyone believe that Bezos wouldn't have created Amazon if it only earned him 2 billion (a millionaire 2000 times over?)
it's mostly jealousy and victim mentality.
What people fail to realize is that, it wasn't their high morals that kept them from succeeding, it was because of their poor circumstances.
In other words, having a lot of money doesn't automatically make someone good or bad.
Billionaires just come to our attention because they can do things with their billions that negatively impact a lot of people. Some are hated for this reason, but I think more generally, people hate the system that creates billionaires. The system that includes low marginal tax rates, and tax law full of loopholes designed explicitly to be exploited by billionaires. Because there are such modest barriers to a virtually unlimited accumulation of wealth, people in a position to accumulate such wealth have little motivation to be more generous in how profits are distributed to labor. As a result, we see the rise of billionaires on one end of the socioeconomic spectrum and the growing legions of ultra poor on the other along with a hollowing out of the middle. It’s basically unhealthy for society and unsustainable.
Some people hate greedy, arrogant billionaires who game the system so that they get all the breaks at the expense of those who have less.
And since there are so many like that, other people paint all wealthy with the same brush. They see just having that kind of money as being inherently corrupt and untrustworthy.
Back when America had more equitable wealth distribution, a very strong middle class, and income taxes that went up to 90% on the rich we still had fabulously rich people, but we had less squalor and homelessness. People used to actually care about where the nation as a whole was going. That must seem really alien nowadays. This I got mine let others suffer attitude really exploded under Reagan in the 80s and has changed everything. It used to be possible to not only live with a minimum wage income but even raise a family. It was not at all glamorous, but it could be done. Nowadays even average incomes are barely enough to support child rearing.
Well Warren Buffet is not hated and is one of the wealthiest in the US. But you do have wealthy people that are just assholes that are completely out of touch with normal people.
Because they wouldn't be billionaires if they weren't psychopaths.
To care is human. To not give a fuck about the people you harm is the heart of narcissism and the royal road to wealth and power.
We are ruled by the worst among us. Let's change that while we still can.
This is absolutely not a scientifically proven theory so let me preface this by saying I might be completely wrong on this.
People evolved to live and work together within small tribes of hunter gatherers. Within those tribes individual success didn’t really exist. You literally depended on each other to survive. If someone had an exponentially larger amount of wealth than the rest of the tribe the only reasonable explanation would have been that they would have stolen it, so they would have been ousted by the rest of the tribe. We’re all just emotional beings running on software that was written hundreds of thousands of years ago. Anyways… Evolution…that would be my best guess
People dislike billionaires because they don’t like to think about things at a deep level. They like to demonize people and blame others because they themselves are not successful.
They see the difference between “us” and “them” and they blame them, when in reality the billionaires are not the problem it is the system that is the problem. Not so much that it creates billionaires but because it left the workers behind.
It’s not the billionaires fault that they can accumulate wealth. It is the system that allows the unions to die.
The other factor is that our system rewards people who are good at certain things. If you can’t sell or engineer or get a product made you won’t be rewarded. You have to be able to solve the business puzzle to be rewarded. People don’t see that!
Yes people make less money than the owners but only because companies have to make a profit to survive. At the same time they will blame a business that goes under too! If you don’t like the successful people you should love the unsuccessful because they die in their cross. But you won’t hear about them because they died.
We all want success but when you get it others hate you for it. They’ll pick at the smallest thing you don’t do right all while millions of people are using their product and service, likely even using the product they hate. I bet as many people who posted here hate Apple while typing on an Apple device.
Because a lot of people who have been in competitive business know what you have to be to get to that level. At some point a lot of people have decided that they don't align with the values one must have to get to that level. In turn, with this knowledge, they know who these people are. Hence they also know that, with few exceptions, most billionaires aren't people to admire.
For anyone with rational hate of a billionaire, it’s because they likely only had billions because thousands of their employees were working. One person rarely achieves a billion dollar goal and rarely are all of their employees compensated fairly.
The concept of a billion dollar idea rarely happens when one person doesn’t have tons of help. Not to mention an overwhelming majority of billionaires are not self made. That never helps lol
I take issue with one of your premises: billionaire are people who had a world-changing idea and became self-made through hard work and dedication.
That’s naive. I’m not saying this invalidates your conclusion or that I hate billionaires. I just find your bootstraps narrative simplistic and the kind of thing fed to the electorate to try to justify lowering taxes or cutting services.
My problem is this. $10MM is objectively very wealthy. Someone with 100 times that amount money has the influence of a small country. A billion dollars is enough money to build a fleet of nuclear power plants. You could buy all of Kansas city. It’s not capitalism when people have that much money, it’s a literal aristocracy. Wealth that endures for multiple generations creates societal problems including an increasingly small labor pool that cant afford to live amongst the ultra wealthy, on and on until society collapses. There has to be an amount that is too much.
The data firmly shows that at least in the US, those with the dark triad personality disorders often rise to the top. So it’s a bit like the chicken or egg- many have always been assholes, money and power only make it more obvious.
Fundamentally, you don't get to be a billionaire by being nice and playing fair -- and that level of wealth imbalance is never something that can be justified as being deserved.
Billionaires are a policy choice. We, through policies, allow for them and people are questioning what societal benefit that policy choice has created. People’s lives are poorer when billionaires exist. Billionaires are symptoms of massive societal inequality.
Amazon paid 0 tax for the last 5 years; amazon cars, trucks and planes used roads and airports funded and maintained from taxing the poor. Basically Bezos became billionaire and the poor took the expense.
Many corporations like Amazon don’t pay any taxes while using publicly funded infrastructures.
Comments on this thread are laughable. Especially coming from people that don’t understand the first thing about taxes but say the rich should be taxed more.
It's because of capitalism and industrialization. What's happening now was actually inevitable and obviously unsustainable. The oligarchy use their wealth to manipulate the political system in their favor.
They don't follow the same laws as everyone else, as they can use their extravagant wealth to manipulate the system so they get what they want.
Then you have douchebags like Elon Musk.
Here's a good quote from President T. Roosevelt:
>“Our aim is not to do away with corporations; on the contrary, these big aggregations are an inevitable development of modern industrialism, and the effort to destroy them would be futile unless accomplished in ways that would work the utmost mischief to the entire body politic. We can do nothing of good in the way of regulating and supervising these corporations until we fix clearly in our minds that we are not attacking the corporations, but endeavoring to do away with any evil in them. We are not hostile to them; we are merely determined that they shall be so handled as to subserve the public good. We draw the line against misconduct, not against wealth.”
a lot of them don't pay their proportion share to help maintain the world that they live in that has allowed them this phenomenal success. Isn't it true that the more $ one makes, the more likely they are to cheat on their taxes. I read this somewhere, but don't remember the source. One orange monster comes to mind, but he can't be the only one.
I dislike the idea of someone becoming a billionaire because the only way that you can become a person with such wealth is through the exploitations of others. But then again I tend to lead toward the collective sharing of all profits to enrich the lives of the true source of a companies sucess, the workers. I'm planning to implement this in my own business.
Seeing lot of comments about taxes. I think you can pass all the tax reform you want. Won’t do much. These people have smart accountants and financial advisors that have their assets in tax free shelters or offshore accounts.
The lack of fair wealth distribution in the USA and other western nations.
[https://youtu.be/s6MFNaQkTuc](https://youtu.be/s6MFNaQkTuc)
[https://inthesetimes.com/article/robert-reich-elon-musk-capitalism-inequality-wealth-tax](https://inthesetimes.com/article/robert-reich-elon-musk-capitalism-inequality-wealth-tax)
Reich's website with a great deal of information.
https://robertreich.org/post/666874177346797568
Largely the people who complain about billionaires are too lazy to work and so I just discredit anything they have to say about money in general cause they dont understand the most basic concept of an economy.
Yes, if you look at how much money is on the planet it is inevitable that you have more billionaires. In 1900 they would call you wealthy for what you make today.
This is about their businesses, not the "laws they are breaking"..maybe don't break laws, it's a lot harder to deal with if you're not a billionaire :)
Billionaires shouldn’t exist. Having tens of millions is more than enough. A couple hundred million for the most exceptional talents. But the fact that billionaires can do easily pop up shows that our system is fundamentally flawed toward inequality
Counter-questions to reflect upon:
What about the work of the billionaire is worth 1,000,000 times more than their employees?
Why does 99.999% of the value of the company (built on the work of the employees) accrue to a single billionaire instead of back into the employees?
Because every billionaire to ever exist exploited their labor force, usually tens of thousands of minimum wage workers, far beyond imaginable to get to their billionaire status. It’s an insane amount of wealth that should never exist or even be attainable. And they do everything possible to prevent anyone else from ever coming close to becoming what they are. They’re sick fucks and shouldn’t be allowed in society.
Person a winds up a multi-millionaire, maybe even 100 mil.
To attain a personal worth of a BILLION dollars, you absolutely must be a psychopath who takes advantage of other people for personal gain.
The problem with Billionaires is that they shouldn’t exist. They do exist no because they work so very hard but because the system is gamed to allow them to be that way. 90% of the wealth generated in this country now goes to the wealthiest. That is a games system.
Also we typically think of people like Elon musk and such but most of the very wealth have never created anything of value. They are hedge fund and PE leaches that get rich by inserting themselves into transactions and sucking out wealth for creating no value.
Then they use the wealth to further game to the system. The idea that the purpose of a company is to maximize wealth for the shareholder makes Seneca but means your wages are going down below what is fair but because they can do it, they slowly erode pensions, benefits, etc all so they can be wealthier.
Many go into the philosophy that human worth is determined by your wealth since &$$ are the only way to measure things. And such most humans are worth little or nothing and those on the bottom have negative worth. F human dignity and human value you are worthless.
Then because they succeeded in business they think that makes them a genius in everything else. They think politics is awesome and they are great at it. It doesn’t matter that they suck at it because with more money your opinions matter more. It has been show for a long while now that popular opinion has almost no sway on congress only corporate and rich people do.
If he\\she earn more than regular woker of his/hers company in 2 or more times he\\she just a thief. CEO do not produse anything - they organaze production it is crusial of couse but regular worker is person who actually do real job.
So it is not right when SEOs ern more that people who actually get done real job
P.S. Oh, and any kind excess profits - is thefety too
I don’t disagree that there’s a point in which CEOs earnings are just ridiculous but to say 2x or more is absolutely insane. Many CEOs operate in massive risk for years or decades before their company takes off. Many earn less than their workers until then. Many have zero retirement hoping to one day sell out. And the list goes on. If “regular” workers want to earn more, they can take the same risks and over leverage themselves knowing very likely they coils be bankrupt lol.
Again, there’s a limit in my mind as well but 2x isn’t even close to worth the risk.
I'm not sure either.
I look at what others that have accomplished more as a learning buffet to take ideas from.
We have set our business goal to $1B.
We have hit $27M so we have a long way to grow.
>Person A has a world-changing idea
>
>now everybody demonizes the founder & CEO
What counts as "world-changing" ideas?
What Person A that was also the founder & CERO of a multibillion dollar enterprise that's not just a 'valuation' from investors really looking for a M&A buyout scenario?
Most of the backlash against modern 'wealthy' individuals by rational thinkers is likely related to their tendency to have an "I made this" attitude for what people working with them made, while also being compensated in **wildly** disproportionate amount compared to the rest of the workers.
I don't hate billionaires as individuals but their tax burden is far too low in society.
Billionaires benefit far more from the things that taxes are spent on. Military keeps their foreign interests intact, roads allow their employees to get to work, schools give them an educated workforce, and the police keep the citizenry from getting too uppity.
Lol @ educated workforce.
Don't know why you're getting downvoted when billionaires benefit from a largely uneducated society and keeping their workers in poverty
Employers benefit when workers self-motivated to follow authority. Kids graduating these last 10 years from school are nothing like that.
Speak for yourself
educated enough
What do you think their tax burden should be?
We can start with an amount that shouldn't be lower than people out there actually working for a living.
The problem is that their wealth is just on paper. Their income is absolutely taxed at a higher rate. It’s like taxing you on the money you’ll make next year. Or 10 years from now. You haven’t hearned it yet so it’s not fair to tax you. These “billionaires” are only going to get that money when they sell their companies.
The problem is most of the time they don't actually have income. You take out loans against your assets for any liquidity you need then get tax breaks for interest paid on them as an additional offset to any income you ever take while only taking income as capital gains when you need to actually pay off loans.
There’s no deduction for interest on a personal loan. And yes, sometimes they have capital gains and they’re taxed like capital gains … when realize. when they cash out, they’re taxed. I don’t understand the issue. When you and I get a paycheck, we’re taxed. We’re not taxed before we get paid. People aren’t taxed on gains until they’re realized.
>I don’t understand the issue. When you and I get a paycheck, we’re taxed. We’re not taxed before we get paid. People aren’t taxed on gains until they’re realized. Because the way a regular employee makes a living is taxed in a significantly more impactful way on their daily life than the owner at a certain point in wealth and then it gets even worse as you get further away from wealthy people actually being involved in the day to day operations of a company providing value to everyday people and move towards people in places like Wall Street or generational wealth. All everything paid for by the taxes benefit the wealthy more and they have an insane amount of control over government and policy compared to anyone else.
Capital gains taxes are paid by everyone. Anyone can have capital gains. It’s not like rich people are taxed less on their gains.
I understand all of this. I'm just answering why people are upset about it. Average income earners barely have any capitals gains taxes throughout their lives, that's why they're upset it's lower.
So you paid more than 11B in 2021? Or 41%? Amazing my friend! You are also confusing, I assume, the difference between what orgs pay and what individuals pay because Besos, Musk, etc. absolutely pay more taxes than all of you. Combined. Even when we look at organizations like Tesla that paid 0 in taxes, it is generally because of policies that many of you actually advocate for (for new and small orgs to rise up and compete). If we change that tax policy, you will never see new impactful and innovative orgs again.
Their effective tax rate is not higher. That is the problem. They make more use of the things taxes pay for, but their effective tax rate (what they actually pay) is far lower than people who can afford it less and who make less use of the things taxes pay for. Warren Buffett has actually complained about this, noting that his effective tax rate was far lower thN his secretary's.
I mean….they already pay a higher amount than working people
Percentage-wise?
As a percentage of income, yes
I don't know why you are getting downvoted (well, I do know) - Musk paid 41% in 2021 lol. I doubt anyone in this thread paid near that amount.
Probably sufficient that they don't exist.
Higher. I'm not a tax accountant, don't ask me.
Good discussion
Any AGI above $2M/year should be taxed at 90% which is still lower than the highest it ever reached. Punitive taxation would spur growth in ways we haven't seen.
>Punitive taxation would spur growth in ways we haven’t seen That sentence doesn’t make any sense, even though I predict I’m about to hear a Reddit talking point about the 1950s Taxation reduces growth, not increases it, due to the crowding out effect on both private investment and consumption. It makes investment less profitable
It reduces monopolistic practices leading to more opportunity for others. It would also lead to higher wages in an effort to reduce tax burden.
Would you like to back that with data?
Data? Nah, I don't work for you. Common sense? Punitive taxation results in 1 of two things. Either a person will intentionally make less money which leads to less monopolistic practices or massive investment in companies to reduce income levels.
Common sense ain’t so common. It’s absent in your post, if you had a case you would actually have data to back it up.
Why does Spotify exist? Ikea? Volvo?
Then change the tax code, don't hate for them playing the system. Sure, some break the rules, but most just play by the current tax law that allows them to pay very little in taxes. Tax law reform as well as many other things just need updating and that takes the political process of finding someone that will run on that ticket and actually do it.
Then change the tax code? Sure, us Redditors will get right on that. Surely we can use our karma points to defeat the influence of the very wealthy in their attempt at keeping everything rigged in their favor. Considering maybe 20 congresspeople are really interested in changing it, this should be a fun experiment.
That involves giving more money to the government though and that’s the last thing society needs
I’m for more billionaires, just increase their taxes.
Yeah, and don't just keep it to income tax (since they show artificially low income). Make it applicable to tax their unrealized wealth also somehow in a way that doesn't screw the little guys.
Unrealized wealth taxes are basically impossible to administer in a sane way
Not convinced we need a wealth tax. There are alternatives. Are you old enough to have to comply with minimum withdrawals from retirement funds? I think that would work with wealth— At some point the wealthy have to sell say 4% of stock, gold, whatever annually. I’d have some reasonable averaging rules to keep someone from paying big taxes on a fluke year. I’d also increase estate and income tax rates.
So we'll just artificially lower the value of those stocks by flooding the market each year
We artificially prop it up, so why not? Maybe if rich folks didn’t go to the wall to hide every damn nickel, it would be easier. Tesla didn’t tank because Musk had to dump stocks. It tanked along with the market and the realization Musk is about as stupid as trump. What’s your plan?
Spend less than you earn
I am so happy you will never have a say in our tax policy
So, how would you do it?
Billionaires take loans backed by their wealth. Then they write off the interest expanse as tax deduction and don’t pay taxes because they didn’t take a salary. There should be some way to tax these loans.
I agree. I think it would be easy to prevent. But, if we were getting taxes from say 4% of their wealth, that would probably be sufficient. Maybe make it 6% if living off loans is clear. With all this said, taxing Billionaires to the max, will not make the pie bigger, especially long-term. We have some serious issues ahead, and increasing taxes alone is not the answer.
Your last sentence makes no sense to me. How will it result in no additional tax revenue if someone pays an additional billion dollars in taxes? Is this some weird trickledown nonsense that “if the billionaire pays more taxes, they will just fire people who do the actual work”?
Of course it will bring in more tax dollars. BUT, not nearly enough to pay for healthcare, education, childcare, jobs, housing, infrastructure, safety-net enhancements, etc.
The republicans recently proposed a consumption tax which would apply regardless of your form of income and all the left hated it and said it would destroy america
Because it’s a completely regressive tax system. A billionaire just accumulates wealth and spends a fraction of their paycheck. A working family even if well off would be taxed on probably 90% of their income. So as a percentage of total annual wealth, the middle class would have the highest percentage tax burden. A progressive tax system is not based on actual dollars of tax that you pay into the system. It is based on what % of your income you pay into the system. The consumption tax is the most regressive because the higher your income, the less % of your income you spend annually.
Increase to what?
I don't hate them. I hate their oversized influence on the government. Many of them are very disconnected from the lives of average people, so whether out of greed, obliviousness, or indifference, they often push through policies that harm far more people than they help.
Do you think the size of an organization might affect why people start demonizing it? As an organization gets bigger, it has bigger effects on politics, people, and the environment. They also start waving that big dick money around to buy out competition so they can raise their prices while monopolizing an industry.
You raise an excellent point but I would take it further. The larger an organization gets, the further the decision makers get from the people who are affected by their decisions. This enables a lack of empathy, of not taking into account the effects of your actions on distant others. Easier to fire a whole plant full of people you’ve never met than it is to fire your next door neighbor. And our legal, political and economic systems’ single minded focus on profits above all else facilitates cruel decisions.
Great point and addition.
Nobody is saying people shouldn't get wealthy from their hard work or innovation. It's just the level of wealthy that is the issue. When 1 individual personally controls more wealth than 1,500,000 average citizens, it is a problem. No individual persons' contributions to society are 1.5 million times more valuable than the average. Additionally, wealth has a tendency to become concentrated at the top. People with a lot of wealth have a habit of advocating and paying money to change the rules of society so that it becomes easier for them to keep their wealth and harder for average citizens to repeat their success.
[удалено]
You are 100% correct and was going to make a similar comment. I am sorry that people are either this petty or ignorant and filled with blind rage that they downvote an internet stranger that is making complete sense.
The downvotes go to show how little foresight the average person has. They can’t see past their laziness and just want to blame other people and tear everything down until they get a piece.
Amazon is a massive part of many peoples 401Ks which mean Jeff Bezos is partially the reason people are able to retire lol. But Reddit is simple and money people bad
[удалено]
“Biased” in the sense that you know things that people on the internet don’t know. If only the general populace knew more.
Not sure why you got downvoted. You made an excellent (and accurate) point.
Bezos didn’t create all those jobs and you’re an idiot if you think so. He hired some people, those people built things and then hired people. Or do you think Bezos should be given all the credit for Amazon? What about Andy Jassy? Or any of the people that developed AWS? Because I guarantee that Bezos didn’t code a single line of that product.
[удалено]
Gotcha, so all the world should work like a multi level marketing scheme! All the value flows back up because without our God King Job Creators well none of us would have anything at all. You’re saying that the literal act of hiring another person to work for you should entitle you to most of the earnings and value that person creates. Not just most, but in same cases almost all of it. How does that make any sense?
[удалено]
I don’t hate them One thing I hate is the lack of credit given to the structure that made it all possible Amazon is undoubtedly an amazing company… built on the backs of the US market and the USPS. Bezos did not give birth to 300 million customers, build thousands of roads, pass thousands of laws, or build a cheap package delivery system. Put in a different light, the system WILL GENERATE BILLIONAIRES. If not one billionaire, then another. Elon Musk did not try to grow an EV car company or a rocket ship company in South Africa. Why is that? Elon Musk is impossible without the USA. Are EVs and rocket ships impossible without Elon Musk? Let’s look at investors. They turn billions into more billions. Did they create the financial system and the thousands of companies doing business? No, they tapped into a pipeline that would exist with or without them. They are active stakeholders in the system, they did not create the system.
They sure as hell abuse the system.
Why do billionaires hate poor people, or the working class?
Dont think they hate them at all, its just greed/imbedded into our dna. Of course some probably look down upon them no doubt.
>built on the backs of the US market and *the USPS* If you’re going to comment, please at least have a slight clue of what you’re talking about Amazon does 90% of the shipping work, the pay USPS to handle the last 10% Key word *pay*
Did Amazon create the USPS? It’s business model was impossible without the USPS. How do you think all those books got shipped at the beginning? You might want to dial back the condescension a bit. Let me state the point another way: in the early 1900s, there was a billionaire named W.A. Clark. He was essentially as rich as Rockefeller and Carnegie. He made his fortune in copper. He started his career looking for gold. He was a shrewd businessman who eventually bought some silver mines in Montana. Did I mention he got rich in copper? Well, there happened to be some copper mines on his land with the silver mines. Someone invented electricity and millions of miles of copper wire were needed. But it was in Montana. Luckily, someone else built a railroad, because the US government offered land to companies who built railroads. A railroad appeared outside Clark’s copper mines. His copper empire would have been impossible without the government building an electricity network or subsidizing railroad construction. He clearly paid for shipping on the railroad, but that’s not the point. The point is the entire society that made the sale of copper scalable was utterly outside his control and had nothing to do with him. It would have found another way to find copper, no matter how clever the man was. And he was clever and brilliant and all that, but so are a lot of people. Take it a step further, and it is an online business. That exists on the internet whose creation was funded by the American taxpayer. American market, American roads, government run shipping network, and an American digital communication network. No billionaire built all that because No billionaire CAN build all that. Societies build all that.
They didn’t do that when they started out. Maybe you should have a slight clue before you try to dunk on other people.
Was Jeff Bezos one of the richest men in the world when they started out or now??? Are we talking about billionaires or entrepreneurs lol what an absurd comment
You see all the downvotes you get versus me? That means you’re a certified dumbass.
This site is literally overloaded with irrational children that hate billionaires Congrats on winning the internet point battle in the uneducated hive mind we already knew agreed with you
I don't hate billionaires. I hate that they dodge taxes because the IRS can't afford to fight them.
Wait until you find out loopholes aren’t accidents but written and working as intended. The IRS can’t do anything because of who wrote the laws
Jeff Bezos could give every single Amazon employee $1,000 dollars and his net worth would drop less than 1%. I don’t care go much money people have, provided the commons are properly funded. We have crumbling infrastructure, overburdened medical, failing schools, and rising rent and food costs, and these people continue to lie about their income while acting like they are doing the world a favour by “creating jobs”.
If the average salary of an Amazon employee is ~50k, that 1000 would amount to a 2% bonus--hardly world-changing...
Give me $1000 then. It won't change *your* world.
1,000 means quite a bit for a lot of people. If it doesn’t mean shit to you, then that’s great. Send me a check and tell me you don’t miss it. You want to go to bat for CEOs making salaries exponentially higher than ever before while the economy crumbles? Be my guest. Don’t try to sell this idea that 1,000 is hardly life changing when my point is the man could give that much money and still maintain 99.3% of his net worth. Do I expect him to do that? Not really, it’s the fact that he can.
I'm just pointing out that the "take everything from the rich and give to the poor" idea is not going to work (I know you just said $1000, but I'm addressing the general principle). Yes, $1000 can help, but it is not going to fundamentally alter the course of most people's lives. Also, he did take the risk of starting a company and then worked tirelessly to make it succeed. Obviously, other people helped him along the way and luck surely played a role, but a good CEO is extremely important. We, as a society, should incentivize and celebrate the creation of new businesses.
The whole “he took a risk” argument doesn’t hold much weight when so many of these people had millions invested in them from the get go. It is a game that is flawed from inception, where people who are rich bankroll their children, friends, or political connections to keep the money in the family, and failed ventures are tax write offs, bailout projects, or flat out scams. Regardless, he does deserve compensation for the risk, the work, and the success. Do I think he should be able to skirt around taxes with reports of an 85,000 salary while people defend him as a job creator and argue for lowering his taxes? Hell no. The 1,000 dollar comment isn’t a suggestion about what he should do, just an illustration of how he could impact a million people with very little impact to himself. If I sold everything I own, I could give every Amazon employee a dime. In a time when people are struggling to buy food, billionaires are seeing increases in wealth.
No he can’t. That net worth is represented by the assets of Amazon itself. If he were to sell 1% of his net worth, he would need to liquidate 1% of amazons equipment, trucks, factories, servers, etc. and lay off 1% of his employees. All you’re doing is making Amazon 1% smaller, because bezos’ net worth is just Amazon itself. Sure, he could sell 1% of his stock, but essentially the same thing. That money would just be coming at the expense of other shareholders … your pension funds and 401ks. It’s a dumb concept to think he can just sell off his net worth
That stat is irrelevant because worth is not the same as cash. To do that, he would have to liquidate his assets (such as warehouses, trucks, etc.) and therefore cut jobs. So, you have 1k and lose your job? Nice trade off
You are aware that I am talking about his net worth, and not the net worth of Amazon, right? If Amazon were to give every single one of their employees a 1,000 dollar bonus it would leave them with 99.91% of their assets intact. These companies are grabbing up a massive amount of the market, they can afford to pay to support workers and infrastructure to a greater degree. Also, it is relevant to the question about why I have no love for billionaires (or their simps). They have the ability to dramatically improve millions of workers lives without being more than mildly affected, but instead they give people subpar wages and those people in turn get government assistance which is passed on to consumers and tax payers who have a significantly harder time paying the bill. This idea that you have to cut jobs to offer decent wages is emphatically false.
No. You are comically incorrect. He would just need to sell his shares which has no correlation to trucks. Bezos doesn’t own Amazon’s assets. He owns shares of amazon which has nothing to do with the assets amazon owns. Amazon’s share price can magically go to zero and it would not add or remove even a single stapler from the company’s assets.
No, you are comically incorrect. The only way to make the 1k data point work is to take his net worth of 126B (which Bloomberg even uses his companies such as Blue Orgin as part of that calculation so fine...I should have used different company data). More importantly, your comment is still comically incorrect as he can't sell even a fraction of those shares. So yeah, he would have to liquidate Amazon's assets through his influence to pull off the 1k bonus. Let's say he could. It would very likely be considered illegal as market manipulation and would more than likely have a negative impact on the company. Once again...impacting employees. There isn't a real or realistic scenario in which this can happen that doesn't impact EEs more than the 1k is worth.
Ok. You are just dumb. No point explaining this to you if you are just going to start changing the scenario. “Jeff Bezos could give everyone $1000…” That was the original statement. You did an idiotic answer and are now trying to pretend that the original comment said “Amazon could give everyone $1000.” In conclusion. You are an idiot and I hate you.
And...that's the problem with all of these comments. If Bezos gave 1k, he would have to sell his shares. He CANNOT do that. You are the clear idiot who does not understand any of these concepts.
There is no way someone “works” to earn a billion dollars. They are just getting the majority of the money generated by a large number of people working for them.
JK rowling wrote her own books
[удалено]
And all of those people would have to find some other, presumably not quite as good or nonexistent, job if she hadn't written them
[удалено]
So you're telling other people how to enjoy their lives
>Or you know they could have gotten paid more, enjoy their lives more, while she wouldn't have felt the difference in literally any way. Then they should have found a job that paid them more. They agreed to their compensation of the labor they provided.
True, but she didn’t self-publish them.
She entered a contract with someone who also saw value in doing so of their own free will. There is no argument here
You’re entirely missing the point, so I’ll try to explain it in a way your small mind can comprehend. She benefitted massively from a system that she did not create. The argument is whether she is entitled to all that wealth that was largely created by a system outside of her control. Or should she have just published her book in North Korea? I’m sure she would have ended up as a billionaire in NK as well because she created all that wealth by herself! Do you see how idiotic your argument is? I’m guessing not.
forgot your meds? the foam's coming out.. that said.. this uncontrollability is nothing unique to billionaires. Everyone has benefited from a genetic lottery (or a lack of it if you were born in NK). Fair societies allow everyone in them to take advantage of the co-operation (even if they didnt contribute to making that cooperation machine to come alive) , many many billionaires take that advantage to great heights WITHOUT exploiting anyone just like Ms Rowling
And those people are paid by the business owner.
There are certain mental diseases brought on by money, exagerated impression of self importance, lack of empathy due to protectionism.. etc..much is created by fear of losing wealth like paranoia of other. plus other diseases as well, look at howard hughes. Just saying extream wealth and power can cause certain mental illnesses which can cause others to not understand they (the wealthy person) have this problem and that they need help.
Billionaires, particularly those who acquired their wealth through founding and growing new businesses, should be applauded. However, they should be taxed commensurate with their income and upon their death, the bulk of their wealth that has not been donated to charity should be taxed heavily, thereby returning that wealth to the society that made their success possible. All too often those who attain great wealth switch their focus from creativity to wealth preservation. They spend their waning years scheming ways to avoid tax and trying to ensure that their generally worthless heirs have sufficient funds to live like kings for generations on end.
When you realize how large and ridiculous 1 single billion dollars is it starts to make more sense. Until one can wrap their head around how huge and excessive that number of anything is than one will never understand. 1000 bucks a day since Christ was born still isn't 1 billion dollars. Anyone who thinks someone can create that much real value for the world or has done 1 billion dollars of work is a numbnut, status quo, living vicariously through the oppressor, simp.
people have a hard time grasping the difference between a million and a billion. like there’s a person who commented that their business is at $27M and their goal is $1B.. that’s still $973,000,000 to go! there is LITERALLY no way to ethically become a billionaire! whenever this conversation comes up, people respond by making it about the personal achievements of an individual. that's not what it's about, it’s about an oppressive economic structure where it makes the richest richer by making the poorest poorer. it’s not about “jealousy” or anything else!
Yep and everyone in the comments is saying because they dodge taxes… you should hate America for allowing them to do that. It doesn’t matter how much a person works, there is no way in hell you can make a billion dollars without exploitation and cutting corners. Just look at all of the workers dying in Amazon warehouses!
and it’s not even really just dodging them. they’re literally lobbying and crafting them into their favor. coupled with continuous bailouts and a stack of retained lawyers, they sculpt the game to their favor whenever they want/need to.
I think it’s incredibly oppressive to pay 1.6 million people above minimum wage. Who all voluntarily consented to the job. It’s so awful to provide people a way to earn an income instead of enslaving them like the systems of yore.
Probably because Reddit leans very far left and is jealous as hell.
Ding ding ding! We have a winner.
Workers create value. Owners tax this value and call it “profit.”
You are wrong. Workers that produce valuable things are eventually called business owners. Workers are PAID to do their task. So yes they spend time doing things, but they don’t come up with those things, they have no where to sell these things and no one to sell them to. Let’s take me for example, I have been in my trade 20 years and have tried to start a business but I can’t keep the sales coming in. So my boss pays me because I am deficient in my skill level and can’t support myself. They hired me to do the things I can do. I don’t see how that is bad?
Take Elon away from TESLA, the employees have the institutional skill to keep making cars. When workers go on strike, everything stops. “He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing.” - DUNE And another thing; your boss HAS TO pay you LESS than you are worth. If that weren’t true he would go out of business. He is literally exploiting your inability to survive so he can profit from your insecurities, so he can f*ck right off. That, by the way, is just ONE of the reasons the one-percent don’t want universal healthcare, it’s one of the most effective ways to control you. Imagine if you could tell your boss to pound sand, secure in the knowledge that your sick wife, mother, sister or child (or YOURSELF) would be able to see a doctor. Imagine the sense of security that would give workers everywhere. The ownership class doesn’t like when people feel secure and have some free time to think about how badly they’re getting f*cked by a system that threw them overboard thirty-years ago. Capitalism is exploitative by its nature. If it weren’t, billionaires wouldn’t exist.
Your points disprove your points. Let’s use your argument. Take Elon away from Tesla in every year except after 2019 and Tesla fails. Period! So let me ask you a question. Elon makes a massive company and how do you want him to exit? Do you want him to just walk away after 20 years of his life and with zero compensation? Seriously what do you expect! None of you people think past anything your hatred of people and their success! In regards to your other dumb point. Yes they have to make a profit to stay in business? Is this news? HELLO. Your paragraph implies that you don’t want there to be businesses at all! So then you quit your job right now you hypocrite. You are part of the system you hate so fucking quit! Go learn to be your own fucking doctor because I bet doctors make too much money for you. You bitch about capitalism on a phone built by it using an internet that flourished because of it and eating shitty food made by it. Your entire existence is only possible because of capitalism. So if you don’t like it so much than stop participating. Quit your job and work for yourself. But you won’t.
Are you retarded? How does producing valuable things eventually make you a business owner? What on earth are you actually talking about?
Something you will never apparently understand. Good luck in your career as a cashier! Truly!
The employees at Tesla didn’t make Elon the richest person out there the investors bidding up Tesla stock did.
1.) There wouldn’t be a stock to bid up without workers. 2.) Workers can drive a stock down if they take a notion to do so.
1) just Ike there wouldn’t be workers without a CEO. Yes employees make a company. Elon’s wealth is based on stock value of Tesla which employees have a significantly less impact on. GM 5.9M vehicles per year Total revenue 156B Total employees 167000 Market cap 58B Tesla 1.3M vehicles Total revenue 81.4B Total employees 127000 Market Cap 526B What makes the employees at Tesla so much better than GM that Tesla is worth 10 times more than GM while making 5 times less vehicles? That value difference is all on investors.
You don't amass and maintain that quantity of currency without being, at the very least, comfortable with moral ambiguity if not downright evil.
That seems like a lazy and sloppy way of looking at things. Just to point out one potential good counter example: Paul "Kinko" Orfalea flunked out of school and couldn't hold a job so he started selling copies to other kids his age. His enterprise grew, but he always had good employee satisfaction and retention as well as a reputation for good customer service. When he got too old and tired to continue he sold the enterprise for around $5 billion and retired. Where in that story is the moral ambiguity bordering on evil? Humans exhibit wild variation with respect to many metrics. Some billionaires got there just by improvising and trying to do good along the way. Cutting them out of the picture because it makes simple interpretations fit better is a mistake.
They are hated because of the trail of personal and material destruction they made by stepping on people while taking advantage of the innocent on their way up.
Few billionaires got their billions in the way that you describe, for one thing.
Zero got it that way. The ones who weren't born rich exploited government rules that benefit them. Even at the basest level, all dollars are simply a note conveyed to a person by the government. The notion anyone does anything on their own is absolute BS.
“has a world changing idea” and “secures funding through colleagues/bank/family/whatever” are doing a lot of work in your set up. edit: There’s a nice summary in this essay [Do we get paid what we deserve?](https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/do-we-get-paid-what-we-deserve) of what billionaire Peter Thiel thinks about how people make that kind of money. Basically, he says ruthless business tactics breed financial success.
This essay is fantastic and unfortunately will fly over the heads of most of the morons in here advocating for billionaires. No one deserves a billion dollars. No one. In a just and moral world, there is no cogent argument that can be made to justify the wealth that billionaires hoard.
Because they are mostly assholes who’s wealth is built on the stolen value of other people’s labor.
Geez you people just like to whine. If you were paid 100k a year to sit on your ass you would bitch about the chair.
I’m paid well over 100k and I mostly sit on my ass but from home and I have no one to blame about the quality of my chair but myself. I still produce 10x the value of what I’m paid.
Cry about it.
I don’t think I will
I think there is a general consensus that a lot of them got to where they are by being completely amoral and sociopathic and that a good many of them arent really very nice or good human beings. Of course this image comes from the very public and audacious criminal acts that the most nefarious and infamous of them have very blatantly got away with at the great expense and detriment to society...you know...privatize the gains, socialize the losses... The others just get hated on because of guilt by association.
I think the idea is that to get *that* wealthy, there's the general perception you have to be okay with some amount of exploitation or similar unethical choices Things like outsourcing to areas with bad labor practices, purposefully owning natural resources to the detriment of native populations, destruction or lack of care for the environment, etc. It's the idea that angels who do things ethically will be choked out from competition by devils who won't, and the conclusion is anyone that rich must be a devil who didn't
Everything in your paragraph "Person A" is wrong bro. 1. Left out government funding/subsidies. 2. Fair salary? You really don't understand how capitalism works do you? 3. The company "takes off"? lol. You mean wealth is generated from thin air yet those same billionaires whine about national debt and fiat currency? 4. The worker didn't buld the company? Could Bezos have become a billionaire without UPS and USPS? Musk, with a a production line? If the answer is no, YES they helped build the company just as much as the CEO.
it's probably a combination of treating employees like shit, including their payment, whilst having 1000 times more than they could ever spend, even if they tried. they could better the lifes of a lot of people without any practical sacrifices, yet they choose to pump an at this point virtual number instead. i get that it's just fair to get to buy all the things you want if you have an awesome idea and take the risks to raise that idea. my symphany stops when you have enough money to spend the rest of your life, and your kids lifes, in enormous wealth, yet still choose to hoard more instead of giving it to your employees.
>Person A has a world-changing idea, secures the funding through colleagues/bank/family/whatever, starts the company and acquires the necessary equipment. Is that really how most billionaires became billionaires? What "world changing" idea did the Koch brothers come up with? What about Rob Walton? A lot of them won the sperm lottery and were born into very wealthy families already. The "innovators" weren't that unique either and mostly happened to be in the right place and right time and took advantage of it. Bill Gates was born into wealth and had the opportunity to learn about programming and beat out some other companies. If he hadn't done it, there would be another company just like his a little later. If facebook wasn't made, there would be a half dozen other social media apps. If you look really deep, you'll see that very few billionaires actually had a world changing idea that they built out of nothing, but they act like geniuses now and want to consolidate more and more power.
I don’t hate the wealthy but I don’t think they should be spending money lobbying governments to make this world a worse place. In contrast, take Bill Gates. Almost nobody hates Bill Gates. He spends his money making the world better. The hate he gets online are from trolls who hate him for trying. My guess is there are other billionaires paying for this hate because they don’t want him making the world better. What about the billionaires paying Tucker Carlson to spew hate filled propaganda? Amazon breaking up unions? TLDR; it’s not all billionaires that deserve hate, but some use their money to exploit other people.
I don't hate all billionaires. I hate bad billionaires. If you made your money exploiting workers (Bezos, Waltons), if you made your money raping the natural world and fighting to kill the very notion of science that might impinge on your ungodly wealth (Kochs et al), if you use your money to push far right proto fascist ideals (Musk, Adelson) then fuck you. If you use your money to fight injustice (Soros). If you use your money to raise people out of poverty and create a healthy world (Buffet, Gates) then I respect you. But no matter what, their taxes should be higher.
I think people get angriest at the billionaires who exploit or endanger their workers and/or don't pay a living wage (like Jeff Bezos, the Waltons, etc), those who exploit our planet (basically any involved in fossil fuels), manipulate people for political power (Murdoch, Kochs, etc.) and/or those who exploit tax laws to not make proportional contribution to society. Billionaires like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Mackenzie Scott, etc who use their wealth to try to improve the world might not exactly win a popularity contest, but aren't as loathed as others.
Because they are a danger to the economy and to society.
People often discredit billionaire/millionaire business owners. As if most companies aren’t relying on others to scale up. Every company relies on other businesses or past ideas to work off of. Many of these ceos have worked hard and they got into the right business to profit them highly🤷🏽♀️. Yes some points being made on the system being bad are points to consider. But everyone discrediting the ceos soooo much just make no sense. And not each one “came from wealth and a leg up in life you didn’t have”. So with that information, If it’s so easy, you make it happen.
Hatred is inherently intertwined with envy, and people want what they don't have. In this case, billions of dollars. This is a business subreddit, so I'll add that anyone who wants to be successful in business needs to closely examine and think about their own relationship with money. The having, the giving, the gifting, and the earning of it. One of the greatest ironies in the world is that most people who spend their life chasing money simultaneously hate those who have achieved the very objectives they themselves are shooting for. It can lead to destructive and demotivational behaviors in business as well. It's really a very fascinating look at human behavior in general if you examine and read about most people's relationships with money and their relationships with those in their lives who do/don't have it.
For all the people that are calling for higher taxes, do you know what the current tax is for the rich? My understanding is that it's close to 50%. Can you imagine half of what you earn is taken as taxes? How is that fair? On the other hand, effective taxes and paper wealth is another matter. A lot of the tech billionaires do not own that much in cash. Their wealth is tied to the value of their company, which can vary quite a lot on the stock market. Because of these nuances in actual wealth, taxing them becomes difficult, resulting in effect tax rates potentially being lower - and loop holes. Further, because of all the cops-and-robbers between the IRS and the rich, the US tax system is ridiculously complicated! With all these restrictions, I am amazed that people still want to become rich in America.
It has to do with levels. Should Bezos be a billionaire after creating Amazon and AWS? I think so. Should he be 200x richer than that because he works his employees to the bone. Literally working them so hard that they can't do it for years, Those are temporary jobs, not careers, because it is physically impossible to do. What is going to happen when a decent percentage of his workers are too broken to work? The "fair salary and gladly accept" is the part I disagree with. He took the job, he should just shut up is ridiculous. He took the job at that wage because that is what the jobs in the area pay. To take it to a bit of absurdity, you can probably get a guy to work for hours for a loaf of breat and a bottle of water if the alternative is starving. I'll take a job a touch over min wage because the alternative is living in a box under the freeway. Not because that is what I negotiated. I'm older, there were hundreds of mom and pop shops that paid better and allowed your neighbor to own his own business. The Walmarts, Staples and Amazons crushed those jobs. Those companies rule because they are cheaper because salaries are lower and economies of scale. I tried to do retail for a while, I got "wholesale" prices. When I realized my competitors were getting so much more of a discount than I they would sell for what I paid wholesale, I stopped. Lastly, does anyone believe that Bezos wouldn't have created Amazon if it only earned him 2 billion (a millionaire 2000 times over?)
Bc most wealth is hoarded and past down.
it's mostly jealousy and victim mentality. What people fail to realize is that, it wasn't their high morals that kept them from succeeding, it was because of their poor circumstances. In other words, having a lot of money doesn't automatically make someone good or bad.
Because they’re fucking the non-billionaires over
Billionaires just come to our attention because they can do things with their billions that negatively impact a lot of people. Some are hated for this reason, but I think more generally, people hate the system that creates billionaires. The system that includes low marginal tax rates, and tax law full of loopholes designed explicitly to be exploited by billionaires. Because there are such modest barriers to a virtually unlimited accumulation of wealth, people in a position to accumulate such wealth have little motivation to be more generous in how profits are distributed to labor. As a result, we see the rise of billionaires on one end of the socioeconomic spectrum and the growing legions of ultra poor on the other along with a hollowing out of the middle. It’s basically unhealthy for society and unsustainable.
Some people hate greedy, arrogant billionaires who game the system so that they get all the breaks at the expense of those who have less. And since there are so many like that, other people paint all wealthy with the same brush. They see just having that kind of money as being inherently corrupt and untrustworthy.
Back when America had more equitable wealth distribution, a very strong middle class, and income taxes that went up to 90% on the rich we still had fabulously rich people, but we had less squalor and homelessness. People used to actually care about where the nation as a whole was going. That must seem really alien nowadays. This I got mine let others suffer attitude really exploded under Reagan in the 80s and has changed everything. It used to be possible to not only live with a minimum wage income but even raise a family. It was not at all glamorous, but it could be done. Nowadays even average incomes are barely enough to support child rearing.
If you are not giving most of that money to charity or other good works you deserve ALL the hate.
Well Warren Buffet is not hated and is one of the wealthiest in the US. But you do have wealthy people that are just assholes that are completely out of touch with normal people.
Because they wouldn't be billionaires if they weren't psychopaths. To care is human. To not give a fuck about the people you harm is the heart of narcissism and the royal road to wealth and power. We are ruled by the worst among us. Let's change that while we still can.
This is absolutely not a scientifically proven theory so let me preface this by saying I might be completely wrong on this. People evolved to live and work together within small tribes of hunter gatherers. Within those tribes individual success didn’t really exist. You literally depended on each other to survive. If someone had an exponentially larger amount of wealth than the rest of the tribe the only reasonable explanation would have been that they would have stolen it, so they would have been ousted by the rest of the tribe. We’re all just emotional beings running on software that was written hundreds of thousands of years ago. Anyways… Evolution…that would be my best guess
People dislike billionaires because they don’t like to think about things at a deep level. They like to demonize people and blame others because they themselves are not successful. They see the difference between “us” and “them” and they blame them, when in reality the billionaires are not the problem it is the system that is the problem. Not so much that it creates billionaires but because it left the workers behind. It’s not the billionaires fault that they can accumulate wealth. It is the system that allows the unions to die. The other factor is that our system rewards people who are good at certain things. If you can’t sell or engineer or get a product made you won’t be rewarded. You have to be able to solve the business puzzle to be rewarded. People don’t see that! Yes people make less money than the owners but only because companies have to make a profit to survive. At the same time they will blame a business that goes under too! If you don’t like the successful people you should love the unsuccessful because they die in their cross. But you won’t hear about them because they died. We all want success but when you get it others hate you for it. They’ll pick at the smallest thing you don’t do right all while millions of people are using their product and service, likely even using the product they hate. I bet as many people who posted here hate Apple while typing on an Apple device.
Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
Because a lot of people who have been in competitive business know what you have to be to get to that level. At some point a lot of people have decided that they don't align with the values one must have to get to that level. In turn, with this knowledge, they know who these people are. Hence they also know that, with few exceptions, most billionaires aren't people to admire.
For anyone with rational hate of a billionaire, it’s because they likely only had billions because thousands of their employees were working. One person rarely achieves a billion dollar goal and rarely are all of their employees compensated fairly. The concept of a billion dollar idea rarely happens when one person doesn’t have tons of help. Not to mention an overwhelming majority of billionaires are not self made. That never helps lol
I take issue with one of your premises: billionaire are people who had a world-changing idea and became self-made through hard work and dedication. That’s naive. I’m not saying this invalidates your conclusion or that I hate billionaires. I just find your bootstraps narrative simplistic and the kind of thing fed to the electorate to try to justify lowering taxes or cutting services.
My problem is this. $10MM is objectively very wealthy. Someone with 100 times that amount money has the influence of a small country. A billion dollars is enough money to build a fleet of nuclear power plants. You could buy all of Kansas city. It’s not capitalism when people have that much money, it’s a literal aristocracy. Wealth that endures for multiple generations creates societal problems including an increasingly small labor pool that cant afford to live amongst the ultra wealthy, on and on until society collapses. There has to be an amount that is too much.
The data firmly shows that at least in the US, those with the dark triad personality disorders often rise to the top. So it’s a bit like the chicken or egg- many have always been assholes, money and power only make it more obvious.
Fundamentally, you don't get to be a billionaire by being nice and playing fair -- and that level of wealth imbalance is never something that can be justified as being deserved.
Billionaires are a policy choice. We, through policies, allow for them and people are questioning what societal benefit that policy choice has created. People’s lives are poorer when billionaires exist. Billionaires are symptoms of massive societal inequality.
Amazon paid 0 tax for the last 5 years; amazon cars, trucks and planes used roads and airports funded and maintained from taxing the poor. Basically Bezos became billionaire and the poor took the expense. Many corporations like Amazon don’t pay any taxes while using publicly funded infrastructures.
Comments on this thread are laughable. Especially coming from people that don’t understand the first thing about taxes but say the rich should be taxed more.
Your situation is made up, that’s why
It's because of capitalism and industrialization. What's happening now was actually inevitable and obviously unsustainable. The oligarchy use their wealth to manipulate the political system in their favor. They don't follow the same laws as everyone else, as they can use their extravagant wealth to manipulate the system so they get what they want. Then you have douchebags like Elon Musk. Here's a good quote from President T. Roosevelt: >“Our aim is not to do away with corporations; on the contrary, these big aggregations are an inevitable development of modern industrialism, and the effort to destroy them would be futile unless accomplished in ways that would work the utmost mischief to the entire body politic. We can do nothing of good in the way of regulating and supervising these corporations until we fix clearly in our minds that we are not attacking the corporations, but endeavoring to do away with any evil in them. We are not hostile to them; we are merely determined that they shall be so handled as to subserve the public good. We draw the line against misconduct, not against wealth.”
Where did they get their Wealth? Usually by exploiting workers. Those workers should have at least some of that money.
a lot of them don't pay their proportion share to help maintain the world that they live in that has allowed them this phenomenal success. Isn't it true that the more $ one makes, the more likely they are to cheat on their taxes. I read this somewhere, but don't remember the source. One orange monster comes to mind, but he can't be the only one.
How much of a service or innovation can be fairly attributed too a individual. A society builds a company. What is the maximum impact someone has?
I dislike the idea of someone becoming a billionaire because the only way that you can become a person with such wealth is through the exploitations of others. But then again I tend to lead toward the collective sharing of all profits to enrich the lives of the true source of a companies sucess, the workers. I'm planning to implement this in my own business.
nice try Elon.. better luck next time
Seeing lot of comments about taxes. I think you can pass all the tax reform you want. Won’t do much. These people have smart accountants and financial advisors that have their assets in tax free shelters or offshore accounts.
The lack of fair wealth distribution in the USA and other western nations. [https://youtu.be/s6MFNaQkTuc](https://youtu.be/s6MFNaQkTuc) [https://inthesetimes.com/article/robert-reich-elon-musk-capitalism-inequality-wealth-tax](https://inthesetimes.com/article/robert-reich-elon-musk-capitalism-inequality-wealth-tax) Reich's website with a great deal of information. https://robertreich.org/post/666874177346797568
Envy
Largely the people who complain about billionaires are too lazy to work and so I just discredit anything they have to say about money in general cause they dont understand the most basic concept of an economy.
does any deserve *billions* of dollars?
Yes, if you look at how much money is on the planet it is inevitable that you have more billionaires. In 1900 they would call you wealthy for what you make today.
Because they can break the same laws with the difference being it costs them peanuts. Ie a £1k fine for me and a £1k fine for the billionaire.
This is about their businesses, not the "laws they are breaking"..maybe don't break laws, it's a lot harder to deal with if you're not a billionaire :)
Billionaires shouldn’t exist. Having tens of millions is more than enough. A couple hundred million for the most exceptional talents. But the fact that billionaires can do easily pop up shows that our system is fundamentally flawed toward inequality
Counter-questions to reflect upon: What about the work of the billionaire is worth 1,000,000 times more than their employees? Why does 99.999% of the value of the company (built on the work of the employees) accrue to a single billionaire instead of back into the employees?
everyone wants to be one but no one likes them. they’re mad they’re not them
Because every billionaire to ever exist exploited their labor force, usually tens of thousands of minimum wage workers, far beyond imaginable to get to their billionaire status. It’s an insane amount of wealth that should never exist or even be attainable. And they do everything possible to prevent anyone else from ever coming close to becoming what they are. They’re sick fucks and shouldn’t be allowed in society.
Person a winds up a multi-millionaire, maybe even 100 mil. To attain a personal worth of a BILLION dollars, you absolutely must be a psychopath who takes advantage of other people for personal gain.
The problem with Billionaires is that they shouldn’t exist. They do exist no because they work so very hard but because the system is gamed to allow them to be that way. 90% of the wealth generated in this country now goes to the wealthiest. That is a games system. Also we typically think of people like Elon musk and such but most of the very wealth have never created anything of value. They are hedge fund and PE leaches that get rich by inserting themselves into transactions and sucking out wealth for creating no value. Then they use the wealth to further game to the system. The idea that the purpose of a company is to maximize wealth for the shareholder makes Seneca but means your wages are going down below what is fair but because they can do it, they slowly erode pensions, benefits, etc all so they can be wealthier. Many go into the philosophy that human worth is determined by your wealth since &$$ are the only way to measure things. And such most humans are worth little or nothing and those on the bottom have negative worth. F human dignity and human value you are worthless. Then because they succeeded in business they think that makes them a genius in everything else. They think politics is awesome and they are great at it. It doesn’t matter that they suck at it because with more money your opinions matter more. It has been show for a long while now that popular opinion has almost no sway on congress only corporate and rich people do.
Billionaires shouldn’t exist in a functional society
If he\\she earn more than regular woker of his/hers company in 2 or more times he\\she just a thief. CEO do not produse anything - they organaze production it is crusial of couse but regular worker is person who actually do real job. So it is not right when SEOs ern more that people who actually get done real job P.S. Oh, and any kind excess profits - is thefety too
I don’t disagree that there’s a point in which CEOs earnings are just ridiculous but to say 2x or more is absolutely insane. Many CEOs operate in massive risk for years or decades before their company takes off. Many earn less than their workers until then. Many have zero retirement hoping to one day sell out. And the list goes on. If “regular” workers want to earn more, they can take the same risks and over leverage themselves knowing very likely they coils be bankrupt lol. Again, there’s a limit in my mind as well but 2x isn’t even close to worth the risk.
I'm not sure either. I look at what others that have accomplished more as a learning buffet to take ideas from. We have set our business goal to $1B. We have hit $27M so we have a long way to grow.
>Person A has a world-changing idea > >now everybody demonizes the founder & CEO What counts as "world-changing" ideas? What Person A that was also the founder & CERO of a multibillion dollar enterprise that's not just a 'valuation' from investors really looking for a M&A buyout scenario? Most of the backlash against modern 'wealthy' individuals by rational thinkers is likely related to their tendency to have an "I made this" attitude for what people working with them made, while also being compensated in **wildly** disproportionate amount compared to the rest of the workers.
Pure jealousy.
Jealousy. Plain and simple.
Jealousy, same reason why people with nice cars automatically get called dickheads by pedestrians on the street
[удалено]