Comment by oh_my_goodness

1 year ago

Come on. Sometimes wealth gets created. Sometimes wealth just gets moved around. That is a fact.

Musk's wealth is mostly notional. Most of it is based on people's guesses about the future of electric cars and so forth. It's not clear yet whether that is creation or transfer or what.

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oh_my_goodness

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WalterBright  1 year ago

Musk's wealth was transferred from nobody. It was created.

When wealth gets "moved around", that is not the market doing that. It's force. Like social security payments.

That's why I prefaced it with "free market".

  • oh_my_goodness  1 year ago

    Maybe a startup can have a high valuation for a while and ultimately be worth nothing. Maybe that has happened.

    Maybe Musk will turn out to have created 10x more wealth than he has now. Maybe he will screw up and go broke.

    Maybe both.

    Where did Bernie Madoff's wealth come from before he got caught? Where did Sam Bankman-Fried's wealth come from? We can't just point to a unit of wealth and automatically applaud its legal owner as having created it. Maybe they created it. Maybe they stole it. Maybe we all wigged out and handed it to them voluntarily. It's case by case.

    We all read Ayn Rand back in the day. And I can groove with that at a certain dosage, but you're taking way too much.