How exactly do you propose keeping a founder from becoming wealthier once their company scales past the point where they are worth a hundred million?
What can happen though is that companies figure out how to prevent meaningful competition to preserve high margins. They're worth millions for the innovation but they get to billions through anti-competitive and extractive practices.
But we can start by not forgiving CG on death. That seems like a no brainer with no downsides.
No downsides I respect, at least. "We want to keep the business in the family" should be ignored.
When Bezos divorced, Mackenzie Bezos was awarded 25% of their Amazon shares valued at over 38 billion dollars.
Just by the above being possible, that means there's no reason why such a "divorce" couldn't happen once per year, and there's also no reason why it has to be 25% rather than "everything above 100M". It means that the tools for this exist. The government takes the place of Mackenzie Bezos. During the divorce, not a single mention of "oh it's just _impossible_ to take 25% of Jeff Bezos' Amazon shares, it will cause collapse". Just all of a sudden if you replace MacKenzie Bezos with "the government" or "the pension fund", suddenly there's all kinds of supposed reasons why it can't happen - even though there's zero reason why it couldn't.
No "but technically they will temporarily have over 100M in the intermediary period" please.
Because it doesn't work that way at that level of wealth, especially for tech CEOs. You can't just hide billions worth of shares in a company.
There's so many possible options.
It's hard. But if we make CG inescapable it should as a second order effect close the Buy Borrow Die loophole, and the super rich must fund their life some other way. Probably by selling assets to consume.
And putting a tamper on inheritance (which could be progressively taxed or capped) it has a second order effect of discouraging hoarding while alive.
So increasing inheritance tax (effectively) would mean a change of incentives for hoarding money. Which is the only thing that actually works.
Obviously, being a hard problem, there's no quick fix. But in the choice between slowing down the problem and not, we should do the former.
How do we "prevent" it? Well, we can throw the baby out with the bathwater. Is that your proposal?
As for your question: no intransigence please.
You tax them. Wealth inequality of this magnitude is toxic to democracy. It's simply too much power. These men aren't gods, they are just flesh and blood and usually really terrible people. We are not staff at their resort. Let them live in luxury for the rest of their life, great. But they don't get to have more political power than half a million people put together.
Please don't do this.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
On the point of democracy, none of the candidates who spend the most on major elections seem to be winning much lately, Bloomberg, Harris, Cuomo, Steyer, etc.
Thomas Massie was just ousted in the most expensive house primary in US history.
The difference between 1-2 mil that is normally spent and the $30+ million spent on that election alone.
The problem isn’t necessarily that some one can buy a seat for themselves (though some people out there could spend 1000x as much as half a billion and still have 500 billion to spend), it's that for less than half a billion, someone can buy 20 house or senate seats for more conventional candidates that are willing to vote the way the financier wants.
Not to mention that the Norwegian Pension Funds holds $2 trillion in assets. UAE and KSA have ones over $1 trillion each.
And that's ignoring that currently an even smaller group of people owns everything, who don't even represent the public on paper. Quite stupid to assume that this is a better idea.
You force the founder to give up their private property just because it is valuable?
Remember these are not dollar bills in the founders bank account. It is just the company they created is now very valuable. It does not mean it is liquid.
Which party is the IRS partisan towards? What do you mean by partisan?
That's how taxes work.
On the business income, on the sale of shares, on their wealth, on loans, on estate and inheritance, etc.
Breaking up the company is another avenue, it could increase competitiveness and make the markets freer, open up more options for employees to shop around for employer, etc.
Raising minimum wage, stronger overtime rules, paid family leave, mandatory paid vacation and sick leave, non-compete restrictions, profit-sharing requirements, and other regulation that favors the employee is yet another avenue...
There are ways if the will is there.
Owe 1M$ in taxes and have ownership stakes in a company worth 1B$? Fine, transfer a 0.1% share of ownership in the company into the SWF.