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Comment by piokoch | Hacker News Reader

Well, this was discovered long time ago, by Vilfredo Pareto, this is exemplification of his 90/10 rule. Having said that... We should be more honest here when we talk about wealth.

If one asks "how much, say, Elon Musk, is worth" we see some crazy numbers with kirjillions of zeros. But those are not "his" money, this is how much his companies are estimated to have. Yes, he has large personal fortune, but it is nowhere near those huge billions of billions amounts.

Second, staying with Elon example, his companies are paying people and other companies that pay people, so there is huge army of people who have food in the fridge because of Elon Musk (I've seen some estimates around ~1 million people overall). Again, they are nowhere near to be as wealthy as Elon, but still, they have a decent live thanks to his companies.

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It’s not about “cash at hand”, it’s about who owns “stuff”. In days past people knew that the aristocracy owned them, their families, the land they work, and the output of their work by a God given right flowing from the anointed King. It was easy to see too - those people living in palaces up the hill owned everything, you owned nothing.

It’s more hidden now. We all have rights and freedoms and whatnot. But there are still people who “own stuff”, and people who don’t. With shades of gray in between those two extremes. It’s good to be cognizant of the system you inhabit relative to what has existed throughout history so you can make good decisions and position yourself accordingly.

> this is how much his companies are estimated to have

Not even ‘to have’, just ‘to be worth, if all of their shares could be sold at the price of the recent ones’. It’s a number only loosely (albeit obviously positively) correlated with actual spending power.

I used to buy this sort of arguments, but then saw him fork $45B to buy Twitter, on demand, so...

> his companies are paying people and other companies that pay people

Yes, his companies, not him. He's not doing much, except distracting part of his workforce to work on vanity projects such as flying cars or mile-long vaccuum tubes, or spending some of his vast wealth to buy politicians that will further the cause of wealth inequality. Get rid of him, and the system works much better for everyone. Him and others like him.

Don’t do the First Name Last Name thing and then get the ratio wrong.

Elons ownership of those companies is not what puts food in people's fridges, nor is that amount of power concentration a natural, good or even defensible thing.

The whole point is that he shouldn't be able to exert autocratic control over large swathes of the economy and control that many people's lives.

But how can we tease people and instill them hate if we're being reasonable with arguments?

If you don't accept this particular argument then there are plenty more. This one is just quick and easy to convey.

There are very solid arguments backing up the same general points that require time to communicate and require good faith attempts to understand from the other party. But you probably don't want those either.

this is such a tired argument, we'd probably be better off splitting musk into a million millionaires than having it all bottlenecked into one person

But millionaires only but nice houses and maybe a nice car or two, and send their kids to a nice college. Billionaires invest in companies that create many jobs. Maybe you can argue the houses and colleges create even more jobs, idk.

We've never had this many billionaires, and they've never been this rich. So following your logic, the country should be more prosperous than ever, right?

We are almost indisputably the most prosperous ever, especially if you index against countries who have taken the approach of preventing or punishing success (UK, France).

The US is more prosperous than ever, if you look at the data (inflation-adjusted, median income, for example). But people hate inflation, and so the vibes are that we're not.

The prosperity is NOT evenly distributed, or even distrusted in a shape that follows historical precedent (until you start looking at the gilded age, which was quite problematic!) mid 20th century America had a very healthy middle class that is now rapidly dwindling. Ironically this is often the time period people refer to as "great" but decry the tax policies that made it possible.

The average person (you and me) are much more productive, but have actually lost our share of wages relative to our productivity compared to our parents and grandparents. That extra production we're doing is almost entirely captured by the top 1% of the population, it's literally been taken away from us.

And contrary to our "billionares create jobs" friends, what billionaires do by and large is hoard wealth and power of a scale most people can't even begin to grasp.

If they hoarded wealth they'd lose tons of money simply through inflation. Most rich people, if they're not stupid, have most of their wealth invested in productive assets.

I specifically used median income to make the point that we are NOT just more prosperous at the top, but at virtually every level of society.

That said, you're right that the gains over the past fifty years have been disproportionately captured by the people at the very top of the distribution, and we should address that with policy changes, including taxation. But we can do so without tossing the facts aside.

A lot of the gains are in things like consumer electronics though? food, healthcare, education, housing and transportation are more expensive relative to median income gains.

So what measure of "prosperity" are you using? income alone can't be it.

this is a very weird perspective that you haven't done even cursory math on, if we're talking a million millionaires... that's a million houses, two million cars, a million tuitions...

has elon musk made it possible for a million people to own houses, cars, and pay tuition? no! does he own multiple houses, cars, private jets, yachts, and other bullshit himself? yes!

he employs maybe 200k people directly? likely a lot less... so we're not even talking quarter of the same economic benefit reach

he also wielded his wealth as power to dismantle government systems single-handedly that lost many people jobs and didn't even scratch the surface of the country's debt

people really need to start thinking critically about billionaires, they are not doing anything for you personally

Reality doesn't follow the promises of Trickle Down - and especially not your bizarre variation.

Most jobs in the US are from small businesses. That means billionaires create fewer jobs than Mom & Pop owners (even owners who may be able to afford really nice cars and houses).

Go back to school.

Splitting Musk into a million pieces? That's certainly an idea.

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