Comment by tomlockwood
6 days ago
Could you help me understand why an individual with one billion, needs two? At what point would you accept that someone has more money than they'd reasonably need? And if you just thought of a maximum amount, then, wouldn't the acceptable tax rate over that amount, be 100%?
> Could you help me understand why an individual with one billion, needs two?
Sure. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43687828
Not sure any of these companies have really appreciably made the lives of people better. Sure seem to have funnelled more money to Elon though.
No money was "funneled" to Elon. He created it.
As for making lives better, Starlink was provided free to disaster victims in N Carolina and the LA fires. Something the government failed at. Enabled by cheap reusable SpaceX rockets, another thing the government failed at. Starlink is very popular, so it must be making peoples' lives better.
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So every enterprise becomes state owned? Ilya Sutkever's new company is already worth 32B so 31/32 of it should be owned by the government in your world? Who makes the decisions for it?
I am alarmed by how quickly Americans leap from the suggestion that we tax the super-wealthy more, to this idea of full communism.
Assume you think the government is in a better position to spend that billion than the billionaire is to figure out what to buy or invest their money in?
I know he's out of favor with a lot of people, but would Elon have created SpaceX or The Boring Co or Neuralink, or helped start OpenAI if he hadn't had the spare billions to do so?
I'd much rather have multi-billionaires investing in the economy, and in the future, than giving additional money to the government.
So you'd rather have someone unelected with that money. Don't y'all live in a democracy?
We live in a Constitutional republic, with a Bill of Rights and the right to own property.
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