5 ms·

Elon was able to leverage his vast personal wealth to secure loans to _buy Twitter_. His purchasing power doesn't extend solely to what he is able to liquidate.

Elon was able to leverage his vast personal wealth to secure loans to _buy Twitter_. His purchasing power doesn't extend solely to what he is able to liquidate. In any case he can liquidate a million dollars a day in holdings and burn it in a barrel and it wouldn't move the market in a meaningful way. In fact he could tweet that and people would probably buy more of his meme stocks. You seem to be peeved about a distinction that is not worth making at the scale we are talking about.

thepasswordis 4y ago
I'm annoyed that people feel the need to lie in order to make a point, when the point would have easily been made without the lie. If they just said: Elon makes $200 MILLION dollars a year, then the point would still be just as valid, and it wouldn't be a lie. It's the same idiocy involved in people talking about needing to tax people more money. They're bait and switch income with net worth, which are radically different things.
- prescriptivist 4y ago
  We don't know what Elon makes a year because money gets very weird at those levels. Loans are effectively free so you don't have to "make money". Accounting chicanery is pervasive. So you have to start somewhere, which is a statement that should apply to revising how we tax ultra-wealthy people as well.
- notahacker 4y ago
  > If they just said: Elon makes $200 MILLION dollars a year, then the point would still be just as valid, and it wouldn't be a lie. Obviously it would a lie to claim that somebody who doubled their net worth to >$200bn last year having earned all that fortune in quarter of a century, and who earned a $23bn performance bonus last quarter earns "only" $200m a year. Whereas the $120bn appreciation in the value of Musk's assets the website highlighted might be unrepresentative of his typical annual earnings, it actually is how much he earned last year, unlike the much smaller number you made up.
  - kortilla 4y ago
    > it actually is how much he earned last year No it’s not. It’s how much his assets appreciated. If he tried to sell that much it doesn’t convert to cash that easily.
kortilla 4y ago

thepasswordis 4y ago

I'm annoyed that people feel the need to lie in order to make a point, when the point would have easily been made without the lie. If they just said: Elon makes $200 MILLION dollars a year, then the point would still be just as valid, and it wouldn't be a lie. It's the same idiocy involved in people talking about needing to tax people more money. They're bait and switch income with net worth, which are radically different things.

prescriptivist 4y ago
We don't know what Elon makes a year because money gets very weird at those levels. Loans are effectively free so you don't have to "make money". Accounting chicanery is pervasive. So you have to start somewhere, which is a statement that should apply to revising how we tax ultra-wealthy people as well.
notahacker 4y ago
> If they just said: Elon makes $200 MILLION dollars a year, then the point would still be just as valid, and it wouldn't be a lie. Obviously it would a lie to claim that somebody who doubled their net worth to >$200bn last year having earned all that fortune in quarter of a century, and who earned a $23bn performance bonus last quarter earns "only" $200m a year. Whereas the $120bn appreciation in the value of Musk's assets the website highlighted might be unrepresentative of his typical annual earnings, it actually is how much he earned last year, unlike the much smaller number you made up.
- kortilla 4y ago
  > it actually is how much he earned last year No it’s not. It’s how much his assets appreciated. If he tried to sell that much it doesn’t convert to cash that easily.

kortilla 4y ago