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Christ on a skateboard!? All the temporarily displaced billionaires in this thread are something else. If you require more than 100M in net worth to be "motiva

• jcampbell1 4y ago
  It isn’t about the money, rather it is a public scoreboard to remind us that we must serve others and be innovative.
  • mkr-hn 4y ago
    It's not working. Jeff Bezos said he can't think of anything to do with his money other than build rockets while people die in his warehouses. Too much money makes people out of touch. I don't think billionaires are evil, I just think they don't know what life is like for people who still have a concept of "cost of living."
    • jcampbell1 4y ago
      I know a few people that like working at Amazon and the pay and benefits are good. Do you know people who died there? Are your friends cursed?
      • akoncius 4y ago
        it is poor argument. you cant see wifi but it exists. if your friends are fine does not mean that there are no issues there. plenty of news articles were published about inhumane working conditions where people cannot go to toilet even.
        • jcampbell1 4y ago
          What does Bezos being a billionaire have to do with the working conditions in Bangladesh? What are you even talking about?
          • iratewizard 4y ago
            There are two kinds of commenters in a flame war. First, the people lead by their emotion, who pretend their emotions can be rationalized as factual and logical. Then, the people who are easily baited into telling them they're idiots.
            • jcampbell1 4y ago
              I do this with pure joy. A love of life. I am waiting on an Uber to go dancing with beautiful people. Trolling lost fools rejuvenates my spirit.
              • Luechkt 4y ago
                You're not doing any of those things and no one here believes or envies you.
                • jcampbell1 4y ago
                  Just woke up with a slight hangover. Life is amazing. I will have some coffee and play with my beautiful child. Then I will go surfing. The good life is free from envy and pity. Full of admiration of those who have qualities that lead them to success. Jeff Bezos company was beautiful in the way it sent me gifts I needed for a relative’s graduation. I am grateful that he had the wisdom and courage to start it. Admiration of others leads us to the good path. Envy and pity are tools of the darkness.
                  • mkr-hn 4y ago
                    I can't tell whether you're trolling or the embodiment of out of touch.
      • rescripting 4y ago
        A quick search turns up tons of stories like https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/17/amazon-warehouse-worker-deaths https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/17/amazon-wa... We’re not talking about improving the break rooms for corporate SWEs.
        • jcampbell1 4y ago
          How is one anecdotal story with conflicting accounts told in a sensational way so meaningful to you? How did Jeff Bezos and his fugly girlfriend and his billions cause a heart attack? Am I confused or are you?
• yellowbanana 4y ago
  This has nothing to do with motivation, If you start a company and that company becomes succesfull you will end up rich. > Being a CEO/leader doesn't require some skill set that's given to you from some mythical watery being just because you're special. Controlling a company requires shares, and shares are networth, it is good that companies are controlled by people who most understand them, and those are the people who started/built them. There seems to be an illogical hate to people who have build companies that ended up being successfull. If you are a small business ( non mega successfull company ), everyone is with you, "Small businesses are the backbone of our economy ", but then you win.
  • Johnny555 4y ago
    Controlling a company requires shares, and shares are networth, it is good that companies are controlled by people who most understand them, and those are the people who started/built them. Voting shares don't have to have monetary value. Rememeber Google's IPO where the founders had stock with 10 votes per share, or Berkshire Hathaway's Class B stock with 1/10000th the voting rights as class A? So a founder could retain control of a company without becoming personally rich.
    • xvedejas 4y ago
      Aren't those classes of stock with voting power worth a lot more? I'm not sure how you'd possibly avoid being rich on paper if you have a majority voting power for Google.
      • Cerium 4y ago
        Not necessarily, for example Facebook supervoting shares were setup to convert to normal shares if transfered, making them only more valuable to the original holder.
        • xvedejas 4y ago
          Okay, interesting. I'm guessing those people typically had many normal shares too, right? Otherwise if they're given a fairly small financial stake, and have no skin in the game -- I'm guessing that most investors wouldn't like that?
• Stupulous 4y ago
  100M in net worth would motivate me, but one of the differences between me and a talented CEO is that I don't already have 100M in net worth. Gates had well over 100M when Microsoft went public in 1986, Bezos had more than a billion when Amazon went public in 1998, Musk made 150M on Ebay's Paypal acquisition in 2002. We may disagree on whether we're better off that they continued working, but I don't think they would have done so as a public service after they capped out lifetime income.
  • Apocryphon 4y ago
    So you're saying all of those figures were more motivated by money rather than building something of value. Do you truly think they were more motivated by money than by glory, a competitive spirit, a desire for legacy?
    • nwienert 4y ago
      Also just something interesting to do. And it’s fun to lead, and get press, and make hard decisions.
    • massysett 4y ago
      Money is how they measure glory, its how the competition is scored, and it’s how they buy legacy. There are people who are not motivated by money, but they’re not billionaires. They’re professors, priests, politicians, etc. Pope Francis has achieved more glory and fame than nearly any billionaire CEO. Yes, the billions is hugely motivational to those who have them.
      • MisterMower 4y ago
      • selcuka 4y ago
        > Money is how they measure glory, its how the competition is scored They can still own the trillion dollar company for glory and fame; they just can't cash out. Also I don't think there should be a cap, but the tax rate should go up indefinitely, causing diminishing returns for higher earners. I pay a higher percentage of tax if my employer pays me more, but I still prefer higher paying jobs.
• sharkweek 4y ago
  I'm a big fan of 100% taxation on anything above 999M, but my continuation here is that anyone that earns more than that gets a trophy for every additional 1B they earn put on display in a big museum in a city of their choice (Museums selectively scattered around the US).
  • theptip 4y ago
    I like the idea of getting public achievements based on your personal tax contributions. Give them a public museum name for each $B for all I care! Or more generally, just let them pick which program they want to have their face/logo on. “The Musk EV car subsidy” etc.
    • hunter-gatherer 4y ago
      And if they get to say, 10 billion they get to replace a president's face on a mint. I'm for it.
  • Aeolun 4y ago
    I’m a firm believer in a maximum of like 50% tax on income. Anything more just feels like a punishment for working.
    • imdsm 4y ago
      Absolutely. Let's say I earn over the threshold, and I can now either choose to continue to try and innovate and add value to society, or retire to a private island and just become a carbon contributor, I mean, why work myself into the ground if I can no longer benefit? Most people have assets not liquidity too, so it's like saying, if you own too much, you have to stop. Well, what if Elon stopped and we reverted back to dropping rockets into the ocean? What if Bill Gates stopped and never did any of the philanthropy that he does? I feel like this is used by people as a cheap excuse for a problem they can't solve.
      • akoncius 4y ago
• Aeolun 4y ago
  > If you require more than 100M in net worth to be "motivated" to work. There's a larger problem with you. How else are you going to buy a decent airplane? The nice ones start at a few tens of millions.
• throwawaylinux 4y ago
• tigerBL00D 4y ago
  Most of wealth is in stock, which also represents control. If you tax heavily that would lead to loss or control. That's not necessarily a good thing for anyone. Besides, you can only buy a okay superyacht for 100M, definitely not the best /s
  • UncleMeat 4y ago
    If people are worried about this then we can simply permit founders who pay taxes via ownership to retain magnified voting rights. We've already invented the idea of non-voting shares. Why is this some sort of thing that could never be solved?
    • californical 4y ago
      Well if they are forced to sell their shares to pay taxes, what happens to the stock market then? Now this causes the company’s stock value to go down due to dilution of shares, since each share is worth a smaller slice of the company, and there are more shares available on the open market. How do we compensate everyone who was holding that company in their 401k hoping to retire? The government billionaire taxation has actually hurt the middle class (& upper class but non-billionaires) too in this case, by taking away value of their retirement funds and personal investments. Do we pay the shareholders the money that was taken from the billionaire to make up the difference? Because then you’ve just created dividends, which already exists, but just with more steps and beurocratic overhead
• akira2501 4y ago
  An odd way to attack the problem would be to demean the personal liberties of someone else based on nothing other than your own personal feelings. I don't see how either of these lines of argument achieve any useful or realistic end state. It's a topic almost perfectly designed for a useless shouting match. Meanwhile. In the 1950's, citizens in the US were expected to pay around 50% of the cost of running the government. Corporations paid 25% of the share and the rest were import and other use taxes. Today, citizens are expected to pay 85%. Corporations pay a mere 7%, and they enjoy reductions in the other tax categories more readily than citizens and consumers do. The elite business class billionaire CEO is just a symptom of this problem, and a fraction of the overall class anyways. Tiger Woods just joined the three comma club recently.. what was his original sin?
  • space_fountain 4y ago
    Corporations are made out of people. You can’t really tax corporations, maybe you can people with capital
    • sifar 4y ago
      corporations have personhood.
      • space_fountain 4y ago
        Sure, in some senses, but I think much of the logic there traces back to cooperations just being collections of people
        • sifar 4y ago
          No not in some sense but legally. And what the OP was saying that the tax burden is split unequally between individuals and corporations. While corporations enjoy the legal benefits of personhood, the same doesn't apply to them when it comes to taxation.
          • 4y ago
• crossroadsguy 4y ago
  > Christ on a skateboard!? Does it mean something specific, or is it just a variant of “Jesus Christ!”? Just curious. Tried Google, nothing turned up on the first page. Not even urban dict.
• shelbyKiraM 4y ago
  "I mean, if I went 'round saying I was an emperor, just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!" - Monty Python, Monty Python and the Holy Grail: Screenplay