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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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I think this is a matter of degree, and also that while talent is important, luck is also.

So I think most would be okay with Musk / Gates / Bezos having 100x the median wealth, maybe even 1000x, there is a problem with them having 100000x the median wealth. They may be talented, but they aren't that talented.

I may just be projecting -- I'm generally a big fan of capitalism, but I think the differences between the 0.01% and the 70% in the US are just too big -- and it's hurting overall society. I'm generally for fairly mild adjustments to redistribution (small bumps to, e.g., income tax, inheritance tax, maybe capital gains) to reduce the skew at the extreme edges.

The thing is, Musk/Gates/Bezos/etc. don't actually "have" 100000x the median wealth. Their "wealth" is simplistically calculated from the stocks they own in their companies. But they couldn't just cash out those stocks and dive into their wealth like Scrooge McDuck. First of all, they would have to find buyers. There's no one alive who would buy $200b in one stock, which means you'd need multiple buyers. But there also aren't $200b worth of multiple buyers waiting around for any one of these stocks at their current price.

Which brings us to the second problem: they'd have to substantially lower the amount they're willing to sell their stocks for, in order to find enough buyers. First, this would substantially lower their net worth (which, recall, is crudely calculated by stock value times quantity of stocks). More importantly, if they were to attempt to sell all their stocks in this way, the market would immediately assume they know something dire about their companies' prospects and the value of the stock would plummet.

So, the mega wealthy like Musk/Gates/Bezos have their wealth locked into their companies and can't unlock it to any substantial degree - they're going down with the ship if they try.

That's not to say they aren't very wealthy - they are. They can leverage their tremendous stock assets to essentially get huge loans to fund a lavish lifestyle ("Hey, loaner, I have a gazillion dollars in stock. Wanna lend me a tiny percentage of that in cash? I'm a low-risk borrower because, if I default, well, here's all this collateral!"). But it's not, like, a hundred billion lavish.