Luxury bunkers to tactical vehicles, ultra-rich are preparing for the Big One
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It also speaks about the disconnect the future vault-dwellers feel about the world, as if they expect their place in the world will remain static. Looking at the Roman empire's fall, it was less cataclysmic than an orderly retreat by the Core from the Periphery [0], leaving local elites in charge of protection and development when the legions left. This means a current slice of high-elite is leaving physically and economically critical infrastructure abandoned to another elite to take up. A smarter elite would be building redoubts along these strategic lines rather than disconnecting entirely.
[0]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23756480_Cyclical_D...
I am not ultra rich, but I do day dream. And if I was ultra rich I would be building one too. Not because I thought I would ever use it. But because it would just be fun.
It’s kind of like playing a video game you mastered. You might go build or do things that simply are for the joy of doing it.
I wonder if the ideal compound would be one that can shelter thousands of people and a massive soup kitchen. When the bombs drop, you're the only person bothering to help others and so you amass followers that you can now use to raid other billionaires that instead spent their money on pools or saunas.
Every litre of water you put into a pool is a litre of water you could be using to supply a soldier to steal some other guy's pool to hydrate more soldiers within a drought-stricken wasteland. Every 500k you spent on a luxury bulletproof SUV is enough to buy 10x the Toyota Hiluxes that can outflank the SUV and pin it in. And the 6x6 luxury SUV is a prime target since anyone riding in one of those has a lot of stuff to steal.
If the rule of law disappears and society collapses, I doubt anybody is going to maintain a pre-war standard of living because the competitive pressures are going to push people to spend a lot more on weapons/violence. The best you can hope for is to become a charismatic warlord, but now you personally have to spend your wealth on providing protection and welfare for the people, plus you have to win against every other person with the same idea.
It'd be cheaper to just pool your wealth together with everyone else in a given area to create a government that enforces certain basic rules, provides for certain basic needs, and allows everyone to stop worrying about killing each other.
it doesn't matter if you have a 1000 guns and plan on stealing what you need -- if no one can farm you're not going to last.
This is what the current government does but in the post-apocalyptic world it'll be less fair and more expensive.
The reason why government exists is because it solves very real problems. If there is state failure, we're not going to devolve into a libertarian utopia. What is more likely to happen is what has already happened in countries such as Somalia or the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire.
Someone needs to turn that into a TV show about a apocalypto-Robin Hood gang going from bunker to bunker, liberating supplies for the desperate survivors using any means necessary.
https://www.propublica.org/article/lord-of-the-roths-how-tec...
> Over the last 20 years, Thiel has quietly turned his Roth IRA — a humdrum retirement vehicle intended to spur Americans to save for their golden years — into a gargantuan tax-exempt piggy bank, confidential Internal Revenue Service data shows. Using stock deals unavailable to most people, Thiel has taken a retirement account worth less than $2,000 in 1999 and spun it into a $5 billion windfall.
"In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes."
between 2014 and 2018, Bezos paid $972 million in total taxes on $4.22 billion of income.
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...
Please let me know then! 37% top income tax bracket + 15.3% self employment social security and medicare is 52.3% right there! and we aren’t included state or local or other taxes and fees involved in running a business.
It seems people get confused about capital gains taxes vs income taxes. That $927/4220 is almost certainly capital gains taxes.
Among them, you! The people in this article aren’t buying them out of paychecks. Capital gains rates are their worst case scenario.
They’re paying next to nothing into Social Security (remember, only the first $160k income gets taxed there) and they aren’t paying into Medicare (Jobs’ famous $1 salary would result in about a penny).
I know that however unless they are selling assets they will still need to pass through as income.
The idea that capital gains taxes are low is also insane. Those are assets that are being sold. Yes they may have started as worth zero when the company was formed but when they sell stock someone else now owns it. The fact we accept the government is entitled to 15% of that asset value increase is frankly insane.
I’d also like to mention that most people on paychecks are not aware of how much they are being taxed as they believe the absurd euphemistically named “employer” taxes aren’t a tax on them directly. Any tax the employer wouldn’t pay if they weren’t employed is a tax on them, regardless of how you name and collect it. Without payroll collection of taxes there is no way the government would politically get away with the extreme high tax rates on the general populations of western governments.
That capital gains rate - and again, that’s their worst-case scenario here; tricks like the Thiel Roth IRA article I linked elsewhere in this thread - pays for the education, healthcare, protection, etc. of their workforce.
Never actually having to sell shares means no taxes, plenty of operating funds. Quite common. https://www.propublica.org/article/billionaires-tax-avoidanc...
Scroll down to #2. Thiel, for example, managed to get $5B into a Roth IRA.
> What’s more, as long as Thiel waits to withdraw his money until April 2027, when he is six months shy of his 60th birthday, he will never have to pay a penny of tax on those billions.
There are too many tricks available for them to wind up paying a fair share of taxes.
The reality is taxes on everyone are actually crazy high, but hidden from everyone, via “employer” labeling and inflation. One latest euphemistic collectivist scheme is “corporate” taxes, total joke, corporations are investors and employees, every tax is either an investor tax or employee tax, taxing an abstract organizational concept is nonsensical.
Envy is one of the most dangerous human emotions, helping destroy numerous productive societies with collectivist ideas, your war on billionaires is nothing but another envy driven scheme to help collectivists continue to rob the productive members of society.
Hell, Larry Ellison owns most of Lanai.