this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2024
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United States | News & Politics
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Right place right bubble.
It'd be nice if these people used that insane wealth to make anything better.
Wtf do you even do with that much money? Everything i can possibly conceive of wanting out of life (that money can get me) is covered long before i can put a dent in the sprawling mass of wealth. Wouldn't it make more sense for everyone's safety and well-being that there's a cap to the amount of wealth one person can possess? Money on that scale is the kind of funding that could make things like proper healthcare and food security available to everyone. Instead some exceptionally small group get nearly all the resources that the labor of millions of people provide
They can’t do anything with it, even if they wanted to. Trying to sell $120 billion worth of stock will cause the price to crash. Plus since he’s an officer of the company he has to go through a bunch of reporting requirements and basically announce the stock sale well in advance. Announcing that you’re going to sell $120 billion of the stock, without providing a strong reason, is just going to cause investors to believe you think the company is in trouble and drive the price down before your stock sale goes through.
Even 1 billion covers everythign most of us could ever hope for in our entire live.
Right, but then a CEO like Jensen Huang already has a paycheque to cover that sort of thing.
The question is what is it really like to have your stock holdings go from $5 billion to $120 billion as a result of the company you run getting caught up in the AI hype bubble? Honestly I think not much. Just a number changing on the computer screen, like a new high score in an arcade game.
How much do I think it affects his daily life? Pretty much not at all. Yet if it went back down to $5 billion people would be screaming at the company and he might be fired. It’s very strange!
If he’s smart he’s not taking a pay check. They get bank loans backed by stock. They never part them of and the bank just assumes the estate will settle it.
They have to bet on Nvidia staying valuable enough to cover the loans though. (Or not, hence the adage about owing the bank a billion dollars).
That’s a consequence of capital gains tax being structured the way it is.
I think one of our biggest issues as a society is the way we try to use tax to target specific people. It never works out! They just find ways around it.
We should be trying to set up a tax system that’s very simple, straightforward, and easy to enforce, such as land value taxes.
You mean income tax.
His stock options would be capital gains. But the loan trick works on either one. No selling stock, no capital gains taxes, paycheck/salary, no income taxes.
But you still get mansions, compounds and mega yacht fleets.
And land value taxes work on both. I mean, unless he wants to live on that yacht and not own any mansions of course. But the land value tax is still going to get him (indirectly) when he pulls into the marina.
I suspect a lot of mansions and compounds would become bank and company owned and the billionaires homes addresses would all be in the nearest tax haven.
It would probably do wonders for all the empty highrises in Boston and NYC, where all the Chinese and Arab oil wealth is stored.
They don't have to sell though, they can borrow against their stock and many do.
Two words: margin call. When you borrow against your stock you can be forced by the bank to sell shares to pay back your loans. If you’ve borrowed a ton of money against a large percentage of shares and the share price goes down a bit, a margin call forcing you to sell shares can send the stock crashing down.
This happened to Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (creator of the Keurig) founder Robert P Stiller and it cost him his job as chairman.