Mark Zuckerberg Pushed Meta to Shield Him from California's Proposed Wealth Tax

Excellent article, but it still seems like a dubious practice to me

A company that's grown large enough to make its shareholders worth multiple hundred billions of dollars is itself too large.

One of the bigger failings of the US government over the last half century is allowing corporations to grow and merge their way to become as large as many have. Stronger enforcement of anti-trust would have both significantly reduced wealth inequality in this country as well as siphoned off much of the growing political power corporations have relative to regular citizens.

Keep it private? Then there are no shares, and no need to worry about losing control of your company.

Pick one: total and complete control over your company, or give it up to the market. Why should owners get the best of both worlds, and at this point trillions of capital themselves?

Billionaires deny climate change for their benefit, except when they do it that actually has an impact. When Uncle Joe denies it, he just continues driving his gas car that was the only option because oil tycoons destroyed all other possibilities.

Billionaires exert a lot of influence on elections and political parties. When they want a bill killed, they can make that happen with enough money. Is this 100%? No, but looking at races around the country they clearly win enough times.

Billionaires can use their wealth to shield themselves from the law in a way few but the most powerful leaders. I can't do that.

Billionaires decide if our food is safe to eat, unless the pesky FDA gets in the way. Good thing Billionaires can also stop the FDA.

Billionaires destroy public trust in healthcare through "wellness" and "holistic care", because of course there is money to be made there (10x more than "Big Pharma"). Big Pharma is also capable of sabotaging health for their own profits. The Sacklers?

Billionaires direct (the US) government to engage in wars the people don't want.

I could go on for how many industries they control with zero input, or the bare minimum, from the rest of us.

But sure, tell me how a "thousandaire" is directing entire markets and countries to act as they singly wish. I have to coordinate with hundreds of thousands, or even millions, to get policies I like. But a single billionaire? They can stand in the way and make that entire fight so, so much harder. And its painfully obvious the only reason they do so is to further enrich themselves.

The US government collects and spends trillions every year, and is doing far more evil than anyone else, perhaps they shouldn't exist?

Most people who say this have no idea how complex governments are. California has a budget stabilization fund which they deposit extra revenue into every year. But it needed to be used post COVID a time 90% of commenters here would have failed to handle well if they'd been in charge.

This is proven by looking at the disastrous Trump admin. Who came in thinking "Uh government is so bloated we need to spend smarter and cut waste" and did DOGE for a bit, then quit, and added more money to our deficit and barely saved anything and spent more money hiring back essential people bc they couldn't distinguish essential spend from frivolous spend

Or do both - tax billionaires and spend smarter - to reduce income taxes. Think how great that would be.

Norway did not see negative revenue from their tax.

A property tax is a wealth tax. You're already paying a wealth tax.

I honestly don't see how this outcome isn't all but guaranteed. It is actually almost comically self-destructive. Taxes based on the same idea of (just take a bit from the rich) destroyed the Swedish financial markets (basically forever).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_financial_transaction_...

> As a result, revenues from these taxes were disappointing. For example, revenues from the tax on fixed-income securities were initially expected to amount to 1,500 million Swedish kronor per year. They did not amount to more than 80 million Swedish kronor in any year and the average was closer to 50 million.[4] In addition, as taxable trading volumes fell, so did revenues from capital gains taxes, entirely offsetting revenues from the equity transactions tax that had grown to 4,000 million Swedish kronor by 1988

So off by an order of magnitude in their estimates _and_ nuked revenue from the capital gains taxes. Overall probably one of the dumbest ideas ever executed because it was so easy to forecast the second order effects.

Have you kept up with the financial status of France and GB? Read anything about the riots?

Squishing the budget deficit for 1 cycle in 2 years.

"I would have worked hard and started a great company, but since I could only ever reach $900M in wealth, I decided to be a bum instead". Sure.

Look it's the temporarily embarrassed billionaire!

Billionaires are a symptom of a problem that the US had under control for almost half a century until Reagan basically broke American economic policy.

Your SEC link says the exact same thing.

"The board establishes a new Class C share type with no votes. It also announces a one-time dividend of a Class C share for each Class A and B share outstanding".

Please tell me what I got wrong.

We have all kinds of restrictions on corporate governance and shareholders. Extending it to add checks and balances to the role and responsibilities of a CEO is well within established law. We don’t want a tyrant running the government so we added checks and balances (time to add more asap but that’s another issue) and corporations should have similar checks and balances at this point. I don’t think that needs to apply to startups but definitely should apply to public companies.

That’s counting one side of the ledger: what of fraud that never had the opportunity to happen?

“Some people still died in car crashes, so seatbelts shouldn’t be required in cars”

Somebody could just create an index fund like that.

I suspect they don’t because such a fund would have missed out on a ton of growth captured by the less “picky” indexes of the last quarter century.

No because money is a deeply undemocratic human invention that allows evil people to continue to persist in spite of it.

Let's not act like oligarch's don't have a massive influence in society as a single person.