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Comment by corrral | Hacker News Reader

If you can get several tens of millions of dollars, liquid, on fairly short notice, there's almost nothing you can't buy on a whim. You may as well have infinite money. It doesn't matter that you can't liquidate another 90-99% of your net worth easily. You borrow $60m for that second yacht, then pay it off as soon as the tax situation looks favorable for realizing some gains. No big deal. Live like (er, better than) a king, pay taxes like a pauper. It's the American way.

Larger sums are only really useful for making big-splash investments. Like this. As far as personal spending goes, it's no obstacle, so it doesn't matter that they can't easily turn their entire net worth into a literal billions-of-dollars balance in a checking account.

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> there's almost nothing you can't buy on a whim

Twitter, you can't buy Twitter on a whim.

Right, big-splash, chest-thumping investments are about the only thing that might be a problem. Not ordinary purchases. But that's not so much buying something, in the ordinary sense, as shifting investment strategy.

Aka, you can't buy anything on a whim.

At least one reason it matters is the gigantic numbers poison public discussion of wealth. People commonly claim things like Musk can single-handedly end world hunger because he has enough net worth to buy everyone food for the next 20 years. That isn't true if there is no way for him to liquidate enough of that worth without destroying the worth in the process. What these people actually can do is give away equity shares to the poor, but you can't buy food with equity shares. Or, in Bezos case, since he owns Whole Foods, I guess he can just give away food.

Didn't he end up not helping at all after previously committing billions to it?

I feel like he's not obligated to do anything, but ignoring his commitment makes him a worse person, and there are probably amounts greater than zero which do not encounter the issue you describe

No, not at all. They didn’t actually detail how they’d spend it.

It seems to me like they did, they came up with a plan and everything.

Are we sure Elon isn't just claiming that he forever wants more detail, like a sealioning troll, because in actuality he wants the money for himself more, and never actually intended to make the donations he committed to? Occam's razor would suggest that is actually the case.

I mean, if we was serious about it, after he received the plan, did he ask for more detail on any of the items he didn't understand?

The so-called “plan”: https://www.wfp.org/stories/wfps-plan-support-42-million-peo...

It doesn’t say how they’ll spend the money aside from allocations here and there, and it wouldn’t solve world hunger.

>the so-called "plan"

it's actually just a plan, not a 'so-called "plan"', whatever that means

>It doesn’t say how they’ll spend the money aside from allocations

the way the money will be spent, is by allocating money to the items that it will be spent on, which are detailed in the plan.

that seems good enough to start for me, but where did Elon ask for more info than that? I asked this in the previous post, but very conspicuously got no answer.

surely he didn't just _forget_ about _billions of dollars he committed to donate to charity?_

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