Hacker News Reader

Comment by edgyquant | Hacker News Reader

> billionaires temporarily down on their luck

This is such a pretentious, bad faith line that you’ve heard from someone else and are repeating. Yeah I heard it in philosophy class freshman year too. You gloss over the possibility that maybe other people just aren’t as hateful and jealous as you and believe that capital allocating into the hands of those who have created the most value is an efficient economic system. That doesn’t equate to those people believing they will one day create that much value and profit for it. Maybe stop projecting your mindset on others.

View on HN

> capital allocating into the hands of those who have created the most value is an efficient economic system

Then let's try it in a different way, "less hateful and jealous"...

What is the net benefit to society of one individual having a net worth approaching $220,000,000,000? Or of ten individuals having a net worth of $1,200,000,000,000?

Explain the "efficiencies" of that with respect to the economic system as a whole.

The 220 billion is equity in companies that are growing at a ~50% 5 year compound annual growth rate. That is about 10x faster than the broader economy. The average Tesla factory worker has >40% higher total compensation than a UAW worker.

If Musk stops using his wealth to grow the economy and sells his shares then he gets taxed. His sales of Tesla shares to buy twitter were taxed at California rates and he paid 10 billion in tax.

If the government could replicate that record of growth and efficient allocation of capital I would be the first one in line to say tax successful capital allocators, but in this case you'd be giving up 10x the economic growth. The US government is incredibly inefficient and poor at doing their job. Just reforming the health care system to be in line with other western countries would free up >1 trillion annually and it wouldn't hamstring the country's growth. You don't see huge threads about that twice a week though. I wonder why.

There is no hate here nor anything intended to be a personal attack on specific individuals, but clearly my comment struck a nerve.

This comes across as a saddeningly extreme armchair psychological evaluation and extrapolation to just attack my entire character.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com