ouhee, how to annoy everybody!
BILLIONAIRES HAVE never exactly been popular, but today they are loathed. Politicians in America’s Congress talk about them far more than ever before, usually to decry their ill-gotten gains or their malign influence on politics, or to insist that their wealth needs taxing... linking members of the ten-figure club with a rigged economy and social decay.
oops. The (braindead?) lefties can't tell the difference:
just as politicians think they have hit on a winning message, something unexpected is happening. More and more billionaires derive their wealth not from accidents of birth or from gaming the system, but by providing useful goods and services and by employing thousands of people.
Yet many billionaires make their money without a hint that they enjoy questionable monopolies or political favour. Oprah Winfrey, worth $3.4bn today, has become rich because millions want to watch and listen to her. Cristiano Ronaldo’s nine-zero fortune rests on scoring amazing goals. Others are less well known, but similarly impressive. Peggy Cherng, the co-founder of Panda Express, is worth perhaps $6.5bn, having built a restaurant chain that serves cheap meals to millions. Yanai Tadashi, who is worth tens of billions, built up Fast Retailing, the parent company of Uniqlo. Can you really begrudge someone who makes such great T-shirts?
So Undisc's future employees crunched the numbers and assessed whether spoils we well or ill gained:
Drawing on data from Forbes, a magazine, Hurun, a research firm, and Gapminder, a Swedish foundation, we have assembled a list of about 7,000 billionaires from the past 25 years. We call a billionaire’s wealth “uncompetitive” when it mainly comes from industries such as gambling, construction, defence and raw materials. These sectors often depend on political access. It is hard to open a mine or a casino, for instance, without friends in the government.
Inheritors and rent-seekers and skims go in the UNCOMPETITIVE category (I would add the boomers here, fuck em, but whatever).
Business builders and founders etc go in the COMPETITIVE category, deserving their riches for having improved the world/made goods and services the peepz desire.
"From 2001, when our data begin, to 2014, the uncompetitive share of billionaire wealth rose slightly. Yet over the past decade the share derived from self-made entrepreneurs in competitive sectors has surged to an all-time high"
This, I didn't know. And NOPE, not just a recent AI-boom story:
old money is fast losing relative power. In the early 2000s close to half of billionaire wealth came from inheritance. That has since fallen to around a quarter. [...] You might think that the artificial-intelligence boom explains the surge in self-made wealth. The fortunes of some founders, including Jensen Huang of Nvidia, have indeed exploded. This summer Elon Musk briefly became the world’s first trillionaire before a decline in SpaceX’s share price pushed him back below the 13-figure threshold. Yet even excluding tech, the self-made billionaire share is rising.
Explanations:
- Bull market in equities: 13% a year for 10y+. (Low interest rates, techno-optimism etc)
- Chinese economic growth: China's growth is slower (and property implosions hit...) but it's a richer country overall, so more people closer to the 1bn mark.
- Mobile-first internet: apps and whatever; messaging and consumer reach instant... TikTok, Spotify/Stripe/Uber.
"It has never been so easy to become extremely rich extremely fast."
Does the rise of the self-made billionaire strengthen or weaken the arguments for wealth taxation? It makes no difference to some of them. Democracy does not work well if a tiny group of people can buy influence—and that is true however they got rich. Mr Musk is self-made, which is all well and good, but he has made no secret of his desire to sway elections, both in America and abroad. Democracy might work better without such influence.
archive: https://archive.md/Zj2zY
The methodology is preposterously stupid but I like the effort.
Something I've wanted to see for a long time are labels on consumer goods indicating how much total government support went into products.
Stupidly difficult to calculate proper, I suspect. But the asshats can manage with "carbon footprint" so might as well do Uncle Sam footprints, ignoring the difficulties in estimating properly
Easy fix: just slap a 100% Commie Crap label on any product that doesn't open their books to the certifiers, then make the same assumption for the companies that supply their inputs until they open their books, and so on all the way up the chain.
that invasion of privacy/surveillance and confiscatory taxes he's OK with... but not on the filthy boomers?!
There's no tax here, just a presumption of guilt until innocence is demonstrate.
like the boomers, then?
Yeah, it's a standard we're both fond of.
I'm not following. People producing shit that may or may not have government involvement are innocent, but boomers are not. Not the same?
as in: it's well established that boomers are guilty -- see my rants. It's not established that random mom-and-pop shop with I dunno agri subsidies or COVID payments are guilty
lol we must have had the same thought
I'd hope so. That was a very dumb choice.
This is the part that I'd have to disagree with. You can't just assume competitiveness based on industry. So much of the political access is really the access to cheap capital and access to social networks that expand your business's reach and influence. Not necessarily industry specific.