Elon Musk Becomes First Person Ever to Lose $200B | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk Becomes First Person Ever to Lose $200B

bloomberg.com

28 pointsvelik_m22 comments

It's shows just how pointless it is to have this much money and only bad things come from it.

Tax anything above 1 billion at 100%. If that isn't realized gains do not allow them to borrow against it. No loop holes.

The US and others managed to set a global minimum coorperate tax so this is doable.

Do you really think he has that much liquid cash, and he physically lost $200 billion?

Like I said, liquid or not, they can borrow against it tax free which in itself should be a crime.

Don't deflate their victory over his loss of funny money

100%? Really? Just take it all away? There must be a middle ground between the former 95% top rate and the current near-zero rate. Yes, no one paid the 95%, I realize - the loopholes have always existed.

The point is NOT to take all of your money away, but to force you to RE-INVEST the money into growth and your employees. Otherwise you are just inviting schemes like stock buybacks and dark money flow into Washington DC, to make all of that legal.

Why not? No individual needs that kind of money.

I don't want billionaires running charities deciding who gets what. I want elected governments to do that. (yes I know the US government is wasteful and incompetent but not all governments are). The wealth these people have acquired is because of the public and the public should benefit from the excess.

Hence the old joke that goes:

Q: How does one become a millionaire?

A: Start as a billionaire and buy Twitter

USD 200B handily (even inflation adjusted) beats the Hunt Brothers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday

https://archive.ph/UvW0E

Midas lost his touch once he decided to jump into politics and champion "free speech" by doing exactly what he railed against.

Who knew that the right wing version of "freedom" is really about using money to promote more bias?

Who knew that blatant right wing hypocrisy was bad for business?

Why hasn't he just bought some ICE competitor and mismanaged that one to the ground?

Just $137 billion more to go

Another example of the error of conflating the purported value of some pieces of paper with real money. It's not like Elon had $200B sitting in a safe and one day it was all gone. That would be a "real loss".

Our capitalist system is more like a visiting a casino. No matter how many chips you win or lose at the tables. The only result that matters is how much money you walk out with.

While I agree that plenty of people (deliberately?) misunderstand how net worth is calculated, what would be the equivalent of “walking out” in this scenario? Transferring your assets to cash that’s going to be devalued by the government issuing more currency?

It’s become extremely difficult to find an asset that’s both liquid and preserves value nowadays. Is cash the money-est money there is? I’m not so sure.

Perhaps, exchanging cash for some real utility.

For sure, and that’s the “medium of exchange” aspect of it. But it’s still not the best store of value…

Elon M speaks of things infinite money can't buy. LEO proliferated communication satellites was pretty much not available before SpaceX levelled up the game. ULA is a money magnet on the books.

If there’s one thing I’d consider valuable that the man is responsible for, it’s SpaceX. I’m not sure I’d invest in Tesla even at half its current price, but if SpaceX ever went public, I’d be on it immediately.

Paywalled

https://archive.vn/UvW0E

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