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> Also note at the utlity aspect - as a purchasing power, $1.33T and $138B are the same, and the only meaningful difference is to keep some kind of score This
by concordDance 3y ago
> Also note at the utlity aspect - as a purchasing power, $1.33T and $138B are the same, and the only meaningful difference is to keep some kind of score
This isn't quite true. There's a noticeable difference in ability to change the world.
With $138B you can eradicate a few diseases and give scholarships to all high performing poor children in the world for a decade.
With $1.33T you can do something like transform Colombia into a developed country.
- abenga 3y agoIf the 1.33T is concentrated in a single company though, can you really sell it without tanking its share price? The 138B Gates holds can probably be liquidated without too much hassle.
- red-iron-pine 3y agopresumably that's why Elon tried to buy Twitter -- TSLA was sky-high, undeservedly so, and if he cashed out bigly then the price would tank. so create a buy-now situation where he can convince the other investors he's not cashing out of a clearly-overhyped, over-valued asset, but is instead making Smart Guy Moves to buy another company, and is simply cashing out TSLA for that purpose. Then he got stuck with the deal, tried to back out three times, and made it what it is today. Hell, he might have gone in with the idea that he'd actually take the TSLA money and put it into Twitter -- only to find the Twitter stock price shooting up + back-end financials and user info (e.g. all of the bot allegations) meant that it wasn't worth the squeeze. A good way to move that TSLA cash until he found out Twitter wasn't as shiny as hoped.
- sschueller 3y ago"ability to change the world" that is the problem. I don't want one individual to have this kind of power. No good can come of it ever. There needs to be a global cap on personal wealth and yes this is also possible for people who's wealth is in companies etc.. Convert those stocks to vote only and stop allowing the borrowing against this capital for less than it would cost to sell it. We managed a global minimum cooperate tax rate we can manage this as well.
- njarboe 3y agoI sort of like reusable rockets.
- concordDance 3y ago> No good can come of it ever. Now that is trivially untrue, see the good work Bill Gates has done on Polio. Of course it's plausible for the existence of people with that level of power to be a detriment on average, but it never being positive seems obviously wrong.
- 0xBDB 3y agoGates isn't the only one. John D. Rockefeller basically eradicated hookworm in the American South, and was instrumental in funding a significant number of the country's historically Black colleges and universities, among many other things. Andrew Carnegie all but invented the public library in America (and some in the UK). Herbert Hoover fed Belgium and Russia after the First World War. If the government had taken their money in tax it could have done some of these things, but I know of no reason to think it would have, or that it would have done them efficiently if so.
- nonameiguess 3y agoThis seems incredibly naive to me, as surely throwing money, no matter how much, at a country doesn't just erase generations worth of accumulated traditions of public corruption, the fact that enormous portions of the population have grown up with extreme trauma, and the resulting martial culture and distrust of institutions in the existing population. Changing that inherently takes time and money can't make it pass any faster.