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I heard a while back that the average person will see about a million of their currency over their lifetime. So we can take a million dollars to be about 1 life

I heard a while back that the average person will see about a million of their currency over their lifetime. So we can take a million dollars to be about 1 lifetime's worth of money. Elon is currently sitting on 817,000 lifetimes worth of money. I feel like we could have like a >95% income tax when you are worth more than like $20 million and it wouldnt actually matter too much to the people who would cap it out? Of course, its a 4000x decrease in wealth for some people, but at that level, when you're getting over 10 million, its basically infinite money anyway. There is no real gain from having 800 billion over having 20 million. What are you going to do with 800 billion dollars? Buy a thousand mega-mansions?

ido 4mo ago
Power and influence.
keiferski 4mo ago
To me it all comes down to time. If you have money to cover your needs, you functionally have control over your time. And your time is more or less the closest analogue to your actual life. The tragedy of course is that the vast majority of people have no real control over their time, and the free time they do have is aggressively fought over by media corporations and advertisers convincing them they need to work more to buy more.
- 9999px 4mo ago
  This is the same conclusion Karl Marx came to. “The entire development of wealth rests upon the creation of disposable time.” —Karl Marx, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), 1857 “…real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time.” “The saving of labour time [is] equal to an increase of free time, i.e. time for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts back upon the productive power of labour as itself the greatest productive power.” —The Grundrisse, 1857 “Labour-time, even if exchange-value is eliminated, always remains the creative substance of wealth and the measure of the cost of its production. But free time, disposable time, is wealth itself, partly for the enjoyment of the product, 3 partly for free activity which—unlike ‘ labour—is not dominated by the pressure of an extraneous purpose which must be fulfilled, and the fulfillment of which is regarded as a natural necessity or a social duty, according to one’s inclination. Karl Marx Theories of Surplus Value” “Just as plants live from the earth, and animals live from the plants or | plant-eating animals, so does the part of society which possesses free time (disposable time not absorbed in the direct production of subsistence) live from the surplus labour of the workers. Wealth is therefore disposable time.” —Economic Manuscripts, 1861-1863
hrunt 4mo ago
> I feel like we could have like a >95% income tax when you are worth more than like $20 million and it wouldnt actually matter too much to the people who would cap it out? It wouldn't matter, because the ultra-wealthy generally don't have much income relative to their wealth. Elon Musk (in the article listed at $817B of wealth) was reported to have had $1.52B of net income between 2014 and 2018, and had no taxable income in 2018. 95% of $0 is still $0. The ultra-wealthy's wealth doesn't grow because of income (as the tax code defines it). Trying to tax income to redistribute their wealth (or even just slow its growth) is not going to address wealth inequality.
- calgoo 4mo ago
  Exactly, at that point it shares need to be taxed. SpaceX is valued at ~$1T Dollars and you own 60% of the shares? OK now you are paying taxes on those 60% every year, not on the income it generates, but on the value of what you own. Same for land - Anything above X size or # of properties gets taxed at 50% the land value each year. Now would this happen? Who knows, and also it will have other effects, like devaluing the stockmarket as no one want to pay taxes on billions worth of stocks.
  - oulipo2 4mo ago
    Exactly. That's a way to force their wealth to become productive or to disappear
  - slashdev 4mo ago
    This sounds a lot like taxing unrealized gains on illiquid assets. A very dangerous idea that would kill innovation and job creation.
  - nelsnelson 4mo ago
    Devaluing the stock market would be a good idea since it would detach people's retirement funding from the decisions made by mobs of speculative gamblers. But would require a return to pension funds or some other collective funding.
- atmavatar 4mo ago
ChrisGreenHeur 4mo ago
They own stock in the company they founded. So, you force the founder to sell 95% of the stock they own in the company. Is this a good idea for the stock price of that company as well as the for the ability of that company to raise cash?
- oulipo2 4mo ago
  Who cares about the stock price. They should be forced to split their companies in smaller, competing companies, so that: 1. there's not a huge asshole controlling enormous companies (and then also buying all the media and ruining the public information) 2. we have more competition and lower prices (that's EXACTLY why capitalism was supposed to have anti-concentration laws) 3. you spread the wealth. Now there are more people owning less, but still a good chunk, it's much better to have 1000 millionaires building creative stuff, than 1 egoistical billionaire
  - papaver-somnamb 4mo ago
    I feel this is closer, but still not equitable. More people owning less, but what about the vision that holds the ship together and leads the org to the goal? In the case of SpaceX, it's Elon and to a lesser extent Gwynn by way of osmosis that hold the light aloft. We force division of wealth, then what about the leadership and direction? SpaceX is what it is because the vision is much less tyranny of the masses, and much more damn the torpedoes no one can stop me.
    - disgruntledphd2 4mo ago
      I think SpaceX is great, fwiw. However, the vast majority of Mr Musk's worth comes from Tesla (which again, made a great product back in the day), but his wealth appears to be driven by some kind of weird hypno-toad like power over the markets. Like, Tesla should not be valued the way it is, and I still can't understand what's going on here. I think that both Tesla and SpaceX have been net good for the world, but do we really think that wealth taxation would've stopped Musk from doing anything post Paypal?
    - 4mo ago
oulipo2 4mo ago
Yet he has the shittiest possible life, forced to be scared of someone harming him, all his children in age of understanding who he is hates him, same for his ex-wives, most hated person in the world after Putin and Trump
- voidUpdate 4mo ago
  I don't think he has the shittiest possible life. Someone trapped in an abusive relationship, suffering from addictions, mental health problems and with financial problems probably has a worse life than the richest man in the world Also, Elon, Trump and Putin may be the most hated people by amount of people who hate them, but I wonder where they would fall on "proportion of people who know about them who hate them". If a thousand people hate me, I've messed up badly. If a thousand people hate someone that everyone knows, like David Attenborough, that's doing pretty good
  - oulipo2 3mo ago
    Are you saying that because you recognize that Musk IS trapped in addictions (coke and MDMA), has severe mental health issues (depression and delusion) ?
storus 4mo ago
95% income tax would remove any incentive to go above and beyond and you end up with collapsing economy where everybody is doing the bare minimum. See Soviet economy outcome and tofu dreg buildings.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- voidUpdate 4mo ago
  95% over 20 million. Average Joe is never going to see 20 million in his life, so it's not exactly a concern for him. You can adjust the value as necessary to only apply to the top 1-2% or so. You can still have 20 million, and even more on top of that if you keep earning. Just most of that extra money will go back to society instead of being locked away inside a bank account forever
  - storus 4mo ago
    20M is not sufficient to run a single LLM pretraining run these days. It's a stupid threshold.
    - tstrimple 4mo ago
      Because this is what the average person is doing. This is what's necessary for a happy and fulfilling life. What a fucking ridiculous claim.
      - storus 3mo ago
        So you cut ambitious people moving society technologically forward off because "20M ought to be enough for everybody".
- _DeadFred_ 4mo ago
  There are plenty of hungry people with under 20 million dollars that will continue to start businesses.
lostmsu 4mo ago
Build a space exploration company?
papaver-somnamb 4mo ago
Billionaires are characterized as such due to their net wealth. They don't actually have that amount in cash silently rotting in bank accounts. What wealthy people, and people more generally, do have is ownership of assets and debts, where the grand sum >= +1B$. Case in point, Elon owns significant portions of valuable companies. Patent nonsense such as > So we can take a million dollars to be about 1 lifetime's worth of money. Elon is currently sitting on 817,000 lifetimes worth of money. belies a gross misunderstanding of these valuations. No, Elon is not sitting on whatever money. He might only have 1Ks or 10Ks splashed throughout several accounts. If he is mid-transaction, then that figure may come into play, but only briefly. Some billionaires, sure, they may actually have cash of that magnitude on hand ready for deployment. For plenty of even more down-to-earth wealthy folk, even 2K burns a hole in their pocket because they haven't found where to invest it yet. And so what is Elon and others like him supposed to do? Divest his "money" to the general population in search of equal outcome (and not equal opportunity)? We need a few people to rise to pinnacles, this is one effective path to creation of markets. Allowing them to concentrate such power and wealth unchecked, though, is a great mistake. And that's on us, the people.
- Obscurity4340 4mo ago
  Whatever they are living of needs to be equalized so they are taxed irl much the same as a normal person. They often get away with this by getting ultra low interest loans backed by their holdings as collateral and living off credit. That needs to change. They need to feel the same taxation everyone else has, it makes it harder to survive and they need to live by the same sword
deepsummer 4mo ago
"Elon is currently sitting on 817,000 lifetimes worth of money." I think that's a wrong perception, especially in this case. Elon Musk does not have nearly a trillion dollar in cash. He holds shares in companies that have a market worth of a trillion dollar. But as soon as he sells, and thus wouldn't be involved with them anymore, they would be only worth a fraction of that. Tesla, in particular, would probably be bankrupt.
- voidUpdate 4mo ago
  And if you sell the shares, you get money back. He owns assets that are valued in excess of 800,000 lifetimes of money. If you can sidestep income tax by simply getting your income in assets rather than banknotes, something has gone wrong somewhere
  - deepsummer 4mo ago
    A Tesla without Musk isn't worth much. It's not that profitable. Tesla's P/E ratio is 350 or so - absolutely crazy. Ford's and Toyota's are about 10. The largest Chinese electric car maker's (BYD) PE/ratio is 20. People are buying Tesla shares because they believe in Musk. The moment he announces that he is out, his wealth is going down by 90% or more.
    - voidUpdate 4mo ago
      If he wanted to get out and sell his stocks, why would he care if it collapses after he leaves? He sells his stocks when the value of the company is still high
      - deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
      - deepsummer 3mo ago
        > If he wanted to get out and sell his stocks, why would he care if it collapses after he leaves? "Selling the stock" is not a single transaction. The moment he leaves Tesla, or starts selling shares (which would take weeks or months), the stock collapses.
Eddy_Viscosity2 4mo ago
> you are worth more than like $20 million Nick pick ahead. I really dislike this phrasing about people's wealth. 'this person is worth $X', when they really mean 'this person has assets valued at $x'. They own things that have monetary value, they themselves are not assessed that monetary value. Some may think this is an innocuous shorthand, but I see it more of a Freudian slip revealing the the actual belief that the rich really are many 1000s or 100000s of times more valuable than other lesser humans. Try phasing it another way, 'person x is hoarding over $20M in assets'.
- Snild 4mo ago
  I hadn't thought about this until I recently saw it (lazily) translated to Swedish literally, where it would traditionally be written more akin to "net fortune". And yeah, "worth" feels super weird.
- bobbytheblkbear 4mo ago
  "Nick pick ahead" I have to ~nitpick~ your mis-phrasing here. ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitpicking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitpicking
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 4mo ago
    You know what, I knew it was wrong when I was typing it but I just couldn't remember what the right way was so I just left it. So thank you for this.
    - tstrimple 4mo ago
      Wait. So is this or is this not an eggcorn? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn
      - Eddy_Viscosity2 3mo ago
        It was indeed an eggcorn, and I knew it was but it had so completely replaced the correct phrase in my mind that I just looked at it like 'that's not right, but I don't know what exactly is wrong about it'
RhysU 4mo ago
Suppose we did exactly what you suggest, preventing amassing incredible wealth. The only substitute for wealth is power and for power is wealth (with a hefty conversion fee). Amassing power would be the alternative action taken by the driven billionaire types if you take away the possibility of amassing wealth. A bunch of stymied billionaires amassing power leads us back to pre-nationalized Europe. At least when people amass wealth, they generally do something valuable for others.
dimava 4mo ago
1. Owning your own company stock is not having money, it's merely ability to control the company. Elon tries to be BDFL of his companies, so selling the stock is not really an option. 2. Stock valuation and money are not the same thing. As you could've noticed from the recent Bitcoin price drop, the moment you start selling it it starts to worth less. Tesla is bubble-priced, so it's sell price is at least 5 times less then valuation 3. Even if you get the money, distribution is much harder problem then you think after agreeing with this sensense. IIRC it was Musk who said "So you say you can fix the world hunger for $nnn? Bring me the plan how you are going to do it. Noone brought me a plan so far".
- tstrimple 4mo ago
  Sure. If you completely ignore the ability to borrow against your assets at extremely low rates. And those assets include stock.

ido 4mo ago

Power and influence.

keiferski 4mo ago

To me it all comes down to time. If you have money to cover your needs, you functionally have control over your time. And your time is more or less the closest analogue to your actual life. The tragedy of course is that the vast majority of people have no real control over their time, and the free time they do have is aggressively fought over by media corporations and advertisers convincing them they need to work more to buy more.

9999px 4mo ago
This is the same conclusion Karl Marx came to. “The entire development of wealth rests upon the creation of disposable time.” —Karl Marx, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), 1857 “…real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time.” “The saving of labour time [is] equal to an increase of free time, i.e. time for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts back upon the productive power of labour as itself the greatest productive power.” —The Grundrisse, 1857 “Labour-time, even if exchange-value is eliminated, always remains the creative substance of wealth and the measure of the cost of its production. But free time, disposable time, is wealth itself, partly for the enjoyment of the product, 3 partly for free activity which—unlike ‘ labour—is not dominated by the pressure of an extraneous purpose which must be fulfilled, and the fulfillment of which is regarded as a natural necessity or a social duty, according to one’s inclination. Karl Marx Theories of Surplus Value” “Just as plants live from the earth, and animals live from the plants or | plant-eating animals, so does the part of society which possesses free time (disposable time not absorbed in the direct production of subsistence) live from the surplus labour of the workers. Wealth is therefore disposable time.” —Economic Manuscripts, 1861-1863

hrunt 4mo ago

> I feel like we could have like a >95% income tax when you are worth more than like $20 million and it wouldnt actually matter too much to the people who would cap it out? It wouldn't matter, because the ultra-wealthy generally don't have much income relative to their wealth. Elon Musk (in the article listed at $817B of wealth) was reported to have had $1.52B of net income between 2014 and 2018, and had no taxable income in 2018. 95% of $0 is still $0. The ultra-wealthy's wealth doesn't grow because of income (as the tax code defines it). Trying to tax income to redistribute their wealth (or even just slow its growth) is not going to address wealth inequality.

calgoo 4mo ago
Exactly, at that point it shares need to be taxed. SpaceX is valued at ~$1T Dollars and you own 60% of the shares? OK now you are paying taxes on those 60% every year, not on the income it generates, but on the value of what you own. Same for land - Anything above X size or # of properties gets taxed at 50% the land value each year. Now would this happen? Who knows, and also it will have other effects, like devaluing the stockmarket as no one want to pay taxes on billions worth of stocks.
- oulipo2 4mo ago
  Exactly. That's a way to force their wealth to become productive or to disappear
- slashdev 4mo ago
  This sounds a lot like taxing unrealized gains on illiquid assets. A very dangerous idea that would kill innovation and job creation.
- nelsnelson 4mo ago
  Devaluing the stock market would be a good idea since it would detach people's retirement funding from the decisions made by mobs of speculative gamblers. But would require a return to pension funds or some other collective funding.
atmavatar 4mo ago

ChrisGreenHeur 4mo ago

They own stock in the company they founded. So, you force the founder to sell 95% of the stock they own in the company. Is this a good idea for the stock price of that company as well as the for the ability of that company to raise cash?

oulipo2 4mo ago
Who cares about the stock price. They should be forced to split their companies in smaller, competing companies, so that: 1. there's not a huge asshole controlling enormous companies (and then also buying all the media and ruining the public information) 2. we have more competition and lower prices (that's EXACTLY why capitalism was supposed to have anti-concentration laws) 3. you spread the wealth. Now there are more people owning less, but still a good chunk, it's much better to have 1000 millionaires building creative stuff, than 1 egoistical billionaire
- papaver-somnamb 4mo ago
  I feel this is closer, but still not equitable. More people owning less, but what about the vision that holds the ship together and leads the org to the goal? In the case of SpaceX, it's Elon and to a lesser extent Gwynn by way of osmosis that hold the light aloft. We force division of wealth, then what about the leadership and direction? SpaceX is what it is because the vision is much less tyranny of the masses, and much more damn the torpedoes no one can stop me.
  - disgruntledphd2 4mo ago
    I think SpaceX is great, fwiw. However, the vast majority of Mr Musk's worth comes from Tesla (which again, made a great product back in the day), but his wealth appears to be driven by some kind of weird hypno-toad like power over the markets. Like, Tesla should not be valued the way it is, and I still can't understand what's going on here. I think that both Tesla and SpaceX have been net good for the world, but do we really think that wealth taxation would've stopped Musk from doing anything post Paypal?
  - 4mo ago

oulipo2 4mo ago

Yet he has the shittiest possible life, forced to be scared of someone harming him, all his children in age of understanding who he is hates him, same for his ex-wives, most hated person in the world after Putin and Trump

voidUpdate 4mo ago
I don't think he has the shittiest possible life. Someone trapped in an abusive relationship, suffering from addictions, mental health problems and with financial problems probably has a worse life than the richest man in the world Also, Elon, Trump and Putin may be the most hated people by amount of people who hate them, but I wonder where they would fall on "proportion of people who know about them who hate them". If a thousand people hate me, I've messed up badly. If a thousand people hate someone that everyone knows, like David Attenborough, that's doing pretty good
- oulipo2 3mo ago
  Are you saying that because you recognize that Musk IS trapped in addictions (coke and MDMA), has severe mental health issues (depression and delusion) ?

storus 4mo ago

95% income tax would remove any incentive to go above and beyond and you end up with collapsing economy where everybody is doing the bare minimum. See Soviet economy outcome and tofu dreg buildings.

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
voidUpdate 4mo ago
95% over 20 million. Average Joe is never going to see 20 million in his life, so it's not exactly a concern for him. You can adjust the value as necessary to only apply to the top 1-2% or so. You can still have 20 million, and even more on top of that if you keep earning. Just most of that extra money will go back to society instead of being locked away inside a bank account forever
- storus 4mo ago
  20M is not sufficient to run a single LLM pretraining run these days. It's a stupid threshold.
  - tstrimple 4mo ago
    Because this is what the average person is doing. This is what's necessary for a happy and fulfilling life. What a fucking ridiculous claim.
    - storus 3mo ago
      So you cut ambitious people moving society technologically forward off because "20M ought to be enough for everybody".
_DeadFred_ 4mo ago
There are plenty of hungry people with under 20 million dollars that will continue to start businesses.

lostmsu 4mo ago

Build a space exploration company?

papaver-somnamb 4mo ago

Billionaires are characterized as such due to their net wealth. They don't actually have that amount in cash silently rotting in bank accounts. What wealthy people, and people more generally, do have is ownership of assets and debts, where the grand sum >= +1B$. Case in point, Elon owns significant portions of valuable companies. Patent nonsense such as > So we can take a million dollars to be about 1 lifetime's worth of money. Elon is currently sitting on 817,000 lifetimes worth of money. belies a gross misunderstanding of these valuations. No, Elon is not sitting on whatever money. He might only have 1Ks or 10Ks splashed throughout several accounts. If he is mid-transaction, then that figure may come into play, but only briefly. Some billionaires, sure, they may actually have cash of that magnitude on hand ready for deployment. For plenty of even more down-to-earth wealthy folk, even 2K burns a hole in their pocket because they haven't found where to invest it yet. And so what is Elon and others like him supposed to do? Divest his "money" to the general population in search of equal outcome (and not equal opportunity)? We need a few people to rise to pinnacles, this is one effective path to creation of markets. Allowing them to concentrate such power and wealth unchecked, though, is a great mistake. And that's on us, the people.

Obscurity4340 4mo ago
Whatever they are living of needs to be equalized so they are taxed irl much the same as a normal person. They often get away with this by getting ultra low interest loans backed by their holdings as collateral and living off credit. That needs to change. They need to feel the same taxation everyone else has, it makes it harder to survive and they need to live by the same sword

deepsummer 4mo ago

"Elon is currently sitting on 817,000 lifetimes worth of money." I think that's a wrong perception, especially in this case. Elon Musk does not have nearly a trillion dollar in cash. He holds shares in companies that have a market worth of a trillion dollar. But as soon as he sells, and thus wouldn't be involved with them anymore, they would be only worth a fraction of that. Tesla, in particular, would probably be bankrupt.

voidUpdate 4mo ago
And if you sell the shares, you get money back. He owns assets that are valued in excess of 800,000 lifetimes of money. If you can sidestep income tax by simply getting your income in assets rather than banknotes, something has gone wrong somewhere
- deepsummer 4mo ago
  A Tesla without Musk isn't worth much. It's not that profitable. Tesla's P/E ratio is 350 or so - absolutely crazy. Ford's and Toyota's are about 10. The largest Chinese electric car maker's (BYD) PE/ratio is 20. People are buying Tesla shares because they believe in Musk. The moment he announces that he is out, his wealth is going down by 90% or more.
  - voidUpdate 4mo ago
    If he wanted to get out and sell his stocks, why would he care if it collapses after he leaves? He sells his stocks when the value of the company is still high
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    - deepsummer 3mo ago
      > If he wanted to get out and sell his stocks, why would he care if it collapses after he leaves? "Selling the stock" is not a single transaction. The moment he leaves Tesla, or starts selling shares (which would take weeks or months), the stock collapses.

Eddy_Viscosity2 4mo ago

> you are worth more than like $20 million Nick pick ahead. I really dislike this phrasing about people's wealth. 'this person is worth $X', when they really mean 'this person has assets valued at $x'. They own things that have monetary value, they themselves are not assessed that monetary value. Some may think this is an innocuous shorthand, but I see it more of a Freudian slip revealing the the actual belief that the rich really are many 1000s or 100000s of times more valuable than other lesser humans. Try phasing it another way, 'person x is hoarding over $20M in assets'.

Snild 4mo ago
I hadn't thought about this until I recently saw it (lazily) translated to Swedish literally, where it would traditionally be written more akin to "net fortune". And yeah, "worth" feels super weird.
bobbytheblkbear 4mo ago
"Nick pick ahead" I have to ~nitpick~ your mis-phrasing here. ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitpicking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitpicking
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4mo ago
  You know what, I knew it was wrong when I was typing it but I just couldn't remember what the right way was so I just left it. So thank you for this.
  - tstrimple 4mo ago
    Wait. So is this or is this not an eggcorn? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn
    - Eddy_Viscosity2 3mo ago
      It was indeed an eggcorn, and I knew it was but it had so completely replaced the correct phrase in my mind that I just looked at it like 'that's not right, but I don't know what exactly is wrong about it'

RhysU 4mo ago

Suppose we did exactly what you suggest, preventing amassing incredible wealth. The only substitute for wealth is power and for power is wealth (with a hefty conversion fee). Amassing power would be the alternative action taken by the driven billionaire types if you take away the possibility of amassing wealth. A bunch of stymied billionaires amassing power leads us back to pre-nationalized Europe. At least when people amass wealth, they generally do something valuable for others.

dimava 4mo ago

1. Owning your own company stock is not having money, it's merely ability to control the company. Elon tries to be BDFL of his companies, so selling the stock is not really an option. 2. Stock valuation and money are not the same thing. As you could've noticed from the recent Bitcoin price drop, the moment you start selling it it starts to worth less. Tesla is bubble-priced, so it's sell price is at least 5 times less then valuation 3. Even if you get the money, distribution is much harder problem then you think after agreeing with this sensense. IIRC it was Musk who said "So you say you can fix the world hunger for $nnn? Bring me the plan how you are going to do it. Noone brought me a plan so far".

tstrimple 4mo ago
Sure. If you completely ignore the ability to borrow against your assets at extremely low rates. And those assets include stock.