> Don't you think he deserves a billion from that $700bn rise in market cap?
No, nobody deserves a billion dollars, I don't care what they do.
No, nobody deserves a billion dollars, I don't care what they do.
You mean the employees should have asked for higher salaries and refused to work for his company if the company refused to pay? I don't think a single person has claimed that Bloomberg has paid them a single cent less than the salary specified in their contract.
That's the rub, isn't it? This is a protest against market forces, not against people. If I write a book and everybody in the world pays a dollar to read it (JK Rowling), how on earth could anyone say that I shouldn't have a billion dollars? Shouldn't they be ranting at the all the people who gave me the money of their own accord?
In Bloomberg's case, every employee made a conscious decision to work for the company to increase its value, and every employee was paid what they signed up for. What's unfair about it?
The second assumption is that people join companies to "increase their value". That may be true for some people on this forum, but most people join companies for a paycheck, because they can't live without income. If no one had to work to live comfortably, I doubt anyone would care about billionaires.
So he summoned it out of thin air
Leadership is the other side of that coin.
If somebody single-handedly invented a cure for all cancer and made it free to the world... you'd have a hard time convincing me that person didn't deserve a billion dollars.
Nobody can actually spend/consume more than ~10% of 1Bn. But if someone is smart enough to make 1Bn, it's probably a good bet for society to "promote that person to being in charge of how most of that 1Bn gets allocated". In most of the civilized world 1Bn doesn't automagically translate into "you're a god now, you can buy off the police and the judges and the government and do whatever". (Now sure, in a corrupt country one could fully spend 1Bn by "buying out" lots of people and institution and making himself a god, but in "the civilized world" it doesn't work, or would require significantly more than 1Bn.)
The alternatives are bureaucracies / central-planning committees. For some things they work well, for some they are catastrophic, but for most thing they are simply very very very suboptimal / wasteful and non-innovative!
Hence we "bet on capitalism" and let the guy "keep" his billion.
(There are issues ofc, one could spend a significant part of the money outside of the "legal market of civilized society" or use them to subtly "bend the system"... hence it's probably a good idea to cap personal wealth at 1Bn or smth like that and force other forms of power be shared or politically mediated. Or to just monitor that the use of the money is on goods and services that are actually legally buyable and are "bought to be used or sold at a profit" instead of "bought to profit the buyer and buy his servitude" or other schemes, or not on fake donations that buy influence.)
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2015/11/18/...