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Comment by iamthemonster | Hacker News Reader

His net worth is $378k per homeless person. You can't solve every homeless person's issues but he does at least have enough to get every homeless person into an apartment.

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There's some aspect of housing that's a positional good. There's only so much land in Manhattan, for instance. However, if refugee-camp conditions (ie. a basic place to live but with poor/no economic prospects nearby) are acceptable, it can probably be done with enough musk level wealth.

The question is how many new homeless people will be created once he starts doing this? And how much will the price of the average rental go up?

Only if he could barter Tesla stock for the apartments, or by liquidating very very slowly, so as to not crash the value of the rest of his shares (so he can keep doing this). Unfortunately, neither are very realistic (ignoring, of course, that Musk would never do this in the first place).

I'm unconvinced rich person net worth is ever actually the dollar figure that's quoted. So much of net worth is in relatively non-liquid assets. If Musk suddenly became a good person and decided to cash out in order to house the homeless, I doubt he would actually end up with $378k per homeless person.

> So much of net worth is in relatively non-liquid assets.

Which is why it's not bought and sold, but used as collateral to obtain low, low interest loans.

> If Musk suddenly became a good person

Is Musk a bad person?

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