This is exactly why individuals should not be allowed to have tens (let alone hundreds!) of billions of dollars in wealth - they become all-powerful and too easily subvert the will of the people. They become their own ruling class, which is unacceptable in a functioning democracy.
Democracies are great, but they become weak when the majority crushes minority opinion and the chilling effects of a singular ideology makes it difficult for those without resources to speak their minds and openly engage in debate [1][2][3]. And this is even more true when there are few alternate centres of power outside of the state. Billionaires, along with NGOs, unions, etc, provide these alternative centres of power that are essential when a perspective or ideology becomes too hegemonic. This is even more obvious when the whole point of what Elon is doing is trying to do right now is to make twitter a more free, fun, and open platform for people who don't have the fuck you money that he has managed to earn.
Of course the other utility of billionaires is that when they've earned it themselves they have shown some skill at allocating capital, and can pursue important societal goals that government or existing corporations have proven incapable of, like space flight, electric cars, better urban mass transit, brain-computer interfaces, etc.. None of those achievements seem important to people who have decided that Elon == bad for whatever transgression they believe is more important.
Important to whom? The same power that lets a billionaire develop spaceflight can also be used to instigate an ecological disaster, roll back human rights, or unleash killer robots.
> In theory, but in practice when did a billionaire do these things you’re worried about outside of a Bond film?
Looking at fossil fuel oligarchs shepherding in global warming, international human rights setbacks, and Tesla's "self-driving" cars that regularly kill other road users... they're more or less doing those things now?
Twitter couldn't exist in its current form without billions from billionaires carrying it through years of not being able to fund itself. It would have had to grow slowly, probably in some decentralized form like Mastodon did with people and organizations funding their own instances and linking up through a common protocol. The world would have been better for it.
In a different universe, (for example) branches of governments run their own instances for politicians and candidates to speak on without having to worry about clashing with moderation policies that serve other use cases on other instances.
If you were our supreme leader, how would you prevent private individuals like Musk, Bezos, etc from acquiring their wealth, given it is tied up in the value of very useful companies they created ?
Also, your solution is now how risk/reward works. The employees starting at Tesla today are not entitled to large amounts of the company because they are coming in on a sure thing. The early employees did get a lot of stock. I personally know someone that worked for tesla in sales in 2008 who walked way from 200K shares because he thought they were worthless.
Not a Tesla employee, but I bought thousands of TSLA stocks since 2012. Why? Because I was already a spoiled child whereas my coworkers haven't inherited shit and had to pay for their education. I'm a multimillionaire, just from TSLA. Now, my wealth is mostly financial so my tax rate is coming down as I get richer because I earn far more from the stock market than from work. How stupid and unfair is this? We're always focusing on those who earn more their hard work but most people winning are just benefiting from unfair advantages. It's so obvious when this happens to you but I guess few admit that in order to keep some pride in their situation.
You picked the (probably?) single highest performing stock in the past 10 years. Call it luck, but it's not luck because you were born rich. What if you invested in any of the other hundreds of companies that have gone bankrupt or lost most of their value.
In any case being born rich is lucky for many reasons, but not for you investing in the huge gamble that was Tesla
I'd arguing that buying 1000s of shares of TSLA in 2012 was a very risky, bad idea. Congrats, it worked out for you. If you hate the system that made you so rich, give it all to charity and start over from scratch.
Risky? No, I did not risk anything but money I did not need. Help me find the charity that will change the system, please. I can't find one and I certainly don't expect money to change anything anyway (since the reasoning itself isn't enough to make people change course).
How is it stupid and unfair? You played a direct role in Tesla’s success - you supported them financially at a critical point, which helped get them through the bottleneck
How does buying shares support a company financially? My understanding of the stock market is that buying shares would only help a company during a time when they issue new shares to raise capital, like during an IPO. Are there other ways it helps them?
Buying (and holding) reduces the number of outstanding shares, which supports the share price. So when the business needs cash to invest in new car research, they can issue shares at the higher price. This is exactly what happened at Tesla and also Gamestop. Now, they have so much cash, they are pretty much guaranteed to not fail.
Even a single large, stable investor like Warren Buffett can be a huge help for a company for this reason.
It's stupid and unfair because only rich people could have a seat at the game table. Of course I did better than other rich capitalists would preferred to invest in a loosers, but is that really the point? For one guy earning millions, thousands are fighting to get a job that pays for food and a roof.
My point is that as inequality increases (since everything is being monetized, without no other consideration than gains and profits), we're making the system even worse by lowering tax rate on the rich. Note that I'm French and both candidates for the presidency intend to lower tax on the rich and privileged. It was already reduced a good deal by making marginal tax rate on capital gains from 45 to 30% (1/3 a drop!) and removing tax on high wealth (I would be over K€50 a year, otherwise). I'm paying far less taxes than I'd have under Sarkozy (whose was said to be more fiscal conservative than Macron… go figure).
Even in the Florence example which seems globally unique, unless you're a scion of one of these families and willing to share how they did it I see no reason to think they did it by more nefarious means than anyone else. Setting one's descendants up for greater prosperity and freedom for the next 600 years seems to me like an ideal to be imitated, and I see no good reason why anyone would feel differently. Perhaps you know of one?
No need to speculate. The US Dept. of Treasury has just created the Office of DEI and that's not an April 1st joke. Musk is simply going to get a low diversity score from that high office and prohibited, by a new statute, from owning more than 10% in a public company.
How is this argument relevant? What difference is it whether person A with billions of dollars or person B with billions of dollars of net worth owns Twitter?
Democracy? No one is forcing anyone to use Twitter. Current users are free to leave.
Zero to Tesla. It's not like he has hundreds of billions of dollars sitting in cash. Almost all of his wealth is in Tesla/SpaceX. He created value from basically zero.
Exactly. It's sickening to see a billionaire like Elon Musk push around the ordinary people who currently own Twitter! (The ordinary people are Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, and State Street Corp.)
I have pretty much zero problem with someone like Musk being a Billionare.
Most billionaires made their money in finance or via generational wealth. Seeing a scrappy immigrant (Even with a $200k business loan) go from practically nothing to the richest man in the world, while doing things that actually have a positive impact on society is pretty much the epitome of the American Dream.
"Scrappy immigrant" whose father was a half-owner of an emerald mine in Zambia. I can't think of a more on-the-nose example of the evils of generational wealth.
Probably less than 0,1 per cent of his net worth today. Possibly less than 0,01 per cent.
Multiplying your net worth by a factor of several thousand is fairly rare, regardless of the circumstances you start in. Most people can't do it, even if they start reasonably well off. For example, Musk's own brother Kimbal couldn't.
> Multiplying your net worth by a factor of several thousand is fairly rare, regardless of the circumstances you start in
lol. No it isn't, maybe if you are born wealthy, but plenty of people have a negative net worth at 20 (no savings yet and student/car loans) and are home owners by 40.
Fair enough. But you are basically agreeing with me that those with non-trivial positive net worth in their youth will find multiplying it by several thousand times harder.
And we should rule out massive inheritance to be fair, too. That can cause sudden large jumps in net worth.
A person having 10 000 USD in their youth (far from wealthy, just not poor) would need to aggregate something like 50 million USD in their fifties. Possible, but rare.
Your phrasing here is odd -- is it a moral wrong to have lots of money? Does having lots of money change the amount someone should be defended on arbitrary issues?
In the context of our society and with "lots" meaning billions - yes it is immoral. I'm sure we've all seen a number of graphics/chats/whatever trying to show wealth inequality, but this is the best one I've come across. Would recommend giving it a look and then asking yourself if having a lot of money isn't immoral.
Billionaires have far more rights than normal people. Their wealth affords those rights to them. "Rights" without ability to achieve actual results is just bullshit meant to placate the rabble.
What does it mean to talk about rights? Who cares if I have the “right” to buy twitter and change the way the entire world talks to each other when I have no earthly chance of ever doing it?
If you’re only allowed a single word to represent anything, I’m afraid much of your sentence is incomprehensible because o many of those words simply can’t exist.
Yea for sure, it's totally awesome when individuals hold absurd wealth because they never abuse it and we definitely don't have countless examples throughout history of this phenomenon causing harm to society.
And we definitely don’t have countless examples throughout history that shows the disastrous consequences of not allowing individual economic freedom and all it entails
Economic freedom is like free speech (and any other freedom, really). It can not be absolute unless everyone behaves in good faith, once you assume you have rogue players who exploit the good faith behavior of others you have to have rules.
So you will find literally no place where absolute freedom is practiced, and for good reasons.
Sadly, in case of economic freedom a rogue player who has billions can also have political power to lobby against inconvenient to them rules, and ah everyone wants to be on their good side.
I am not surprised that you are confused by my comment. Do you need me to provide the long list of times that the United States has gone to war with countries not participating in the global capitalist economic system?
Or maybe the number of ways that personal wealth is restricted throughout the world? Or how about the number of referendums around limiting personal wealth that have been submitted throughout history?
Or what about societies that successfully existed without what you would consider modern capitalism, whose ideas weren't necessarily proved wrong, but were victims of genocidal attacks by other capitalist countries?
Or should we discuss how the massive innovation and huge success of the United States, often attributed solely to capitalism, is actually (gasp) more complicated than a simple economic life hack?
I have neither the time nor the crayons for this, so I’ll leave you with this very simple thought:
Economic system A fought economic system B in a decades-long cold war. System A won, on every level, including the standard of living for poor people. System A, therefore, works better than B. QED.
Kindly provide a single example of an alternative to capitalism that was in any way "successful" by metrics vaguely comparable to capitalistic success. No, you cannot point at China, their success over the past 5 decades was entirely a result of privatization and allowing market forces in their country.
Japan did not adopt a form of modern capitalism until the 1800s. The Byzantine empire was never capitalist. Ethiopia did not adopt modern capitalism until it was invaded by the west. Ancient Egypt was never a capitalist society.
> by metrics vaguely comparable to capitalistic success
If you measure by quality of life I'd say it's a dramatic loser.
If you unlearn decades of propaganda and realize the technological revolution was not created by simply stealing the value of labor from the worker and siphoning that up to the ruling class, and then combine that with the understanding that global trade controlled by massive banks created the capacity to destroy alternative economic systems, you might start to reveal the truth.
> You can't hold an adult conversation with people until you figure that out.
It’s a disingenuous argument, that’s normally completely aside from whatever topic is going on at the moment, I doubt anyone using it is interesting in “adult conversation”.
It seems to me that you are actually the one who doesn't understand how extreme concentration of wealth has the potential to steer and disrupt societies.
It's unconscionable that MS doesn't have warning notifications in place BY DEFAULT, so when you start incurring charges e.g. 10x of normal, you get notified immediately. One shouldn't have to set these up manually ever.
It is not a bug. That very character was submitted to Unicode by none other than DIN (the German national standardization organization) [1] and it was clearly indicated that the capital eszett should be encoded without case folding to the original eszett (p. 4). As others mentioned the capital eszett is allowed but not enforced, so DIN didn't want to break the original case mapping between ß and SS. And because of the Unicode stability policy [2], it can no longer be made into a case pair even though DIN changes its mind.
If you read the official announcement for the German language (cited in the wiki article) there it states that SS is the capitalization of ß, but ẞ instead is permitted. So the standard Form is double S.
Question: is there any reason to expect that the double s form will be replaced, or is this a more of a permanent quirk of a language adopting quirks from their neighbors?
Difficult to say. The double s Form has to stay (for small and capital) to not deviate from Swiss German too much (has to stay compatible). Generally older people think capital ẞ is ugly, but maybe this will change over generations. Best bet (for me) is that all ß fall out of favor and Germany goes the Swiss way. Let's talk in 60 years again.
When I first heard about it a few years ago I did indeed think that it was ugly-looking and the whole idea rather pointless.
I've recently re-discovered it, though and somehow this time around actually taken a liking to it, and have smuggled it into a few reports I've had to prepare since then.
Get this guy a couch - someone has a case of the vapours. PRERELEASED SOFTWARE HAS A BUG IN IT OMG! Yes, there are still going to be problems. No, it's not the end of the world and there's still time to fix it. This is a tempest in a teapot and utterly not worth the screen space on HN.
