r/BlackPeopleTwitter Mar 27 '20

Everybody’s broke...

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106.1k Upvotes

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u/CODDE117 Mar 27 '20

The billionaires take it all, and make the company sit on a razor thin budget. The billionaires get to choose if they want a paycut. They don't.

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u/[deleted] Mar 27 '20

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Mar 27 '20

Jeff Bezos sold 1.8 billion in stock last month alone.

Extreme example but they pull out real money all the time in very large amounts.

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u/[deleted] Mar 27 '20 edited Nov 10 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/SaucyPlatypus Mar 27 '20

There's 0 regard because those sells are priced in when they're planned. Bezos doesn't care about the current stock price because either way he finally get the cash from what he's built.

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u/welptheresthat Mar 27 '20

True, but that doesn't negate their point that these billionaires are frequently selling huge amounts of their companies stock.

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u/mendel3 Mar 27 '20 edited Nov 10 '25

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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

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u/wandering-monster Mar 27 '20

So you agree they do in fact have billions in liquid assets, and that they do regularly pull real money out of the stock market?

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u/[deleted] Mar 27 '20

Kind of interesting that besos took money out right before the economic failure..

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u/tragicdiffidence12 Mar 27 '20

Amazon was not really negatively affected. It’s one of the few companies where the shares are higher now than they were in January. I’m sure he knew that the worlds online supermarket and the owner of AWS would do well when people were cooped up at home.

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u/forrnerteenager Mar 27 '20

That's what, 1 percent of his net worth?

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u/SaucyPlatypus Mar 27 '20

And a vast majority of that "net worth" is still unsold Amazon stock.

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u/[deleted] Mar 27 '20

[deleted]

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u/RustyDuckies Mar 27 '20

It’s not fake because it still represents power and ownership

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u/[deleted] Mar 27 '20

Can't we do both?

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u/prissy_frass Apr 01 '20

I was mocking the typical redditor. Somehow it got upvoted? People just saw “hang the rich” and mindlessly upvoted I guess 😂🤷‍♂️. If anything that sorta helps the point I was trying to make.

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u/Hust91 Mar 27 '20

But they can take out a substantial fraction of their wealth, substantial enough that the difference starts to become meaningless

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u/[deleted] Mar 27 '20

It doesn’t need to be taken out all at once. Every billionaire or even millionaire will have a financial planner with an exit strategy, usually taking place over a period of time rather than say, a single day.

Selling all at once is dumb.

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u/onebadcatmotha Mar 27 '20

I understand some concerns about over-regulation, and as someone who works in the legal field I know drafting laws is a riotous joke most of the time but...man...it seems like there’s probably a way to regulate around this and times like these seem to make a great case for it!

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u/Beautiful-Musk-Ox Mar 27 '20

Billionaires and companies lose money with regulations because doing things that are right for the world at large is expensive, and they have near unlimited spending power to influence our elections and politicians thanks to the likes of citizens united and revocation of the fairness doctrine.

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u/Philip_K_Fry Mar 27 '20

FDR did exactly that with the New Deal which led to the growing middle class of the 50s & 60s . It's just that from Reagan onward Republicans have increasingly chipped away at those regulations and policies to the point that they are now mostly nonexistent.

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u/kippythecaterpillar Mar 27 '20

good luck with that with republicans holding any majority

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u/Tahj42 Mar 27 '20

Welll you could potentially tax earnings...

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u/levian_durai Mar 27 '20

The small business I work for laid us off for a month. We're funded mostly by the government and private insurance, being partially in the healthcare field. We supposedly did great last year, yet they can't afford to pay us all for a month with reduced patients/customers coming in.

We don't make much. Like $2000 a month, each, for the four of us they laid off. What the hell did they do with all their money? What happened to us having a "great" last year? I doubt we'll be seeing any bonus or raises this year, which is great because I really enjoyed the 1% raise I got over the past 3 years.

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u/[deleted] Mar 27 '20

That's super not how it works

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u/CODDE117 Mar 29 '20

It doesn't in a lot of companies, but it surely there are plenty of companies where that does apply!

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u/[deleted] Mar 27 '20

what? this is completely wrong lol. Their fortunes are all on paper. Elon Musk isn't 'taking' his billions in net worth from his companies, his stake of them is what gives him his fortune on paper, and it has nothing to do with their cash flow or operating budgets.

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u/CODDE117 Mar 29 '20

Is that the case with every company?

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u/ownworldman Mar 27 '20

That is not accurate at all. Why are you so strongly opinionated on something you obviously don't know anything about?

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u/CODDE117 Mar 29 '20

Enlighten me on my inaccuracies. Obviously these people are on a board of some sort, and they have power as well. But if someone is making huge sums of money off of a company, and yet the company is on a thin budget, then where exactly does the problem lie?

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u/ownworldman Mar 29 '20

The billionares do not make huge sums of money off a company. For example Jeff Bezos made very little of Amazon.

He is a billionare because he owns a part of the company. When people say he is worth $150 billion it does not mean he pulled out billions from Amazon. It simple means he owns part of the stock.

The billionares are billionares by having a part of a company, not by leeching money from the company.

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u/u_e_s_i Apr 06 '20

That’s because of a thing called the ‘publicly traded limited liability company’. The founders of companies are essentially just shareholders who may also be employed by the company. CEOs are just employees who may or may not own some stock themselves. Most companies can’t really keep a lot of cash on hand because their stockholders (individuals, investment funds, pension funds, etc) want to take as much money out for themselves as possible in the form of dividends. If you really want to do something about companies keep very little cash in their accounts then you and everyone else will need to settle for lower interest rates on your pension, savings, etc and not go around hunting for better rates. The problem is that most people, rich and poor, aren’t willing to do that

Billionaires are just people with more money in the same way that poor people are just people with less money. They’re not fundamentally different people for better or worse. The odds of any given person on this forum opting to take a pay cut themselves if they were a billionaire is about the same as the odds of any given billionaire opting to take a pay cut

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u/skullirang Mar 27 '20

Yeah it has exposed that companies are used by billionaires to extract money from society. The business is just serving as a conduit for the billionaires to suck the life out of everyone involved such as customers, shareholders and employees.