A billion dollars is a hard sum of money to wrap your head around. There is basically no ethical way to make a billion dollars. If you have a billion dollars it’s because you’ve stiffed a lot of people a lot of the value they created and kept it for yourself.
This is exactly how I have always thought about it too. Pure greed. My father ran a company for 35 years and for 3 of those years he took either no payout or a very small payout so that he didn’t have to let anyone go. I asked him why he didn’t just downsize and he said that other people needed the money more than us. That’s how shit needs to be run. People centric not profit driven.
Unfortunately it is in human nature to compare oneself to other people, and becoming big in other people’s eyes is easiest when other people around you are already smaller than you.
This becomes truly predatory when you become the person deciding on other’s situation.
Do you know a single business where an employee makes more money than his boss? Because I sure know lots of businesses where employees posses much more knowledge or skill than their supervisor, yet none of them surpass them in earnings.
I’ve had one supervisor in a large enterprise company make less than me - and they were damn good at their job. I was also told at another job I applied for (different firm) that I couldn’t realistically request to make more than the manager.
Though I have known business owners who have made less than their employees at times, it’s always been small 2-10 person businesses, and in a hard time when the owner was trying to weather the hard times with their own equity (ie paying the company to keep people employed). But that’s only a small amount of time, and never a business that the majority of people in the county knew the name.
As for businesses with shareholders. Hell no. Never would happen.
Business owner here who’s best employees earn at least as much as me: an often overlooked fact is the risk of invested time without equal payout for founding a business and ally the time until it eventually all works out.
All the employees at my age bracket already bought a house, and although my business starts working out now, after 10 years invested, my kids don’t play in their own yard yet.
We need people creating ethical business and they need to earn quite a lot more money after all that first to catch up money wise and then to justify the risk. Of founding at all.
Most employees forget that for all their economic security there was somebody before them taking the risk and pay cuts to make that a possibility. Which is understandable, but sometimes a little sad. :/
Even if they earned it ethically, they literally can’t spend this much money. They can’t spend the money fast enough.
They hold on to this much money to keep score.
Forbes did the math once and determined that Smaug, a dragon embodied by greed and selfishness, is worth $62 billion. There are 17 people richer than him.
Smaug was shot in the heart and it was a morally good act.
I’d be willing to bet that Smaug caused less death and destruction than many (if not most) billionaires
Fyi that math was heavily contested, i agree with the sentiment but a literal mountain full of gold, assuming the market wouldnt crash, would make him the richest person on the planet.
We don’t actually know the size of the hoard, though. We know it’s big enough for him to sleep in it, and we know the Arkenstone was worth one share of it, but we don’t have specific numbers (at least, none I can see). Any valuation has to be an estimation, and any estimation will be contested.
Also, the value of gold today is 75 times that of what it was in the 1930s, which makes it even harder to put a price on Smaug’s hoard.
Regardless of the specific number, there is a certain level of wealth and greed that makes it morally good to shoot someone through the heart. Smaug is not the only one to have hit that threshold.
Bard the Bowman was to blame. He gave love a bad name.
We should probably deal with them sooner rather than later
Tax them. Kill them. Whatever order
I don’t support violence at all. But for every mentioned woodchipper, this scene from Tucker & Dale vs Evil is mandatory:
Asking this on lemmy is like asking a pack of wolves if they enjoy the taste of lamb. You already know the answer you’re going to get…
Is ok to ask for an AMEN now and then.
Fuck em. Instantaneous lead poisoning.
Billionaires shouldn’t exist; no one needs that much money. They should be taxed until there are no more billionaires.
It’s why we invented the gulliotine
I think they’re bad for the economy. Money has to circulate. Every time a billionaire throws another million on the pile, they make things worse for everyone else.
This is a view we don’t see often enough. Everybody is into hating billionaires the way teenage girls hate the super-hot cheerleader. All they do is complain that it’s not “fair” for somebody to be so rich. There’s not enough discussion of the purely mechanical reasons extreme wealth is bad for the economy, not to mention the corruption opportunities it creates. The ultra-rich don’t spend their money, they just exchange it to trade big blocks of asset ownership back and forth. None of that money ever gets spent on a loaf of bread or a bus ticket, or a GI Joe with the kung fu grip. It essentially disappears from the economy. I don’t think most people even comprehend how that works - it involves more thought than reacting to memes.
They literally steal work out of the system like a parasite. As you say, we shouldn’t be envious, but fix the problem with the money leaking away.
I’m hungry.
Billionaires are a crime against humanity.
Ideally they’d be taxed into no longer being billionaires.
Realistically we probably need to violently remind them who holds the actual power before this becomes a reality.
It billionaires exist then there is a problem in the system. Billionaires are a bug, not a feature.
They are subsidized by our government. Truly. The broken system created Elon Musk and now the broken system allowed him to buy a presidency for $134 million. Cheap, for him.
How? That is how much the system has devalued American labor since 1981.
