We should probably deal with them sooner rather than later
50Tax them. Kill them. Whatever order
49Billionaires shouldn't exist; no one needs that much money. They should be taxed until there are no more billionaires.
36I'm hungry.
28Tax them.
23It's why we invented the gulliotine
20Billionaires are a crime against humanity.
20If you invest in the sp500, you'll have something around 8% return per year. This is highly variable year by year, of course, but in the long run, that's what you can expect to average out. You can do better than the sp500, but generally not without accepting higher risk.
With those returns, you will double your money every 9 years. Roughly. It's going to vary by decade. 2000-2010 was flat, while 2010-2020 was unusually good.
If you max out a 401k, HSA, and IRA on this strategy from a young age, you should have millions for retirement. If you're a millennial or younger, you're going to need a million or two (at least) to have a reasonable retirement.
How do you turn that into a billion? Doubling every 9 years won't do it in your lifetime. Not unless you started life as a millionaire and never withdrew a dime until you were 90. Starting with $1000 and doubling every year for 20 years, consistently, would do it.
How do you double your money consistently for 20 years? Either extreme luck or doing something extremely shady. Probably both.
In other words, they are not the genius captains of industry that right-libertarians want you to believe. They got lucky or are deeply unethical or both, and they do not deserve your respect. Most likely, they deserve your disdain. Every one of them.
19It's not so much the money, the wealth in itself, that bothers me about them, it's the mind boggling absolutely insane amount of power having that much wealth is capable of.
They literally buy elections, they buy media outlets, by their actions they buy the direction entire countries take. They use their money to fund the actions of others that work on their behalf. They can create a literal army of individuals to work for them towards whatever end they wish to achieve. That's entirely way too much power for an individual or a family to have. Just imagine living next to someone who has a 500,000 strong army of militants just hanging out. Maybe theyre good, maybe they want to turn your neighborhood into a warzone for kicks, either way you would have no means to stop them.
Just look at smoething like the "tea party" movement in the US. Grassroots? No, try Koch brothers funded with the intent to install Koch approved representatives into the government.
17They would serve a greater use to humanity as compost
14Look at this visualization of how much money Jeff Bezos has, and then tell me that it is reasonable and justifiable.
14- I think wealth should be capped at a few million or tens of millions. Too much wealth hoarding keeps money out of circulation at the consumer spending level, which is bad for the economy in general, especially lower income people.
- Without knowing anything about a person and how they became a billionaire, I have no opinion on them individually. Jumping to conclusions about someone based on the group they belong to (like say, a black guy walking down the street) is bigoted thinking, no matter who the target is.
13Billionaires shouldn't exist.
There should be a hard upper limit on wealth somewhere around the $100 million mark.
An amount where you can still invest your money risk-free at ~1% above inflation and live a life of plenty without lifting a finger, forever.
Any property, company, or thing in general worth more than $100 million should never be owned by one person alone.13Depose.
12Ideally they'd be taxed into no longer being billionaires.
Realistically we probably need to violently remind them who holds the actual power before this becomes a reality.
10It billionaires exist then there is a problem in the system. Billionaires are a bug, not a feature.
10They need sanctions proportional to their wealth. And checks and balances. The less they can play the system, the better.
9I don't eat meat, so I'm not that into eating them. I'd advocate for composting instead
9They are subsidized by our government. Truly. The broken system created Elon Musk and now the broken system allowed him to buy a presidency for $134 million. Cheap, for him.
How? That is how much the system has devalued American labor since 1981.
9Psychopaths
9Tax, kill, eat. In that order.
9Hoarding that wealth does nothing to improve society.
Cap real wealth at 200 million EUR, any more wealth accumulated needs to be shunted to a global poverty fund.
However, the wealth earned should still be recorded as having been earned by the person, this will give the person the recognizion they crave, a highscore list to give them incentive to keep going.
This is obviously impossible to do as wealth is not a tangible concept these days.
8Used to think: wow they've got a lot of money. Untill I grew up and realised it's not money they've got, it's estimated net worth. It's hard to turn that into cash.
If they got there by making a company that other people now value a lot: impressive.
If it's a royal family member/inheritance/..., less impressive.
Overall: don't think about it often.
8they're by definition a cancer in society
8Fuck em. Instantaneous lead poisoning.
8We need way less of them or way more of them. The wealth gap needs to be closed and I don't care which direction.
7What a funny thing to ask on Lemmy.
I prefer mine well done, and grilled to perfection personally.
6Bait used to be believable
6they look delicious.
6They're a cancer on society.
6I respect some of what they do but they should be taxed more and the top ones a lot more.
5I think there’s about 8-10% too many of them. To make things fair, we should remove an equal portion of each (starting from the top).
5Like most parasites, they have an important place in the ecosystem.
Ticks for instance are a source of food for several species.
4Medium rare with a little bit of butter and thyme.
4The easiest way to identify enemies of freedom and liberty. Count their net worth.
4I under stand the human desire to compete in wealth as a [genitalia] measuring contest, but there should probably be a cap somewhere...
Maybe a cap at somewhere between 500K and $10Mil, I'm not sure where, but someone else fancy enough to write laws should maybe figure it out... cuz any amount higher kinda make no sense.
Oh and redistribute the excess as a UBI that everyone would get.
I don't like the bandwagon of "kill billionaires". Like why need to kill when we can just seize excess funds that they don't need and redistribute, everyone can just chill.
4Honestly, I try not to think about them. It's an inherently selfish and self-serving class and they've got enough money to pay people to think about them, so I'm not going to do it for free.
4If anything, I have ever so slightly less problems with billionaires like Gabe Newell (Valve ceo) since he's doing something constructive (proton/steam deck) that, while it does absolutely help line his pockets, is still helpful to people who play games.
Though on a moral level I personally feel not allowed to like him because he's a billionaire. That sentiment is spread across all billionaires for me. Either way, in general I don't like them because 99.9999999% of all billionaires do as much as possible to fuck over literally everyone else.
4Fuck 'em all to death.
3I'm always thinking about how bad humans are when thinking about numbers rationally. Of course we understand what a "billion" is, we know how many 0's it has and can do basic mathematical operations on it. But how much is it really? One of my favorite analogies for putting it in perspective is seconds.
A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds is … 31,688 years.
The analogy already breaks down, because while most people could understand 12 days and a lot of adults can understand 31 years for having lived it (some even twice or more!), 31,688 years is completely incomprehensible again. How many human generations is that? All of recorded human history is only like 5,000 years. It’s utterly, mind-numbingly insane. No trillionaires, ever! No billionaires!!!
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/17/business/elon-musk-richest-person-trillionaire/index.html
This was published on September 17th of this year, after most of the nonsense of Twitter and utter things. He’s still on track, by 2027 no less.
3Not good
3I feel like there are billionaires in the world who manage to be rich without damaging society (or being the society).
If there's one example then there's no excuse for all the others to behave the way they do..
If all billionaires are the same then it's past time to question why we have to put up with them
3Too much power
2Seems logical if there was a law that the average worker had to be paid a percentage of what the top people get paid. I thought that Japan had something like this.
2I dont think about them
2Don't know them, don't care about them.
2Is this a joke topic?
2Same as that guys from yesterday. I would prefer a guillotine, but You gotta work with whatcha got.
1Abolish with prejudice
1in the (translated) Words of Knorkator:
The world doesn't need billionaires imagine how beautiful it would be without you! Empathy and reason instead of greed and scam fresh air, green forests, clean seas.
The world doesn't need billionaires and we will even achieve this without guns: No, we won't kill you and we won't imprison you, on the opposite: you will be millionaires!
1This is a bait folks!
1Permanently Deleted
1Leeches. Fuck em.
1I want to be one and buy land and develop a village and live on a mansion on a hill overlooking it. Not for profit or anything, make the houses affordable (maybe rent them out and then sell it to the tenants after a certain time, factoring paid rent as a discount?) for nice people. Just have myself a wee community and LARP as a 17th century lord (the nice kind)
1Their an abomination. An exploitation of a system that values exponential growth more than inherent human values. In a world where public infrastructure is collapsing and there's homeless people on tbe street, individuals should not be able to amass such absurd wealth only for their own self enrichment.
1Wealth tax that goes directly to funding a billionaire audit program. It should create a self-perpetuating cycle that means IRS audits for all of them every year.
1In terms of scale, from the person at the top making xxx times the person at the bottom, they've likely always been around.
"Robber Baron" is the ye olde term.
Google tells me John D. Rockefeller peaked at around $1.4 billion in 1937. 1.5% of US GDP.
https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=47167
The average wage in 1937 was $890 a year.
https://time.com/archive/6760420/personnel-above-average/
So Rockefeller, at his death, had amassed as much wealth as 1,573,034 average people would earn in a year.
In order to hit 1.5% of current US GDP (27.36 trillion), Bezos or Musk would have to hit 410.4 billion. That's how wealthy Rockefeller was.
1.2 Musks. 2 Bezoses.
0I support billionaire behaviour fully
0Conflicted. I'll give you my top 4 considerations.
- Pro 1: The reason a lot of these folks become billionaires is because they are able to sell an idea and execute on it. I think that's admirable. I think it's aspirational. I think that is part of the human condition.
- Pro 2: Additionally, they're billionaires because society made them billionaires. Often, they founded a company (or got in on the ground floor), then issued stock to investors. More and more investor's piled on. It's a bit like winning the lottery, only that you (the aspirational billionaire) have some effect in the outcome. Again, I think this is part of the human condition. Civilizations, tribes, companies, whatever you call them, for some bizarre reason that I personally don't quite grasp, prefer to have a leader, or at least will defer to one.
- Con 1: Many people can be millionaires. It's not easy, but with the right vision, gumption, financial know-how, time and a bit of luck, someone pursuing this effort can do so. But, it takes a certain kind of person to be a 100+ millionaire or even billionaire. I think we have enough historical evidence of the type I'm describing - greedy, predatory, manipulative, aggressive, sociopathic. These traits can flourish in business, but I don't think that these are traits that we should encourage in society as a whole. It gives me some gratitude that, for every 1 megalomaniacal billionaire in the world, there were 1000s of lookalikes who flailed.
- Con 2: Rent-seeking behavior and loot dragons. Nothing pisses me off more than a self-entitled dumbass whose entire being is resting on the laurels of a family legacy. I think once the great person's first generation passes, that most of their remaining horde should be returned for the public good. While I do think a certain amount should be endowed to the next generation so that they are equipped to pursue their own marvel, I do think society resources made these people and society should be able to take them back.
-1I have no problems with billionaires, in a society where everyone's a millionaire.
A society that allows for such wealth disparity to happen is deeply corrupt. Anyone who not only participates in that society, but voluntarily becomes the cause of such disparity is irreparably morally bankrupt. They are a burden on society, contributing millions of times less than what they take.
-1This is a bait folks!
-1
