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Comment by schwartzworld | Hacker News Reader

> Just imagine if all of Musk's wealth is seized by the US government, would that solve poverty or homelessness or even make a difference? Obviously not, Musk's billions are barely a drop in a bucket.

https://www.globalgiving.org/learn/how-much-would-it-cost-to...

Looks like we could end homelessness for about 20 billion. Elon Musk, born into wealth because his parents had a diamond mine in apartheid South Africa, is worth over 220 billion.

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Except that the US government has Trillions to spend and they absolutely do not need Musk's wealth to do this. 20 billions is nothing for the US government's budget, why don't they end homelessness? Again, a socio-political problem that money alone cannot solve.

> why don't they end homelessness?

Easy, because the Democrats are feckless at best and the Republicans are a death cult.

Musk was not born into wealth and lived in squalor in Canada with his divorced mother at one point. He self-made his wealth when his first company (with his brother Kimbal) was bought by Compaq during the dotcom boom of the early 1990's. He rolled that cash into his next company, x.com, which merged with Confinity to create a little company called Paypal.

Elon "funding secured / sued by the SEC" Musk was absolutely born into wealth. His father co-owned an Emerald mine in Zambia, he went to a private high school in Pretoria, and attended Universities in South Africa and Pennsylvania.

Further reading: "As a result of this, the teenage Elon Musk once walked the streets of New York with emeralds in his pocket. His father said: “We were very wealthy. We had so much money at times we couldn’t even close our safe,”"

source: https://web.archive.org/web/20211215175402/https://www.indep...

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