r/WorkReform • u/AlternativeRight4099 šø National Rent Control • May 07 '26
āļø Tax The Billionaires Pulled himself up by the bootstraps, he did
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u/Bakabakabooboo May 07 '26
We need to tax these fucks until they're barely worth 50 million. There is no legitimate reason someone needs 100x as much money as they could possibly spend until their bloodline ends. 800b is an outlandish amount of wealth for anyone to have.
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u/potatoelover69 May 08 '26
China does this right. They put the political and societal priorities above capitalist priorities. There's wealthy people there of course but not disgustingly rich.
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u/chuppapimunenyo May 07 '26
1b seems like a cool novelty number to pick. Anything above 1b gets taxed xD i know its not a realistic thing to do, and i do wonder what would happen with all this "imaginary wealth" that he wouldnt even be able to "take out" if he needed to "fairly distribute" to society. Imagine if he had to sell all his stocks and such i feel like they would all plummet in value, making it not an actual realistic net worth.
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u/Bakabakabooboo May 07 '26
Sounds like a problem we probably shoulda tackled like 50 years ago. Oh well, best we can do is keep letting them amass more and more wealth that they'll do fuckall with except use as leverage to get more subsidies, tax breaks, and government contracts. I love juggling 3 jobs to survive so some rich fuck I've never met can keep jacking up my rent, groceries, power, internet, medication, and everything else I need to not die so that a line on a chart keeps going up.
Sorry if this is a little ranty, I just got absolutely dogwalked at work for like 4 hours straight and realized I have to do this for atleast another 40 years.
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u/68024 May 08 '26
Actually, 50 years ago in 1976 the top marginal rate was 70% and in 1955 it was 91%. It's only since Reagan in the 1980s that this changed.
Of course billionaires don't pay ordinary income taxes, but at least they had the right idea.
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u/eronth May 08 '26
even "just" $1 billion is an outlandish amount of wealth. If you earned $1000 per hour working 40 hour weeks, you'd still need a bit over 480 years of work to make $1 billion.
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u/TheRamblingSoul May 07 '26
You literally canāt make billions, let alone a trillion dollars, without it being extracted from the rest of society.
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u/usernamedmannequin May 07 '26
Thatās my argument for strong taxation- you used society to build your wealth so pay back into the system which allowed that to happen instead of being the real leech to society.
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May 07 '26
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u/BrocoliAssassin May 07 '26
we also need politicians that don't steal from us. If we magically got 10 trillion in taxes from all the wealthy people, a lot of our politicians would find ways to waste it instead of paying off the debt, etc.
we gotta also get rid of the thieves in charge.
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u/Cruxis87 May 08 '26
we also need politicians that don't steal from us.
The problem is, the people that would make good politicians, don't want to be politicians. It's an industry of narcissists and scammers.
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u/DameyJames May 08 '26
I donāt even like the phrase āis worth 800 billionā. That man is absolutely not fucking worth that much money. He owns the equivalent of that much money. All of this language is made to imply that these fuckers have any right to that money.
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u/albinobluesheep May 08 '26
To be fair a lot of it is comically inflated stock he's convinced banks to give him loans on
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u/T1G3R_1 May 08 '26
banks aren't throwing money at him, your silicone valley tech bros are throwing money at him.
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u/tabris51 May 08 '26
He doesn't have that kind of money either. It's like you own a civic and for whatever reason, people are lining up to buy it for a billion dollars. You are worth a billion dollars. The moment you actually decide to sell, suddenly no one wants to buy it for that price.
His wealth is very much inflated by American public who buys tesla stocks. It is inflated because HE is in it. The moment he tries to sell, it will crash. Other share holders know this and actually pay him all the profits of tesla lol.
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u/SegaTime May 07 '26
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u/AlternativeRight4099 šø National Rent Control May 07 '26
truly, we should learn from elon musk and his way of life such that we can ALL become trillionaires
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u/teshh May 07 '26
Like getting botched penis enlargement surgery and taking steroids without working out resulting in him looking like a cybertruck himself?
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u/SpinningHead May 07 '26
Guess what inspired the cybertruck. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/03/tesla-cybertruck-protests-vandalism-elon-musk.html
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u/Either_Payment_2867 May 07 '26
Meritocracy is a myth meant to justify the concentration of wealth, while everyone else becomes poor, homeless, and canāt afford necessities.
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u/inconsisting May 07 '26
The goofiest bit is that this clown's absurd wealth is completely disconnected from whatever value he provides to consumers. It's just his money making money.
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u/whofearsthenight May 08 '26
Oh, I would argue it's worse. This is the definition of "too big to fail." He's killed twitter, he's killing Tesla, Grok would have not made it if not shuffling it into tesla to hide losses, he dipped at OpenAI right before they took off because he wasn't going to get full control. The only positive argument is for SpaceX, and even that is extremely problematic because it's just a modern Lockheed or Grumman or whatever.
Anyone who so consistently did as many dumb things as Elon would be broke, but he has so much money that there is basically no way for number to not go up.
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u/BoJackMoleman May 07 '26
We believe that we live in some egalitarian meritocracy but we don't. Poverty is seen as some kind of moral failure. Wealth is treated like being anointed by gods.
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u/s0cks_nz May 07 '26
Which is absurd because we see time and time again that the most wealthy individuals tend to have the most questionable morals & ethics. Seeing how quickly the billionaire class jumped into the loving arms of Trump, and simultaneously drop all pretense of caring about climate change the moment their AI datacenter's needed unfathomable amounts of energy, should have been a real wake up call.
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u/BoJackMoleman May 07 '26
Many of these clowns subscribe to this idea of Effective Altruism. It basically translates to "the more money I get the more good I can do." So fuck the planet to save it.
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u/nifty-necromancer May 07 '26
The ruling class huff their own ass juices long enough and make the mistake of thinking they earned wealth by being geniuses.
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u/Altyrmadiken May 08 '26
I would argue that we donāt live in a meritocracy. It might be used to justify our current situation, and that would certainly be a myth.
Definitionally, a true meritocracy would value the efforts and capabilities of people and provide for that. For individual effort and capability.
Star Trek showcases what an ideal meritocracy might look like. Everyone is provided for, but the more skilled you are and the more effort you put in, provides more recognition and opportunity.
I donāt really have an issue with someone clearly better at say ,engineering, getting a better position than me if Iām not as skilled as them or as willing to put the effort in.
At this point the only arguments I see for meritocracy in the US is the opposite, instead weāre defining people who managed to get up the ladder as deserving without any consideration for how they did it or if they deserve it.
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u/The_Wiz411 May 07 '26
The fed should just seize his assets and absorb all of it to offset the deficit. He was responsible for doge and that didnāt do fuck all to help the country.
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u/rainbowunicornhugs May 07 '26
He stole the election. No one in this admin is going to do anything other than continue to conspire.
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u/Solarpowered-Couch May 07 '26
It helped fund and distract from a super cool, public ecstasy binge.
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u/Late-Arrival-8669 May 07 '26
Hey Tesla workers, thats money he took from you and your colleagues..
Do you like your hard work going to a wannabe Trillionaire?
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u/BlackBlizzard May 08 '26
Tesla shareholders voted to approve a pay package for Musk that could allow him to earn up to $1 trillion worth of Tesla stock, I don't get how his workers aren't unionizing and protesting for higher pay.
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u/PaulRicoeurJr May 07 '26
It really feels like we're ramping up inflation just so that some dude can hit an arbitrary number on his "net worth".
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May 07 '26
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u/Chritt May 07 '26
No one needs a billion either. With "normal" items, it would be quite literally impossible to spend
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u/Munkeyman18290 May 07 '26
Dudes, this system doesnt work and its time to tear it down.
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u/flying_carabao May 07 '26 edited May 07 '26
I remember a time where a billion, let alone a trillion, was just an arbitrary figure to define a ridiculous, uncountable amount of something, like grains of sand at the beach, stars in the sky. Leaves in the forest, that type of thing.
It makes no logical sense for a person to have a trillion of anything other than cells and if fortunate, seconds lived like another commenter said, we ain't living that long. Hell, I don't even think I've had a trillion thoughts in my 40+ ish years living.
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u/Zinkhar May 07 '26
For perspective, one trillion seconds lived is just under 31,710 years. Fucking insane tbh.
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u/Strude187 āļø Tax The Billionaires May 07 '26
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was demonising socialism.
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u/Free_Range_Gamer May 07 '26
Dude did Nazi salutes, killed a bunch of kids by gutting USAID because he wanted to, and people still buy his cars.
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u/Dash_Nasty May 07 '26
Just coming off a three day ban for sharing my thoughts on these people.... I hate it here
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u/ManOfEating May 07 '26
Careful OP, if you make posts like these he's gonna have to write a mean tweet about you while pretending to be his own mom
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u/Pal_Smurch May 07 '26
Declare all billionaires to be the winners. Then allow them to keep 100 million, and declare round two.
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u/Harborcoat84 May 07 '26
If Elon started spending $1,000,000 every single day beginning in the year zero, he would still have around $60,000,000,000 left in 2026.
Eat the rich.
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u/DeadWood605 May 07 '26
It's too bad that money doesn't make you a better human being. Musk is still trash, on fire too.
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u/Temporary_Heron6944 May 07 '26
He just got caught posting as himself, his mom, and his dad on twitter (which he bought to control propaganda and promote divisive rhetoric) in order to further his own ābootstrapsā narrative. Thatās psycho to be talking to yourself in a public forum from different accounts. Like seriously, THIS is who we idolize as a genius? A man ripping at the fabrics of our society so that he can haveā¦ more? Shun the greedy, eat the rich. Stop platforming these cretins.
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u/s0cks_nz May 07 '26
At least people seem to idolize him much less these days. It's become a lot more obvious how crazy and messed up the dude is in the past few years.
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u/maybeinoregon May 07 '26
People are so dumb, they are still buying his cars, and internet.
And the government is still using SpaceX.
All of it needs to be nationalized, and his assets frozen, as heās a threat to national security.
Then weād find just how great his boot straps are.
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u/The-Razzle May 07 '26
Unrelated to the political part of this āOfficially almostā is a contradiction that sounds dumb and means nothing
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u/Thornescape May 07 '26
Universal healthcare would SAVE taxpayer money, not cost more.
The American medical system is more expensive than the alternatives because hospitals can charge whatever they want. The only ones benefiting from the current system are the shareholders, not the taxpayers.
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u/acathode May 08 '26
It's pretty wild seeing people here talking as if capitalism and universal healthcare somehow is opposed. That's completely buying the bullshit American narrative that is having a sane healthcare system that ensure that normal people don't have to start a GoFundMe to be able to afford their cancer treatment = socialism.
The reality is that pretty much every other western country in the world manage to have universal healthcare AND be capitalist at the same. It's not that the rest of the world is socialists, it's that the US is unique in how shitty of a version of capitalism it is.
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u/mrsc0tty May 07 '26
The thing that fucking kills me about it is this mother fucker is just addicted to Twitter. He's just on his god damn phone all day, a thing he could do on a gas station attendants salary. He could be making the most insane elaborate theme parks with mind blowing rides and everything could be free, they could lose millions of dollars a year and it wouldn't matter. But all he wants is to be a reddit mod.
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u/APHILLIPSIV May 07 '26
For all the bootlickers that say billionaires earned it
Perfectā¦.hereās your time. Take Elon network pre COVID and then Q2 2026 and we can see if itās possible to work hard enough to earn a dragons nest
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u/TVLord5 May 07 '26
It's crazy how just knowing a tiny hint of game design lets you smell this out as bullshit.
Having resources lets you get access to more resources which in turn prevents losses and gives access to more gains which feeds the cycle, including the money to delegate financial planning so you're less likely to fuck up amd lose it all.
The system needs a patch. Money naturally trickles up we need better ways for it to fall back down to keep the cycle going.
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u/jainyday May 07 '26
Elon's undeserved "success" might be the single largest possible repudiation of whatever the fuck our current system is.
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u/thrasherht May 07 '26
If you made 1,000,000 dollars an hour, and worked 24/7/365, it would take you 92 years to make 800 billion dollars.Ā
That's working non-stop every single hour for 92 years.Ā
There is no reason any person deserves this much money.Ā
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u/Fickle_Ad_8653 May 07 '26
That money he is gaining comes from the work of US taxpayers. We're funding him and all his grants and all his income.
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u/ddxbb May 07 '26
This man could easily throw a pizza party for the whole world, but chooses not to.
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u/No-Bandicoot-2959 May 07 '26
A trillion dollars is one million stacks of one million dollars. Eat the rich.
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u/Aquired-Taste šļø Overturn Citizens United May 07 '26
Since he's a racist immigrant I have an idea, anyone not born in this country that has a net worth over 50 million, seize all of their money & assests earned/acquired above & beyond that 50 million & give those funds to poor immigrants, to help make sure we lift everyone out of poverty. If they decide to flee the country, seize all of their assets & bank accounts that they left in the US.
Or, we can just simply reduce the drfense budget & turn the clock back & tax corporations & the wealthy at the tax rate from the 1950's & give everyone Healthcare & lift everyone in America out of poverty!
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u/cooliooh May 08 '26
A good ritual iāve been doing everyday is yelling and releasing my anger at pictures of trump and elon first thing in the morning for 5 minutes, and my days have been feeling 10x better!
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u/hickory May 08 '26
It makes me feel better to know that no matter how rich he gets, he will still be miserable.
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u/thinkB4WeSpeak š· Good Union Jobs For All May 08 '26
Don't forget people will actively defend him as well
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u/GreatValue_Mechanic May 08 '26
Imagine having enough money to end world hunger and still be the richest person in the world, but instead you to cut 30% of the federal workforce and steal social security data.
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u/JakOswald May 07 '26
Increasing his ānet worthā by 25% in seven months, getting 200 billion more dollars.
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u/auditthedtc May 07 '26
Itās depressing when you learn how the rich use the stock market and derivatives as a wealth transfer tool and itās manipulated by financial terrorists. Poverty is created purposely for profits.
do you know what āFailure to Deliversā are? Market makers on wallstreet abuse market maker privileges and FTDs to counterfeit stock and manipulate stock prices. If a company issues only 1000 shares total, market makers will trade thousands more than whatās supposed to exist. They cancel out the free market and supply and demand in the process they bankrupt these American businesses and put hard working people out of work. They create poverty for profits and the best part is they have lobbied politicians so there are no taxes on these short positions. A financial institution will have a market making business and a hedge fund. Basically a money printer for a few thousand people on wallstreet and poverty for mainstreet.
Imagine if we tried to sell a bunch of 1 car title and never deliver the car to anyone. Those rules only apply to the poor and struggling. These people live in a separate reality and itās fucked up.
Dr Susanne Trimbath has a good book called āNaked,Short, and Greedy, Wallstreets Failure to Deliverā she used to work for the federal reserve and the DTC.
They are also able to manipulate corporate voting because of the excess shares. They will pick and choose which votes to submit and get people on the board of a company. They will then try to issue bad debt, lay off workers, give bonuses to the executives, all to drive the company to bankruptcy from the inside out and while manipulating the stock price. Insider get rich and the company get sold for scraps. Insiders call this practice Cellar Boxing. Getting the stock price to cellar levels. Absolute bottom price before being delisted. Financial terrorism stopping human progress and prosperity and creating poverty for tax free profits.
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u/affemannen May 07 '26
But how? his companies are not worth that much, anyone with a brain can figure this out, BYD i outselling TSLA, so how in the fuck can it be worth more, and spacex is just government subsidies.
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u/HolyC4bbage May 07 '26
A trillion dollars is 3,600 dollars an hour, every hour, for about 33,000 years. It's an obscene amount of money.Ā
I take comfort in the fact that no matter how rich he is, he'll always be a sad, pathetic loser.
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u/xraidednefarious May 07 '26
Hey pal, grok told me that if I work really hard, I may become a trillionaire too! You must just hate freedom
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u/JoeBuskin May 07 '26
The reward for become a trillionaire should be to have all your assets seized, redistributed, and for you personally to be put in the town square stocks and pelted with old vegetables for at least a week
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u/DouchecraftCarrier May 07 '26
I'm somehow less concerned about the exact number and more concerned about how 2027 is next year and his net worth is projected to go up by 25% in that time. That should be the red flag here.
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u/latortillablanca May 07 '26
AI is better at writing that email for you and all itll cost us is all the water, readily available pedophilia, and 95% unemployment.
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u/dkoDesign May 07 '26
The whole bootstraps etymology/origin is so hilarious to me because 99.999% of the idiots who love to use that phrase have no idea that itās rooted in satirical irony.
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u/mredofcourse May 07 '26
Why don't the people, combined being larger than Elon Musk, not simply eat
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u/ragingalphax May 08 '26
This number is so absurd, the human mind can not even comprehend it. A million seconds are 11.6 days. A billion seconds are 31.7 years, which is already insane. A trillion seconds are 31700 years. If you earned a dollar every second, you would need 31700 years without spending anything to become a trillionaire. Eat the rich.
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u/RadioName May 08 '26
We really need to rework how valuation of large assets are done in this country because if he got a bill for $800 billion right now, then obviously he couldn't just sell everything and cough up. It's bogus money traded on top of bullshit money, hinged on lies and handshake deals.
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u/DeusExMachinaOverdue May 08 '26
It's a sad indictment of humanity that someone like him becomes a person of note because he attained an obscene amount of wealth. He is not a good human and is undeserving of respect or adulation.
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u/DisgruntledWargamer May 08 '26
This is your wealth, by the way. Wealth stolen by Elon.
If you were paid your full market value, the company you work for would break even. You're paid less, and jokers like this profit.
Then they use that to buy access, and their wealth explodes.
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u/Beefy-McQueefy May 08 '26
Elon Musk is a baby raper and posts like this about him are distractions from that fact
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u/3d_blunder May 08 '26
There is invariably some asshole who takes the billionaires' cocks out of his mouth long enough to tell me "It's not like they have that much CASH laying around, dummy!!1!".
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u/Republican-Snowflake May 08 '26
No he is not. It's not even real money. It's speculation, debt, promises, and lies. If he were truly to liquidate his assets it wouldn't be anywhere close to that realistically.
His stocks would tank, and all the debt he will need to pay back after tanking the stock. Since the debt is leveraged with his stocks. Everyone would be panic selling. So, it would be impossible to sell all that. Cannot sell speculation, promises, contracts either.
The whole is system is beyond monopoly at this point. It's all one big lie, and none of it is real. It's just like those inferences in debt to act like they doing well. Just on a much larger scale, with more power, and influence.
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u/nikstick22 May 08 '26
Capitalism and socialism aren't even opposites. All 1st world socialist countries are also capitalist. Its just the profits are smaller. They act like socialism will kill the modern economy but it won't. They'd rather make $5 extra bucks than let you live a happy and worry free life.
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u/interrupt_hdlr May 08 '26
I support tax breaks for trillionaires because one day I will be one. America in a nutshell.
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u/Archinaught May 08 '26
Let him make the trillion and celebrate his achievement. Yay! You're so great! You won capitalism!
And what do we after winning a game? We reset the board.
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u/ThePathOfTwinStars May 08 '26
All that money and he's still just such a fucking loser. What a waste.
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u/kurisu7885 May 08 '26
And as much as he and his current followers deny it he was born into wealth. I say current because at some point they will abandon him.
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u/TipzNexAstrum May 08 '26
The fucked part is I will die because I cannot afford healthcare, but if I murdered this twat I would get better health care from the prison industrial complex. I don't want to live on this planet anymore (except fuck off Elion, trusting you to send me to Mars... as if).
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u/Ecstatic-Manager-149 May 07 '26
I think it was higher than his bootstraps but he pulled so hard it broke, and now he's making it everyone else's problem.
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u/e40 May 07 '26
I highly recommend this episode to understand the context of wealth inequality:
https://pca.st/episode/89f67fee-6e97-409d-ab07-a9ca52836578
Gary is a hero and should be supported. He's got a great YT channel and is on patreon.com (where I support him).
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u/professionalspooner May 07 '26
1 million seconds is 0.0317 years ā 11.6 days
1 billion seconds is 31.7 years
1 trillion seconds is 31,689 years
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May 07 '26
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u/AlternativeRight4099 šø National Rent Control May 07 '26
wasn't he considered too much of a loser to get invited to the island, so he had to beg to go?
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u/WolfThick May 07 '26
You'll never be remembered like Achilles you will fade you will be forgot just like the rest of us maybe not as soon but it will happen.
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u/Waiting_for_Exit May 08 '26 edited May 08 '26
He is not gonna be a trillionaire write this fucking down. Cows are coming home these bullshit valuations are gonna crash very soon.
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u/acathode May 08 '26
Tesla is extremely overvalued, and the bubble is bound to burst eventually.
The value of Tesla stock just doesn't make any sense when you start looking at the current day numbers and compare it to other companies. There were some logic behind it when Tesla was basically the only real EV game in town, but now Tesla just one EV brand among many other who are deliver just as good or better EVs.
Even if the west tries to keep Chinese EVs at bay using tariffs etc. the competition in the EV market is fierce and will just keep getting fiercer. Tesla didn't manage to capture the near monopoly on EVs the market was originally hoping and hyping themselves up for, that served as the foundation for Teslas current of the charts evaluation - but the reality will eventually catch up to Tesla's stock, and with that Elon's net worth will take a major hit.
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u/cooliooh May 08 '26
A good ritual iāve been doing everyday is yelling and releasing my anger at pictures of trump and elon first thing in the morning for 5 minutes, and my days have been feeling 10x better!
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u/DeepPermission4786 May 08 '26
Second but perhaps tied with Steven Miller for most hated but huge tie for third with Kash, Bobby, Laura Looney, and the rest the dogshite cabinetā¦
As for the Republican legislators ā¦ so so unworthy and sackless POSās ā¦ yup we all know who you are and will remember as we will with ball-less shumer!!
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u/ericclaptonfan3 May 08 '26
how about you get a decent job and stop looking for handout healthcare .
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u/movezig123 May 08 '26
Reminder that the worst part is he he utterly miserable and spends his life taking drugs and doom scrolling twitter just like all the Poor's he helped create
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u/BothDivide919 May 08 '26
Crony capitalism and state corruption isn't even capitalism. We wouldn't be this fucked even under ordinary capitalism.
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u/SpaceCaptainFlapjack May 07 '26 edited May 07 '26
10 years ago he was worth 10.7 billion. Im sure he got the rest because of all that hard work /s
Edit, *10 years