Hacker News Reader

Comment by cgtyoder | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly why individuals should not be allowed to have tens (let alone hundreds!) of billions of dollars in wealth - they become all-powerful and too easily subvert the will of the people. They become their own ruling class, which is unacceptable in a functioning democracy.

View on HN

Democracies are great, but they become weak when the majority crushes minority opinion and the chilling effects of a singular ideology makes it difficult for those without resources to speak their minds and openly engage in debate [1][2][3]. And this is even more true when there are few alternate centres of power outside of the state. Billionaires, along with NGOs, unions, etc, provide these alternative centres of power that are essential when a perspective or ideology becomes too hegemonic. This is even more obvious when the whole point of what Elon is doing is trying to do right now is to make twitter a more free, fun, and open platform for people who don't have the fuck you money that he has managed to earn.

Of course the other utility of billionaires is that when they've earned it themselves they have shown some skill at allocating capital, and can pursue important societal goals that government or existing corporations have proven incapable of, like space flight, electric cars, better urban mass transit, brain-computer interfaces, etc.. None of those achievements seem important to people who have decided that Elon == bad for whatever transgression they believe is more important.

[1] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-study-shows-peo...

[2] https://www.cato.org/survey-reports/poll-62-americans-say-th...

[3] https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2021/1...

You can't just have two possible opinions in society, we've been going more in that direction and it is quite hostile to freedom.

Love him or hate him, Elon adds value because he has a lot of power which isn't at all aligned with either of the two dominating opinions in America.

Important to whom? The same power that lets a billionaire develop spaceflight can also be used to instigate an ecological disaster, roll back human rights, or unleash killer robots.

In theory, but in practice when did a billionaire do these things you’re worried about outside of a Bond film?

Doesn’t history suggest that the state is more likely to deploy capital in destructive fashion than a private actor?

> In theory, but in practice when did a billionaire do these things you’re worried about outside of a Bond film?

Looking at fossil fuel oligarchs shepherding in global warming, international human rights setbacks, and Tesla's "self-driving" cars that regularly kill other road users... they're more or less doing those things now?

What is "the will of the people" with regards to Twitter?

The will of twitter employees

Do you think all Twitter employees have a say in how Twitter is run?

I mean it's pretty obvious which side they're on: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/twitter/summary?id=D0000671...

Well, no, that just shows it’s obvious which side they’re not on. The Red and Blue are two very large tents.

You're only a people if you have a blue checkmark.

Twitter couldn't exist in its current form without billions from billionaires carrying it through years of not being able to fund itself. It would have had to grow slowly, probably in some decentralized form like Mastodon did with people and organizations funding their own instances and linking up through a common protocol. The world would have been better for it.

In a different universe, (for example) branches of governments run their own instances for politicians and candidates to speak on without having to worry about clashing with moderation policies that serve other use cases on other instances.

If you were our supreme leader, how would you prevent private individuals like Musk, Bezos, etc from acquiring their wealth, given it is tied up in the value of very useful companies they created ?

Perhaps by sharing that value with others in the company, thus diluting it from any one person.

Like, there are tens of thousands slaving for these big companies, and a few on top reaping the rewards.

Wait, I thought every Tesla employees has to ability to buy the stock at a discount?

https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/automobile/do-tesla-employ...

Also, your solution is now how risk/reward works. The employees starting at Tesla today are not entitled to large amounts of the company because they are coming in on a sure thing. The early employees did get a lot of stock. I personally know someone that worked for tesla in sales in 2008 who walked way from 200K shares because he thought they were worthless.

Not a Tesla employee, but I bought thousands of TSLA stocks since 2012. Why? Because I was already a spoiled child whereas my coworkers haven't inherited shit and had to pay for their education. I'm a multimillionaire, just from TSLA. Now, my wealth is mostly financial so my tax rate is coming down as I get richer because I earn far more from the stock market than from work. How stupid and unfair is this? We're always focusing on those who earn more their hard work but most people winning are just benefiting from unfair advantages. It's so obvious when this happens to you but I guess few admit that in order to keep some pride in their situation.

You picked the (probably?) single highest performing stock in the past 10 years. Call it luck, but it's not luck because you were born rich. What if you invested in any of the other hundreds of companies that have gone bankrupt or lost most of their value.

In any case being born rich is lucky for many reasons, but not for you investing in the huge gamble that was Tesla

>Call it luck, but it's not luck because you were born rich

So if I let you flip a coin, give you nothing on tails and $1 million on head, and you win, will you owe your fortune to luck, too?

L'argent ne fait pas le bonheur… de ceux qui n'en ont pas ~ Boris Vian

How is it stupid and unfair? You played a direct role in Tesla’s success - you supported them financially at a critical point, which helped get them through the bottleneck

How does buying shares support a company financially? My understanding of the stock market is that buying shares would only help a company during a time when they issue new shares to raise capital, like during an IPO. Are there other ways it helps them?

Buying (and holding) reduces the number of outstanding shares, which supports the share price. So when the business needs cash to invest in new car research, they can issue shares at the higher price. This is exactly what happened at Tesla and also Gamestop. Now, they have so much cash, they are pretty much guaranteed to not fail.

Even a single large, stable investor like Warren Buffett can be a huge help for a company for this reason.

Thanks, I didn't realize issuing new shares after being public was a relatively common activity.

It's stupid and unfair because only rich people could have a seat at the game table. Of course I did better than other rich capitalists would preferred to invest in a loosers, but is that really the point? For one guy earning millions, thousands are fighting to get a job that pays for food and a roof.

My point is that as inequality increases (since everything is being monetized, without no other consideration than gains and profits), we're making the system even worse by lowering tax rate on the rich. Note that I'm French and both candidates for the presidency intend to lower tax on the rich and privileged. It was already reduced a good deal by making marginal tax rate on capital gains from 45 to 30% (1/3 a drop!) and removing tax on high wealth (I would be over K€50 a year, otherwise). I'm paying far less taxes than I'd have under Sarkozy (whose was said to be more fiscal conservative than Macron… go figure).

I'd arguing that buying 1000s of shares of TSLA in 2012 was a very risky, bad idea. Congrats, it worked out for you. If you hate the system that made you so rich, give it all to charity and start over from scratch.

Risky? No, I did not risk anything but money I did not need. Help me find the charity that will change the system, please. I can't find one and I certainly don't expect money to change anything anyway (since the reasoning itself isn't enough to make people change course).

Ok, I suspect your trolling at this point:

If you're not, here you go: https://www.givewell.org/

but your parents (or their parents if this goes back a number of generations) already did a lot of hard work to make that possible no?

No. You can go back 600 years (!) and find that things don't change much: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-wealthy-in-florence-today-a...

Even in the Florence example which seems globally unique, unless you're a scion of one of these families and willing to share how they did it I see no reason to think they did it by more nefarious means than anyone else. Setting one's descendants up for greater prosperity and freedom for the next 600 years seems to me like an ideal to be imitated, and I see no good reason why anyone would feel differently. Perhaps you know of one?

No need to speculate. The US Dept. of Treasury has just created the Office of DEI and that's not an April 1st joke. Musk is simply going to get a low diversity score from that high office and prohibited, by a new statute, from owning more than 10% in a public company.

>Musk is simply going to get a low diversity score from that high office

Musk is, bona fide, 100% African American.

Checkmate, atheists.

Don't worry, it'd just be seized and put in control of very competent and qualified "elected" members of The Party.

Progressive taxation to hundred percent for both individuals and corporations.

Well that's one way to get them to leave the country, I guess.

That's straight up fucking stupid. 100% tax is not a tax. That's theft.

the OP isnt serious.

snap my fingers and turn all corporations into worked owned cooperatives

How is this argument relevant? What difference is it whether person A with billions of dollars or person B with billions of dollars of net worth owns Twitter?

Democracy? No one is forcing anyone to use Twitter. Current users are free to leave.

Zero to Tesla. It's not like he has hundreds of billions of dollars sitting in cash. Almost all of his wealth is in Tesla/SpaceX. He created value from basically zero.

Didn't steal it from anyone.

Exactly. It's sickening to see a billionaire like Elon Musk push around the ordinary people who currently own Twitter! (The ordinary people are Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, and State Street Corp.)

Lol,

People don't care about facts brother, some people are just jealous and love to hate.

That, or they piss it away on vanity projects like this and level themselves downwards in the process.

Shouldn’t be allowed? What’s the magic number the government will stop allowing one to accrue wealth?

Bold of you to think the US has a functioning democracy

Reply on news.ycombinator.com