What if -- bear with me here -- it's possible for bright, motivated founders to create startups that your kids can work in, but those founders could be content with merely making a hundred million dollars? Because, and I don't know if you know this so you may have to take it on faith, that is still so much money that said founder and their family and very likely their descendants can live in extreme luxury for the rest of their lives even if they stop working right then.
I don't know what the best solution to the problem of wealth inequality is, but I know that we need to collectively get over this "but if people think they will be limited to a mere hundred million dollars in wealth they will have no motivation whatsoever to work" nonsense. You know what the motivation is? It's still a hundred million dollars, that's what.
How exactly do you propose keeping a founder from becoming wealthier once their company scales past the point where they are worth a hundred million?
The market is supposed to do that. Once an opportunity is identified there is a rush to compete and margin disappears, so the people still get the new, better thing, but for much cheaper.
What can happen though is that companies figure out how to prevent meaningful competition to preserve high margins. They're worth millions for the innovation but they get to billions through anti-competitive and extractive practices.
Most things don't behave like pure commodities regardless of anything that can be considered monopolistic.
I agree with you on it being hard.
But we can start by not forgiving CG on death. That seems like a no brainer with no downsides.
No downsides I respect, at least. "We want to keep the business in the family" should be ignored.
100%. I don't understand how anyone defends the "death loophole" for capital gains. If you get rid of it you could actually get rid of estate taxes, which are a kludge to capture some of the capital gains that are given away by resetting the basis at death. It's a nutty system we have right now.
This one does seem to be a no brainer
Are you expecting someone to drag your contribution to the discourse out of you?
My question was how do you prevent anyone from having over 100M? No motte and baileys please.
Reverse lottery.
Like I said...
It's hard. But if we make CG inescapable it should as a second order effect close the Buy Borrow Die loophole, and the super rich must fund their life some other way. Probably by selling assets to consume.
And putting a tamper on inheritance (which could be progressively taxed or capped) it has a second order effect of discouraging hoarding while alive.
So increasing inheritance tax (effectively) would mean a change of incentives for hoarding money. Which is the only thing that actually works.
Obviously, being a hard problem, there's no quick fix. But in the choice between slowing down the problem and not, we should do the former.
How do we "prevent" it? Well, we can throw the baby out with the bathwater. Is that your proposal?
As for your question: no intransigence please.
By taking the excess yearly, and that's very doable.
When Bezos divorced, Mackenzie Bezos was awarded 25% of their Amazon shares valued at over 38 billion dollars.
Just by the above being possible, that means there's no reason why such a "divorce" couldn't happen once per year, and there's also no reason why it has to be 25% rather than "everything above 100M". It means that the tools for this exist. The government takes the place of Mackenzie Bezos. During the divorce, not a single mention of "oh it's just _impossible_ to take 25% of Jeff Bezos' Amazon shares, it will cause collapse". Just all of a sudden if you replace MacKenzie Bezos with "the government" or "the pension fund", suddenly there's all kinds of supposed reasons why it can't happen - even though there's zero reason why it couldn't.
No "but technically they will temporarily have over 100M in the intermediary period" please.
The amazon shares weren't liquidated in the divorce. Are you saying the government will receive shares instead of cash?
Yes.
So then the government becomes a stakeholder with vested interest in certain companies and not others?
You can simply mandate by law that these sells must be sold to the market at, say, 2% per month, and that the government will not make use of voting rights during that period.
There's so many possible options.
I’msure they will just ensure they will never reach 100m and stash their cash somewhere hidden. So won’t work that well. But might work for a one off cut. Which is good.
Why didn't Bezos just stash his assets somewhere hidden so that he wouldn't have to give $38 billion of it to his ex?
Because it doesn't work that way at that level of wealth, especially for tech CEOs. You can't just hide billions worth of shares in a company.
Guillotines are the classic method, and they are likely coming if we don't change course.
Revolutionaries often overestimate the appetite in the general populace for revolution. Also I'm not sure guillotines will be able to do much against the killer drones that palmer luckey is making
It's mind boggling that you view the solution to this as so counter to the interests of the capital class that you can't even speak it aloud
You tax them. Wealth inequality of this magnitude is toxic to democracy. It's simply too much power. These men aren't gods, they are just flesh and blood and usually really terrible people. We are not staff at their resort. Let them live in luxury for the rest of their life, great. But they don't get to have more political power than half a million people put together.
So you're saying the obvious solution is to force founders to liquidate all shares necessary every year to keep their wealth under 100M? How to keep short sellers from feasting on this? Who will the buyers be if everyone is selling around tax season? If the stock crashes because there is government-mandated short interest and no long interest are they off the hook?
On the point of democracy, none of the candidates who spend the most on major elections seem to be winning much lately, Bloomberg, Harris, Cuomo, Steyer, etc.
> On the point of democracy, none of the candidates who spend the most on major elections seem to be winning much lately,
Thomas Massie was just ousted in the most expensive house primary in US history.
The difference between 1-2 mil that is normally spent and the $30+ million spent on that election alone.
Tom steyer spent half a billion to not even make it onto the final ca ballot
I think you'd find more examples of people spending much much less money to influence elections, or buy certain positions than you will people spending money to make the public vote for them. The money influences policies, regulations, wars, etc.
The problem isn’t necessarily that some one can buy a seat for themselves (though some people out there could spend 1000x as much as half a billion and still have 500 billion to spend), it's that for less than half a billion, someone can buy 20 house or senate seats for more conventional candidates that are willing to vote the way the financier wants.
Buying senate seats is for chumps. For $300 million, Musk got his own executive branch agency, a pseudo cabinet level position, and carte blanche to take a machete to all the programs he personally disliked including investigations into himself and his companies.
Maybe if you suck them off hard enough they will give you a few crumbs after you are done.
Beats sucking off a communist in order to not starve when there is a food shortage
Speaking of hunger, capitalist utopia is worse than a global pandemic: https://www.npr.org/2026/05/27/nx-s1-5836441/food-insecurity...
ok now compare it to food insecurity in north korea or venezuela
No one is advocating America to be more like North Korea or Venezuela. Democratic Socialism is what young people are asking for today. These cold war era dichotomies will die with the boomer generation.
How about the doesn't need to be paid in cash? The government claims a percentage of the company over time...as always only above some level of valuation
No, the shares can be directly transferred to a government-held portfolio. Come on, think for 2 seconds, my god. If you're going to rage like this at least don't come up with strawman issues that can be trivially resolved in 2 seconds of thinking.
Of course the government should own everything! How stupid of us for assuming that's a bad idea.
How stupid of you for assuming they'd have to keep it, rather than slowly selling it off, indeed exactly like Mackenzie Bezos might do. You could easily mandate this.
Not to mention that the Norwegian Pension Funds holds $2 trillion in assets. UAE and KSA have ones over $1 trillion each.
And that's ignoring that currently an even smaller group of people owns everything, who don't even represent the public on paper. Quite stupid to assume that this is a better idea.
It's so weird that taxing my property is straightforward but taxing the property of the capital class is so incredibly Byzantine and unexplainably impossible
Elon musk was unceremoniously kicked out of the white house. To say he has some great power is ridiculous. Whatever power he has aside from his companies is in his mind
Think for a second… If money doesn’t give people power… then what’s all the fuss about??
> It's mind boggling that you
Please don't do this.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
tax?
On what? You force the company to break up and liquidate so they can pay taxes?
You force the founder to give up their private property just because it is valuable?
Remember these are not dollar bills in the founders bank account. It is just the company they created is now very valuable. It does not mean it is liquid.
Owners being able to lock the value generated by workers solely within their family for generations has been tried. It ends in feudalism.
Are you proposing changing inheritance laws or are you proposing forcing companies to sell their stock in a firesale to be in accordance with the IRS? Be clear in your propositions please.
Progressive taxation, taxes on CG, inheritance taxes, and a well funded and non-partisan IRS.
None of these will prevent someone from gaining more than 100M. That is what is under discussion. I am not against more progressive taxes.
Which party is the IRS partisan towards? What do you mean by partisan?
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/experts-warn-trump-imm...
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-irs-investigations...
I agree these are partisan and bad developments. It is also unrelated to the question at hand about how to prevent people from gaining over 100m which people have been able to do under the heretofore non-partisan irs
What do you mean by “is”? What do you mean by “you”? By clear.
It doesn’t end in feudalism. It ends in guillotines.
> On what?
On the business income, on the sale of shares, on their wealth, on loans, on estate and inheritance, etc.
Breaking up the company is another avenue, it could increase competitiveness and make the markets freer, open up more options for employees to shop around for employer, etc.
Raising minimum wage, stronger overtime rules, paid family leave, mandatory paid vacation and sick leave, non-compete restrictions, profit-sharing requirements, and other regulation that favors the employee is yet another avenue...
There are ways if the will is there.
> You force the founder to give up their private property just because it is valuable?
That's how taxes work.
The straightforward solution to this is to allow the tax to be paid in kind, to be paid into a sovereign wealth fund.
Owe 1M$ in taxes and have ownership stakes in a company worth 1B$? Fine, transfer a 0.1% share of ownership in the company into the SWF.
Taxes. If they want to externalize the costs then society should socialize excessive surpluses.
anti-trust
What if -- bear with me here -- the very thing that makes those founders able to make the $1B they would otherwise make would drive them to also ask why it is that someone else who had no hand in building or funding it gets lion's share of the $900M while they get only $100M?
You don't /know/ that people need to collectively get over "this" -- you have a feeling that it seems more fair to do that than the alternative. But you can look at what happens elsewhere in the world with regimes that implement exactly what you are describing. And what happens is the people who are most equipped to be the golden gooses that you are proposing are just as equipped to simply most somewhere they can do so unencumbered.
That's why what you're proposing will just never really work.
The entity you're implicitly proposing should take the money doesn't have a good track record of spending it wisely. I'd much rather let the startup founders keep their money and build rockets with it, than spend another few trillion on building 100 meters of high-speed rail.
The whole problem with CalHSR is precisely that they can’t spend any real money… There were governmental barriers like CEQA and local NIMBYs but the primary cost culprit is that the legislature has continuously kicked fully funding the project down the tracks for the past two decades. Funding it fully with a 10-20 year construction timeline in the early 2010s would’ve far cheaper at this point.
Every American economic miracle has been precipitated by the government building basic infrastructure and doing basic research.
So it's pretty clear it's not the billionaires but random thousandaire loudmouths that are the problem then.
Does this contradict the comment you're replying to, somehow, or are you trying to prove their point?
It is not like the money is in his bank account.
And it’s not like he took the money from somebody else.
He spent a ton of time to create something that he owned the majority of and to make that thing more valuable. He paid other people to help him and they were happy with that exchange. The government also helped them and they were happy with that exchange.
Suddenly, people have assigned a concrete value to the thing via the IPO and it is very valuable.
It’s not like he suddenly has $1 trillion in his account. It’s just the thing that he made and has ownership of is suddenly worth that much.
Of course he took the money from someone else.
Is your theory that he dug it out of the ground with a shovel or something?
That must be why there is exactly as much wealth now as there was in the year 600. We've all just been stealing it back and forth.
Thank you, I never thought debating economics on hacker news of all places would be the equivalent of discussing orbital mechanics with flat earthers.
I have a degree in economics and wrote my economics thesis on the application of complex adaptive systems to economic theory. I'm still quite attached to economic analysis, it's even the story behind my user name.
You can be assured I understand the concept of wealth creation.
But the fact that there are, in fact, other people involved here is hilariously hand-woven away here:
> He paid other people to help him and they were happy with that exchange. The government also helped them and they were happy with that exchange.
OK I will bite. Who determines what "the government" thinks in a democracy? The general public, right? Does the general public seem happy?
Is the general public happy? Who cares, it is not the job of the government to ensure happiness but rights.
Regardless:
1. Starlink is amazing (literally never want to fly on an airplane without it ever again, wish I could search for flights based on having it)
2. Starship is amazing. (ensures American space dominance for generations)
3. Being able to manufacture hard things at scale and employ hundreds of thousands of people and making thousands of millionaires is amazing for our economy!!
Unless they are fools, the general public should be stoked AF.
Yes, if you're the kind of person who just kind of thinks that Elon's stuff is really really cool, then that's fine. I have no reason to think your point of view is insincere. I have quite a few good friends who share it with you. And I strongly believe in your right to express it and to vote based on it.
With that said, it might also be instructive to realize that most people in the country are coming to fucking hate this bullshit. They're exhausted at the fact that our economy is now dominated by financial extraction and that nearly all of the resources of the country are accruing to a tiny group of people.
They're increasingly unable to afford housing in the places that they grew up. They're unable to raise their families. They're unable to have any sense of security or continuity in their life whatsoever.
And the best part is that they have to listen to people like you calling them fools for wanting to live healthy and productive lives, for valuing human connection over technology, for value and tradition over innovation. They get to be told that they're lazy for not having built some sort of financial engineering machine to extract money like you guys did.
The problem for you guys is there's a lot more of them than there are of you. At a certain point, they will kill you and eat you for your protein content.
It's happened quite a few times in history before. So good luck with all that.
If you want a tip, you might want to think about how we can harness the power of all this incredible innovation and still get exciting new toys and quality of life improvements while also having a society that's more balanced, fair, and healthy for all the participants, including the ones who aren't as smart or weren't born into money.
I don’t like it because it’s Elon (I literally have been an active litigation with him for years lol)
I like it because it’s useful.
Life is objectively much better today for the average person than it has been for 99% of humans in 99% of history.
(“They will kill us and eat us for our protein” makes you sound totally insane and in this ludicrous scenario I think the rich peoples army of drones/optimus robots would simply say “no”.)
> Life is objectively much better today for the average person than it has been for 99% of humans in 99% of history.
Life is objectively much worse for many communities in this country.
Get on a plane to Detroit if you don't understand what I'm talking about.
We allowed one of the most powerful and sophisticated industrial economies in history to be taken over by bankers who shipped the jobs to a different country, bought off our politicians, and spend most of their time coming up with new ways to use monopolies to overcharge us for shit.
You can talk about 99% of history all day long, but if you're standing in a town and the stores are boarded up and the jobs are all gone, or alternately, if you have to move further and further away from the community that you were born in because you can't afford to live in the same neighborhood that your parents raised you in, then you're not interested in statistics or people telling you it's the best we've ever had it.
What?!
Real median household income is the highest its ever been and risen steadily for 50 years: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
Unemployment rate is 4.3%
Also, I go to Detroit about once a year. Every year it is more vibrant than the lows of 2010. Real estate prices support this argument. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ATNHPIUS19804Q
Not saying some people somewhere don’t have it rough but overall we are doing better than we ever have.
> overall we are doing better than we ever have
Yep, this is it. This is the fundamental disconnect in our culture. Who do you mean by "we"? And why do you think that Detroit being increasingly unaffordable is a sign that things are going well for working people? Huh?
For a large group of working people you are definitely wrong about this, and the signs of the crisis are literally everywhere in our politics right now, but if you can't see it, I can't make you see it.
Perhaps file this conversation in the back of your head as you go about your business in the coming weeks and months, and see if you can see any examples of what I'm talking about after all.
Instead of taking me at my word, just consider it as a hypothesis that you'll objectively try to verify or disprove.
My hypothesis is this: for regular working people who don't have access to excess capital by virtue of birth, connections, or high levels of education, life has increasingly become a living hellscape of being ripped off and exploited in every aspect of their economic life. They are more precarious and less able to control their own destiny than at any time in the modern post-war era, and they are increasingly mad about it.
Only as a reminder and a data point, homelessness rises every year, too. It's at record highs. (Caveat: homelessness data is difficult to calculate.)
https://endhomelessness.org/state-of-homelessness/
So we are possibly having more record highs in wealth, and more record lows.
> Also, I go to Detroit about once a year.
Show me a plane ticket stub or gtfo
It's curious to me that the message board run by arguably the most significant capitalist group in tech seems to hate capitalism and tech
First of all, it doesn't. The Silicon Valley market fundamentalist, future worshipping contingency is still very much alive and well here.
But I do agree and have noticed that the tone here is radically different than it would have been five or ten years ago. I've been around for a while here as well.
I think that's a sign of the cultural shift underneath our feet. Silicon Valley and the tech sector in general has almost no goodwill left. They've harmed too many people for that at this point.
His money is tied to his equity. The equity itself is created by typing a number into a computer - it's not taken from anybody. The equity represents the value that the company has created
Nah. We are talking about people who started businesses that are then valued at $1bn.
How about we set a maximum wage instead of a minimum wage? But it's not a set number. It is a maximum multiple of the lowest paid employee at a company? 10x should do it. If the CEO wants a million each year then the lowest paid employee still gets 100k. I'm trying to think of why this wouldn't work.
Probably won't work because the ultra-wealthy don't get ultra-wealthy by earning wages.
The only reason it doesn't is the greed of folks who become billionaires.
> But those founders be content with merely making a hundred million?
What does this mean? Without some insane wealth tax this is literally impossible. No founder chooses to become a billionaire. They just keep growing a business that is solving a billion dollar problem.
The only other was is if after 100M they start turning down customers or restricting services.
This is conflating businesses that solve billion dollar problems with people who individually contribute so much to a business that they solved the billion dollar problem all on their own. The latter is probably possible, but it's not necessarily the case that all billionaires and up today were such individuals.
It might be that if personal wealth alone were (effectively, by taxation) capped to $100m, we would still have exactly as much collective wealth, innovation, and value creation as we do today. Possibly more, because of more wealth distributed onto shared infrastructure and into the fluid economy.
They can continue growing the business while giving other employees a larger share of the asset. One person doesn’t create a billion dollar company, dozens or thousands do. After founding, other people who don’t become billionaires work similarly hard and are similarly smart as the founder. This is why people dispute “earning” a billion dollars.
You don't have a solution unless you can propose a way this gets legislated and executed. No hand waving. How specifically does this work? Suppose it is day one of my shares being worth more than 100m. What happens?
I didn’t say I did have a solution :). There’s value on agreeing or disagreeing that a problem exists without needing a solution. Dismissing a problem based on the viability of a solution is a strange fallacy.
You've asked this about 10 times in this thread, I've provided a very straightforward manner elsewhere as a reply to you and am eagerly looking forward on what you come up with to claim that it's impossible.
> I am eagerly looking forward on what you come up with to claim that it's impossible.
Since you aren't willing to engage in a discussion in good faith, implying whatever I have to say about your 5th-grader-level economic plan to just seize all the shares is bs, I recommend you ask chatgpt why it doesn't work.
My latest reply to you was "Yes.". Might want to feed the thread to chatgpt and ask it if that's "not willing to engage in a discussion in good faith".
It's pretty easy.
You can just cap total compensation for executives relative to the lowest paid worker and include equity in that calculation. If you want to pay yourself, 10 million a year in stock, great... You need to pay the lowest paid person 10k in stock or whatever.
Or, you can mandate that after a certain size a worker owned trust/union will own some percentage of the company.
There's dozens of ways you could address this problem. Each have pros/cons. It's not that hard to fix if we actually wanted to fix it though.
The founders already have the equity, they aren't receiving more on an ongoing basis.
We’re not talking about founders. We’re talking about executives.
Executives do get equity as part of their compensation and it’s a huge reason for the massive disparity in wealth.
This is well studied stuff.
Why are we not talking about founders? They are the most likely to have obscene wealth.
This...100%
My old startup got bought out and while I can't know if the CEO became a billionaire, why do I care if he did? I made out with a shit ton of money so what? Why are people so jealous of other people? Of all industries, tech is probably the most likely to share... I mean look at spacex where even janitors and cafe workers were given equity, whereas most companies would contract that out
I’m not jealous or losing any sleep over this. But it’s worth evaluating in our quest for a more perfect world. Something “feels unjust” about the current wealth inequality. Maybe it’s the best possible situation, but maybe not.
Imagine you lived in a feudal kingdom. Would you just shrug at all the wealth of kings and lords made off your back? Most people did, but thank god times have changed for the better. Perhaps we can change them to be better still.
Feels fine to me. I agree we need to create a world in which everyone's basic material needs are met but given America's history I think we have probably the ones with the system that'll get us closest to that ideal.
Nobody is jealous. They are pissed that excessively wealthy people can pay their way to success and influence the US government, for their continued personal gain. It’s about fairness and democracy, not luxury.
Taxes. So insane.
> it's possible for bright, motivated founders to create startups that your kids can work in, but those founders could be content with merely making a hundred million dollars?
Making a billion dollars doesn’t require becoming a billionaire. Someone who makes a billion dollars in a balanced society generates wealth and taxes. (One who does in an unbalanced one has the choice to donate.)
Also, liquid versus illiquid. Founders shouldn’t be under obligation to cap their ambition or force liquidate if their companies do well.
This is why the guillotine will either be taxes or blades. It's either Bernie or Luigi. There is a sizable segment of the population that just doesn't have any empathy for society at large. "There should never be a cap to my selfishness."
You might think: I can argue with them.
No. You can't. They literally couldn't care less about you or anyone else. They do, however fear retribution.
> This is why the guillotine will either be taxes or blades
There is legitimate debate around whether the French aristocracy came out of the Revolution richer than they were before.
> They do, however fear retribution
They don’t. They haven’t been targeted. Luigi potted a middle manager with a glorified title. The billionaire who owns the group is fine.
We need to raise taxes. We need new tax brackets. But pretending violence is a check on a globalized rich is just self-congratulatory fantasy. Worst case, they lose billions when they flee.
"They don’t."
When are you gonna stop acting like you are an authority on all things?
ELon has said many times he fears being taken out in a public setting, therefore he does not present himself in public.
If the world's wealthiest man says this, he is far more indicative of the ultra-wealth class than you.
> ELon has said many times he fears being taken out in a public setting
Elon has said lots of things. His behavior, in this regard, reflects limited concern.
There is, in theory, a type of fear that makes someone comply and obey and do what you want. There's another type of fear that just makes someone hate
I don't know about this. Pre-Trump I would have agreed with you.
Post-Trump. The mask is off, and they are evil.
How many billionaires are there? I don't think we'd miss them if they were gone.
And it goes farther than this actually.
Should we have publicly executed the cigarette CEOs, and those CEOs of the drug companies who knowingly destroyed so many lives with opiates? What about the company CEOs who poison water.
Before Trump I would have said, "no." But now, "yes." They deserved it, and by not sufficiently punishing them for their crimes against humanity we sent a message to the likes of Facebook and OpenAI and the new batch of psychopaths, that there are no real consequences for their actions, no matter how base they are.
If Trump and his family does not sit in jail after he leaves office, if the democrats do not exact retribution for all he and his ilk have done, I think there will be rioting against both sides.
I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. I actually hope I'm wrong.
But I think I'm right. And even though this post will be down-voted for referencing violence as leverage, I think these ideas are mainstream now.
> don't think we'd miss them if they were gone
We wouldn’t. I’m not arguing that. I’m saying they don’t believe they are at risk. Because they aren’t. None of them have been even close to being harmed.
LOL. I realize this isn't 4chan from 2000s- but I can't tell if you are arguing that Luigi messed up by committing murder, or he messed up by offing the wrong guy.
That's hilarious. I guess. Maybe not?
> if you are arguing that Luigi messed up by committing murder, or he messed up by offing the wrong guy
I’m saying it was symbolic but inconsequential to the richest and most powerful. If you’re a billionaire, Luigi didn’t show you’re at risk. He showed that the folks who work for the folks who work for you might be.
And for the record, I think what hd did is wrong. But that’s orthogonal to the question of effectiveness.
What makes you think there will actually be a guillotine? This isn't the French Revolution era.
The alternative to your wet dream is that both Bernie and Luigi are hapless and actually incapable of altering the systems they rail against besides symbolic token gestures meant to appease the hopes of someone, anyone to serve as a messianic figurehead.
> Bernie and Luigi are hapless
Bernie Sanders has de facto been in the ruling party for multiple years in his career. (As in aligned with Democrats when they controlled all branches of government.) Taxes on the rich went down each time.
Meanwhile, Luigi potter a middle manager. No billionaires harmed in his schemes.
These are hapless symbols of class warfare. That’s problematic, because we need competent leaders to channel this rage. Not another eighty-something who refuses to retire.
Surely this would just create an industry of ways to dodge the “$100m tax”.
Just waiting for my company’s top 10 shareholders to be anonymous entities owned by other companies based in the Cayman Islands.
The rich being willing to cheat doesn't mean we should just give up and let them consume all surplus value in the system, until people are literally working 3 jobs for rent and food.
UK companies are forced to list beneficial owners, in order to cut through these kinds of shenanigans. It did take decades to get this change implemented because capital was deeply opposed to it. For some reason, I'm sure it's not because they want to avoid paying taxes like the little people.
Let's give it a try and see. Maybe better things ARE possible
There is an alternative: 1) limit how much descendants can inherit. Allow them only a maximum amount of let's say: 10 million and make sure that either the founder finds a way to redistribute his/her wealth to the rest of the world, or make the government find ways of redistributing this money. 2) make it mandatory for corporations to share their wealth (income) with the employees -- as an example make it mandatory to redistribute 50% of the income generated to the employees working for the company rather than paying CEOs insane amounts of money to return 'shareholder value'. The whole motto of maximising shareholder value has poisoned capitalism: the goal of a company should not be to become a cancerous growth -- but to serve as a net good for humanity. 3) seal the tax loopholes that make it easy for the rich to avoid paying taxes. There is no reason why the poor and middle class pay a disproportionate amount in taxes compared to the rich.
The primary issue with this is the way shares and equity work. Elon Musk is a trillionaire on paper. He pays himself famously little.
That net worth is, under our current system, tightly linked with his interest and control in his various enterprises.
He can borrow against it which gets around taxes and that should probably be addressed, but he like the hypothetical fresh billionaire startup founder don’t have that money. And the mega rich on paper can’t access more than a small percentage of that money without reducing their control of the company they built or are building.
Ideas like a wealth tax, or the new sovereign fund paid into by an equities tax or grant are all interesting, but they are all more complicated on the ground than “wouldn’t $100m be motivating enough?”
FWIW, I think that some sort of public endowment and/or sponsored healthcare, education and safety net and/or tax or management of hyper wealth is one of the problems of our age.
But part of that problem is that it’s not clear how to do that in a way that is workable in an increasingly multipolar world of tech and soon healthcare giants that are as powerful as small but growing nation states. Economically and in some cases militarily linked to great powers.
Just don't step-up cost basis at death and you solve the problem. Elon's fine, we can wait until he dies and his heirs sell their shares.
1. End step-up cost basis at death 2. Tax or end lending against portfolios
Seems like a solved problem to me.
So what I'm gathering is the only way they're rich is because they can borrow against these monopoly-level valuations. Actual liquidity makes them essentially another joe schmoe. So people in the finance sector successfully just "made up more money?"
> He can borrow against it which gets around taxes and that should probably be addressed
Folks who lend money against stock insist on being repaid. (In fact, they typically have the right to sell the stock to be repaid.) The money to replay was taxed. (It comes from salaries and/or stock sales. Borrowing more to repay previous loans just kicks the can down the road.)
Who is it that implements the rights around ownership? Who is it that will (possibly literally) go to war to defend this right? Maybe he should pay a bit of tax on this right since he expects others to defend it.
>He can borrow against it which gets around taxes and that should probably be addressed, but he like the hypothetical fresh billionaire startup founder don’t have that money. And the mega rich on paper can’t access more than a small percentage of that money without reducing their control of the company they built or are building.
Yes, this is a good take. I wish more people understood this. Things like sales taxes could address this. Land value tax, with single homestead exemptions are another.
I understand it perfectly fine and I'm still supportive of taxing and regulating billionaires. I just don't see why it would be an issue. Private credit loans now commonly feature payment-in-kind provisions, I see no reason why the tax office can't do the same thing for situations where it knows the payee would likely have insufficient liquidity.
> that is still so much money that said founder and their family and very likely their descendants can live in extreme luxury for the rest of their lives even if they stop working right then.
Professional athletes and lottery winners prove otherwise.
I don't understand why people argue for a limit on wealth - the line of reasoning, when reasoned out, concludes with a majority of people having the exact same amount of wealth.
How so?
Well, suppose we say, nobody should be a trillionaire - is this an arbitrary number, or is it aimed at the richest person? Clearly, the latter. Now if we carried this out, now there are billionaires remaining. Well, nobody should be a billionaire, one might say. Most will agree. So the wealth of billionaires is taken away, and redistributed evenly.
This will continue, with the majority of people below the average wealth level, demanding a more equal playing field. You can see how it ends
Is this not an exemplar of the slippery slope fallacy?
no, it's not. It's math. If you make a rule that you lower the person at the top of the pile, over time, there will be nobody left to lower - everybody will be at the top of the pile.
The fact people say 1 billion is too much money, or 1 trillion is too much is something to dig into - the number is relative! 1 billion is only a lot because not many people have a billion dollars. If inflation keeps up, one day everybody will be a billionaire.
> everybody will be at the top of the pile.
Why is that a bad thing? Or will it exemplify some other non-financial inferior trait of the person which might be existentially 'scary?'
I think the most chronic misunderstanding in the "billionaire" rhetoric is that billionaires are in it for money.
People who work a job they don't like because they need money to live, view money as the objective in life, because the equivocate it to escaping and freedom. So wearing that lens, and looking at billionaires, these motherfuckers are greed driven psychopaths who blew past the "escape with freedom" bank account ages ago, and are now just taking money off the table from others trying to get ahead.
But that is not how it is at all. Virtually every billionaire is crazy focused on their work, and the money is a side effect that they don't really care that much about, besides it being a tool to enable more work they can do.
It's very hard to get this across when speaking to people who view work as an obstacle, money as god, don't have personal business experience, and whose passions are things that aren't very productive.
I've known and spent time with quite a few billionaires personally.
I can assure you, with the utmost in direct observation, that they are extraordinarily obsessed with money. It is, in fact, the defining characteristic of their entire existence, literally by definition.
Any argument to the contrary is profoundly hilarious. Imagine if you came across someone that had over one billion model trains in his basement who was claiming that he wasn't super interested in model trains.
This is missing the forest for the trees on the level of "I have spent time around photographers, and let me tell you, they are obsessed with lenses to the point that it defines their existence".
From a billionaire POV, money is what you use to build valuable things (what the lenses are to photographers). Unlike photography, it also happens to be the thing that the market rewards you with for doing a good job (although a successful photographer could convert their profit to new/better lenses).
I would eat my hat if you could find a single billionaire (outside trust fundees / inheritance) that is grinding it out doing something they hate, selling a product(s) they think is shit, all so they can hit whatever number, cash out, retire to a private island or whatever and never work again.
I'm not sure if this is a straw man or what.
Let's phrase this a different way. Everyone has values that they live by.
Some people value family and community above all else. For example, even if their town has very little economic opportunity, they will stay there to support their grandparents, their parents, their cousins, and so on.
Some people might value artistic expression, and they will forsake money for the chance to be, let's say, a musician. They might become incredibly successful, or they might not, but they will always focus on playing music. That's the thing that they value whenever they have to make a choice. That one goes first.
Billionaires value money. I'm 100% certain of this. I've had a sort of interesting life and happen to have been quite close to and worked with at least twenty billionaires, some of whom I've known for decades and watched their progression. I'm telling you for certain that they value money incredibly highly.
This, of course, really should be obvious to even your average child or anyone who takes even a passing interest in the topic. A couple of million dollars here or there can be an oddball side effect of some luck or strange life choices. A billion dollars cannot, it is an absolutely staggering amount of money, and anyone who has achieved it has aggressively sought it out and has been given dozens, if not hundreds, of opportunities to focus on something else instead and settle for some large amount of money that is short of a billion dollars.
Again, this should not surprise anybody at all who has a functioning brain. Imagine Jane Goodall heads into the jungle to study a tribe of gorillas and discovers that most gorillas have a dozen or so bananas, but then discovers a gorilla with a pile of bananas several thousand feet tall.
How do you think she'd fare trying to make the argument that this gorilla was actually focused on other things besides bananas for most of their life and the pile just kind of happened as a side effect?
>then discovers a gorilla with a pile of bananas several thousand feet tall.
Then she didn't discover the billionaire gorilla, she discovered the lottery winner or the trust fund kid.
The billionaire gorilla has thousands of acres of banana trees, with enough bananas to reach the moon and back if all picked and stacked.
The billionaire gorilla is laser focused on generating bananas. A complex machine with fractal parts whose ultimate output is bananas.
Meanwhile the other gorillas are laser focused on the height of their banana stack (which is rotting and half aren't even aware). Telling themselves if they had a stack 1000ft high they would never work a day again.
I'm pretty sure you understand this, and part of me thinks we are saying the same thing.
> The billionaire gorilla is laser focused on generating bananas
Yeah exactly. And the billionaire is laser focused on generating dollars.
Not just more dollars in the world though. More dollars for themselves, specifically.
We can re-ground ourselves in your original comment that I am responding to though, which is this:
> I think the most chronic misunderstanding in the "billionaire" rhetoric is that billionaires are in it for money.
Nope. There's no misunderstanding. Billionaires are definitely in it for the money.
Perhaps it was my mistake to rely on the colloquial meaning of "in it for the money".
What could possibly be the non-colloquial meaning of the phrase? It's a colloquial expression.
If they’re not in it for the money, they’ll be happy to pay more tax
Taxes are money that they lose control of.
There is a reason Bill Gates didn't just write the IRS a check for $175B and created the Gates foundation instead.
That's kind of the opposite of your original claim then.
They're in it for the money as it allows them to exert control. That's still being in it for the money.
They are in it for manually appreciating their own assets, which has the intrinsic effect of generating wealth.
A better way to frame it that doesn't hinge on the colloquial vs literal meaning of "in it for the money".
Okay, so they are in it to grow their assets, so they can leverage them in their life in this world. And those assets probably get evaluated or assessed at some point, and get assigned some numerical value. And the unit of measurement used for that evaluation may be referencing something like a currency, that other people can understand for its use as a medium of exchange. I see that is very different than money.
I think the deeper issue is a chronic misunderstanding of what wealth is. Most people engage with wealth in the form of usable goods and services. A banana is wealth. A house is wealth. A dollar in my bank account or a share I own is, at the margin, entirely fungible into things I can consume, so they aren't meaningfully different.
This is an illusion. A share has value because it represents the hypothetical future productivity of an abstract entity that may or may not even exist in the future.
At the margin, you can take an Amazon share and buy bananas with it. However you absolutely can't take the entirety of Amazon and exchange it for a trillion bananas. Those bananas don't exist.
More importantly, you can't take the entirety of Amazon and transform it into housing supply. I think people are often too careful about "missing the forest for the trees" and then conceive of problems as overly abstract. The affordability crisis is, first and foremost, a housing shortage.
Young people can't afford homes. Millennials are hitting 40 and realizing they may never afford one. Being secure in housing is pretty damn low on the Maslow hierarchy of needs. Sure maybe we need a more progressive tax policy, but this myopic focus on billionaires distracts from the real problem which is a housing shortage.
1T dollars allows you to corner the best contractors, maybe most of them, for your own projects while houses remain unbuilt.
1. You think Amazon has the market of contractors that build houses locked down?
2. A $1T market cap is not $1T of spendable cash. This is exactly the point I was making that people don't understand the difference.
1. The contractors move to where the money is. They will migrate to specialized work that will not benefit those who can’t afford “competitive” prices.
2. You can borrow 1T dollars in cash, effectively maxing out what the physical world will allow you to spend it on.
You can borrow 1T in cash? From whom?
One of the problems is that rather than billionaires being it for money, they’re in it for money. They don’t lack for money to live, sure, but they do want more money for the power it provides.
One thing I'm gathering from reading this thread is that the 'spending money' is different than the 'power money.' The 'power money' may not actually exist as it's tied up in valuations. If your company is the 'power money' generator, then of course you'll need to work more, since you're in it to be more powerful
bear in mind, elon musk now has the wealth of 10k "100 millionaires" - we truly lack comprehension of how wealthy the wealthy have gotten.
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what are you talking about????????? 100 million is a fortune, and only people in the SF bubble could even consider that a drop that is pissed into the wind. I would say that you need to take a serious step back and actually contemplate life around you. 100 million is a fortune, and no one actually NEED that much money, if they do, then they have lost touch with reality.
In California that's only 100 homes. That's what's normal for us. Increased market efficiency should actually be lowering taxes, not increasing them just to make you feel good about yourself.
It's normal for someone to want 100 homes?
Elon spent less than that to fund SpaceX and Tesla which are now bringing in money from abroad and therefore paying a lot more in taxes than whatever you would have collected from that 100 million. Now you can be a commie and seize more or of it to fund your healthcare or whatever but that person that is capable of earning 100 million will simply exit your tax jurisdiction and then you'll be poor. See Europe for the example.
> Elon spent less than that to fund SpaceX and Tesla...
So 100 million is enough to do quite a bit with?
> that person that is capable of earning 100 million will simply exit your tax jurisdiction
There are plenty of lower tax jurisdictions than Silicon Valley. Is it possible there's more to a jurisdiction than the raw marginal tax percentage it applies to one's paycheck?
It's not enough to build a data center these days. Or even run the government for a day these days it seems. Or are you saying salaries need to come down?
The amount it costs to build a datacenter or run the government for a day is an unimaginable level of personal wealth to virtually every person on the planet.
My own wealth now would be unimaginable to myself when I lived in the USSR. Maybe don't look at the bottom for what should be. There's never any imagination there. I know better than most.
> Maybe don't look at the bottom for what should be.
The people at the top should look at the bottom for what should not be.
> My own wealth now would be unimaginable to myself when I lived in the USSR.
Good! But apparently $100M isn't enough?
Enough is not for you to define. Or anyone. Please internalize that. It's part of something called freedom.
> Enough is not for you to define. Or anyone.
You might look at history for how the "let them eat cake" approach goes.
> It's part of something called freedom.
Freedom is more complicated than you make it out to be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_liberty
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_liberty
One of the early things toddlers have to learn, in fact, is that their personal freedoms may be in conflict from the very legitimate freedoms of others.
> "You might look at history for how the "let them eat cake" approach goes."
It went rather badly for the revolutionaries: the vast majority of the nobility escaped, most of those executed were commoners, Robespierre himself was guillotined (nice own goal there) as a result of political infighting, and the First Republic gave way in only 10 years to the reign of Napoleon as emperor.
Those who invoke the French Revolution of 1789 are self-identifying as future failures. For pity's sake, at least use a historical example that lasted longer.
It went badly for everyone, including the people hoarding all the cake.
Few invoking the French Revolution think it'd be good. I'd just like to avoid a repeat.
A 21st century repeat would accomplish even less. Global air travel is effortless and moving wealth across borders is done electronically.
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This would sting more if the poster posting it thought the Census hadn’t heard of retirement accounts.
The average person in my area makes like 250-350k between two professionals being a couple. They will have 25 peak earning years where they earn like 240k after taxes but only spend 100k so that extra 140k goes into IRA/401k, and other investments, plus discretionary spend. They have 1 million in those accounts within 10 years and 3 million by the time they are in their 50s. That 40k per year you keep citing at that point is less than 2%. None of these people will vote for higher taxes and they keep winning elections. This isn't France and you're not gonna do shit.
> The average person in my area makes like 250-350k between two professionals being a couple.
Even in SF that's about double reality. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanfranciscocit...
> They will have 25 peak earning years where they earn like 240k after taxes but only spend 100k so that extra 140k goes into IRA/401k, and other investments, plus discretionary spend.
Talking about an extra $140k a year for decades straight to put into savings as if it's the American norm illustrates just how deeply out of touch you are here.
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-28...
"Median household income was $83,730 in 2024"
> This isn't France and you're not gonna do shit.
Yeah, Louis XVI thought the same.
You don't understand how incomes and the census data even works. When you set aside 401k and IRA money it doesn't show up as income. It actually lowers your taxable income for that year so instead of seeing 180k earned you might instead have 150k earned. It's what the IRS calls "tax deferred" which means the money is sitting in an account you own and contributes to your net worth but it's pre-income-tax money. That means someone who has 3 million in an IRA will only show "income" on money they take out of the tax deferred account which may only be 50k in a fiscal year. Income basically tells you nothing and it's a dumb statistic to cite.
Someone doesn't understand it, but it's not me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...
"A household's income can be calculated in various ways but the US Census as of 2009 measured it in the following manner: the income of every resident of that house that is over the age of 15, including pre-tax wages and salaries, along with any pre-tax personal business, investment, or other recurring sources of income, as well as any kind of governmental entitlement such as unemployment insurance, social security, disability payments or child support payments received."
> That means someone who has 3 million in an IRA will only show "income" on money they take out of the tax deferred account which may only be 50k in a fiscal year.
We're talking about putting in, not taking out.
No one is revolting over even 80k. It's actually funny you would even suggest it. Good luck. I am not rooting for you.
> No one is revolting over even 80k.
Define median for me?
Yeah, sure, Elon will leave US if he is taxed. Where will he go? EU - even higher taxes. Russia? China? Elon cannot even cross the street in those countries without Putin’s/Xi Ping’s approval.
He already moved to Texas because of taxes - I think this is as good as it gets for him. If US Federal Government taxes his wealth (not something remotely possible) he will still stay in Texas.
You misunderstand. He never would have done it here in the first place. And we would all be poorer for it. Whether he would have been successful elsewhere or not is entirely irrelevant. He could have retired like any one of us normies would have.
Why did he pick one of the highest tax jurisdictions in the country to do it "in the first place", then?
Taxes in California are quite low. That's why I moved here and purchased property.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-income-tax-ra...
> Top marginal rates span from 2.5 percent in Arizona and North Dakota to 13.3 percent in California. (California also imposes a 1.1 percent payroll tax on wage income, bringing the all-in top rate to 14.4 percent as of 2024.)
Am I missing something?
> Am I missing something?
Yes. Literally an entire lifetime of context.
I'm not sure any amount of context is going to make your assertions that average Americans can put $140k in savings annually, that the Census doesn't account for pre-tax income, that Musk moved to CA for its low taxes etc. make any sense.
Don’t feed the trolls.
Market efficiency as most people in the US mean requires the presence of things like roads in decent condition and regulation of RF spectrum use. Both of those are funded via taxes. Reasonable tax rates and uses of tax revenue are required for most non-trivial-sized markets to function efficiently.
Who is going to cap how much a company is allowed to be worth? Or how much of the company you start you are allowed to own? Why should anyone have the power to do that? That is a far more evil power than any billionaire has.
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We are. All of us. If enough of us agree, we can make any rule we want.
So "enough of us" can take anything by forcing the asset to be valued at an artificially high value, force them to sell it for taxes, and then reduce the price down again to keep it ourselves?
Yep. That’s how democracy and law work.
Mob rule is not something to celebrate.
How do you, personally, distinguish between democracy and mob rule?
In the extreme there is no distinction. This is why the US and almost every other democracy are not direct democracies.
Things he wants = democracy
Things he doesn’t want = mob rule
No, it's called rule OF law. Not rule BY law. We create a law, like property rights, and we work within that framework. We don't suddenly decide that property rights don't matter any more because someone happens to have stuff we particularly want to take. That's how dictatorships work.
It would seem quite an essential liberty for a democratic polity to be able to impose this thing called "taxes". I suppose it's up to you to decide whether that is compatible with the rule of law and property rights.
We already have taxes, the vast majority of which are paid by the wealthy. Taxes are not a cap on allowable net worth. That is a different thing altogether. That is economic suicide.
Most of the rah rah billionaires shouldn't be allowed people are just proposing a wealth tax from what I've been told. If I'm wrong I'm open to hearing about it.
Wealth taxes are also economic suicide but most of the "rah rah billionaires shouldn't be allowed" people seem to have absolutely no idea how anything works and think billionaires have billions of dollars sitting in their checking accounts and they could easily write an "end homelessness" check but just don't because they're mean.
pg has an essay addressing exactly that: https://paulgraham.com/inequality.html
The problem is that when you cap earnings to $100m, most investors lose motivation to invest in startups, because their investment isn’t likely to yield a reward. Unless you think all investments should be less than $100m, this kills large investment rounds. That would have killed OpenAI, for example, since their recent round was larger.
In other words, it’s fine to say “you can only earn a hundred million dollars.” The hard part is implementing it without killing the investment ecosystem. Every investor is chasing the big return that covers the 20 investments that didn’t pan out. If that big return is capped, there won’t be investment, and hence no startups.
I don't understand. Just because one person can't own 100 million doesn't mean an investment firm can't make a 100 million dollar investment and make returns on it. Those are 2 different things. The firm is managing the money of multiple people.
And when one of those people breaks $100m, does the excess money go to the firm, or to taxes? Or are you saying that a company can have unlimited money, as long as the shareholders don’t extract more than $100m over the course of their lifetime?
The ultimate point of money is for someone to have it. And since corporations are owned by people, it’s not enough to say that corporations aren’t bound to the $100m cap. Otherwise people will just hoard money using corporations, and take loans against their value, a bit like how it already works today.
What counts as $100m? If you buy a million dollar house, then sell it a few years later for a million dollars, are you now limited to $99m since you already spent $1m? Does the money from selling the house go to taxes, or to you? If it goes to you, what’s to prevent someone from hoarding equity and only taking out $100m at a time, effectively living the life of a billionaire while keeping their balance under $100m?
If you own some stock, and it rises in value to $150m, you forfeit $50m to taxes, right? But then if the value of the stock goes down by half, would you have $75m or $50m?
And if the answer is “you have $150m, the cap only applies when selling stock,” then what stops people from putting the money under the custody of a business (which you said isn’t bound by the cap) and then taking loans against that extra $50m?
These aren’t contrived scenarios. Stock goes up and down all the time, and it’s important to be clear about how the proposed system will work.
I’m genuinely interested in answers. It’s easy to say “just cap someone’s wealth at $100m,” but people seem to shy away from proposing specifics.
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Yes, divestment.
Sure you must pick a point in time. But no matter. This is what we all do on Tax day. This how home owners pay property tax.
There does not need to be an exception for stock.
This argument you make, as if "but who can say how much it really is worth?" Sure. Just like a house. Somebody builds a freeway right next to you, guess what, your house is not worth as much as it was yesterday.
Your argument, "but you can hide your money in a company." Actually, this is good point. Perhaps companies shouldn't be allowed to hoard wealth, then buy up their competitors in order to skew the market.
Maybe this is a problem. Maybe we wouldn't the google/apple phone duopoly, maybe we wouldn't have Meta owning Facebook, and Whatsapp and etc, and all this AI, if they weren't able to hoard cash.
Maybe there should be some law that says, the maximum a company can pay the top is 100 times what they pay the bottom, including the janitors.
There are lots of solutions. If you stop trying to defend some random human having the wealth of a god, it's easy to come up with many, many ideas.
Instead of say, "but this, but that", say, "what if we tried that."
I appreciate the response.
The trouble with economics is that if you get the incentives slightly wrong, people will relentlessly exploit the difference. So when I ask "but this, but that," I’m asking "have you thought of this exploit or that exploit?" Because unfortunately you can’t just ignore that they exist. Each of them needs a concrete answer, or the system will reward those who exploit it. (You can argue that’s true for the current system too, but at least it’s hard to exploit. The loopholes I listed above are all straightforward.)
You miss the point.
Instead of, "but this, but that," you say, "what about this?"
You use your considerable brain power, to, instead of finding faults and leaving it there, you suggest something better, that you believe can accomplish the overall goal. The overall goal, I believe, is fixing wealth disparity before violence becomes the only answer.
In this manner, we come to some solution that benefits society, rather than keeping the status quo which is obviously, without doubt, broken.