Do we need billionaires?

https://bjhess.com/posts/do-we-need-billionaires

by speckx • 2 months ago

71 135 2 months ago

bjhess.com

dm_4• 2 months ago

The book "Limitarianism" seems relevant: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/jan/21/limitarianism-...

throwaway742• 2 months ago

No.

0123456789ABCDE• 2 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

shrubby6• 2 months ago

Correct once again it seems.

joncrane• 2 months ago

We need intensely ambitious and competitive people. We shouldn't use money to keep score.

shrubby6• 2 months ago

In the times of metacrisis and power concentrated in the hands of few who actively try to fry the world I think what we need is the exact opposite of that.

That is what we've had mostly for the last fifty years and look where it has gotten us? And US. I'm not from US

folkrav• 2 months ago

Money pays the bills, not ambition and competition. Every freaking thing out there uses money to keep score. There's no reason we should not use money to keep score of the people hoarding more and more of the money bags, and actively using their money towards leaving the rest fighting over am ever shrinking pot.

weeznerps• 2 months ago

What do you propose as the alternative? Whuffie?

dqv• 2 months ago

"Competition" is too ambiguous a term to be something to strive for. It needs to be qualified further to remove the domination mindset that many competitors have. I just don't get the mindset of living in a society where you know you have to cooperate with others because they have skills you do not have, but also of the mindset that, if push comes to shove, they must be homeless so that you don't have to be. "Why aren't there any clothesmakers?" the person who made the clothesmakers homeless asks.

I wish billionaires were competing on how many people they've lifted out of homelessness or how many people they've fed without making a profit (with the additional caveat that it is a carbon negative, sustainable production). And not in the fake way where they use creative language to obfuscate the harms they've done, but in an actual tangible way where when you look at it, it actually shows a genuine desire to be participant in society, not a dominator of it. All the "good" that billionaires do these days comes with caveats or over representation.

Of course, this stuff all gets rationalized away by people. They will ask stupid questions like "why don't you open your home up to homeless people then" or the classic "do you know what capitalism has done for you you ungrateful little shit? you better do 5 hail Bezos prayers right now before I report this to Palantir", because why would you try to understand a metaphor? Things have to be this way! There are no other options. We have to fuck people over to survive.

shrubby6• 2 months ago

I was just gathering a list of global top hundred with their influence relevant spending and boy that was not a pretty sight. At least in terms of normal people.

lucamark2• 2 months ago

risk-takers who are badly needed

But at what point does marginal private incentive stop helping innovation and start damaging democracy? For sure risk-taking deserves reward but the size of the reward matters

alpinisme• 2 months ago

Totally. Those conversations often also overlook the fact that some people are just driven and curious and risk taking by personality (especially after they’ve made it to adulthood and have entrenched work habits that may have been partly the result of economic incentives along the way). Even if you start having diminishing (personal financial) returns on added effort at some point, or even hit a ceiling, there are plenty of people who will keep pushing just because it’s all they know how to/want to do. Or because they get a thrill out of knowing that they’re on top of a still growing product (how much bigger can I make this?). Or because they are vying for non-financial social status.

lucamark2• 2 months ago

Exactly. Many people - e.g., founders, scientists and artists - keep pushing because of curiosity and mission.

Money matters, especially early, but after some extreme level it is hard to believe that the next $50B - just to say a number - is what causes the useful work to happen.

sschueller2• 2 months ago

But when they fail, they fail upwards. These risks are always on the backs of everyone else.

For example, they take risks by using chemicals (that they know) can kill people, by the time people get cancer they are retired, there are no claw-backs.

More recently you commit actual fraud, get convicted but then get a pardon and somehow end up with money again running the next "scam".

These people never take real risks.

DOGE resulted in the death of over 100k people [1] and will result in many people dying of Ebola. It was a huge failure yet the "risk" Elon took is not his.

[1] https://healthpolicy-watch.news/the-human-cost-one-year-afte...

autaut• 2 months ago

100% see this times article about how musk only hit 19% of his targets on time:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/06/02/technology/el...

storus5• 2 months ago

Ebola is a bad example as the easiest way to prevent it is to ban bushmeat markets (or at least some types of bushmeat), but for some reason that's never discussed.

cmxch• 2 months ago

Only the death of a lot of gravy trains and slush funds enabled by USAID and similar.

At the best, it’d be a stretch to claim that USAID was the sole or primary thing that kept people alive or disease free.

ggm2• 2 months ago

It's very unlikely any mainstream political class is going to take serious action anywhere to forbid them, but a few take action to limit them. Too few I think.

The (mis-attributed to Lenin and Stalin) quote "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." is quite big in this. A little humility and a lot more tax-paying could save the trillionaire classes from the tumbrils but they lack the emotional intelligence to see it and as long as they make a few thousand millionaires below them they have useful idiots to decry any changes.

On the plus side, workers are in short supply. The future needs more people who can do things other than thinkers, and robots (bless their hearts) don't spend money as consumers so the other side of the billionaire equation demands new people to come into spending class: this means Africa, Asia and South America levelling up.

js8• 2 months ago

A little humility and a lot more tax-paying could save the trillionaire classes from the tumbrils but they lack the emotional intelligence to see it

I think there is some research which shows that as you get rich, you lose emotional intelligence (empathy towards others). So maybe we should consider being rich a health hazard.

prawn• 2 months ago

Many people would've seen the tweet:

"Ok how about this: No more billionaires. None. After you reach $999 million, every red cent goes to schools and health care. You get a trophy that says, “I won capitalism” and we name a dog park after you."

If there isn't the political will to ramp up taxes on extreme wealth, I'd be interested to know how much effort there is in pitching legacy projects (more exciting than dog parks) to those with the means to execute them. Like crowd-funding, but for major developments and with further tax incentives if necessary.

It wasn't pitched to him, but in Australia, a wealthy individual put Hobart (more) on the map with a now famous contemporary art gallery complex which is an excellent drawcard for the state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Old_and_New_Art

That is an extraordinary development for sub-$100m. Supposedly Australia has 150+ billionaires. Build us some crazy things.

ggm2• 2 months ago

He's a contrarian and it's gambling money not tech bro entrepreneur. Mind you MONA is fantastic. Two time visitor and hope to be there within a year or two again.

soco• 2 months ago

I know you meant it as a joke, but a regional mayor of Bucharest, Romania is currently pushing to have a Trump park.

qaq4• 2 months ago

We need competent people to remain in control of companies they have created.

dm_4• 2 months ago

What's ironic about your statement is that it's this exact belief--that founders should remain in control--that has led to the widespread adoption of dual class shares, in which founders maintain control while ceding a majority of equity.

And the irony here is, by that same token, founders could maintain in control while not having such large equity stakes, and not becoming so rich.

So I do not think this is an argument for billionaires.

qaq4• 2 months ago

if you look at actual proposals like in CA they focus on taxing based on control %

analog31• 2 months ago

Lots of companies are controlled by shareholders.

ceejayoz• 2 months ago

How much did Zuck waste on the Metaverse again?

internet_points• 2 months ago

by that argument, we definitely don't need billionaires

bobbytheblkbear2• 2 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

I think the Peter principle applies here; what you view as "competent people" are actually beneficiaries of systems, that they themselves can never independently create due to the nature of organizations themselves.

qaq4• 2 months ago

Would you elaborate how it applies here? To me it's much more pronounced in companies run by "professional CEOs".

shrubby6• 2 months ago

Human being, with very few exceptions, is corrupted by power. And a billion dollars is immense amount power.

You can make your opponent's life a living hell with a hundred thousand and buy or figure out a way to frame extortion material from almost any decision maker with a million.

See how wars are being started tweeting from the toilet seat by a man who has never known anything but power to harm others.

See the many "formerly normal" people ending on a private island, doing horrendous things to children.

We tried to figure out examples of people with power who weren't corrupted by it, at least to some extent, and came up with very few.

It's a human trait we know very well, but do very little about.

shevy-java2• 2 months ago

See how wars are being started tweeting from the toilet seat by a man who has never known anything but power to harm others.

To be fair: it is not Trump only who is addicted to warfare. You have a whole industry that benefits from war and thus wants warfare. Trump is just, in addition to being corrupt, really really not that clever. And now he is old and has dementia - amazing how the USA can so easily become subverted by Russia here. The KGB won.

slashdev3• 2 months ago

Suppose you add a very high tax (it would have to be a wealth tax, not income, because they don’t have much income.)

Zuckerberg just moved to Florida for a tiny wealth tax in California.

These people would just leave the state or leave the country. It’s been happening in Norway with just a small wealth tax.

It’s not impossible, but it’s also not that simple to do.

These kind of policies are risky, because you may drive away the next generation of entrepreneurs and the jobs they create.

The rich should pay more taxes, but not to the point that it would chase them away or disincentive them from building companies.

That being said, taxes are incredibly destructive. Every dollar you tax someone is much more than a dollar you take from that person and the economy. Government is too big, it’s out of control. They can’t balance a budget either, so we pay an additional destructive tax called inflation. I would personally like to see government go on a diet to half or a quarter of the size it is and reduce taxes at the low end instead.

atmavatar2• 2 months ago

These people would just leave the state or leave the country. It’s been happening in Norway with just a small wealth tax.

Would they really, though?

A lot of people say this, but I think one very important thing is being overlooked: should a billionaire leave the US, they'd also lose a significant amount of influence over US policy. Especially when their wealth is built significantly upon the stocks of major US companies, giving up that influence is a huge risk to their wealth.

Just think - not only would the billionaire's influence suddenly become stigmatized "foreign influence", but it would also become tainted by the fact that they fled the country to avoid taxes. Politicians on the opposing side of an issue the billionaire wants to fight for would have a field day pointing out both every time the billionaire attempted to influence any policy.

RetroTechie• 2 months ago

As you said a wealth tax would be needed, as opposed to income tax.

Taxes always have some optimum level: a point where benefit to society as a whole is maximized. Too high, and indeed investors / entrepreneurs could move away. Too low, and society leaves money on the table that could be better used elsewhere.

The simple fact that a society allows individuals to amass $100B+ (or even a 'mere' $1B) shows that wealth taxes are below what's optimal. If existing at all. It doesn't matter if wealth is stuck in assets, it's still society-distorting / corrupting power. There's no benefit to society to have individuals sit on say, >100x the wealth of average folks. Let alone 1000x, 100,000x or even higher.

So why is there no such wealth tax? Answer that question (in depth!), and you're getting closer to fixing the problem.

JKCalhoun4• 2 months ago

Yeah, that's kind of where I am: Billionaires appear to be a net-negative for society, the planet.

Regardless of what you even do with the money, simply preventing people from ever having billions is going to be a good thing for the world, democracy, etc.

Havoc• 2 months ago

Capping it makes sense but should also be quite high.

1B actually seems good...congrats you've won capitalism but that's enough for one person

quirkot2• 2 months ago

Made $1 billion? Throw 'em a parade, put their name on a plaque on Wall Street, and never let them touch a new penny from here on out.

shevy-java2• 2 months ago

I don't necessarily intrinsically have a dislike against billionaires per se. However had, if you look at the USA, where basically billionaires are dictating policies (Elon mass-firing people at DOGE, showing a chainsaw and right-arm gesture antics) - this simply undermines and cripples democracy. This, in addition to it being unfair that they aren't really contributing their due share to society usually; and no, creating a legal foundation to avoid paying taxes, including "Bill Gates Foundation" (see the benefits it has) when you avoided paying taxes before, does not fix anything at all. The model that is currently used, is broken by default.

The ancient greek did not have this problem. Modern democracy does. And let's not even get into the issue of Putin-Trump being suspiciously a corrupt tandem team, just as Yuri predicted in the 1980s (!!!!!) already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9apDnRRSOCk

(Flood the zone with shit is based on an older KGB strategy, and the chinese had this under an even older stratagem name, though not necessarily based on information-overload; I'd call the KGB strategy primarily information-overload. The chinese stratagems are named a bit differently, e. g. holding the dagger under the cloak, or attack west while convincing the enemy you would attack east; sun tsu also built on the older chinese stratagems.)

ipaddr• 2 months ago

Billionaire's always influenced policy. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford and Morgan were much more powerful than Egon, Bezos or Gates.

In Ancient Greece you had a larger gap between rich and power. Landowners vs farmer. In the early 6th century BC, inequality was so extreme that poor farmers regularly sold themselves or their families into slavery just to pay off debts and survive.

If we only learned more about history we might be more thankful for where we really are.

trolleski• 2 months ago

The issue is not the money, the issue is massive wealth imbalance which is best reflected in the $ class owning the current political players. In other words, oligarchy must be stopped, and democracy defended.

Rebuff5007• 2 months ago

Every conversation about the existence of billionaires misses the point: Its not about whether or not billionaires should exist. Its about whether they should exist at the same moment in time when there are people cannot get healthcare or have a decent roof over their head, or a number of other basic things.

paulcole2• 2 months ago

I think this misses the point as well.

If we eliminated billionaires would everyone have healthcare, a decent roof over their head, and other basic things?

I generally believe that to not be the case. The government misspends (to an extent) the money it has now. So the solution is to give them more money to misspend?

harimau777• 2 months ago

The billionaires themselves cause massive harm on society due to the extreme power that wealth inequality gives them. So getting rid of billionaires, even if their money wasn't actually used for anything useful, would still be a win for society.

voidUpdate5• 2 months ago

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• 2 months ago

Power and influence.

keiferski• 2 months 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• 2 months 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• 2 months 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• 2 months 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.

atmavatar2• 2 months ago

A much better tax change would be to automatically realize gains on stock used as collateral in loans.

That would cover loans the ultra-wealthy use for their day-to-day living as well as loans used for leveraged buyouts of other blocks of stock (usually to buy or become significant voting shareholders of a particular company).

The other side of things would be to start actually enforcing anti-trust laws. A big part of the reason we have people running around with 10^11 dollar wealth is due to extreme market consolidation.

KyleTheDev• 2 months ago

Sort of agree, yea. The issue is we allow high wealth individuals to use their assets as collateral for low interest loans, without having that be a taxable event. They can cash in on their equity, effectively withdrawing from their stake in these companies, and avoid taxes altogether.

I think just closing this loophole, and having personal loans over a certain % that are backed by specific equities (stocks, land, etc), be taxable. This fixes the loophole, in that they now need to pay taxes on these loans, on top of interest. It would incentivize them to then increase their base pay, where they'd pay income tax like the rest of us.

ChrisGreenHeur• 2 months 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?

oulipo25• 2 months 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

nelsnelson2• 2 months ago

Shares do not require sales to achieve more equitable distribution. They merely require dilution.

oulipo25• 2 months 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

voidUpdate5• 2 months 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

storus5• 2 months 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.

voidUpdate5• 2 months 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

_DeadFred_• 2 months ago

There are plenty of hungry people with under 20 million dollars that will continue to start businesses.

bikelang• 2 months ago

On the contrary - forced retirement may be a healthy prophylactic to those suffering from wealth addiction.

lostmsu• 2 months ago

Build a space exploration company?

papaver-somnamb2• 2 months 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• 2 months 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

deepsummer3• 2 months 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.

voidUpdate5• 2 months 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

Eddy_Viscosity23• 2 months 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• 2 months 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.

bobbytheblkbear2• 2 months ago

"Nick pick ahead" I have to ~nitpick~ your mis-phrasing here. ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitpicking

RhysU• 2 months 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• 2 months 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".

tstrimple4• 2 months ago

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

olalonde• 2 months ago

Sure. Having billionaires allocate their own capital driven by profit motive and market feedback results in more efficient allocation than having some random bureaucrats do it. That's what it's really about. For example, Elon Musk probably doesn't personally consume much more than the average American. He perhaps consumes 10x or 100x more, whereas his net worth is actually 5,000,000x. There are likely millionaires who live more lavish lives than him. The bulk of his fortune is actually just resources allocated in the economy.

erelong• 2 months ago

"The problem isn't that we have billionaires but that the system doesn't make more millionaires and billionaires"

Discuss?

emsign3• 2 months ago

lmao, that's a good one

iloveoof• 2 months ago

Surely there has to be some number that pushes individual wealth from a net benefit for the country to a net detriment? Surely we are seeing lots of data and examples right now where we can start to come up with that line as a society? Surely it’s very reasonable that we might want to develop policy to make it hard for an individual to end up with more than, say, ten billion dollars1. That doesn’t seem very controversial to me.

This seems very controversial to me. Why does increasing wealth eventually cause negative outcomes? What do you mean by “make it hard”?

This article skips over justifying its argument. I don’t think, for example, that someone should have come along to Warren Buffett in the late 80s and said: “Your company is too successful, you can’t be the full owner of it anymore”

Individual, founder-led companies are a good thing, especially if the companies are very successful. You’re more likely to force these companies into being led by investors and private equity if you don’t let the founders lead them.

inglor_cz• 2 months ago

It seems to me that even here on HN, way too many people think in the binary "rich-poor" schemes.

Ironically, what produces billionaires quite reliably, is precisely the growing global middle class, which is now estimated to number around four billion. If 4 billion people can spend, say, 200 USD a month on various non-necessities, much of that enormous stream of cash will naturally flow to some big corporations producing universally demanded services and will make their main shareholders billionaires.

If Africa ever gets to the living standards of Asia, expect even more billionaires. Etc.

d3ckard• 2 months ago

Controversially, yes.

The right frame of comparison is not towards average Joe, but towards governments. Billionaires, for better or worse, are independent power sources, which IMO in grand scheme of things are useful.

I think the problem with modern world is not that some people have lots of money, but that we allowed money to buy pretty much everything else.

Brendinooo• 2 months ago

Yeah I was gonna offer a similar hot take: in a world where government can have trillions, it's probably good on some level that some people have billions. Checks and balances.

quirkot2• 2 months ago

If you want good checks against a government, one dude rich enough to field an army has historically been a bad way to keep the government in existence

thrance• 2 months ago

Except billionaires are never on the side of the people. They functionally already own the US government, which is how they've been able to amass so much wealth while the rest of the world gets poorer and hotter.

They buy media to push their propaganda, buy politicians... They are not acting as "checks and balances" to power. They are power.

casey2• 2 months ago

It's not so much risktaking that's the problem with Reaganomics. It's the risktaking+socalizing costs. If we let billionaires fail there wouldn't be as many of them. Joel Schreiber, Adam Neumann, Miguel McKelvey all billionaires yet nil contribution to society, arguably slight contribution to a small group of insiders. Clearly that's not a a stable situation in regards to resource allocation, the terrifying thing is that the gamblers and scamees of the world know this, they just want to lose all their money as a group and obtain a collective casus belli to fuck shit up.

madmaniak• 2 months ago

Billionaires are infinitely smaller than money printers (and they are created by them). Did you got the scale?

cyberjerkXX2• 2 months ago

Yes, because we need to respect private property rights. All criticisms of people using money to corrupt government is actually a criticism of government power. You need to limit government's coercive power.

emsign3• 2 months ago

Naaaah. Property entails obligations.

cyberjerkXX2• 2 months ago

ok lets do tyranny of the majority then - fuck it. Maoism for everyone.

emsign3• 2 months ago

No. Because no single man should have so much power: a person as a single point of failure, no-one is smart enough to think of everything and everyone has blindspots in their reasoning, awareness and wisdom. Billionaires especially because people around them become sycophants. Billionaires don't talk to regular people anymore, they are in an elitist bubble out of touch with other people's reality.

mplanchard• 2 months ago

My favorite way of conceptualizing the difference between being a millionaire and a billionaire is relative purchasing power. If I have $100k in the bank, so not even a millionaire, a billionaire has 10k times more than me. If Let’s say I imagine making a normal purchase for someone with six figures in assets, like a car, and let’s say the car costs $20k. Imagine what that feels like. It’s a big purchase, right? Probably will use a loan for it, pay it off for a while. For someone with $1 billion (10k difference), the car is the equivalent of something that costs me $2. They don’t even have to think about it, it affects their total monetary position not at all. If on the other hand I’m a millionaire, and I’m imagining buying the same car, it’s a bit easier: equivalent to me with $100k buying something that costs $2000. Still though, a $20k purchase for a millionaire is just a $20 purchase for a billionaire.

I know net worth != purchasing power, but they are likely correlated enough for the examples to be broadly accurate.

The quote defending the billionaires also reminds me of this piece from a recent Harper’s about the march in support of the ultra-rich: https://harpers.org/archive/2026/05/billionaire-blues-thomas...

rsynnott• 2 months ago

They seem, fairly clearly, like, at the very least, a market inefficiency. In a perfect spherical-cow market they would not exist.

hollerith• 2 months ago

We need a system that allows people to keep most of what they lawfully earned.

burnt-resistor• 2 months ago

The wrong question to ask.

We need much higher taxes on the high end, at all levels, especially on loans on expensive assets, estates, and carried interest. And make stock buybacks illegal. Higher high-end only taxes realign interests promoting a middle class rather than a serfdom, unequal world of neoliberal utopian fantasies.

Furthermore, we need much less corruption and influence purchasing by separation between wealth and social/mass media and journalism and state.

mistic92• 2 months ago

We don't. Tax the rich, globally

WhereIsTheTruth• 2 months ago

The money experiment is a failure, there is nothing else to add, you just have to look outside of your rotten mind to notice how mankind has collapsed, there no longer is a society

NoGravitas• 2 months ago

It seems like China has about the right approach to billionaires: allow them to come to exist, to drive up economic growth, but when they start trying to influence the political system, just execute them, so that the others know their place.

the_solenoid• 2 months ago

It would be fine if:

Labor was better protected Elections were funded by the gov and any money spent outside of that sent you to jail and confiscated everything from you and your company and your family They were taxed at the top marginal back at 90% They could not buy or own anything in media

My problem with capitalism is the rules were made at a certain time and place. Then the industrial revolution happened which bricked the old rules, and let wealth concentrate, which started eroding rules to favor those with the accumulated wealth.

Then the sale of single input products and services (first software, then the web - or make one sell infinite) bricked what was left of capitalism and let wealth accrue at 99% of light speed. And the laws/regulations never got changed to put a clamp on that, the tax rules and everything else went to favor those with more than they could spend, then the self-interested actors spent a pittance to do what the framers were trying to avoid: buying up all the government reps.

And here we are - all the monied people who mostly dont seem to grasp that they are just hastening their own implosion doing their 60 year old plan of robbing the bank, as it were.

Gud• 2 months ago

Literally no single person has produced "a billion dollars value".

99.999% of the times, the people who reach billions come from a privileged position in society and are using their position to gain wealth for themselves.

We live in a society built for the powerful. It is paramount that we decentralize and democratize the power. Look at Switzerlands system of governance. Tear down the giant empires(USA, EU, China, Russia, etc). Build small to medium sized nation states, subdivided into commune with self governance(cantons in Switzerland as an example).

My country Sweden is having an election this September. I am voting for direktdemokraterna(https://direktdemokraterna.se/).

https://www.aboutswitzerland.eda.admin.ch/en/political-syste...

klatchex_too• 2 months ago

> Literally no single person has produced "a billion dollars value".

How has someone like Taylor Swift not produced a billion dollars value?

Some of her tours have brought in more than 2 billion in revenue, she makes many millions a year in merchandise sales, millions selling streaming rights to her music, she has re-recorded the albums she didn't own the rights to and bought back the rights to others. She has a net worth of over 2 billion, how has she not produced "a billion dollars value"?

What does she do that you think you should be able to tell her that she can't do? And where do you think you get the right to tell her she can't do that?

If she wants to do concerts and concert goers want to go to them, who should stop her? If people want to stream her music and she gets a cut, you're going to tell her she can't do that? If she wants to sell vinyl records and I want to pay for one of them, you should be the boss that says no? Is that what you're saying?

I don't think so. A single person, Taylor Swift, has produced multiple billions of dollars of value.

This is not a problem to be solved. This is America. This is no country for everybody. It's a country for me. For people like me.

This ain't Switzerland.

I'm not saying Taylor Swift never did anything wrong. But mostly, she earned that. You're still allowed to do stuff like that in America. Sorry, not sorry.

Lockranor• 2 months ago

Let's say no. Now what?

readthenotes12• 2 months ago

Let's say yes. Now what?

readthenotes12• 2 months ago

Of course, the author should have been asking imwhat people were worth over $350M in 1988.

There's been a bit of inflation since then

tsoukase• 2 months ago

Forget about reasonable arguments about wealth distribution. Human greed is infinite and the belly is insatiable, so they will stop at no amount of money. The ultimate goal of a totally capitalist society, like the US, is to create a single mutli-trillionaire, while all others starve.

ruicraveiro• 2 months ago

No.

Billionaires ultimately go hand in hand with fascists (Ford, Musk, ...) and the only threat to democracy and freedom that competes with those is communism.

Do we need billionaires?

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