Most billionaires cannot extract most of their wealth without crashing the price of their remaining assets. No doubt the gulf is still great, but it's a little smaller than the raw numbers imply.
https://github.com/MKorostoff/1-pixel-wealth/blob/master/THE...
Remember when Jeff Bezos sold 4+ billions of Amazon stock in 11 days, and it didn't crash? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/11/jeff-bezos-sold-4point1-bill...
They can access credit by giving poetuons of their wealth as collateral. Do you think they sustain lavish lifestyles and have an outsized influence by crashing the stock value of their companies?
A billionaire's net worth is measured in dollars. If that isn't a valid unit of measuringing their wealth, then find another way to measure it. The theoretical loss in stock price if they sell their holdings shouldn't factor in here, because it isn't universally true, and doesn't actually change the real-world value of their assets.
I too cannot liquidate my entire net worth without selling my house and car, cashing out my retirement accounts, and spending lots of fees in the process. Regardless, my net worth is still measured in the dollars those things are worth before I liquidate them, because that's how wealth is measured.
Musk spent $44B buying a website that has since plummeted in value, and his net worth has only skyrocketed since. It seems like wealth for billionaires does indeed work differently than wealth for the rest of us, and it is fact MORE forgiving for billionaires than it is for us.
The only difference is that most of these billionaires are invested in a few specific companies, however there are plenty of people who (likely for bad reason) are also heavily invested in only a few companies.
2. Transaction costs for liquidating your wealth is materially different from selling enough to significantly affect the market for an asset. As an extreme example, large holders of a meme cryptocurrency cannot sell the majority of their holdings without crashing the value of their coin.
3. Borrowing works for smaller amounts if you can spread out the sales of your assets over a long period of time (or if you don't need to sell at all, e.g. if investing in something that gives you returns).