Imagine an America with Steep Billionaire Taxes. No Amazon, Pixar, SpaceX, Tesla

Strange way to look at it on the whole. Article suggests that a tax on the ultra-wealthy would impact the motivation of those individuals to be who they are.

It doesn't seem to follow that someone like Steve Jobs is solely motivated by money, nor that a tax on the highest level of earnings would actually impact their motivation in a meaningful manner.

The article tries to convince the reader that we wouldn't have certain companies with such a tax. But that's pure speculation. It also seeks to define success purely by profit and company value.

The problem needs to be looked at another way. Companies can have relatively unbound earning potential as long as they keep their revenue cycling back into the economy. There's no problem with big, great, companies. There is a problem with companies siphoning cash to private individuals and then being stored in tax-evading systems that keep the money out of the economy or in self-sustaining investment loops.

We can't all have the same success as the wealthiest people in society, if we did and we all had equal wealth, we wouldn't call that success. It's always going to be true that comparatively, there will be a few people at the top. The point is to rein in the gap between top and bottom. That's not a punishment for the people at the top. They can still do and afford everything they wish to do, and projects like SpaceX can still be possible. We need to reframe our discussion on personal wealth and hoarding. It's totally compatible to do with the idea of big companies and big ideas still remaining possible.

This article is ignoring any upside to a hypothetical situation, without defining the parameters. If we had a better federal social safety net from all that tax revenue, more people would choose to become entrepreneurs, which might result in 10 new film studios, 5 rocketry companies, and hundreds of unique retail businesses instead.

Some of these examples, particularly SpaceX, are actually a pretty good place to make the case against the rule-by-billionaires.

Individual agency and freedom of action is great when one starts out. We wouldn't have reusable rockets without that freedom of enterprise early on. But I think it starts to have drawbacks at scale, as things pass from development into being business as usual with critical infrastructure.

Like, what happens if Elon Musk goes insane?

Seriously. The future of human space flight in America basically hinges on SpaceX. The American economy increasingly hinges on technology launched by SpaceX satellites. Particularly in the case of SpaceX, it's a privately held with a majority controlling stake. The Ukrainian state is now relying on Starlink. But nothing much stops him from simply liquidating it all tomorrow because he's decided space guns are a better method of launch. (Of course, if he actually did that I suspect we'd see parts of the company nationalized, to be honest. Which I think naturally raises the question of whether such an important project of such scale should be subject to entirely private whims.)

founders are hugely important to the success of the companies they found. where would Microsoft be if Bill gates stopped running it. or if Steve jobs stopped running apple.