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Now I need to do the math on space karen/ henery ford 2.0 aka Mr my autism makes me prone to outbursts of fascist apologia.
I did the math recently and if you took the assets of the wealthiest 1% and divided only half of it amongst the remaining 336.3 million Americans it would be a check of approximately 68,000 for every man woman and child and those bloated blood sucking leaches would still have an average remainder of just under 6 million dollars each.
He’d have to give them this as equity in the company, he’s not liquid for that amount. None of the “richest Americans” have near the amount of wealth they appear to have.
This is what people mean when they say workers should own the means of production tho
Musk paid $44 billion in cash for Twitter. Billionaires only have wealth on paper until they want to buy a company, then magically they have the cash.
It’s my understanding that Musk borrowed heavily from investors for that cash.
Buy, Borrow, Die strategy.
Buy something that potentially increases in value (real estate, companies, stock etc)
Borrow money against the appreciated value of step 1, this borrowing in not taxable.
Die and leave assets to whoever and never pay tax on the assets.
It's called leveraged borrowing, it's how the billionaire class pays for things. The banks typically give them super low rates and generous terms on these types of loans.
So what Elon did was took a loan against his assets, Tesla stock, at a low APR with very loose repayment terms, then paired that with money pledged by a few other minority investors and that's how he was able to quickly come up with 44 billion to buy Twitter.
https://youtube.com/shorts/J3UVMlDUFkc
You need this guy on YouTube. He's excellent at shedding light on this stuff. He has stuff for lobbying, aipac, billionaires, rfk, private equity, and more
Yeah and a lot of that came from other investors
Other investors that will be coming to look for their investment money
IIRC they basically use some of their shares like a credit card, since the value of their shares keeps appreciating the interest is much easily paid off
Musk paid very little for twitter. He paid $0 in real money. He traded (iirc) like $13b of Tesla stock. The rest was filled by Saudi investors and western banks, who were greatly encouraged to own and control one of the primary modalities of communication in the 21st century. Either way very little actual cash transferred hands
he’s not liquid
Who gives a fuck? Wealth is wealth and his equity is his security for the low to zero interest loans from where all his spending money comes.
None of the “richest Americans” have near the amount of wealth they appear to have
Again, yes they do. Illiquid wealth is still wealth and is the basis of rich people getting to spend as much as they want with little to no risk compared to people who DON'T have a dragon's hoard in stock for the above infinite money exploit to work.
This is what people mean when they say workers should own the means of production tho
Nah, when people say that workers should own the means of production, they're talking about ACTUAL ownership, not bonuses from the owner.
That's not really how that works. Sure, it isn't liquid, but you can still borrow against it, and you don't pay tax in this like you would if you sell. That's how the wealthy can still buy things without having to pay any reasonable amount of tax.
And if amazon gave their employees stock options (like they did at one point) the employees could also borrow against it. But amazon stopped doing that once they reached a point where their employees were impacting their bottom line. They now rob their employees of that option to entrench wealth amongst the elite
I got into an argument years ago with someone who appeared to start on the conclusion that co-operatives must be bad and tried to work backwards from there.
There was this notion that it was somehow unfair for one delivery driver to earn $1,000,000 and another to earn $10,000 just because they worked for different companies, since it was mostly the efforts of other people in the company that gave it its value. He wasn't able to then take the tiny extra step required to apply the same logic to CEOs and shareholders.
I realized there's a kind of proximity bias; billionaires are so far removed from our lives that we just accept their existence as part of how the world works, whereas if a regular employee like us is getting something we're not then the jealousy becomes palpable. It's the same thing that drives hatred towards minorities and immigrants.
You could just use the top .1% and not drop that figure much. The differences as you go up are huge.
Anybody saying that co-ops don't work or whatever should check Mondragon which thrives in thoroughly capitalist Spain.
The consumers have to use their brain when they use their money. Cooperatives are very big in Denmark.
The Behind the Bastards episode about him is really mind blowing. Like, he sucks way more than you could ever imagine. When I was in college, Amazon was the company that you could get used textbooks from. Now they're the default web shopping platform.
Going by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis the 1% are valued at ~49 Trillion works out to be ~$145k per person. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLT01026
So that was 5 years ago. Which means he could give them all a $20,000 annual raise and still be making money.
Will that keep them from parking like assholes?
What was that thing about the band in 'Restaurant at the End of the Universe' being so so unbelievably wealthy that the accountants prove that space/time is not just curved, it is warped, please internet tell me i'm not insane?
Yup! You're remembering that right. Also, the frontman Hotblack Desiato was temporarily dead as part of a tax avoidance scheme 😄
And then the State Department starts flooding Amazon warehouses with drugs and guns to ruin the co-op and make people nostalgic for the good ol days when the Bezos junta was around to control the gangs.
Math is beautiful.
Some people who don't know any better would say that poor Jeff innovated the world into a better place by inventing Amazon, that he's being justly rewarded by the free market.
But Amazon became so successful because it killed off all of it's competitors - not through a better service, but using investor capital to artifically lower it's prices, systematically targeting it's rivals and taking them over.
Amazon is so profitable because it has killed the market and replaced it with itself, and the tech giants and uber and so on are doing exactly the same thing.
So turn it into a co-op, let it's workers decide if they can piss on the clock or not. Give it's sellers a say in whether they want to pay 40% markup and hidden fees to get pushed to the top of front page. Amazon abuses workers, businesses and the market - this is a great solution to a problem that everyone ought to have, regardless of politics.
I like the energy, but you're not going to sell 92 Billion dollars worth of stocks for 92 Billion dollars.
He could just hand over the stocks.
though they would drop in value very fast thereafter, no? My naive understanding is that a good share of people would sell them immediately, causing a price crash.
Around 25% would have to sell over 50% of their stocks for it to maybe start having an effect.
It could also raise the value of the stock to free up so much stock from a single person to many, as selling it would mean stronger belief in the stock going up.
Stock market is part math, part religion really.
Also companies do "stock options with limitations on selling for a certain period" all the time.
Then the stocks shouldn't be worth that much and the man shouldn't be able to spend like he has $92 billion
That’s a specious argument. It might be technically true, but not by nearly a big enough margin for it to make any difference to the underlying point. It’s not like you’d have to unload them all in one month.
cooperatively owned
This usually means employee, or sometimes, customer owned. You described fair taxation and UBI/freedom dividends instead.
What needs to be nationalized with 99% shareholder dillution and zero compensation in the US is oil, weapons companies on the basis of their warmongering lobbying, and other zionist first rule over America media and political funding terrorists.
UBI is first and foremost power redistribution. The wealthy stay wealthy, and through economic growth and faster money multiplier, get even richer even at higher tax rates.