4 ms·
That wealth is not cash. It's control. It's control of something he created and would like to continue to control. He can't convert it into cash without liquida
by malandrew 6y ago
That wealth is not cash. It's control. It's control of something he created and would like to continue to control. He can't convert it into cash without liquidating control.
Imagine is 98% of net worth was in your home. You can't mortgage that without giving up control. This is why even Bill Gates really only started being truly philanthropic at a grand scale once he had decided to relinquish control in Microsoft and pursue his philanthropic endeavors. It was only at that point was he free to do something with that wealth.
We would all be better off letting Bezos build wealth and then tax it at the end. There's going to be a lot more tax money to work if you tax at the end of the prosperity.
- ben_w 6y agoI am aware the shares operate like that, and that this is still the case even though he is cashing in enough to run a space program as a hobby. It is nevertheless a bad look for him to run a space program with pocket change while fighting against internal efforts to unionise his workforce. To steal a cliché from a different sector, I believe that when a corporation is “too big to fail” is becomes a threat to the governments which it operates under and the societies which it operates in. There are many ways to manage this risk, and I am not qualified to study their pros and cons — taxation is a simple solution, and I will accept that simple solutions are probably bad solutions. This does not mean that there are no better solutions.