Imagine if Amazon and all jobs out there were cooperatively owned?

He’d have to give them this as equity in the company, he’s not liquid for that amount. None of the “richest Americans” have near the amount of wealth they appear to have.

This is what people mean when they say workers should own the means of production tho

Musk paid $44 billion in cash for Twitter. Billionaires only have wealth on paper until they want to buy a company, then magically they have the cash.
- It’s my understanding that Musk borrowed heavily from investors for that cash.
- It's called leveraged borrowing, it's how the billionaire class pays for things. The banks typically give them super low rates and generous terms on these types of loans.
  So what Elon did was took a loan against his assets, Tesla stock, at a low APR with very loose repayment terms, then paired that with money pledged by a few other minority investors and that's how he was able to quickly come up with 44 billion to buy Twitter.
- https://youtube.com/shorts/J3UVMlDUFkc
  https://youtu.be/J3UVMlDUFkc
  https://youtu.be/LpgNHaCuu44
  You need this guy on YouTube. He's excellent at shedding light on this stuff. He has stuff for lobbying, aipac, billionaires, rfk, private equity, and more
- Yeah and a lot of that came from other investors
  Other investors that will be coming to look for their investment money
- IIRC they basically use some of their shares like a credit card, since the value of their shares keeps appreciating the interest is much easily paid off
- Musk paid very little for twitter. He paid $0 in real money. He traded (iirc) like $13b of Tesla stock. The rest was filled by Saudi investors and western banks, who were greatly encouraged to own and control one of the primary modalities of communication in the 21st century. Either way very little actual cash transferred hands
he’s not liquid
Who gives a fuck? Wealth is wealth and his equity is his security for the low to zero interest loans from where all his spending money comes.
None of the “richest Americans” have near the amount of wealth they appear to have
Again, yes they do. Illiquid wealth is still wealth and is the basis of rich people getting to spend as much as they want with little to no risk compared to people who DON'T have a dragon's hoard in stock for the above infinite money exploit to work.
This is what people mean when they say workers should own the means of production tho
Nah, when people say that workers should own the means of production, they're talking about ACTUAL ownership, not bonuses from the owner.
- No, they’re saying they should own the means of production. Which in the modern context means equity in the company. All 876,000 employees could be given a 105,000 bonus in terms of stock and then they’d own Amazon equity, done
That's not really how that works. Sure, it isn't liquid, but you can still borrow against it, and you don't pay tax in this like you would if you sell. That's how the wealthy can still buy things without having to pay any reasonable amount of tax.
- And if amazon gave their employees stock options (like they did at one point) the employees could also borrow against it. But amazon stopped doing that once they reached a point where their employees were impacting their bottom line. They now rob their employees of that option to entrench wealth amongst the elite

I got into an argument years ago with someone who appeared to start on the conclusion that co-operatives must be bad and tried to work backwards from there.

There was this notion that it was somehow unfair for one delivery driver to earn $1,000,000 and another to earn $10,000 just because they worked for different companies, since it was mostly the efforts of other people in the company that gave it its value. He wasn't able to then take the tiny extra step required to apply the same logic to CEOs and shareholders.

I realized there's a kind of proximity bias; billionaires are so far removed from our lives that we just accept their existence as part of how the world works, whereas if a regular employee like us is getting something we're not then the jealousy becomes palpable. It's the same thing that drives hatred towards minorities and immigrants.

You could just use the top .1% and not drop that figure much. The differences as you go up are huge.

Anybody saying that co-ops don't work or whatever should check Mondragon which thrives in thoroughly capitalist Spain.

The consumers have to use their brain when they use their money. Cooperatives are very big in Denmark.
- Unfortunately Americans using their brain when they purchase something means they are looking to maximize their quality to cost ratio. I do this all the time when shopping for automotive tools. Lots of companies sell what is more or less the same exact quality product made by the same exact manufacturer. And if you peruse amazon(so hard not to even send traffic their way) you will find the same item sold by say matco, cornwell, mac or bluepoint rebranded in different packaging for 15-25% the price asked by those other high end brands. And in some instances i have seem people open up the product and find it is packaged with the more expensive brand name logo on it. So when 50% of Americans earn $42,200/year($20.29/hr) or less and when you remove the highest earning 10% from the data set then the average wage in the USA is $58,000 ($28/hr) American’s known only one way to shop smart and that is look for the best deal and ignore the ethical implications because most of us can not afford to figure this into our shopping habits.
  And this is compounded even more so by the reality that us yankees are being lied to by the financial institutions at the helm of our societal machinery. Inflation statistics are wildly skewed to reduce the possibility of the working class rioting and fomenting a revolution so the passive income stream for the ultra wealthy will continue to flow.
  The world bank and international monetary fund who’s inflation calculations are regurgitated to us hu the FED and all of Wall Street- they use consumer price index to figure inflation statistics and CPI is flawed in multiple ways but the most important of them being that CPI does not account for the devaluation of a currency due to the increase in circulating currency supply as well as leveraged national debt/ deficit, and these 2 factors are the primary driving force of inflation. And if you even mention the fact that the price of gold foes account for those two factors then youre called ridiculous and a few will try to spew out a ton of nonsensical economics information at you but all you need to know is that in the 172 years of the US dollar as a standardized currency the price of gold only fluctuated ≈95% from $18 to $35 (and the bulk of that was when FDR had to take drastic measures to save the economy after wall street malfeasance that caused the Great Depression which was mild in comparison to the last 40 years of fraud by wall street so FDR made it illegal to hoard gold and bought up the majority of the supply at $20.67/ounce to store in the newly built fort knox and when his administration was certain they had the majority of the supply they revalued gold wt $35/ounce where it remained until nixon ended the gold standard permanently in 1971 by withdrawing from the bretton woods agreement) but since nixon ended the gold standard permanently 54 years ago the value of gold has increased in direct proportion to the national debt going from $35 to $3400/ounce or ≈9600% compared to the national debt increasing from $400 billion to 37.3 trillion ≈9400% in the same exact time frame.
  So this is why the silent generation l, boomers and most of Gen x had it so well. Why my grandfather was able to buy a house in 1955 just 5 years after coming to the usa at the age of 18 on a minimum wage salary in an Ivy League college town for less than $3000 but today federal minimum wage hasn’t been raised in going on 17 years and average rent for a 2 bedroom apartment in the same city is now $3000/ month if you go outside the city its $2200-2500 depending on your standards but the reality is that it cost more to purchase and maintain enslaved people during chattel slavery some 170+ years ago than minimum wage workers anywhere in the Usa are currently paid today. We are slaves convinced of an illusory freedom. Mainly through the eradication of high education standards that were the norm after the Great Depression up until the end of the civil rights movement Fascism has creeped into sociopolitical system and taken a strong foot hold while using digital medial to effectively disburse propaganda and condition many to support ideas against their own self interest and simultaneously believe what is in the better interest of the working class is evil and foolish. Things couldn’t be more upside down than they are now.

The Behind the Bastards episode about him is really mind blowing. Like, he sucks way more than you could ever imagine. When I was in college, Amazon was the company that you could get used textbooks from. Now they're the default web shopping platform.

Episode 1
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/behind-the-bastards/id1373812661?i=1000544956556
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-jeff-bezos-and-the-90475835/
https://youtube.com/watch?v=I1jXyh6Y8-g
Episode 2
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/behind-the-bastards/id1373812661?i=1000545159218
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-two-jeff-bezos-and-the-90559135/
https://youtube.com/watch?v=BhnN-d9mTFA

Going by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis the 1% are valued at ~49 Trillion works out to be ~$145k per person. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLT01026

So that was 5 years ago. Which means he could give them all a $20,000 annual raise and still be making money.

Will that keep them from parking like assholes?

What was that thing about the band in 'Restaurant at the End of the Universe' being so so unbelievably wealthy that the accountants prove that space/time is not just curved, it is warped, please internet tell me i'm not insane?

Yup! You're remembering that right. Also, the frontman Hotblack Desiato was temporarily dead as part of a tax avoidance scheme 😄
- Oh right! Thanks!

And then the State Department starts flooding Amazon warehouses with drugs and guns to ruin the co-op and make people nostalgic for the good ol days when the Bezos junta was around to control the gangs.

Or we could just end the prohibition of drugs because it does nothing beneficial for society and destroy the black market instead of doing bullshit like “decriminalizing” which doesn't do any good because the black market still flourishes
- I'm sorry, do you think that would stop the State Department from giving all of their children fentanyl?
  Besides, there's always going to be a black market unless you want the drug trade totally unregulated. No drug standards, no age limits, no quality control, just a wild West free for all.

Some people who don't know any better would say that poor Jeff innovated the world into a better place by inventing Amazon, that he's being justly rewarded by the free market.

But Amazon became so successful because it killed off all of it's competitors - not through a better service, but using investor capital to artifically lower it's prices, systematically targeting it's rivals and taking them over.

Amazon is so profitable because it has killed the market and replaced it with itself, and the tech giants and uber and so on are doing exactly the same thing.

So turn it into a co-op, let it's workers decide if they can piss on the clock or not. Give it's sellers a say in whether they want to pay 40% markup and hidden fees to get pushed to the top of front page. Amazon abuses workers, businesses and the market - this is a great solution to a problem that everyone ought to have, regardless of politics.

Math is beautiful.

I like the energy, but you're not going to sell 92 Billion dollars worth of stocks for 92 Billion dollars.

He could just hand over the stocks.
- though they would drop in value very fast thereafter, no? My naive understanding is that a good share of people would sell them immediately, causing a price crash.
Then the stocks shouldn't be worth that much and the man shouldn't be able to spend like he has $92 billion
- Stocks aren't the exception, if a massive amount of USD holdings were sold off it would also plummet in value.
  Its basic Supply and Demand.
That’s a specious argument. It might be technically true, but not by nearly a big enough margin for it to make any difference to the underlying point. It’s not like you’d have to unload them all in one month.

cooperatively owned

This usually means employee, or sometimes, customer owned. You described fair taxation and UBI/freedom dividends instead.

What needs to be nationalized with 99% shareholder dillution and zero compensation in the US is oil, weapons companies on the basis of their warmongering lobbying, and other zionist first rule over America media and political funding terrorists.

UBI is first and foremost power redistribution. The wealthy stay wealthy, and through economic growth and faster money multiplier, get even richer even at higher tax rates.

That's impossible. Because a bonus that much would mean there would be a lot of taxes paid, and that goes against Bezos his principles.

I did the math recently and if you took the assets of the wealthiest 1% and divided only half of it amongst the remaining 336.3 million Americans it would be a check of approximately 68,000 for every man woman and child and those bloated blood sucking leaches would still have an average remainder of just under 6 million dollars each.

I think you're math lost an order of magnitude somewhere in there. Quite a few billionaires increased their wealth by 10s of billions of dollars in 2024 alone. 336 million is a bit less than 1/3 of a billion. If you just took 1 billion dollars from Bezos for example, and distributed that to all Americans you'd have an economic disaster from the sudden shock of every single American becoming a multi-millionaire overnight and Bezos would still be wealthy as fuck and making more money in a day than anyone could dream of

Tax. the. rich. When billionaires can increase their wealth by hundreds of billions of dollars per year, there is no reason for anyone to be poor. Hell, lets imagine a conservative 30% tax on wealth gains over a billion dollars. That's hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into the government every single year. Universal healthcare, free university tuition, and UBI all paid for with plenty leftover for ambitious megaprojects like reconnecting the entire country to passenger rail services. Anyone who says the government can't pay for shit that will help the 99% is ignoring the amount of wealth that exists.

I don’t follow. $1B/336M people is about $3/each.
- ah shit you're right. I was an order of magnitude or 3 off
I think you have misread what I said.
The richest 1% (3.4 million people) own 44.6 trillion. Half of that is 22.3 trillion so 22,300,000,000,000 divided by 336.6 million (336,600,000) and you're left with $66,646.74 now take the other half and divide it up amongst the 3.4 million richest 1% of Americans and they are left with $6,558,823.53 each

This particular case would be great! But yeah, but give out all the billionaire money and money wouldn't be money.

Dad: "Money's valuable because it's hard to get. If everybody had it, it wouldn't be money."

Friend argued with me in the 90s about the feds shredding worn bills.

"They could give those millions to people like us!"

Well, yeah, and they could give every American a million bucks. Want that?

"Fuck yeah!"

I mow lawns for $20 a pop. If I had a million I'd want at least $20,000.

"Yeah, but a meal at McDonald's would still be $5! We could eat like kings!"

Tax the fucking snot of out 'em, but these dreams of spreading the wealth like peanut butter are childish.

Your Dad in particular is a moron.
Literally, definitionally, money is valuable because it is near universally exchangeable for any good or service.
Money literally is not money if basically everyone does not have at least some of it, to transact with.
Money is money because basically everyone has, uses, accepts it.
Money is generally functionally defined as money, at its most basic level, by the fact that a government requires it as some kind of tax or tithe or tribute; this definition holds for the vast majority of human history and civilization.
...
If things were valuable by their rarity alone, their difficulty to possess...
Then the world's last pristine mint condition pog or beanie baby or funkopop of some particular type... would be immensely valuable, universally.
A random fingerpainting by someone you know, the only exact one of its kind in existence, would be so valuable you could buy a house with it.
...
I say your Dad in particular is a moron because his view represents a much, much more deepseeded misunderstanding of what money even is than your friend who is simply ignorant of the concept of inflation.
That is something you can sit down and explain the basics of in like 5 to 15 minutes.
Your Dad on the other hand ... seems like he would require unlearning about 50 years worth of a horrendously malformed worldview.
...
Money and taxation are inextricably linked in modern societies... and it is very, very well known that highly wealth lopsided societies are unstable, prone to collapse, and are less efficient in terms of actual real economic productivity than societies with a more equitable distribution of wealth.
The capitalist lie is that concentrating wealth upwards results in a trickle down effect that makes everyone wealthier overall.
We are way, way, waaaay past the point of wealth inequality where that could be theoretically possible, and it just literally is objectively false for at least the past 40 years in the US.
What actually would cause the vast majority of people to be more wealthy, and would then also make billionaires more wealthy also, in real terms, would be the trickle up effect that would occur if you taxed the fuck out of the wealthy, gave that money to the poorer, and then they would increase the velocity of money and thus actual economic growth considerably.
The wealthy do not want this, becauss even if they gain in absolute terms, they would not be as well off in relative terms.
They want to be better than everyone else.
Not just 'better off'.
They want power, they want monopolies and oligopolies, to sit on their hoards of extremely low velocity wealth that generates no real material gains... because this dragon-like hoarding makes everyone else far, far worse off in relative terms.
They want the power differential.
...
Billionaires do not need their excess money.
It just sits there, does nothing, other than destabalize the whole financial system by haphazardly seeking the greatest ROI, untill too many bad bets are made for too long and it all blows up (ie, what is happening right now).
After a billion, congrats, you won capitalism, 100% effective tax rate after that, dear god do we need to repair and upgrade our failing infrastructure, and mitigate climate change, dig in for its already baked in, now unavoidable, massive, massive future losses in the tens to hundreds of trillions of dollars over the next 25-50 years.
We are at the point now where it is basically either than, or literally billions will die in the next 25 to 50 years, from statvation and climate disasters, increased crime rates as people become impoverished, increased war and genocides as mass migrations from disaster areas are gunned down or enslaved, nation states fight over the last remaining bits of non cost prohibitive resources that can be extracted.
- I love how hard this comment goes
- Easily triggered? Yeah, dad's point was, more to the point, "if everyone had a bunch of money", which was kinda the theme of my post. And I gather you understand inflation quite well. Would have hoped you could tease the theme from a couple of sentences.
  This fucking place. Everyone ready to go off on the "bad guys". No wonder it's the worst echo chamber I've ever participated in.
The bills to be shredded aren't legally money. They're shredded because they were exchanged for new legal tender
however giving out money that already exists doesn't magically make money
- You get it. I get it. My buddy Mike didn't get it.
  I explained the replacement thing.
  "But they could still give us the old bills!"
- I have zero arguments with any of that and can't imagine why you think I would.
There are so many issues with this but the primary one is that you'd be an idiot to try and never work again with only a million bucks in your hand.
- Inflationary as giving everyone a million bucks would be, this was the 90s. $1M would net you a fair retirement.

Jesus fucking christ you guys don't have any idea about how owning something works. Would you please stop commenting on wealth until after you have read like the simplest economics book even once?

He could give the money in the form of Amazon stock, or if he doesn't want to dilute his ownership he could get a loan backed by his assets. The same way he does things like buying the biggest yacht in the world or hiring Venice for a wedding.
(They said without reading a simple economics book.)
do billionaire’s nuts taste that good?