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Comment by omginternets | Hacker News Reader

>That leaves him with $747M for the year.

I'm not sure what this is supposed to suggest/demonstrate.

Surely you agree that taxing (say) 20% of 60k is different from taxing 20% of 1B. Namely: the former has a much more significant impact on quality-of-life then the latter...

Figuratively speaking, what can you do with 747M that you can't do with 300M?

(Before the pedants inevitably pick this rhetorical question appart: the point is that it's not prima facie unreasonable to tax extreme wealth significantly more heavily than the median income)

Edit: the first of the pedants have arrived... sigh...

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>>Figuratively speaking, what can you do with 747M that you can't do with 300M?

Invest in starting brain-computer interface and rocket companies

And I believe a boring company, hyperloop, other efforts in AI, etc.

A more substantive question is how that money would be spent by the relevant parties. I would argue that Musk would spend it better than the federal government and as such, he should have it.

Then you'd end up having a fairly stupid argument about the semantics of "better".

Far better to have that conversation than to sit and argue fairness, equity, and justice. The alternatives are dumber.

Downvoted because, well, you didn't make much of a point really.

The idea that the argument is stupid should be presented with an argument as to why. For what it's worth, we have existing law in most (American) municipalities that support the argument that if Musk can be shown to be a better steward here, then he might have a claim to make, i.e., adverse possession, which is basically a claim against the state that says "I can tend to this property better than you, and my doing so provides social and financial utility to the state, to my would-be neighbors, and to myself as well.

To be sure, it's an argument in abstracts, but there's precedent enough that it clearly isn't an entirely meritless (or stupid) argument to be made.

How could that be? Suppose Musk controlled all the resources in the world. What motivation would he have to allocate them fairly?

What motivation does he have right now to do all the things he does? So he got about $100M from the sale of Paypal a while back. He could have easily coasted on that and led an easy life and never have to work a day any more. Why didn't he? (I'm not glorifying him here by saying that he would allocate all the resources in the world fairly, neither that he should or should not be given that power, in our little thought experiment here.)

Whatever his motivations may be, we couldn't possibly allow any one person to decide over our finite resources. So, how to stop that from happening? Should there be a some kind of cap? Or maybe take some progressive amount from everyone based on some rules? And so forth.

Yes, what motivates somebody like musk after they earned 100m? Money? Or doing something relevant, challenging, satisfying? Real innovators aren't homo economicus, they don't do everything just to maximise future earnings...

Isn't this is case in point that you're wrong?

Have a much greater chance at purchasing a controlling stake in a US sports franchise (likely still need to go in with some partners).

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