IMHO, nobody is remotely worth $1B, period.
The fact that some (usually toxic) individuals get there shows that the system is flawed.
The fact that those individuals feel like they can do anything other than shut up, stay low and silently enjoy the fact that they got waaaay too much money shows that the system is very flawed.
We shouldn't follow billionaires, we should redistribute their money.
If someone founds a company, grows it and owns $1bn of its stock, they don’t have $1bn in cash to distribute. They have a degree of control over the economic activity of that company. Should that control be taken away from them? Who should it be given to?
I can see an argument when it comes to cashing out, but I’m not clear how that should work without creating really weird incentives. Some sort of special tax?
> Some sort of special tax?
Well yeah. After some amount, you get 100% taxes. So that instead of having billionaires who compete against each other on how rich they are or on the first one to go contaminate the surface of Mars or simply on power, maybe we would end up with people trying to compete on something actually constructive :-). Who knows, maybe even philanthropy!
So, who owns and runs the companies? How do new companies get formed?
I'm not against higher taxation of the wealthy. I think inequality is a serious problem. The issue is what the wealth of these people isn't a big pile of cash they are wallowing in, it's ownership of the companies they build and operate. Is that what we want to take away? How, and what would we do with it?
I think it makes more sense to tax it as that power is converted into cash. I'm not clear how a wealth tax should work.
> I think it makes more sense to tax it as that power is converted into cash
Yeah, that makes sense to me. And those are all good questions of course :-).
> So, who owns and runs the companies?
I guess ownership stays the same, we just need to prevent the companies from growing too big. Because the bigger they are, the more powerful their leaders get, for once (aside from all the problems coming from monopolies). But by taxing them, we prevent the people owning those companies from owning 15 yachts and going to space for breakfast :D.
> How do new companies get formed?
I don't know if that's what you mean, but I often hear "if you prevent those visionaries from becoming crazy rich, nobody will build anything, ever". And I disagree. A ton of people like to build stuff knowing they won't get rich. Usually those people have better incentives (it's hard to have a worse incentive than "becoming rich and powerful", right?).
Some people say "we need to pay so much for this CEO, because otherwise he will go somewhere else and we won't have a competent CEO". I think this is completely flawed. You will always find someone competent to be the CEO of a company with a reasonable salary. Maybe that person will not work 23h a day, maybe they won't harass their workers, sure. But will it be worse in the end? The current situation is that such tech companies are "part of the problem, not of the solution" (the problem being, currently, that we are failing to just survive on Earth).
Big agree, at a certain point a company is big enough that their impact has to be managed democratically. I don't have an issue with effective leaders, the problem is that we reward a certain kind of success with transferable credits that don't necessarily align with people's actual talents or skills.
I want skilled institutional investors who have a track records of making smart bets. I don't want a random person who happened to get lucky in business dictating investment policy for substantial parts of the economy. I want accountability for abuses and mismanagement.
I know China gets a bad rep, but their bird cage market economy seems a lot more stable and predictable than this wild west pyramid scheme stuff we do in the US. Maybe there are advantages for some people in our model, but I really dislike the part where we consistently reward amoral grifters.
> Big agree, at a certain point a company is big enough that their impact has to be managed democratically.
100%. First, a company should not be that big. The whole point of antitrust was to avoid that. The US failed at that, for different reasons, and now end up with huge tech monopolies. And it's difficult to go back because they are so big now.
BTW I would recommend Cory Doctorow's book about those tech monopolies: "Enshittification: why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it". He explains extremely well the antitrust policies and the problems that arise when you let your companies get too big. It's full of actual examples of tech we all know. He even has an audiobook, narrated by himself!
Well, redistributing their money is (in some cases disingenuously) exactly how they are able to pitch investors. "Sure, value my company at $10B and my shares make me $2B, but we're alllllll gonna make money when hit AGI!!!" That kind of thing.
Sure, I understand why the people around them who benefit from it also want to do that.
My point is that it all only benefits a few people. Those people used to call themselves "kings", appointed by god. Now they are tech oligarchs. If the people realised that it was bad to have kings, eventually maybe they will realise that it is bad to have oligarchs?