Richest people surpass $10T in wealth in 2024

https://www.ocregister.com/2024/12/31/worlds-500-richest-people-surpass-10-trillion-in-wealth-in-2024/

by GeoAtreides • 2 years ago

37 7 2 years ago

rayiner4• 2 years ago

Put another way, the lifetime wealth—which is mostly notional stock valuations—of the people who founded the businesses that make products and services we use everyday, is less than the actual spending of the federal and state governments in the U.S. in just 12 months.

slively3• 2 years ago

Put another way, if you personally taxed all US income at the federal rate for 2 years you’d have less wealth then this handful of people (the federal government collected 4.5 trillion last year). They basically represent another tax on income that everybody pays.

rayiner4• 2 years ago

Less than two years because total taxation is about $7 trillion (don’t forget state and local). Also, insofar as most of the $10 trillion in wealth is equity, it represents their share of expected corporate earnings decades into the future. The proper comparison for that is the $360-400 trillion in future federal revenues over 75 years, probably $500+ trillion accounting for state taxes.

So the share those billionaires will get of expected earnings 10, 20, etc., years from now is just 2% of what the government will bring in from taxing everyone over a similar time horizon.

rayiner4• 2 years ago

Put yet another way, Bezos’s $220 billion represents 94% of his “wealth.” And what it represents is the right to a stream of dividends out of Amazon’s profits decades into the future. It makes no sense to compare that to income the government is taxing this year. The government is already going to tax that money in the future when Amazon earns it, and then again when Amazon pays it as dividends. The government can’t make those future profits materialize in the present by taxing Bezos. Obtaining stock from Bezos would give the government a share of Amazon’s future profits. But the government already has that right—it can simply tax those profits when Amazon earns them. Talking about a taxing Bezos’s “wealth” as if it’s money that’s sitting around is just a shell game.

Richest people surpass $10T in wealth in 2024

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