Forbes did the math once and determined that Smaug, a dragon embodied by greed and selfishness, is worth $62 billion. There are 17 people richer than him.
Smaug was shot in the heart and it was a morally good act.
I'd be willing to bet that Smaug caused less death and destruction than many (if not most) billionaires
Fyi that math was heavily contested, i agree with the sentiment but a literal mountain full of gold, assuming the market wouldnt crash, would make him the richest person on the planet.
We don't actually know the size of the hoard, though. We know it's big enough for him to sleep in it, and we know the Arkenstone was worth one share of it, but we don't have specific numbers (at least, none I can see). Any valuation has to be an estimation, and any estimation will be contested.
Also, the value of gold today is 75 times that of what it was in the 1930s, which makes it even harder to put a price on Smaug's hoard.
Regardless of the specific number, there is a certain level of wealth and greed that makes it morally good to shoot someone through the heart. Smaug is not the only one to have hit that threshold.
Bard the Bowman was to blame. He gave love a bad name.
We should probably deal with them sooner rather than later
Tax them. Kill them. Whatever order
Asking this on lemmy is like asking a pack of wolves if they enjoy the taste of lamb. You already know the answer you’re going to get…
Is ok to ask for an AMEN now and then.
Billionaires shouldn't exist; no one needs that much money. They should be taxed until there are no more billionaires.
I think they're bad for the economy. Money has to circulate. Every time a billionaire throws another million on the pile, they make things worse for everyone else.
This is a view we don't see often enough. Everybody is into hating billionaires the way teenage girls hate the super-hot cheerleader. All they do is complain that it's not "fair" for somebody to be so rich. There's not enough discussion of the purely mechanical reasons extreme wealth is bad for the economy, not to mention the corruption opportunities it creates. The ultra-rich don't spend their money, they just exchange it to trade big blocks of asset ownership back and forth. None of that money ever gets spent on a loaf of bread or a bus ticket, or a GI Joe with the kung fu grip. It essentially disappears from the economy. I don't think most people even comprehend how that works - it involves more thought than reacting to memes.
They literally steal work out of the system like a parasite. As you say, we shouldn't be envious, but fix the problem with the money leaking away.
Tax them.
I don't support violence at all. But for every mentioned woodchipper, this scene from Tucker & Dale vs Evil is mandatory:
It's why we invented the gulliotine
If you invest in the sp500, you'll have something around 8% return per year. This is highly variable year by year, of course, but in the long run, that's what you can expect to average out. You can do better than the sp500, but generally not without accepting higher risk.
With those returns, you will double your money every 9 years. Roughly. It's going to vary by decade. 2000-2010 was flat, while 2010-2020 was unusually good.
If you max out a 401k, HSA, and IRA on this strategy from a young age, you should have millions for retirement. If you're a millennial or younger, you're going to need a million or two (at least) to have a reasonable retirement.
How do you turn that into a billion? Doubling every 9 years won't do it in your lifetime. Not unless you started life as a millionaire and never withdrew a dime until you were 90. Starting with $1000 and doubling every year for 20 years, consistently, would do it.
How do you double your money consistently for 20 years? Either extreme luck or doing something extremely shady. Probably both.
In other words, they are not the genius captains of industry that right-libertarians want you to believe. They got lucky or are deeply unethical or both, and they do not deserve your respect. Most likely, they deserve your disdain. Every one of them.
It's not so much the money, the wealth in itself, that bothers me about them, it's the mind boggling absolutely insane amount of power having that much wealth is capable of.
They literally buy elections, they buy media outlets, by their actions they buy the direction entire countries take. They use their money to fund the actions of others that work on their behalf. They can create a literal army of individuals to work for them towards whatever end they wish to achieve. That's entirely way too much power for an individual or a family to have. Just imagine living next to someone who has a 500,000 strong army of militants just hanging out. Maybe theyre good, maybe they want to turn your neighborhood into a warzone for kicks, either way you would have no means to stop them.
Just look at smoething like the "tea party" movement in the US. Grassroots? No, try Koch brothers funded with the intent to install Koch approved representatives into the government.
In the words of the next post on my feed: Boil ‘em, mash ‘em, stick ‘em in a stew
Bill-ion-aires!
Look at this visualization of how much money Jeff Bezos has, and then tell me that it is reasonable and justifiable.
They would serve a greater use to humanity as compost
Billionaires shouldn't exist.
There should be a hard upper limit on wealth somewhere around the $100 million mark.
An amount where you can still invest your money risk-free at ~1% above inflation and live a life of plenty without lifting a finger, forever.
Any property, company, or thing in general worth more than $100 million should never be owned by one person alone.- I think wealth should be capped at a few million or tens of millions. Too much wealth hoarding keeps money out of circulation at the consumer spending level, which is bad for the economy in general, especially lower income people.
- Without knowing anything about a person and how they became a billionaire, I have no opinion on them individually. Jumping to conclusions about someone based on the group they belong to (like say, a black guy walking down the street) is bigoted thinking, no matter who the target is.
I've always liked the idea of you can get $999,999,999.99 after that 100% tax rate and you get a plaque that says "Congratulations, you won capitalism"
I feel that eventually somebody will crack the problem of how to reward people for beating capitalism. Various zillionaires have said that at some point money ceases to be a motivating factor. They're driven by other things, and by the time they personally become super wealthy they've already achieved all the things that are going to benefit society. Further wealth accumulation beyond that point wasn't their goal, and I really don't think a wealth cap would deter those people or deprive the world of their achievements at all.
Asking this question on lemmy is like going to a Linux comm and asking if it's a good idea to switch from windows to Linux. You're preaching (asking?) to the choir.
That said, eat the fucking rich.
Which Linux though?
Depose.
Billionaires as individuals are just humans with all the good and the bad coming from that fact. Acting against them as individuals is pointless. We need to establish a system where becoming a billionaire is impossible in the first place.
At least in most democratic countries you can't just bribe the politicians legally. That helps a lot.
Wealth tax that goes directly to funding a billionaire audit program. It should create a self-perpetuating cycle that means IRS audits for all of them every year.
Yes this could fix it. But we're here because of the exact same reason that if that law was magically on the books, it'd be rewritten or repealed almost instantly.
Used to think: wow they've got a lot of money. Untill I grew up and realised it's not money they've got, it's estimated net worth. It's hard to turn that into cash.
If they got there by making a company that other people now value a lot: impressive.
If it's a royal family member/inheritance/..., less impressive.
Overall: don't think about it often.
Untill I grew up and realised it’s not money they’ve got, it’s estimated net worth. It’s hard to turn that into cash.
I used to think that, too. But just because its not cash doesn't mean it doesn't still translate to wealth or power. They essentially park their money in investments, liquidate when they need to, but otherwise use their assets to extract further wealth exert further influence.
Oh, yes. But at a certain point it stops to make sense to count.
Baradar is the leader of the taliban. He can walk into any afghani home and take whatever and whomever he wants.
He has no repercussions, no need for exchanging net worth for influence. What's his net worth?
At least, where I live, he isn't allowed to take anything without a warrant. I value those things more: freedom to live, freedom to express, freedom to fart in front of the most of wealthy people.
Let others play their "maximizing net worth" game.
Why would you want to turn ownership of a country-sized apparatus that acts solely in your interests into something as motionless as cash?
Ideally they'd be taxed into no longer being billionaires.
Realistically we probably need to violently remind them who holds the actual power before this becomes a reality.
It billionaires exist then there is a problem in the system. Billionaires are a bug, not a feature.
Tax, kill, eat. In that order.
I don't eat meat, so I'm not that into eating them. I'd advocate for composting instead
Psychopaths
they're by definition a cancer in society
They are subsidized by our government. Truly. The broken system created Elon Musk and now the broken system allowed him to buy a presidency for $134 million. Cheap, for him.
How? That is how much the system has devalued American labor since 1981.
They need sanctions proportional to their wealth. And checks and balances. The less they can play the system, the better.
If a monkey hoarded more bananas then it could ever eat in its life, to the detriment of other monkeys around it, those other monkeys would kill it, and if they didn't, scientists would, to see what was wrong in its brain.
Not before ripping it's face off and maiming it's genitalia. Honestly, it's too good for em
They're a cancer on society.
Fuck em. Instantaneous lead poisoning.
Bait used to be believable
We need way less of them or way more of them. The wealth gap needs to be closed and I don't care which direction.
they look delicious.
I don’t have an opinion on billionaires specifically. I don’t care if they take home a billion dollars. What I do care about is the ratio of top earner income with median income. It should never exceed 10-30%
Should, and reality are a couple orders of magnitude separated.
That is what the graduated tax system should be fixing
What a funny thing to ask on Lemmy.
I prefer mine well done, and grilled to perfection personally.
Give them an award saying "Yay, you won capitalism!" then force them to retire and enjoy the rest of their life without ruining any more people's lives.
NG+, take away their money and have them start over again, but without help from their rich parents or with the odds stacked against them somehow.
If they truly work so hard that they deserve all that money, they'll have absolutely no issue earning it again.
Like most parasites, they have an important place in the ecosystem.
Ticks for instance are a source of food for several species.
It depends on the billionaire.
They need to regularly take a shit, like everybody else. They just use more expensive toilet paper I suppose.
Haha, those silly billionaires are just like me! Haven’t we all bought an election or two?
Except at their offices where they but the thinnest 1 ply air they possibly can.
Medium rare with a little bit of butter and thyme.
Honestly, I try not to think about them. It's an inherently selfish and self-serving class and they've got enough money to pay people to think about them, so I'm not going to do it for free.
If anything, I have ever so slightly less problems with billionaires like Gabe Newell (Valve ceo) since he's doing something constructive (proton/steam deck) that, while it does absolutely help line his pockets, is still helpful to people who play games.
Though on a moral level I personally feel not allowed to like him because he's a billionaire. That sentiment is spread across all billionaires for me. Either way, in general I don't like them because 99.9999999% of all billionaires do as much as possible to fuck over literally everyone else.
I feel like there are billionaires in the world who manage to be rich without damaging society (or being the society).
If there's one example then there's no excuse for all the others to behave the way they do..
If all billionaires are the same then it's past time to question why we have to put up with them
The easiest way to identify enemies of freedom and liberty. Count their net worth.
Seems logical if there was a law that the average worker had to be paid a percentage of what the top people get paid. I thought that Japan had something like this.
Same as that guys from yesterday. I would prefer a guillotine, but You gotta work with whatcha got.
I'm always thinking about how bad humans are when thinking about numbers rationally. Of course we understand what a "billion" is, we know how many 0's it has and can do basic mathematical operations on it. But how much is it really? One of my favorite analogies for putting it in perspective is seconds.
A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds is … 31,688 years.
The analogy already breaks down, because while most people could understand 12 days and a lot of adults can understand 31 years for having lived it (some even twice or more!), 31,688 years is completely incomprehensible again. How many human generations is that? All of recorded human history is only like 5,000 years. It’s utterly, mind-numbingly insane. No trillionaires, ever! No billionaires!!!
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/17/business/elon-musk-richest-person-trillionaire/index.html
This was published on September 17th of this year, after most of the nonsense of Twitter and utter things. He’s still on track, by 2027 no less.
In terms of scale, from the person at the top making xxx times the person at the bottom, they've likely always been around.
"Robber Baron" is the ye olde term.
Google tells me John D. Rockefeller peaked at around $1.4 billion in 1937. 1.5% of US GDP.
https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=47167
The average wage in 1937 was $890 a year.
https://time.com/archive/6760420/personnel-above-average/
So Rockefeller, at his death, had amassed as much wealth as 1,573,034 average people would earn in a year.
In order to hit 1.5% of current US GDP (27.36 trillion), Bezos or Musk would have to hit 410.4 billion. That's how wealthy Rockefeller was.
1.2 Musks. 2 Bezoses.
Not good
Fuck 'em all to death.
Too much power
Conflicted. I'll give you my top 4 considerations.
- Pro 1: The reason a lot of these folks become billionaires is because they are able to sell an idea and execute on it. I think that's admirable. I think it's aspirational. I think that is part of the human condition.
- Pro 2: Additionally, they're billionaires because society made them billionaires. Often, they founded a company (or got in on the ground floor), then issued stock to investors. More and more investor's piled on. It's a bit like winning the lottery, only that you (the aspirational billionaire) have some effect in the outcome. Again, I think this is part of the human condition. Civilizations, tribes, companies, whatever you call them, for some bizarre reason that I personally don't quite grasp, prefer to have a leader, or at least will defer to one.
- Con 1: Many people can be millionaires. It's not easy, but with the right vision, gumption, financial know-how, time and a bit of luck, someone pursuing this effort can do so. But, it takes a certain kind of person to be a 100+ millionaire or even billionaire. I think we have enough historical evidence of the type I'm describing - greedy, predatory, manipulative, aggressive, sociopathic. These traits can flourish in business, but I don't think that these are traits that we should encourage in society as a whole. It gives me some gratitude that, for every 1 megalomaniacal billionaire in the world, there were 1000s of lookalikes who flailed.
- Con 2: Rent-seeking behavior and loot dragons. Nothing pisses me off more than a self-entitled dumbass whose entire being is resting on the laurels of a family legacy. I think once the great person's first generation passes, that most of their remaining horde should be returned for the public good. While I do think a certain amount should be endowed to the next generation so that they are equipped to pursue their own marvel, I do think society resources made these people and society should be able to take them back.
Don't know them, don't care about them.
Is this a joke topic?
Leeches. Fuck em.
Abolish with prejudice
in the (translated) Words of Knorkator:
The world doesn't need billionaires imagine how beautiful it would be without you! Empathy and reason instead of greed and scam fresh air, green forests, clean seas.
The world doesn't need billionaires and we will even achieve this without guns: No, we won't kill you and we won't imprison you, on the opposite: you will be millionaires!
I support billionaire behaviour fully
Their an abomination. An exploitation of a system that values exponential growth more than inherent human values. In a world where public infrastructure is collapsing and there's homeless people on tbe street, individuals should not be able to amass such absurd wealth only for their own self enrichment.
Wealth tax that goes directly to funding a billionaire audit program. It should create a self-perpetuating cycle that means IRS audits for all of them every year.
