• nonentity@sh.itjust.works
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    12 hours ago

    Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.

    Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but trillionaires should be forced to transition into billionaires, and billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.

  • whotookkarl@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    11 hours ago

    Humanity is disgusting for us to allow this to continue to get to this point. It’s an obscene thing to have happened and is one of many stains on our history as people & will be pointed to in the future as evidence of a dark age. Imagine discovering an alien species and then learning they are capable of the same depravity and carelessness as people.

  • benny@reddthat.com
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    12 hours ago

    In other news, the billionaire mind disease mutated today into the trillionarie mind disease.

  • melsaskca@lemmy.ca
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    22 hours ago

    This carrot here? Why I’ll let it go for 50 Billion dollars. Yup, I value that carrot at 50 Billion. I guess I’m a billionaire! Let’s ignore the smoke and mirrors and look at how many white south africans have emigrated to america under the trump/musk presidency recently.

  • chunes@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    1 million seconds is 11.5 days.

    1 billion seconds is 31.7 years.

    1 trillion seconds is 31,688 years.

    This is an affront to decency, morality, ethics, and humanity. It cannot be allowed.

    • krashmo@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      If you have a retirement account or an index fund you are one of those cunts

      • baggachipz@sh.itjust.works
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        22 hours ago

        Not yet, the S&P backed off their fast-track and it won’t be able to go into their index funds for 90 days. But Tesla is already in there, so 🤷

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        24 hours ago

        You can direct your provider to invest however you personally feel comfortable. But it’s incredibly boring for most people to have to administer this and the whole point of a pension fund is you don’t have to worry about it. Otherwise I might as well play the stock market myself.

        A lot of pension managers now are starting to become increasingly wary of AI and “fledgling startups” that have been going for 20 years and have still yet to generate a profit

        • fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works
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          12 hours ago

          Its been a total pain with in any 401k I have had. Just point to index funds. Borrow against to take it out temporally or invest more.

      • timochka@lemmy.zip
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        1 day ago

        Not me; I contacted my pension fund last week to move it entirely out of equities and into bonds & cash.

        Which is no guarantee, but… I’m not close enough to retirement that this would normally be sensible, but I know I’m close enough that I’d never earn back the losses from the mother of all crashes that is riding into view on the back of these IPOs (and the “I can’t believe it’s not a crime!” changes to index rules to fast track this nonsense into trackers, guaranteeing that pension funds and the like will be left holding the bag.)

        • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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          18 hours ago

          Personally I would advise keeping money out of AI just generally anyway, not on any moral principle but simply because everyone knows it’s a bubble. No one wants to be left holding the bag and you could end up with a less money than you had to begin with. Over long enough time periods risky strategies like that aren’t worth it.

          So you might as well get out of AI in the long run it will probably save you money.

  • nomad@infosec.pub
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    1 day ago

    Let’s normalize calling him a theoretical trillionaire. Economics tells us that the only way to determine the price of something is to auction it. But the price is determined at the moment of actualized sell, not at what other people payed for similar objects.

  • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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    24 hours ago

    No it doesn’t because he doesn’t get any money from the IPO, he gets money from selling the shares, the initial evaluation can be whatever the hell it wants to be.

    The best he can do with this is use it as collateral in order to get a loan to by a helicopter, which he could probably already do, so nothing’s really changed for him.

    • ReptilianCleric@lemmy.zip
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      21 hours ago

      So the borrowed money that came from nowhere isn’t real because they did enough sleight of hand that the literally real bank balance doesn’t actually exist because it isn’t real money.

      Got it!!

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        21 hours ago

        Like most rich people his wealth is purely theoretical. If I needed to demonstrate my entire wealth I could just extract it all from my bank account, but a lot of his money is based on perceived worth of his businesses, which of course don’t really have a value because they haven’t been sold to anyone and in many cases haven’t actually generated a profit.

        So basically the IPO is saying that if the company was sold, it would be worth x amount of money. But of course we don’t know that, and unless he actually sells the business, he doesn’t get x amount of money.

        This is what people mean when they say we are in another tech bubble, companies are getting massively overvalued for what it is even remotely conceivable somebody would be prepared / able to pay for them. So you get stupid headlines like this that say that Elon Musk is a trillionaire, even though he has substantially less than 1 trillion dollars in his various bank accounts. In terms of actual dollar amounts he probably has 10 or 20 million at most. Absolutely not chicken feed by any stretch of the imagination but also not more money than most countries GDP.

        • JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz
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          18 hours ago

          A lot of wealth is based on perceived/theoretical value. Most of it, in fact. Let’s say you own a car or a house, their value is based on what someone else is willing to pay for them, but you can’t know how much that would be before you do. Heck, even bank notes are technically just “worthless” IOU’s backed by a government.
          That doesn’t mean your net worth is zero just because you don’t have cash on hand.

          Shares are (in reasonable sale quantities) more factual, because they are essentially based on buy offers: if you have one SpaceX share, you know it’s currently worth exactly $160.13, because someone has offered to buy it for that amount.

          And this is entirely ignoring the fact that you, like Musk, can turn the “perceived” value into “real” value extremely easily - it’s called a loan. Musk got a cool $13 billion one back when he bought Twitter.

        • ReptilianCleric@lemmy.zip
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          21 hours ago

          Really? Go buy a fucking president. I’m not kidding. Cause if you can’t, your “theoretical” money is literally able to but things you’d be killed for suggesting.

          So fuck you. Fuck you for defending the fact that thousands of kids are going to start starving to death so this soulless cockwart can LITERALLY take that money away from the parents. Fuck you for defending using resources that should keep Americans alive to kill babies in countries I’ll never see.

          Fuck you for wanting to be one of them.

          • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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            17 hours ago

            It may be too late but it would probably be a good idea to quit the drinking, your remaining brain cells will thank me

    • betanumerus@lemmy.ca
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      18 hours ago

      No one ever trades in all their shares for whatever it is you choose to count as “money”. By your count, there aren’t even any millionaires.

    • krashmo@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      That doesn’t stop him from borrowing real money from real banks using this supposedly imaginary stock value as collateral. I’m sure he’s more than happy for people to call it fake news while he buys yachts and islands and surrogate mothers with that money.

  • realitaetsverlust@piefed.zip
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    1 day ago

    Who even gives a shit at this point. It’s almost laughable. The stock market creates money from thin air without any sensible valuations anymore. Could be a decidillionaire at this point and nothing would change.

    Governments should really find a way to tax unrealised gains. Then this fiesta would end quickly.

    • mysticpickle@lemmy.ca
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      1 day ago

      Governments should really find a way to tax unrealised gains. Then this fiesta would end quickly.

      They already do for a lot of middle class people. They’re called property taxes and they’re reassessed regularly (usually up) based on change in market value and not realized gains. We need something like that for billionaires.

      But you know, conservatives think taxing rich people is unpatriotic and stuff :>

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        18 hours ago

        Well the arguement they always put forward is something about trickle-down economics. Essentially the rich people will spend their money which will benefit the local economy.

        Accept of course it doesn’t work because rich people don’t spend money in the local economy they spend it in Monaco. Who’s economy I don’t care about.

    • iopq@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      My man, my stock market portfolio could go up when Trump tweets about a deal, get hit by a huge tax, then I won’t have the money to pay the tax when it turns out there’s no deal

      • krashmo@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Taxes can be variable depending on income, net worth, number of children, nipple circumference, or any other measure we decide to use. Don’t talk about them like you’re in the same category as Elon Musk because there are very few categories in which that is true.

        • iopq@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          But they never just pass a tax that only affects the wealthy. I ended up paying AMT one year because I had capital gains. I think that’s ridiculous because it was meant to affect only rich people and I had a one time windfall

  • bigbangdangler@reddthat.com
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    1 day ago

    You know how you can put something on eBay for any amount of money? Of course it won’t sell if it’s priced too high, but the price can be set however.

    Then people with random items go on eBay. They see their item priced at some exorbitant level and make the jump: “this thing is worth so much money!” Even though it isn’t worth that. It never sold for that. Someone just picked a number.

    Starting to feel like this is how valuations work.