I think this is a good example of someone thinking that the way it works in movies is the way it works in real life. Michael Bloomberg spent hundreds of millions to be president. He won the American Somoa primary. Tom Steyer just came in third in the California primary. Jeffrey Epstein died in jail. Money can buy a lot. It doesn’t make you Lex Luther or Blofeld.

I’ll take the trillionaire creating thousands of millionaires over the millionaires creating trillions in debt.

It’s true

What socialism reliably produces, when imposed, is not equality but a closed caste. The Soviet nomenklatura had its sealed stores, hospitals, schools, and dachas. The Chinese Communist Party’s “princelings”—Xi Jinping among them—inherited political position as straightforwardly as any Habsburg. North Korea has produced three generations of Kims; the Castros gave Cuba six decades of dynastic rule. The empirical record is uncontested: every long-running communist regime has frozen its founding elite into a hereditary aristocracy. The system that promised to abolish class only ever abolished the class mobility that threatens its rulers.

If you just want Elon’s wealth, you’re not fit to hold office. You may not be fit to vote.

I’m concerned that not a single person we’ve elected to national public office can do math, or, it seems, knows how much *they themselves spend* on anything. Like, not everyone gets stocks, I understand that. But this isn’t even remotely correct.

After the last couple of days, Ayn Rand suddenly seems a lot less melodramatic.

If, when you say regulation, you mean the dead and clammy hand of the commissar—the gentleman who has never in his life built a single thing, drafting rules to govern a thing he cannot define, to be enforced by men who cannot read them; if you mean the form in triplicate, the impact assessment upon the impact assessment, the compliance officer who breeds, in the warm dark of the org chart, further compliance officers unto the third and fourth generation; if you mean the moat—the deep cold moat that the giant digs around his own castle and christens, with a perfectly straight face, public safety—the drawbridge he hauls up behind himself the very instant he is across, lest any hungrier and hungrier man should follow; if you mean the precautionary principle, which, had it governed our grandfathers, would have banned the wheel pending further study of the hill, and left us yet shivering and raw in the mouth of the cave, blessing its excellent ventilation; if you mean the European disease—that magnificent open-air museum of a continent, which produces in our time precisely two things in great abundance, and they are regulation, and the eloquent and well-footnoted regret of cultivated men explaining at length why they have produced nothing else; if you mean the license required to think, the permission slip for honest arithmetic, the king’s wax stamp pressed upon the forehead of every new idea before it may draw its first breath; if you mean the agency dispatched, with trumpets, to slay a single dragon, which arrives at the cave, surveys the accommodations, and moves in—and spends the ensuing century laying eggs and devouring the very villagers it was sworn to defend; if you mean the startup that perishes not of the market’s honest verdict but of the filing fee, the genius decamping by the next tide to a freer and warmer shore; if you mean the law that arrives, faithful as the swallows, exactly one whole epoch too late—helmeted, plumed, and magnificently armed—to regulate the stagecoach—then certainly, my friends, I am against it. But—but, my friends—if, when you say regulation, you mean instead the humble steel guardrail upon the mountain road at midnight, the very thing you curse on the easy days and bless on your knees the one night the fog comes down; if you mean the brakes—for it is the brakes, and not the engine alone, that permit a sane man to drive fast and yet arrive alive—and the buttress, without which no cathedral was ever flung so high, but only in spite of which, but because of which; if you mean the meat inspector, who is the single homely reason a man may eat a sausage in this republic without first composing his last will and testament; if you mean the firebreak cut clean through the forest before the dry season of the burning, the smallpox cordon, the buoy that marks the channel, the rule of the road that lets ten thousand strangers hurtle past one another in the dark at fearful speed and arrive, by its quiet grace, every one of them home; if you mean the honest scale and the true weight, the reason a pound is a pound and a dollar a dollar from Natchez to Nome; if you mean the firm and decent wall between the counterfeit voice and the widow’s bank account, between the deepfaked candidate and the ballot box on the eve of the vote, between the loosed and loveless machine and the schoolyard it neither knows nor pities; if you mean the simple plank of law that says the strong shall not, in the gray dawn, feed the weak quietly into the furnace and sell the rising smoke as progress; if you mean, in the end, the one slender thread of trust without which no citizen will ever dare to use the marvelous thing at all—for where there is no rule there is no trust, and where there is no trust there is no commerce, and a miracle that no man dares to touch is no miracle, but only a handsome and expensive ghost—then certainly I am for it. This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise one inch of it.

Wow.

History's first trillionaire is a guy who catches rockets out of the sky with chopsticks and beams internet to every dead zone on the planet. Same guy ships cars that drive themselves, humanoid robots for the factory floor, brain chips that let paralyzed people move a cursor with pure thought, and an AI running on a supercomputer his team stood up in months instead of years. And the people crashing out about his net worth are doing it on the app he owns. The same app governments spent years trying to censor. You cannot legislate a rocket into orbit.

With $1 trillion in net worth, Musk could give everyone on earth around 125 bucks and thereby solve all problems forever.

The reason anyone gets insanely rich is almost always because of the stock market. It certainly how @elonmusk did. And the reason they get rich from the stock market, is because 150m Americans decided they wanted to own shares of stocks directly, or through their retirement plans, or through other approaches as a way of building their net worth and trying to create a better life for themselves. One Hundred Fifty Million Americans. About 60% of adults. Effectively believing that @elonmusk and many billionaires could make them wealthier and help them achieve a better life. If you want @elonmusk , and most billionaires to no longer be that rich, convince those 150m to sell their stocks, funds, ETFs whatever. Of course you would wipe out the net-worth of most of those people, and everyone else’s savings, as the markets crashed and brought down the economy and created the worst depression we have ever seen. Alternatively There are ways to improve healthcare access and eventually make it available to all. To start - If you want @elonmusk and all billionaires to improve healthcare for everyone , ask them to stop doing business with the enormous healthcare conglomerates and to work directly with transparently priced care providers. It’s the behemoth HC conglomerates that make HC so bad for so many. (Check my timeline for more detail) Removing them would push the cost of healthcare down for everyone. Their corporate decisions impact our healthcare cost and availability. Of course if they do that, not only would our HC costs go down , and the quality of care for their employees and the entire country go up But They would see their corporate cash flow increase dramatically and we would have more millionaires, billionaires and maybe even another trillionaire when that cash flow moved from the big health care conglomerates to their bottom line, so would the net worth of the 150 million American adults that own public stocks Capitalism is better than socialism because 150m Americans can influence exactly what happens in this country.

Court-packing by either party would unleash a dynamic that would destroy the independence of the judiciary. Its advocacy by a politician should be treated by sane and reasonable people of both major parties as disqualifying that person for office. It is worse than a crank idea.

Over 4000 workers just became millionaires by owning the means of production and the socialists are pissed

The idea that wealth is like a pie—where one person's larger slice necessarily leaves less for everyone else—is a persistent and destructive fallacy. It is not merely mistaken; it is a seductive lie that often serves the interests of the manipulative and the envious rather than reflecting economic reality. Wealth is not a fixed, static resource that must be divided up. It is created and increased through human ingenuity, exchange, innovation, and productive effort. The total "size of the pie" expands over time, often dramatically. This is the positive-sum nature of exchange. Envy disguised as economics helps no one. The pie metaphor flatters the greedy and the power-hungry while misleading the well-intentioned. Real economic progress comes from rejecting it in favor of wealth-creation over redistribution.

Je vais partir du principe que tu es de bonne foi, parce que ton raisonnement est intuitif et que 90% des gens le partagent. Mais il repose sur trois erreurs factuelles, et ça vaut le coup de les regarder calmement. Erreur 1 : la fortune d'Elon n'est pas un tas d'argent. C'est de la propriété d'usines, de fusées et de satellites. "Prendre la moitié de sa tune", concrètement, ça veut dire forcer la vente de la moitié de SpaceX et Tesla. L'argent ne sort pas d'un coffre, il sort des entreprises elles-mêmes, qui passent sous contrôle de fonds étrangers ou d'États. Tu ne redistribues pas du cash, tu démantèles un outil de production. C'est la différence entre récolter des pommes et découper le pommier. Erreur 2 : "ça résout énormément de problèmes dans le monde". Cette expérience a déjà été tentée, en vrai. En 2021, le directeur du Programme Alimentaire Mondial de l'ONU a affirmé que 6 milliards de Musk pouvaient "résoudre la faim dans le monde". Réponse d'Elon : décrivez-moi exactement comment, comptabilité publique à l'appui, et je vends mes actions Tesla immédiatement. Le PAM a publié son plan. Verdict : ce n'était pas "résoudre la faim", c'était nourrir 42 millions de personnes pendant un an. Un an. Puis il faut re-payer, pour toujours. Le PAM avait d'ailleurs levé 8,4 milliards l'année précédente, et la faim était toujours là. Les ONG traitent les symptômes en boucle, jamais les causes, parce que leur financement dépend de l'existence du problème. Erreur 3, la plus importante : tu cherches ce qui sort vraiment les gens de la pauvreté. Bonne nouvelle, on a la réponse, et elle est massive. En 1990, 36% de l'humanité vivait dans l'extrême pauvreté. Aujourd'hui, moins de 9%. Plus d'un milliard de personnes sorties de la misère en 30 ans. Par quoi ? Pas par la charité ni par l'aide internationale (plus de 1 000 milliards versés à l'Afrique en 60 ans pour un résultat à peu près nul). Par l'ouverture des marchés, l'industrialisation, le commerce. La Chine seule a sorti 800 millions de personnes de la pauvreté en abandonnant le collectivisme, pas en taxant ses entrepreneurs. Donc fais le calcul complet. Option A : tu confisques 500 milliards, tu finances quelques années de programmes, l'argent est consommé, et tu as détruit la machine qui produisait les fusées, les voitures électriques et l'internet des zones rurales. Option B : tu laisses le meilleur allocateur de capital de sa génération réinvestir 100% de sa fortune dans des industries qui baissent les coûts pour tout le monde et emploient des centaines de milliers de personnes. L'option A soulage ta morale pendant 18 mois. L'option B sort des populations entières de la pauvreté pour toujours. La pauvreté ne se redistribue pas. Elle se résout par la création. C'est contre-intuitif, c'est frustrant, mais c'est ce que disent 200 ans de données.

I've watched enough Ridley Scott properties where I feel humanity should have long ago figured out any potential gains from xenobiology are not worth it.

What makes all this pining for Elon’s money worse is how badly the government (of either side) manages its vast resources.

Net worths of politicians whining about Elon Musk’s fortune from SpaceX: 🔵 Ro Khanna: $250 million (inherited) 🔵 Gavin Newsom: $30 million 🔵 Elizabeth Warren: $12 million 🔵 Bernie Sanders: $5 million (plus 3 houses) A bunch of virtue signaling hypocrites.

I still remember when Elon struggled to put together the money to buy twitter and tried to pull out of the deal. Glad it worked out and happy to see the champion of free speech thriving.