Billionaires 7 years ago:
https://web.archive.org/web/20171004002738/https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/
Billionaires today:
This is a list of people who’s creations I’d like to avoid, if at all possible.
It’s obvious for several people on this list, but how do I boycott someone like the Oracle guy? As a non-tech guy, it just seems impossible. I don’t even recognize several of these people, tbh.
tail -n +2 listAbove | cut -f 2 > DeathNote.txt
Is this inflation corrected? Cause an arbitrary line across 7 years of inflation is gonna be crossed…
kamala harris’ proposed tax on unrealized gains seems like a great idea rn
Hey, look, I found the thing the US is still number 1 at!
There are probably several Russian Oligarchs missing from this list because their wealth is mostly dark money. Rumor has it Putin is the wealthiest man in the world and has been for some time.
And that’s just the wealth that we know about
Billionaires are a political choice as much as homelessness. They are allowed to exist because nobody does anything about it.
There was an article celebrating the fact that we’re on our way to having the first trillionare.
I wanted to die. It’s so insanely fucking disgusting
Look at all our WONDERFUL job creators amassing their dragon hoards!
Why would you go around celebrating untreated and ignored mental illnesses?
On the other hand, if we all work really hard, go the extra mile, burn the midnight oil… we can make it happen faster for that special someone.
The overall average median lifetime earnings of $1,850,000 for men and $1,100,200 for women. Let’s just take the average and say an average American earns $1,475,100 in their lifetime.
The important thing to remember is, in an unequal system where workers have most of the value of their work taken by a single person who the system disproportionately favors, that value is translatable to literal life. They are directly, inexorably going to die having had that value simply transferred to the other person or people who collect that value. Or put succinctly, they are giving up life, and the “owner” of the business is gaining the value of their life.
Another note is that even though most valuations are stock, stock valuations do not exist in a vacuum. The stock market is the realizable increase in productivity value that we all collectively have caused.
So based on that principle, just for fun, let’s convert these fortunes to human lives, to better understand just how much (economically-valued) life force these people have taken from people:
Elon Musk: $262,000,000,000 = 176,259 American lives.
Jeff Bezos: $208,000,000,000 = 141,007 American lives.
Mark Zuckerberg: $203,000,000,000 = 137,617 American lives.
just for fun, let’s convert these fortunes to human lives
Muh capitalism
To take that farther I wonder how many employees they have. How close is the ratio of workers to their life value obtained by the owner.
It’s almost seems like the main thing you need to make money is money
A boring distopia is already even a single person having more than a single billion.
Yup, there was that post a while back, like you reach a billion, you get a plaque that says “congrats you won capitalism” and then they start at 0 again
For real, like Prestige in Call of Duty
Looks like Sam Walton would be atop the list had he figured out immortality.
Probably would top this list as the most decent person of the bunch too. He wasn’t a saint, but I haven’t seen evidence that he was rotten to the core, either.
How has musk maintained his companies’ valuations? Particularly Tesla.
Blatant fraud
If my math is correct and we taxed everything over 100 billion at 100% we’d get over 900 billion in taxes. Nearly a trillion bucks if we limited these assholes to a measly 100 billion.
A trillion bucks, but not in cash; in shares of those companies. Try to sell it all for cash and you tank the share price. People lose their jobs, pension funds that own shares in those companies lose value.
That’s the trouble with taxing wealth. It’s not liquid like income. All that net worth is tied up in the companies and not easily accessed.
I’d be okay with the govt owning shares, honestly. That way the public would get a voice in how these megacorps operate, and that voice would get bigger the larger the company becomes.
Didn’t Bill Gates sign a pledge to give all of his money away? And he is billions richer than last year? Huh.
Yes he signed up to give his money away. To a charitable trust. Which he and his family controls. And can withdraw from at any time.
It isnt a charity pledge, its a plan to avoid paying taxes.
Adam Conover video on the “Billionaire Donation/Charity” scam:
https://youtu.be/0Cu6EbELZ6I
It’s all bullshit and marketing so people will regurgitate this lie. Everyone that says that puts it into a charity that they or their friends run.
Their children get high positions that allow them to have high paying jobs from the start. They have huge political influence which helps them with their other companies.
We need to redo our tax system and increase the top brackets. We also need to redo what is considered taxable and what can be claimed as a tax benefit.
Bill Gates a lying piese of shit? Who would have thought?
I went out in the rain yesterday and I got slightly moist. More at seven.
I’m not sure who is doing the calculations here, but the latest estimates I’m seeing for Gates have him down a bit for the year. He also is down after is divorce from Melinda, which included splitting off a good chunk of money for her own personal and philanthropic use.
Bill Gates signed his pledge more than 10 years ago. His wealth doubled in the last 7 years, meaning that he’s gotten average increases of like 10% per year.
Mr. Gates, you’re going the wrong way!
It’s just more proof billionaires simply cannot spend the money they have accumulated.
They need to be guillotined.
Meh. Net worth can be volatile in the upper echelons of wealth. It’s often based on volatile assets. He’s still giving away plenty. I’m seeing a budget of $8.6 billion in 2024 for the Gates Foundation.
Also, his wealth doesn’t need to be spent within his lifetime to remain true to the pledge. The Gates Foundation can continue functioning long after his death, much like other foundations like the Carnegie Foundation.
