Nice comparison, but this piece of math doesn't quite work out:
> If you earn $25 per hour, Musk makes that equivalent in passive investment returns every 58.400 seconds (assuming a conservative 5% annual return on his wealth).
You'd have to work 28.539 hours at $25/hour to make what he makes passively in one second.
Put another way, your annual income working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year without time off, (40 * 52 * 25 = $52,000) would take him 72.89 seconds or 1.21 minutes to achieve passively at the conservative 5% annual return rate.
> Every single person in America could be lifted above the poverty line with a one-time cash subsidy of around $10,000 per impoverished family (and about $7,000 for impoverished individuals). The total cost would be $170 billion, a little over 5% of the wealth currently controlled by 400 individuals.
The visualization is good, but the content is ... fraught.
I'm all for wealth redistribution and ending inequality, but analyzing wealth 1:1 with cash isn't a serious way to think about the issue. We should all realize that liquidizing Amazon shares and turning them into cash that floods the market wouldn't do anything other than gut pensions and create inflation.
It's better to think of ways of getting wealth (not cash) out from under billionaires. And it's something we should do because we believe this kind of wealth is bad for society, not because we think it will magically give us free stuff.
Empower the family businesses again, move power away from the super corporations. Encourage and invest in small business owners, giving them all the tax breaks while raising the taxes on the giant corporations. Basically, start recreating the middle class wealth, and then strive to bring everyone to that level at the cost of the giant corporations and mega rich.
This one is rather preachy. It is unintentionally arguing the existence of Amazon itself is bad and that everyone would be better off without it, including all the people it employs and serves, directly and indirectly.
Where does it argue against the existence of Amazon. Not that I disagree with it, but it doesn't even do that.
It is however, out of date. At the time of creation, the 400 richest people in the world owned $3.2T of wealth, now you only need to take the top 23 richest people to amass $3.2T of wealth.
If it is preachy it uses very few words to preach. In fact it only mentions Amazon once, and that's to highlight the average pay of an Amazon warehouse worker.
I see only demonstrated difference between exactly how wealthy one single man is versus things you also can't imagine but we can understand their relative size.
How many mouths Amazon feeds is not on-topic. Imagine that he got his wealth by magic. Poof. He has it. The data would still be the same.
His wealth, as of 2021, is literally unimaginable the same way that counting the number of stars in the universe is.
I saw a great representation of this several years ago. I think it was also for Bezos but might've been for Musk. It was a horizontal scrollbar with random points of various datapoints that would fit within his wealth. it went on for so long that it was spectacularly boring to zoom through.
Reminds me of the story of Mansa Musa, and how he took a trip once and it affected the economies of the areas he visited for generations. . . The influence of these guys strains the imagination.
Consider this too next time you read about a billionaire supporting charity (besides their motives likely being tax breaks). For example Zuckerberg donated $75 million to a San Francisco hospital, which was plastered all over the news. Proportionally it's less than what the average person spends on charity a year.
Even Bill Gates who donated tens of billions still sits on an unimaginable amount of money. And unlike your grandpa leaving $10k to charity and getting a honorable mention plaque, Gates's donation buys him and his heirs significant influence over entire nations.
As with most of these things, the (shallow) comparison is interesting but there is no actual justification for why it's _bad_.
Why do I care how many jets an ultra wealthy person can buy? I literally am not affected by it at all. In fact, my best friend is an aircraft mechanic at a popular private airport. He directly benefits (full wage, salary and benefits) from the rise in private air travel.
One reason it's bad is because they are taking all the new wealth. Since 2020- the economy has gone up, billionaires are dramatically wealthier, and yet most peoples wealth did not change or went down.
In the USA, the wealth of the top 25 people is equal to that of the entire bottom 50%.
An excellent visualizer. I particularly appreciate the use of text metaphors and analogies in lieu of traditional graphics, as it provides a more relatable metric to go by than just starkly different bar sizes on a chart.
My only critique would be to put into perspective social problems (e.g., homelessness, medical debt, etc) to demonstrate what portion of these could be solved through the wealth of a single billionaire. This is going to be even more critical as we approach the bleak reality of having our first trillionaire, barring global catastrophe wiping out asset values.
> Back in July of 2021, U.N. World Food Programme Executive Director David Beasley told us it would take an estimated $40 billion each year to end world hunger by 2030.
The problem is that it would mean directing his wealth and influence according to the guidance of others, which would detract from the cult of personality billionaires carefully cultivate for themselves. It’s a difference of emphasis: sure, their fortune and influence could end world hunger/buy everyone a home/pay off medical debts, but they can’t solve these problems themselves because they’re not capable of doing so.
And so they don’t. They let problems fester because they cannot get the credit they want for fixing it. They’re unconcerned with actually solving problems, and solely concerned with recognition.
If you received one dollar per second from the day you were born then you’d be a millionaire in ~11 days and a billionaire in ~31 years.
At some point, these big numbers are generalized as “big numbers” and we don’t conceptually comprehend the significant difference between “big numbers”.
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.
One wonders how they can buy private jets, luxury cars, and mansions with their modest liquidity, right? It's as if they could extract their wealth over time and not all of it at once, so the remainder doesn't lose its value.
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?
It's much easier to do this than many people think as wealthy individuals frequently borrow against their non-liquid assets. This circumvents the price drop associated with flooding the supply of some stock.
They want Bezos to be forced to sell off his assets and give the money over for government use. Sell it to who, though? Where did they get the money to buy it and why are they allowed to have that money in the first place? Why not just find out who wants to buy Bezos's assets, then take their money instead?
I hear this muddy defense of billionaires every time anyone tries to compare the wealth held by the working class vs. the ruling class, and it's pure BS.
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.
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).
you fail to see that their net worth is dependent on everybody else’s actions: if the combined shareholders of their companies start selling for whatever reason, what happens to musk’s net worth?
the only way that rich people are rich is because other people want to get rich on their succes and that’s why they buy in. regardless of the real value produced, net worth is much like influencer reach.
No, this is true for most random people. My net worth is largely tied up in assets like my car and house - if everybody else decides these are worthless, because I live in a "bad neighborhood", or if they decide that they prefer new cars way more, I stand to lose huge proportions of my net worth.
This is no less true for the average person. If the real estate market in your area crashes and you own a house, your net worth would crash through other peoples collective action.
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.
Musk is kind of a bad example. Something around half of his holdings in Tesla is currently tied up as collateral for loans into other ventures. Most of the rest of his net worth comes from his ownership of SpaceX, whose valuation is incredibly skewed by the small number of shares that have ever transacted. Simply put, I am not actually sure if he could buy a 787 with his assets right now if he wanted to.
The comparisons are still good if we look at a "normal billionaire" (Let's say Charles Koch) with "only" $65 billion dollars (but they are much more diversified and fungible). The example of him buying a 787 and wrecking it would be the equivalent of me burning $10k. But some of the elements on this page don't work right when you use that few of billions to compare against.
Musk is rich, because government takes money from poor people, and gives it to Musk! I am not allowed to buy normal cheap car. I have to choose between expensive Tesla or bike! Government will even give $20k to Musk for every Tesla!
Could, but almost certainly won’t, and I say this as someone who is unabashedly actively working to take advantage of the wealth building opportunities available in the US. Most people would be extremely lucky if they manage to break $1m by retirement (if they even get to retire).
That's cute, but these measures of "wealth" are misleading in a subtle way.
The way articles like this and most popular media portrays it, people like Jeff Bezos are wealthy because they are hoarding money that they somehow extracted from the productive economy and diverted to their use by nefarious means. Like fairy tale dragons perched on their pile of gold and treasure at the top of a mountain, lording it over the poor peasants in the village down below.
When in reality, someone like Bezos or Musk is "worth" their billions of dollars only in some theoretical sense, based on the notional book value of their ownership of the immensely productive and valuable compan(ies) they built. This is entirely abstract - they could likely not sell their share for cash. But more importantly, it generally represents wealth that truly has been "created" - in 2000 there was no SpaceX and no Tesla, and now there is, and they're 'worth' $800 billion dollars, and Musk "owns" a large fraction of that. But this is entirely wealth that was created from zero through the creation and organization and leadership of these companies. It wasn't taken from anyone, taken from workers or consumers, or diverted from the economy. It was created out of thin air!
In the same way the dragon hoarding their loot wields immense power over the peasants (strained analogy, I know), having immense amounts of wealth accessible allows for one to wield immense amounts of influence. Just look at what is happening the last few weeks. Basically explicitly buying favor with the government.
> If you earn $25 per hour, Musk makes that equivalent in passive investment returns every 58.400 seconds (assuming a conservative 5% annual return on his wealth).
(450,000,000,000 * .05) / 365 / 86400 (seconds/day) = $713.47/second.
You'd have to work 28.539 hours at $25/hour to make what he makes passively in one second.
Put another way, your annual income working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year without time off, (40 * 52 * 25 = $52,000) would take him 72.89 seconds or 1.21 minutes to achieve passively at the conservative 5% annual return rate.