Do we need billionaires?
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You can make your opponent's life a living hell with a hundred thousand and buy or figure out a way to frame extortion material from almost any decision maker with a million.
See how wars are being started tweeting from the toilet seat by a man who has never known anything but power to harm others.
See the many "formerly normal" people ending on a private island, doing horrendous things to children.
We tried to figure out examples of people with power who weren't corrupted by it, at least to some extent, and came up with very few.
It's a human trait we know very well, but do very little about.
Regardless of what you even do with the money, simply preventing people from ever having billions is going to be a good thing for the world, democracy, etc.
To be fair: it is not Trump only who is addicted to warfare. You have a whole industry that benefits from war and thus wants warfare. Trump is just, in addition to being corrupt, really really not that clever. And now he is old and has dementia - amazing how the USA can so easily become subverted by Russia here. The KGB won.
Zuckerberg just moved to Florida for a tiny wealth tax in California.
These people would just leave the state or leave the country. It’s been happening in Norway with just a small wealth tax.
It’s not impossible, but it’s also not that simple to do.
These kind of policies are risky, because you may drive away the next generation of entrepreneurs and the jobs they create.
The rich should pay more taxes, but not to the point that it would chase them away or disincentive them from building companies.
That being said, taxes are incredibly destructive. Every dollar you tax someone is much more than a dollar you take from that person and the economy. Government is too big, it’s out of control. They can’t balance a budget either, so we pay an additional destructive tax called inflation. I would personally like to see government go on a diet to half or a quarter of the size it is and reduce taxes at the low end instead.
Taxes always have some optimum level: a point where benefit to society as a whole is maximized. Too high, and indeed investors / entrepreneurs could move away. Too low, and society leaves money on the table that could be better used elsewhere.
The simple fact that a society allows individuals to amass $100B+ (or even a 'mere' $1B) shows that wealth taxes are below what's optimal. If existing at all. It doesn't matter if wealth is stuck in assets, it's still society-distorting / corrupting power. There's no benefit to society to have individuals sit on say, >100x the wealth of average folks. Let alone 1000x, 100,000x or even higher.
So why is there no such wealth tax? Answer that question (in depth!), and you're getting closer to fixing the problem.
Has that happened? Has that been a problem?
Would they really, though?
A lot of people say this, but I think one very important thing is being overlooked: should a billionaire leave the US, they'd also lose a significant amount of influence over US policy. Especially when their wealth is built significantly upon the stocks of major US companies, giving up that influence is a huge risk to their wealth.
Just think - not only would the billionaire's influence suddenly become stigmatized "foreign influence", but it would also become tainted by the fact that they fled the country to avoid taxes. Politicians on the opposing side of an issue the billionaire wants to fight for would have a field day pointing out both every time the billionaire attempted to influence any policy.
I think it's about time we turn adult now. The coming of age for humanity, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer used to say.
(I understand there is at least one Billionaire that wants to occupy Mars—and I am 100% on board.)
I feel like we could have like a >95% income tax when you are worth more than like $20 million and it wouldnt actually matter too much to the people who would cap it out? Of course, its a 4000x decrease in wealth for some people, but at that level, when you're getting over 10 million, its basically infinite money anyway. There is no real gain from having 800 billion over having 20 million. What are you going to do with 800 billion dollars? Buy a thousand mega-mansions?
The tragedy of course is that the vast majority of people have no real control over their time, and the free time they do have is aggressively fought over by media corporations and advertisers convincing them they need to work more to buy more.
“The entire development of wealth rests upon the creation of disposable time.” —Karl Marx, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), 1857
“…real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time.”
“The saving of labour time [is] equal to an increase of free time, i.e. time for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts back upon the productive power of labour as itself the greatest productive power.”
—The Grundrisse, 1857
“Labour-time, even if exchange-value is eliminated, always remains the creative substance of wealth and the measure of the cost of its production. But free time, disposable time, is wealth itself, partly for the enjoyment of the product, 3 partly for free activity which—unlike ‘ labour—is not dominated by the pressure of an extraneous purpose which must be fulfilled, and the fulfillment of which is regarded as a natural necessity or a social duty, according to one’s inclination. Karl Marx Theories of Surplus Value”
“Just as plants live from the earth, and animals live from the plants or | plant-eating animals, so does the part of society which possesses free time (disposable time not absorbed in the direct production of subsistence) live from the surplus labour of the workers. Wealth is therefore disposable time.” —Economic Manuscripts, 1861-1863
Nick pick ahead. I really dislike this phrasing about people's wealth. 'this person is worth $X', when they really mean 'this person has assets valued at $x'. They own things that have monetary value, they themselves are not assessed that monetary value. Some may think this is an innocuous shorthand, but I see it more of a Freudian slip revealing the the actual belief that the rich really are many 1000s or 100000s of times more valuable than other lesser humans.
Try phasing it another way, 'person x is hoarding over $20M in assets'.
And yeah, "worth" feels super weird.
So, you force the founder to sell 95% of the stock they own in the company.
Is this a good idea for the stock price of that company as well as the for the ability of that company to raise cash?
1. there's not a huge asshole controlling enormous companies (and then also buying all the media and ruining the public information)
2. we have more competition and lower prices (that's EXACTLY why capitalism was supposed to have anti-concentration laws)
3. you spread the wealth. Now there are more people owning less, but still a good chunk, it's much better to have 1000 millionaires building creative stuff, than 1 egoistical billionaire
Like, Tesla should not be valued the way it is, and I still can't understand what's going on here.
I think that both Tesla and SpaceX have been net good for the world, but do we really think that wealth taxation would've stopped Musk from doing anything post Paypal?
Apple did not need to be controlled by a majority shareholder in order to follow an ambitious, cohesive vision.
- by doing it through governments (that's how we went to the moon, BTW)
- by having a collection of smaller companies cooperating and acting together
2. Stock valuation and money are not the same thing. As you could've noticed from the recent Bitcoin price drop, the moment you start selling it it starts to worth less. Tesla is bubble-priced, so it's sell price is at least 5 times less then valuation
3. Even if you get the money, distribution is much harder problem then you think after agreeing with this sensense. IIRC it was Musk who said "So you say you can fix the world hunger for $nnn? Bring me the plan how you are going to do it. Noone brought me a plan so far".
It wouldn't matter, because the ultra-wealthy generally don't have much income relative to their wealth. Elon Musk (in the article listed at $817B of wealth) was reported to have had $1.52B of net income between 2014 and 2018, and had no taxable income in 2018. 95% of $0 is still $0.
The ultra-wealthy's wealth doesn't grow because of income (as the tax code defines it). Trying to tax income to redistribute their wealth (or even just slow its growth) is not going to address wealth inequality.
That would cover loans the ultra-wealthy use for their day-to-day living as well as loans used for leveraged buyouts of other blocks of stock (usually to buy or become significant voting shareholders of a particular company).
The other side of things would be to start actually enforcing anti-trust laws. A big part of the reason we have people running around with 10^11 dollar wealth is due to extreme market consolidation.
I think just closing this loophole, and having personal loans over a certain % that are backed by specific equities (stocks, land, etc), be taxable. This fixes the loophole, in that they now need to pay taxes on these loans, on top of interest. It would incentivize them to then increase their base pay, where they'd pay income tax like the rest of us.
Same for land - Anything above X size or # of properties gets taxed at 50% the land value each year.
Now would this happen? Who knows, and also it will have other effects, like devaluing the stockmarket as no one want to pay taxes on billions worth of stocks.
But would require a return to pension funds or some other collective funding.
The only substitute for wealth is power and for power is wealth (with a hefty conversion fee). Amassing power would be the alternative action taken by the driven billionaire types if you take away the possibility of amassing wealth.
A bunch of stymied billionaires amassing power leads us back to pre-nationalized Europe.
At least when people amass wealth, they generally do something valuable for others.
Also, Elon, Trump and Putin may be the most hated people by amount of people who hate them, but I wonder where they would fall on "proportion of people who know about them who hate them". If a thousand people hate me, I've messed up badly. If a thousand people hate someone that everyone knows, like David Attenborough, that's doing pretty good
What wealthy people, and people more generally, do have is ownership of assets and debts, where the grand sum >= +1B$. Case in point, Elon owns significant portions of valuable companies.
Patent nonsense such as
> So we can take a million dollars to be about 1 lifetime's worth of money. Elon is currently sitting on 817,000 lifetimes worth of money.
belies a gross misunderstanding of these valuations. No, Elon is not sitting on whatever money. He might only have 1Ks or 10Ks splashed throughout several accounts. If he is mid-transaction, then that figure may come into play, but only briefly. Some billionaires, sure, they may actually have cash of that magnitude on hand ready for deployment. For plenty of even more down-to-earth wealthy folk, even 2K burns a hole in their pocket because they haven't found where to invest it yet.
And so what is Elon and others like him supposed to do? Divest his "money" to the general population in search of equal outcome (and not equal opportunity)?
We need a few people to rise to pinnacles, this is one effective path to creation of markets. Allowing them to concentrate such power and wealth unchecked, though, is a great mistake. And that's on us, the people.
That needs to change. They need to feel the same taxation everyone else has, it makes it harder to survive and they need to live by the same sword
I think that's a wrong perception, especially in this case. Elon Musk does not have nearly a trillion dollar in cash. He holds shares in companies that have a market worth of a trillion dollar. But as soon as he sells, and thus wouldn't be involved with them anymore, they would be only worth a fraction of that. Tesla, in particular, would probably be bankrupt.
"Selling the stock" is not a single transaction. The moment he leaves Tesla, or starts selling shares (which would take weeks or months), the stock collapses.
But at what point does marginal private incentive stop helping innovation and start damaging democracy? For sure risk-taking deserves reward but the size of the reward matters
For example, they take risks by using chemicals (that they know) can kill people, by the time people get cancer they are retired, there are no claw-backs.
More recently you commit actual fraud, get convicted but then get a pardon and somehow end up with money again running the next "scam".
These people never take real risks.
DOGE resulted in the death of over 100k people [1] and will result in many people dying of Ebola. It was a huge failure yet the "risk" Elon took is not his.
[1] https://healthpolicy-watch.news/the-human-cost-one-year-afte...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/06/02/technology/el...
At the best, it’d be a stretch to claim that USAID was the sole or primary thing that kept people alive or disease free.
Money matters, especially early, but after some extreme level it is hard to believe that the next $50B - just to say a number - is what causes the useful work to happen.
And the irony here is, by that same token, founders could maintain in control while not having such large equity stakes, and not becoming so rich.
So I do not think this is an argument for billionaires.
But this isn't a fundamental aspect of wealth taxes; it's a choice. So I don't think it's a meaningful argument against wealth taxes in general.
(As an unrelated point, I think dual class shares are sort of bad and it makes sense to me to discourage them as a matter of public policy, but this doesn't seem like necessarily the best way to do it.)
Read the text (https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/initiatives/pdfs/25-0024A1%2...), specifically 50303 section c.
It seems to me that the authors were, as you say, trying to close a loophole, namely that where I set up a Nevada LLC to which I hold 99% of voting shares but 1% of outstanding equity, put my assets in it, and just direct the LLC to spend on things I want it to--but in the process, they failed to realize that non-public super-voting shares (like Google class B shares) seem to fall into category (3) of section (c) (i.e. neither sole proprietorships nor publicly traded assets).
I don't think that's a great design, though it's still worth noting that it doesn't rule out privileged shares in general--GOOGL, to give an example, are privileged voting shares that trade publicly, and thus are obviously under category (1), and assessed per their FMV.
But in any case, I stand by my broader point: this is a specific detail of how the California proposal has been written; it's not a fundamental aspect of wealth taxes. Switzerland has a wealth tax that does not have this aspect, for example.
I think the Peter principle applies here; what you view as "competent people" are actually beneficiaries of systems, that they themselves can never independently create due to the nature of organizations themselves.
99.999% of the times, the people who reach billions come from a privileged position in society and are using their position to gain wealth for themselves.
We live in a society built for the powerful. It is paramount that we decentralize and democratize the power. Look at Switzerlands system of governance. Tear down the giant empires(USA, EU, China, Russia, etc). Build small to medium sized nation states, subdivided into commune with self governance(cantons in Switzerland as an example).
My country Sweden is having an election this September. I am voting for direktdemokraterna(https://direktdemokraterna.se/).
https://www.aboutswitzerland.eda.admin.ch/en/political-syste...
How has someone like Taylor Swift not produced a billion dollars value?
Some of her tours have brought in more than 2 billion in revenue, she makes many millions a year in merchandise sales, millions selling streaming rights to her music, she has re-recorded the albums she didn't own the rights to and bought back the rights to others. She has a net worth of over 2 billion, how has she not produced "a billion dollars value"?
What does she do that you think you should be able to tell her that she can't do? And where do you think you get the right to tell her she can't do that?
If she wants to do concerts and concert goers want to go to them, who should stop her? If people want to stream her music and she gets a cut, you're going to tell her she can't do that? If she wants to sell vinyl records and I want to pay for one of them, you should be the boss that says no? Is that what you're saying?
I don't think so. A single person, Taylor Swift, has produced multiple billions of dollars of value.
This is not a problem to be solved. This is America. This is no country for everybody. It's a country for me. For people like me.
This ain't Switzerland.
I'm not saying Taylor Swift never did anything wrong. But mostly, she earned that. You're still allowed to do stuff like that in America. Sorry, not sorry.
That is what we've had mostly for the last fifty years and look where it has gotten us? And US. I'm not from US
I wish billionaires were competing on how many people they've lifted out of homelessness or how many people they've fed without making a profit (with the additional caveat that it is a carbon negative, sustainable production). And not in the fake way where they use creative language to obfuscate the harms they've done, but in an actual tangible way where when you look at it, it actually shows a genuine desire to be participant in society, not a dominator of it. All the "good" that billionaires do these days comes with caveats or over representation.
Of course, this stuff all gets rationalized away by people. They will ask stupid questions like "why don't you open your home up to homeless people then" or the classic "do you know what capitalism has done for you you ungrateful little shit? you better do 5 hail Bezos prayers right now before I report this to Palantir", because why would you try to understand a metaphor? Things have to be this way! There are no other options. We have to fuck people over to survive.
Labor was better protected Elections were funded by the gov and any money spent outside of that sent you to jail and confiscated everything from you and your company and your family They were taxed at the top marginal back at 90% They could not buy or own anything in media
My problem with capitalism is the rules were made at a certain time and place. Then the industrial revolution happened which bricked the old rules, and let wealth concentrate, which started eroding rules to favor those with the accumulated wealth.
Then the sale of single input products and services (first software, then the web - or make one sell infinite) bricked what was left of capitalism and let wealth accrue at 99% of light speed. And the laws/regulations never got changed to put a clamp on that, the tax rules and everything else went to favor those with more than they could spend, then the self-interested actors spent a pittance to do what the framers were trying to avoid: buying up all the government reps.
And here we are - all the monied people who mostly dont seem to grasp that they are just hastening their own implosion doing their 60 year old plan of robbing the bank, as it were.
1B actually seems good...congrats you've won capitalism but that's enough for one person
Ironically, what produces billionaires quite reliably, is precisely the growing global middle class, which is now estimated to number around four billion. If 4 billion people can spend, say, 200 USD a month on various non-necessities, much of that enormous stream of cash will naturally flow to some big corporations producing universally demanded services and will make their main shareholders billionaires.
If Africa ever gets to the living standards of Asia, expect even more billionaires. Etc.
I know net worth != purchasing power, but they are likely correlated enough for the examples to be broadly accurate.
The quote defending the billionaires also reminds me of this piece from a recent Harper’s about the march in support of the ultra-rich: https://harpers.org/archive/2026/05/billionaire-blues-thomas...
This seems very controversial to me. Why does increasing wealth eventually cause negative outcomes? What do you mean by “make it hard”?
This article skips over justifying its argument. I don’t think, for example, that someone should have come along to Warren Buffett in the late 80s and said: “Your company is too successful, you can’t be the full owner of it anymore”
Individual, founder-led companies are a good thing, especially if the companies are very successful. You’re more likely to force these companies into being led by investors and private equity if you don’t let the founders lead them.
There's been a bit of inflation since then
The right frame of comparison is not towards average Joe, but towards governments. Billionaires, for better or worse, are independent power sources, which IMO in grand scheme of things are useful.
I think the problem with modern world is not that some people have lots of money, but that we allowed money to buy pretty much everything else.
They buy media to push their propaganda, buy politicians... They are not acting as "checks and balances" to power. They are power.
If we eliminated billionaires would everyone have healthcare, a decent roof over their head, and other basic things?
I generally believe that to not be the case. The government misspends (to an extent) the money it has now. So the solution is to give them more money to misspend?
You’re going to have to explain the logic of that to me.
Do you disagree that (many, perhaps not all) billionaires also create a massive amount of value for society? Would Jeff Bezos be a billionaire if Amazon was a net drain on society?
Jeff Bezos being incredibly rich doesn’t make my life worse. In fact, Amazon makes my life better. I’ve had jobs that existed because Amazon existed. I’ve had things I wanted to buy delivered very quickly. I read my Kindle for hundreds of hours a year.
We need much higher taxes on the high end, at all levels, especially on loans on expensive assets, estates, and carried interest. And make stock buybacks illegal. Higher high-end only taxes realign interests promoting a middle class rather than a serfdom, unequal world of neoliberal utopian fantasies.
Furthermore, we need much less corruption and influence purchasing by separation between wealth and social/mass media and journalism and state.
Discuss?
Billionaires ultimately go hand in hand with fascists (Ford, Musk, ...) and the only threat to democracy and freedom that competes with those is communism.
The (mis-attributed to Lenin and Stalin) quote "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." is quite big in this. A little humility and a lot more tax-paying could save the trillionaire classes from the tumbrils but they lack the emotional intelligence to see it and as long as they make a few thousand millionaires below them they have useful idiots to decry any changes.
On the plus side, workers are in short supply. The future needs more people who can do things other than thinkers, and robots (bless their hearts) don't spend money as consumers so the other side of the billionaire equation demands new people to come into spending class: this means Africa, Asia and South America levelling up.
"Ok how about this: No more billionaires. None. After you reach $999 million, every red cent goes to schools and health care. You get a trophy that says, “I won capitalism” and we name a dog park after you."
If there isn't the political will to ramp up taxes on extreme wealth, I'd be interested to know how much effort there is in pitching legacy projects (more exciting than dog parks) to those with the means to execute them. Like crowd-funding, but for major developments and with further tax incentives if necessary.
It wasn't pitched to him, but in Australia, a wealthy individual put Hobart (more) on the map with a now famous contemporary art gallery complex which is an excellent drawcard for the state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Old_and_New_Art
That is an extraordinary development for sub-$100m. Supposedly Australia has 150+ billionaires. Build us some crazy things.
I think there is some research which shows that as you get rich, you lose emotional intelligence (empathy towards others). So maybe we should consider being rich a health hazard.
The ancient greek did not have this problem. Modern democracy does. And let's not even get into the issue of Putin-Trump being suspiciously a corrupt tandem team, just as Yuri predicted in the 1980s (!!!!!) already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9apDnRRSOCk
(Flood the zone with shit is based on an older KGB strategy, and the chinese had this under an even older stratagem name, though not necessarily based on information-overload; I'd call the KGB strategy primarily information-overload. The chinese stratagems are named a bit differently, e. g. holding the dagger under the cloak, or attack west while convincing the enemy you would attack east; sun tsu also built on the older chinese stratagems.)
In Ancient Greece you had a larger gap between rich and power. Landowners vs farmer. In the early 6th century BC, inequality was so extreme that poor farmers regularly sold themselves or their families into slavery just to pay off debts and survive.
If we only learned more about history we might be more thankful for where we really are.