Imagine how different the world would be if billionaires competed to solve problems instead of competing to become richer. What a world that would be!
To be honest, I think the billionaires think they are solving problems. I also think that they believe if they had the money they could do more good with it. They are obviously wrong.
Every billionaire is also an undiagnosed narcissists with delusions of grandeur.
I had this vision of the military. Imagine a natural disaster like a tsunami is about to strike the Middle East. Here comes the carrier force and they start launching what looks like tomahawk missiles. Instead of blowing people up on the ground they open up in air and drop rafts and life preservers. The military has shown up to save countless people instead of murdering them.
National guard? I think that’s them?
Yes, along those lines only the major force(Army, Marines, Navy, Air Force, etc.) would be like a nation wide coast/national guard that goes around helping nations out in times of disasters. In-between disasters they could act like a worldwide corp of engineers improving areas that need it.
Why do billionaires despise efficient uses of money?
Because they think they know better than us hoi polloi. Seriously. There’s a psych term that escapes me, but once a person gains wealth and power, they think they know better than the rest of us and the rules don’t apply to them.
One of the most horrifying things I know about humans is that almost all of us are susceptible to this and it’s not simply a matter of people kissing their ass, though that certainly “helps”.
One of the most horrifying things I know about humans is that almost all of us are susceptible to this and it’s not simply a matter of people kissing their ass, though that certainly “helps”.
This doesn’t have to be true. I have explained to one of my kids when asked why I don’t think the rich are good people.
Me: Well, what would you do with a billion dollars?
Them: buy lots of toys
Me: ok, after you have bought all the toys in the store, what would you do?
Them: Buy toys for all my friends… Well maybe they could have the ones I’m not using. Buy a house? Buy you a new car?
Me: What would you do after you had bought all that and still have almost all of the billion dollars left over, since a billion is so huge?
Them: um, buy houses for the people that don’t have houses? And food for the people that don’t have enough food?
Ultimately I believe that to have a billion dollars for any decent length of time you are probably a bad person, because even a kid’s instinct is to use that money to help others’, even people they don’t know.
While wealth might make people bad as you imply, I think an equally valid option is that good people don’t stay wealthy because they use the money to help others.
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Okay you have to be a troll, but just in case you aren’t: If poverty was caused by “low IQ” (which btw IQ is correlated with education so that’s a circular argument even if true) rich people who are dumb wouldn’t exist.
“low IQ”
Read their username. They’re obviously a troll, probably piloted by an LLM.
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sources?
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the IQ is not a valid test of mental aptitude just like the BMI is not a valid test of physical aptitude
Imagine having an iq of only 105, bragging about it, and spouting iq-justified nazi shit
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Thanks fcr confirming how lamely average you are
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mid
Troll account.
poverty does cause theft. Frater, examine yourself and improve
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Criminal Tribes Act Thinking, this is just racism
Because they don’t actually have the money. The value of their holdings are used as collateral on loans. They use the loans to pay for their expenses and are just constantly in debt. This avoids all tax consequences for them. And it is fucking stupid.
i learned a new word kiting the other year, it sounds like thats why rich people do.
When oligarchs do kiting, it is called “circular financing”.
they like to hoard it, and use other peoples money thats why. thier net worth is actually in thier stocks/investments for the most part.
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2/10 trolling; nobody is this stupid.
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No, unless a company releases new stock options that are diluting the value of the current shareholders, the money doesn’t go to the company, it goes to the shareholders that sell the shares. Their money doesn’t create employment, it realises the capital gain of other investors. And companies don’t want to dilute the shares as their sole purpose is to increase shareholder value. And even though they sometimes do, it’s pale in comparison to stock buybacks which are exactly the opposites, removing money that could be used for R&D or for workers and raising the imaginary value of their company by inflating investors shares.
It’s not their money. These people have 5 aces in their hand. They cheat and then instead of golden rocket cars, they buy the media, our politicians, and secret compounds where they brainstorm how to dismantle democracy and start cults.
It’s just that the cheaters that top the leaderboard also know how to play the game, so they overlap legitimate investors and business owners. Musk and friends don’t need to cheat every hand because the deck is already stacked in their favor.
That’s not really how it works though. The money you pay for stock goes to the person you bought the stock from not into the company to pay the employees
A man cannot develop and maintain a product that made a billion. He has to employ people. And if he does not exploit them for their surplus labor value, he CANNOT become a millionaire
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To become a millionaire, you need to exploit your workers for their surplus labor value ie. be a thief.
Dealing with investments and the stock market is like going to a casino. Unless they inherited legacy accounts, they made their money gambling.
Cuban is probably the most obvious example. The man placed a risky bet on shorts and won. Gallway, for all his faults, discusses the luck factor that he stumbled into based on someone else’s gambling failures.
They don’t see money as we do. It’s the control in the price of items and buying power where the real value is at.
These sort of control freak cultists have existed in human societies since time immemorial. They have, can and will always find ways to exploit everyone.
Last year was religion, yesterday ideology and today it’s finance. None of these things in a vacuum were meant to debilitate humans until these same people rigged the system.
Future humans will be condemning our capitalist ways like we do feudal societies. They won’t see the difference.
Correct (when it comes to billionaires; Sam Altman and his ilk intentionally caused the RAM shortage by buying RAM their companies are not using and should be held accountable).
Billionaires would be impossible in a properly civilised society, which would implement progressive taxes so that anyone with a wealth above, say, ten times the median wealth of the population or 25 times the wealth of the poorest person (citizen or not) in the nation (whichever’s lowest at the time) are taxed to the point that their wealth can increase no further, with the resulting income being invested on public services so that personal wealth is irrelevant except for luxury items.
Quit making perfect sense. You’re making the capitalists nervous and ruining the hopes and dreams of all the Questrader’s out there. /s
I get what he’s saying, but billionaires don’t have “billions” in “banks”.
Just because it isn’t hundred dollar bills in their mattress doesn’t mean they don’t have it. They can leverage what they own in exchange for goods and services equivalent to the value of their holdings, the exact mechanism doesn’t really matter.
We just watched musky light $500,000,000 on fire last month they clearly got the liquidity.
The crazy part is, thats the equivalent of me buying a combo at Wendy’s.
he also spent an additional 1bn to stop the documentary from being released, now ellison holding the rights.
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No, it’s that they invest their money so it makes more money. They leverage the wealth being liquid to make more. It’s the real dividing line between wealth and not.
You can’t really invest $200 in your bank account and expect anything. First of, you need that to spend to live.
The only actual cash billionaire I can think of is the guy that created and sold Minecraft. That dude has billions in the bank. Or at least he did for a minute or two before I’m sure he invested a ton of it. All the other billionaires just own billions worth of stuff for the most part. Banks don’t even leave money in banks. They invest or loan out all of it and keep the returns. That’s the scam, same as it ever was.
It’s not really a scam to move your cash into non liquid assets for financial security. How you got there could be a product of a scam but (going off of a previous comment I made a few days ago about how they buy assets and hold their money in those) typically, after you have a certain amount of money, one can only figure boredom kicks in and that in-turn, would most likely create a sense of frivolous spending or seeing what you can hold in forever items with absurd values.
Paintings, Collectable Cars, Mid-Century Clothing, Collectable Foods (ikr), Historical Properties (that sometimes get sold and then they re-coup losses through making the historical property profitable…sigh, creating a historical society with the goal of recouping losses). …
Nah, I meant the banks are the scam. They hold your money in a low interest rate savings account. Then they loan out your savings account (on paper at least) to someone at a higher interest rate and so on. Every bank for the longest time was a big old house of cards that only held up as long as no one moved too much money at once. I get what you are saying about wealthy people wealth acquisition, though.
Whoever downvoted this: For example, if you purchased a… Idfk a Rolex watch and it gained value over 40 year and you kept it pristine condition and never wore it and sold it at auction, is that a scam or just market fluctuations? Is it a scam that someone would pay twice as much at auction for a watch that due to others opinions gains market value or just ridiculous?
It’s no one’s fault or a scam that an item in the future gains value. Is it a scam that a video game system can become more valuable in 20 years or just a product of opionated market value?
It’s not fucked up to have nice things of value. People put payment plans on nice things that they may choose to keep in pristine quality for decades before it gains value and sell it at auction, is the person who did a payment plan for the item and has an item of value that gains value over time more fucked up than the person who can buy the same item outright to do the same?
It’s the fact that people who are stupid rich do it but if I, a person in financial poverty does the same, through a payment plan I’m a fucking idiot for not saving money.
So when does it become okay to buy nice things at a ridiculous value to have financial security in non-liquid assets? When, in your opinion does it become okay to buy a nice piece of jewelry or a nice painting and storing those away properly until they gain more value?
I mean shit people collect baseball cards and wait until they gain value. It’s such a normal thing, to hold value in assets.
People have this contrary view that billionaires actually have all this liquid wealth, yet that same money living in the stock market is fake. And this causes no cognitive dissonance.
It’s not “fake”. They can liquidate. Bezos liquidated 10 billion in stock to push his cock-rocket vanity project over the finish line. They can do it when they want to. The same way they can do it to pay taxes, if we make them. No, it’s not “fake money”.
I think we should extract the water from Sam Altman’s body and use it to cool a datacenter
The blood could also replace the motor oil in my car. Use all parts of the Sam Altman.
Eat the rich.
Use all parts of the Sam Altman.
The purpose of the Nose-to-Tail approach is to show respect to the animal. Are you trying to show respect to Sam Altman?
I have a better idea, we use his joints to make collagen fleshlights
I knew there’d be folks in here claiming it’s “fake money.” They can liquidate when they want to, it’s not “fake.”
Not only is it real money when its invested, typically the rich can just borrow against those shares instead of having to liquidate anything to pay for things.
For example when they need $40b to purchase a website or media corp to use so they can have better control of the narrative, they just get a loan because everyone knows they’ll be able to make the payments, instead of selling enough shares to tank the thing that inflates their networth beyond all reason.
They can liquidate part of it. If they liquidate all of it then most will disappear into thin air.
If you’re Elon Musk and own a large part of Tesla and SpaceX and you sell all your shares, both companies crater HARD.
Just remove stock from anyone who owns over 1% of any publicly traded company and nationalize all index funds’ assets (yes, that includes retirement funds). Problem solved.
Or just cap total wealth at ~5 mill, indexed to the median income so there’s no need for legislation like with minimum wage.
They don’t even need to liquidate. They can just take a loan against it like they already do.
No
That’s the thing; the billions don’t sit in a bank account but in the
stockbetting market. They would be heavily taxed otherwise.Just tax unrealised capital gain then. A progressive tax too so small investors wouldn’t really be penalized much.
I would be ok to rent my RAM to this guy. Of course it would have a price. We are in a democracy and market is free… Right?!
This is something you can do right now. It does not benefit you.
He bankrolled a longevity company called Retro Bio to the tune of $150M. It’s lunacy and the money would be way better spent by the NIH as tax dollars.
Sam Altman doesn’t know how dumb terminals operate.
the catch is that those billions are not even real for the most part.
Damn maybe unused ram really is wasted ram
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valid
The billionaires think they are already doing “good for the society” by having their money invested in companies and stuff
They really do! Bezos can simultaneously pat himself of the back for bringing us cheap consumer goods, more fuel efficiently delivered than all of us driving to the store, all while pumping out his personal CO2 emissions and treating his employees like slaves.
One notable exception is Bezos’ ex. She carefully doles her billions out to causes her team researches so as to continually grow her fortune and have more to donate. Sustainable philanthropy! To have that kinda money and not let it go to one’s head is very, very unusual in a person.
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Refuting your inane statements would be a full time job, but it’s not my job.
Having critical thinking and an analytical mind prevents you from caring about others now?
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Well you can do good and have a lot of money, I mean I think the biggest problem is that they’re unable to do it without having more income in the process. Maybe there aren’t as many as we’d like to think but I hold the naive and simplistic hope, that humanity over profits will exist in a future billionaire.
The rich person dilemma of: If I help everyone, I won’t have any money left. Doesn’t apply to people like musk
The 2,000$ stimulus checks we got before covid… That shit went to groceries, appliances, new cookware and clothing…
I didn’t pick the most fashionable clothing, the most expensive cookware, the most expensive grocery store or the best of the best with appliances but I used that money on what I needed and you know what it made me realize:
$2,000 goes fucking quick. I’m not defending the superduper rich but I am saying I can partially understand how if you just give and give and give to every cause in society, if you were worth like 10mil and your assets were already declining with no substantial gains to recoup the major net losses. eventually you hit the point of: If I help everyone who needs it, I won’t have any money left to survive and as bullshit as it is that it would likely be that way for someone who has that much money, there’s a weird understanding there and maybe it’s the growing up in capitalism that the thought of, “If I keep giving I won’t have anything left for myself,” mindset is even alive in me but I think it’s survival and I do fully understand and appreciate the difference between survival and greed.
I hate to even say it like this but the people making the least don’t give to the people who have hardly anything every single time. Like someone who’s working a minimum wage job isn’t going to give to the person begging on the street with a cup asking for spare change or even saying what it’s for, every single time. That’s because if you did that every single time, you most likely would start running out of money.
We can all agree though, once you have enough money to where you’re building your own space exploration company… give the dude begging 500$ and walk away. Like if you have so much money you can open a suitcase, throw the money up in the air let it fall and make snow angels with money… fuckin’ redo some hospitals and schools. Do something other than keep looking at the dollar signs.
Two points to counter what you said here.
First, Harris Rosen put a program in place for a neighborhood and changed the lives of a generation in a generation. He had enough money after to do it again.
Second, while $2000 USD is nice for you, but goes quick, there are 6 countries in 2025 where that is at least 4 years’ of median income, and about 67 (!) where that is at least a year’s median income. That $500M Elon blew trying to subvert democracy could have given 250k people enough security to actually try to change their lives for the better instead of just surviving.
Carefully targeted funding can make a difference in nations with a high cost of living, and can impact even more people while requiring less discrimination in areas with a lower cost of living.
You mean 2,000$ in a different country where 2,000$ makes a difference, right? Where in the US is 2,000$ going to make a difference? Where is that going to change a life? The national average of rent is 1,175$ unless you’re on section 8 or have a rent controlled apartment at a severely lowered percent, that’s not going to do much in way of housing. Food is bullshit expensive it took 4 grocery trips to use ¼ of that 2,000$.
Unbranded lowest brand names clothing that are considered unbranded like Gildan (my favorite) are going up every 4 months. Temu clothes are total shit. …
… If this was 1996, 2000$ could change a life…
2000$ to 250k people in 2026 is not going to significantly change a single life in the US.
A high cost of living means the prices are higher meaning the money goes quicker… You’d be spending money on gas or transportation getting to cheaper areas…
That is specifically what I said, yes. It would take more money, and longer, to make a significant change in America, but as the example with Harris Rosen showed, it can still be done.
It’s not underused if they’re running windows with a few tabs open in chrome with sites that have similar ram usage to chatgpt… 😅
Wasted in terms of bloat maybe in some cases, but it is being “used” 😅
This is patently untrue.
Billionaires have myriad investments because, unlike us non-wealthy plebs, they have a critical mass of wealth that can easily make greater wealth by flinging it around. They rarely keep all that much in cash because cash is static and stupid to them. It’s the only money that isn’t working for them to make more.
Which is why they look down on us for chasing money needed to live and survive. Because we have to use silly pleb levels of money that we can’t even invest.
Salaries are for suckers is the phrase.
Billionaires have myriad investments because,
no they do it for the tax deductibles.
Both. It’s tax free and earns then more tax-free money.
All the incentives are there.
I disagree. No person needs so much surface to leave, people to care for their need, exceptions to the basic rules of leaving together. They can keep the money but leave in 100m2 max, buy your food, take the f…king bus.
You’re saying you disagree with what billionaires do, and not the factual statement of what they do and how they talk about us being foolish non-billionaires, right?
They are human beings. No human is an enterprise nir need so much. I’m not against who they are, I am against what they think they are.
