Hi comrades, I'm new here, how do we feel about posting Mastodon content on Lemmy?
this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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Most of this wealth is in stocks, though. Their worth is based on the number of shares they own of these companies. For every share they sell the value of the other shares drops a bit. So if Musk or Bezos sold all their shares, to have this money in actual cash, not only would they probably bankrupt their company and crash the stock market, but the cash they got out of it would be only a fraction of what this shows on paper now.
"Most of this wealth is in stocks".
This argument has to be one of the worst, most ridiculous ones ever.
First of all, nobody would ever buy, sell or hold stock if it wasn't valuable.
Secondly, stock is directly and indirectly valuable. Aside from directly selling it, some companies provide dividends. People who own lots of stock can make a lot of money just from dividends. Also, they can use that as collateral and borrow from banks at good interest rates and live off of that.
My company gives us stock grants as bonuses. I'm paying a ton of money to remodel my house and the vast majority has come from cashing in stock. If me, with my modest stock grants, can cash in a few years worth of stock bonuses and basically pay to rebuild my house, these guys with assets in the 100's of billions can live off the interest of a few sales. They can borrow against their wealth. It's so awful and disingenuous to imply that they're not hoarding wealth because "most of it is stock".
If it's so worthless, give all of their options to their workers!