Yes, that includes Gabe Newell and the Costco guy.
Gabe proves there are less-bad billionaires though
Newell and Sinegal (Costco) prove that some billionaires are able to brainwash people into believing that they’re good people instead of believing their wealth could be redistributed to those in need instead of being used to buy a yacht collection. As long as there are people starving and homeless and the climate crisis is a thing, there will not be a single billionaire that isn’t an evil piece of shit.
Newell and Sinegal (Costco) prove that some billionaires are able to brainwash people into believing that they’re good people
Except that’s not what happened here and I see Gabe N get shit on on Lemmy a lot so I don’t know why you think you need to preach to me.
Because you’re the one calling them “less bad” when they’re consciously making the choice to accumulate unfathomable amounts of wealth while people around them are starving and can’t afford to have a roof over their head.
Newell is less bad. It’s not my fault you’re too simple minded to understand shades of gray so I’d rather not hear about it
If someone agrees with you there are no good billionaires but adds a slight caveat, you could probably be less abrasive and just move on with your life instead of arguing and potentially pushing people away from your point of view even further.
Exploitation is exploitation is exploitation
Eh, I feel like everyone in the billionaire club is playing a slow game of poker trying to get the first “trillionaire” title. I’m expecting that when Gabe shows his hand it will be revealed that his fleet of yachts is also equipped with luxuries such as nuclear armaments.
Gabe’s net worth hasn’t increased as far as I’m concerned. I think the bad billionaires would typically be those who obsess with growing their net worth assets.
I don’t care to hear about any reasoning about “bad” vs “good” billionaire nonsense. There are people in the world that need immediate access to food and shelter, but won’t get either largely due to billionaire cunts hoarding the wealth to try and get a top score into the history books.
It’s a class of people that shouldn’t have come into existence. Their being is a strain on the rest of humanity and nature in general.
I’m not defending all billionaires, but there is nothing wrong having net worth of at least a billion because the assets came from your own company. What is more questionable is how can someone go over one billion worth of assets.
The reason they got that money in the first place is because the company charged the customers enough to generate that profit, they could just as well have cut their profit and made that billionaire a multimillionaire and all customers would have kept more money in their pockets.
They also make the decision to accumulate this wealth instead of redistributing it to those in need, that’s a conscious choice that they make.
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While, Brian Thompson may be the exception, after The-Man-Luigi-is-taking-a-fall-for was done with him of course.
Bill Gates? Mark Cuban? (Although I can’t remember if he is a billionaire or not)
They are both pure evil.
I’d argue they’re “less worse” but the fact remains that no one becomes a billionaire without exploitation. Bill Gates owned a monopoly and I’m honestly not sure what Mark Cuban did. At some point and time you must exploit a system and it’s people to amass that much wealth.
I’ll say Bill Gates monopoly sucked, but didn’t represent anything like Amazon warehouse conditions or generally other terribly exploitative behaviors. He basically won the lottery of being in the right spot in a tech industry to be the benefeciary of a lot of money being freely thrown at him without him having to resort to typical billionaire measures. Sounds similar for Mark Cuban.
No, he didn’t “win the lottery”. He was a monopolist who engaged in anti-competitive behavior for years. Went to court and everything, case closed.
He can’t donate more than the total he stole and destroyed by deadweight loss.
Monopolistic tactics.
Cuban is what would have happened to Musk if he basically just took his money and walked away after Paypal. Cuban sold a website to Yahoo and the deal is arguably the worst deal (for Yahoo) of the dot-com bubble.
Billionaire is a pathology as far as I’m concerned.
Forbes sometimes publishes lists of good billionaires:
General strike is the best and most effective means we have. If we wait for AI and robots to replace you, you loose your bargaining power.
Crash the fake economy. Your fucked either way might as well go down swinging and on your terms.
When you do it, I’ll do it. But I’m not wasting my life if it’s not a community effort.
Been on strike since the election. Come join me!
My industry doesn’t strike. It wouldn’t work. BUT I hope that all works out for you.
However, striking only works for so long. And, with Trump as president, I doubt there will be much striking allowed once he changes those laws or just replaces you with people from the concentration camp.
Fill in the blanks:
A ______ billionaire is a good billionaire.
Expropriated
Former
Luigi’d
That wealth is the spilled blood of the working class
money is both power and violence
A million seconds is 11.5 days. A billion seconds is 31.7 years.
Just a good way to ground an unimaginable number in something more familiar and drive home how ridiculous having a billion dollars is. I hear we’re on track for our first batch of trillionaires this decade.
A trillion seconds is 31,688 years.
This is actually great! Welcoming your example to my now collection of two, alongside Wealth, shown to scale.
And then there’s that Tom Scott video
I hear we’re on track for our first batch of trillionaires this decade.
Unless we do something about the wealth, this is kinda expected eventually. Give it another decade after that and it would be wholly expected to have our first multi trillionaire, and honestly they wouldn’t even need to do anything to make that happen, they’d just need to invest in a board market ETF.
I’m not saying this is good, but this was inevitable due to how the markets and inflation work.
Edit: Also it will probably happen sooner than anyone realizes when you take into account private unmeasurable wealth like Saudi royalty.
Yup. Show me a billionaire who has paid their workers fairly from day one, followed every single law and regulation by the book, never spent a single dollar on lobbying Congress or contributing to political campaigns for quid pro quos, and never used underpaid contractors or foreign slave labor. You can’t, because there’s no such thing as a good billionaire.
I don’t have a problem with open lobbying per se. If it’s on behalf of all of the workers and customers as well and not just their own interests.
But can anyone identify such a billionaire?
And by definition that rules out any that step on their workers like bugs…
Yes, even that one
Taylor Swift?
Nope. That amount of wealth is only generated via exploitation. Exploiting workers or exploiting customers, or cutting corners and skirting regulations, failing to internalize externalities. Mostly all of the above
I assume you have examples?
Unless her financials are public, it’ll be hard to do but the general principle is that everyone’s labour is worth the same.
She’s able to get more money through manipulation, whether intending to or not, through her fans buying multiples of her merchandise, to playing her songs on Spotify non stop to boost her profits etc.
Applying this principle, she’s gaining profit from the work of her fans who aren’t getting any compensation for their labour, resulting in millions of dollars.
So the defining factor is her work, not her staff. Her staff doing the same work at another place wouldn’t generate the same profit. And if you think listening to songs on Spotify is work…
I love how swifties always say, “WhAt AbOuT tAyLoR?!”
And I say this as someone who loves her music.
She’s still a bad billionaire.
EVEN IF she paid everyone who works for her or her label above market rate, even if she charged her concert tickets below market value, even if she “goes green” with every CD, every piece of merchandise, the fact that she has more money than most people makes her a bad billionaire.
She could easily give half of her wealth away and still be okay.
She’s a bad billionaire.
Some people think all profit is “stolen” labor value, and thus all wage labor is exploitation. I don’t think that’s true, but it is true that all for-profit firms have an incentive to pay their workers as little as possible, while getting as much productivity from them as possible, because that will maximize profits.
For-profit companies also have an incentive to cut other costs as much as possible, to maximize profits. This is why we see things like shrinkflation, planned obsolescence, or products just getting gradually crappier over time.
For-profit companies also have an incentive to externalize certain costs, like pollution, environmental destruction, or resource depletion, to, once again, maximize profits.
Where do you think that wealth comes from? They don’t produce it. The workers create the value, which is stolen from them for the owners and shareholders.
To be fair to Taylor she is producing a show, but the wealth should be fairly distributed with the crew that make those performances possible
Where do you think that wealth comes from? They don’t produce it. The workers create the value
This is such a deeply unserious argument when used in this case. “I can’t wait to see the front of house guy!” say all the wine moms and 14-year-old girls waiting in line outside the stadium. “And the road manager too!”
Fuck it you’re right. She can lug her own shit around and set the stage and work the sound system. That’s why she earns billions!
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What about Warren Buffet? Out of genuine interest.
He disowned his granddaughter for having the temerity to appear in a Johnson&Johnson kid’s documentary about how the rich talk and act behind closed doors.
While he certainly comes across as one of the more virtuous billionaires, his company Berkshire Hathaway, has massive investments in some of the worst and most damaging industries in the world, in terms of labor exploitation and ongoing contributions to the climate disaster. For example, his company owns 6.6% of Chevron and 27.2% of Occidental Petroleum, two massive exploiters of fossil fuels. That’s no good in my book.
The guy who founded Costco and was its CEO up until a few years ago is this, if not very close. A business lauded for both how it treated its workforce, and its customers. Basically no turnover unless someone retires.
And even then, if they managed to amass that kind of wealth, it had to come from somewhere, i.e. consumers paying enough for their product that it made them a billionaire, meaning all these people found have paid less and that billionaire could be a millionaire or just middle class and more people would be richer.
That is kind of true. But on the assumption that the corporation (in this case Costco) is doing more good than bad, like generating fair jobs, it would benefit most to see that business grow. If you dont generate profit because you distribute everything to your employees or customers, you will never be able to grow. So Costco will stay with 10 employees forever and only those businesses that exploit workers and customers can grow.
You could argue that there is really no need for businesses to grow as big ss many are today and I would completely agree, but that has to be regulated by law.
Non profits are a thing and they are able to grow, hell, you would expect them to grow more because less money goes to the pockets of a CEO and more goes to growing the company.
It can also make profit without billions going to the pockets of a single person, if that money was just redistributes to all employees the business would probably grow even faster because more qualified people would want to work there and would be happier working there.
Three scenarios:
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The company makes 100B in revenue, pays its employees a fair wage, distributes 5B to the C-suites and makes 50B in total profit
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The company makes 100B in revenues, pays its employees a fair wage, distributes 10M to the C-suites, distributes 9.99B in bonus to all employees and makes 50B in total profit
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The company reduces its prices, makes 95.01B in revenues, pays its employees a fair wage, gives 10M to the c-suites, makes 50B in total profit
What’s the difference?
Hint: there’s no difference except the number of people being treated better
NPOs have CEOs as well and many earn salaries in the millions. NPOs are the exact right example, though, but not for the reason you are talking about. Non-profit does not inherently mean lower-ranking employees get a bigger share.
The big difference is that NPOs dont have shareholders or owners, which is how billionaires become billionaires, by owning companies worth billions.
But you should know that most NPOs rely almost entirely on government grants and donations. They couldnt even survive a single year on their own revenues.
If you want to establish the NPO concept in the free market, you would need to ban private ownership of ocmpanies. It could work but there is no way it will ever be implemented.
Funny how you ignored everything but the non profit bit. The reason they rely on donations and grants is because they’re mostly charities, there’s no reason a private company couldn’t reinvest 100% of its profits and try to adjust its prices to be closer to breaking even. Hell, life insurance for road users works exactly this way around here, prices are adjusted based on how much they need to pay for claims and we’re the place that pays the least for that type of insurance in North America, everything is paid for by car owners and it will covers anyone involved in an accident with a car, may they be in the car or riding a bike or walking on the sidewalk, it’s still cheaper than anywhere else for those who pay for it.
Tell me, from the companies’ perspective what the difference is between the three example I gave? You’re the one who said it’s not realistic to lower prices.
I think you are not familiar with how economy works. No offense, really, Im not an expert either but I dont really have the patience to go over everything in detail. Reinvesting profits is what ALL companies do. What youre suggesting was the opposite, you said profits should be distributed to employees or customers.
The difference between your examples is that 1 is a different company than 2 and 3. They are not different scenarios for the same company.
There are reasons why CEOs earn a lot and you cant change that by telling companies “but why not just give the money to your other employees, it would be better for them”. Thats not how economy works. Im not saying the way things are is good at all, but youre not offering an alternative. What youre suggesting would require that owners and shareholders would give a shit about the wellbeing of their employees and customers.
What a nice non answer that also ignores dividends and wealth accumulation and the fact that profits = revenues - spendings including wages :)
“ThEy’Re NoT tHe SaMe CoMpAnY!”
It’s what we call a thought experiment, the end result is the same, the difference is who gets to keep more money.
I’m done with people like you defending billionaires and being unable to think about alternatives, have a good life.
I think you are ignoring his main question though. Are those not legitimately three different options companies have? Do they not have wildly different outcomes on the workers?
No, companies do not actually have the option to simply cut the upper managements salary by 99.8%. And even if they could, it would simply end in all management leaving the company the next day, the company going bankrupt and all of the empolyees losing their jobs.
Im not trying to defend management salaries in the millions. It is damn unnecessary and should be taxed appropriately. But simply denying that thats how the world works right now is bs.
And even if they could, it would simply end in all management leaving the company the next day, the company going bankrupt and all of the empolyees losing their jobs.
The management would all leave? I wonder how often that actually happens? I’d totally believe never. If you offered the management a lot less money, they could walk, but more likely, only some would walk. And in any case, then you could also promote employees from within the company. I bet there’s a department manager that wouldn’t mind the huge pay increase that comes with a c-level promotion, even if it does come with a million dollar bonus rather than a billion.
If you adjusted salaries slowly, say over the course of 5 years, managers could leave (if they really wanted to) gradually, you’d have time to replace people for a much smoother transition.
-
I like to think there may be, and could be… But I have never seen a great example.
Any individual that wants to horde so much money and wealth that could satisfy the lives of millions of people is not a good person.
It’s like having a million sandwiches and thousands of hungry people around you … but you’d rather keep all your sandwiches and screw everyone else, even though you will never be able to physically eat all the sandwiches you have in a lifetime.
Being a billionaire is not a sign of intelligence, it’s a mental disorder and a person who lacks human empathy.
A billion dollars distributed to 1,000,000 people is $1000.
All the wealth billionaires in the US hold is not enough to pay for the government to run for one year.
Let’s not pretend giving away all their wealth would fix all of our problems.
Youre not talking about running the government, which isnt really expensive, youre talking about the whole country. “10 people cant pay for a whole country of 340,000,000 including all of its infrastructure and industry, they dont have that much money”.
Can you reflect on how fucking ridiculous this statement is?
Whats next? “Elon Musk cant even buy a planet, hes not that rich”
There are about 800 billionaires
“800 people cant pay for a whole country of 340,000,000 including all of its infrastructure and industry, they dont have that much money”, better?
Let’s not pretend giving away all their wealth would fix all of our problems.
Let’s not pretend that assets work like cash.
What makes more sense in a society? One person who controls a billion dollars or a thousand people with million dollars?
The billionaire locks up all that wealth and it doesn’t do anything for anyone … sure it might make someone even more money but it essentially locks away that potential wealth from a larger group of people.
If you had 1,000 millionaires, then they would all go out to perform all kinds of other activities and businesses that would be smaller but at least benefit even more people.
Driving wealth to smaller and smaller groups of people only drives more and more wealth to fewer people while everyone else suffers.
Redistributing millions or billions of dollars might not change much … but at the very least it would be a hell of a lot better than what we have now.
The billionaires have their wealth in businesses, it’s not locked up. People don’t just put a billion in a savings account
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Your argument lacks credibility. If people didn’t like extremes then we’d have similar outrage from those centrists when Elon Musk throws a Nazi salute or when people hurt cops and storm the Capitol building. Instead we get apologists and excuses. Meanwhile protestors of injustice are treated as if they’ve committed genocide caused they hurt a Walmart and people actually committing genocide get excused.
People don’t worry about extremes. They worry about change of the status quo.
Also, the systemic issues within our country and the ability to ignore the system as a whole by the privileged is what gives you the power to say something like “reeorting to violence as a first resort” as if we haven’t had ample evidence of attempts to bring accountability and change to the system that just gets ignored. Not only is it not a first resort but to the people who are suffering daily… Why should they care what level of resort it is? We excuse businesses for doing whatever it takes because “shareholder value” but when it comes to the poor and suffering they just follow the exact letter of the law and then some.
It’s not about extremes and never has been.
Yes but we are letting the companies get this big. But competition whatever. So we could split them back up. And Elon WHY is Tesla stock do high. There isn’t a reason.
I have no problem with splitting up Microsoft or Google, but the founders would still get shares in both companies. Ideally those companies wouldn’t lose value after being split
Modern age dragons, sitting on their hoards while occasionally burning a peasant village to keep those dirty plebs in line.
Well, you know what to do with dragons
Sir/ma’am/other, you are on the internet. There are many responses to that.
Donkey_from_shrek.gif
There are many responses. Not all of them are right
No, they are right.
All the many responses.
Just not right -in this circumstance-
Will someone stop this man from yelling “dragon”?
You know… you don’t really need the qualifier “modern age”. There weren’t dragons in the middle ages or at any period in human history.
Sorry to be that guy, I guess I’m that guy… 🫤
Not to be that person, but most people forget that the net worth oft these people is not liquid. They can not just wave a magic wand and give people money.
It’s usually in shares of their very highly valued company which they can’t give up because they wouldl give up control. Billionaires are not about money, they are about power.
What keeps you in power does not align with doing good. Thus the giving pledge exists, it allows giving away the money while you don’t lose control in your lifetime.
Most billionaires do some kind of philanthropy. Gotta control where the money they would pay in taxes ends up. Even this is about power.
Their survival bias makes them believe that they know best what’s good for the world. Taxing them would just increase their philanthropy, which is a good thing even though not perfect. Let’s start somewhere.
If a company is set up right from the start, you could have voting shares that aren’t stock based, and that can be a way to maintain control of your company without hoarding the wealth via stock, but if it’s not like that from the start, it would be very hard to make that change after the fact.
It’d probably be better if that was more common, but I still don’t think they’d give up their shares worth money on the market, and then I still think these types of shares would have off market value?
It’s usually in shares of their very highly valued company which they can’t give up because they wouldl give up control.
To be that guy, they still can access the wealth provided by those shares without liquidating them. That’s exactly what they do too. They use shares as leverage to obtain loans, and then they spend the loan money. It’s called the “buy borrow die” strategy and they also use it to avoid taxes because loans aren’t considered income.
That is the fallacious paper millionaire argument. They have more than enough liquidity, can take loans against their “non-liquid” wealth, and are anyway working with multi-year plans to sell assets and have enough liquidity. I believe this is also explained in https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/ and there they also explain that the US market cap is bigger than their stocks and so. So they could sell a lot in one go, of course losing “efficiency”, but the market would be able to cope without any issue.
I think we are on the same side here judging from the rest of your comment, but I find it important to refute this typical argument, because it does not help that there is some sort of billionaire apologism by saying that they “don’t actually have this money in their bank account to spend”.
Hoarding is hoarding
If a little old lady hoards 20 cats we call her crazy … a man hoards $400 billion dollars and we call them a genius
You do know that billionaires don’t actually have billions of dollars in a vault in a Scrooge McDuck fashion, right?
Yes there is Luigi showed us the way.
Or just fucking stop consuming like idiots and assholes. You really think shooting CEOs in the street is going to change anything for the better without changing the bad behaviour that those CEOs are still salivating and precumming at the thought of exploiting??
In America, people may have to pay over $1000 a month for health insurance, which may or may not even cover all their medical needs. People still need Bank accounts; cities are built without public transportation so vehicles are required just for the ability to feed and clothe yourself. This isn’t a “consumer” issue, this is a systemic structures of our civilization issue, where the needs of the many are less of a concern to politicians than the loudest voices of the few.
Nevermind lobbyists writing laws wholesale; supply chain management systems owned end to end by single companies; and Wall Street / vulture capitalists destroying companies (and lately hospitals!?!) to extract their wealth.
We need to structure civilization so that Money isn’t the only, single end goal of all endeavors; and we need to ensure that Greed is kept in check.
Poverty exists not because we can’t feed the poor, but because we can’t satisfy the rich.
Brian Thompson was just a poor millionaire though. Perhaps one of the reasons why he was so easy to get.
George Soros?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Soros
“As of October 2023, he had a net worth of US$6.7 billion,[9][10] having donated more than $32 billion to the Open Society Foundations,[11] of which $15 billion has already been distributed, representing 64% of his original fortune.”
This is great, but he still tanked the UK economy to make his fortune, didn’t he?
From the Wiki, yeah:
“Soros is known as “The Man Who Broke the Bank of England” as a result of his short sale of US$10 billion worth of pounds sterling, which made him a profit of $1 billion, during the 1992 Black Wednesday UK currency crisis.”
But who do you hate more? Billionaires or bankers? ;)
And although he regretted them, he promoted economic decisions to the Eastern Bloc, which lead to the rise of Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, etc.
ABAB
All Billionaires Are Bastards
Millionaires too
You can easily burn through a million in ten years of medical care with certain conditions (certainly in the US). Yes that needs to be fixed, but people with a million dollars for their retirement after working 50 years, they are not the problem with society.
They are definitely a problem.
How exactly is someone a problem if they worked for 50 years and managed to save around 1 million in that time?
Billionaires. Not millionaire.
You might want to reread those last 3 comments in the chain.
People are starving bud. Having a million dollars while people starve is fucking insane
This feels a bit like the oxygen masks in an airplane. Take care of your own basic needs first and then focus on others around you. Who is going to take care of me when I’m no longer earning if I gave all my money away to the more needy when I was earning? Or should I just die?
