Compounding interests. I don't think that most people realise how powerful the effect of it is. Anyone can take advantage of it but there's no getting around the fact that the more money you have the easier it gets to make even more which then makes it even easier and this just keeps accelerating.
this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2025
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That shit was unimaginable even before 2024.
Billionaire wealth surges to 'unimaginable' levels in 2024 as Oxfam predicts emergence of five trillionaires within a decade
It's less impressive when you realize that much, if not most, of that wealth isn't "real." The vast majority of that wealth is in corporate stock, and the value of the stock is based on a lot of speculation. How much of that trillions of dollars in corporate stock will ever be converted to cash? Who knows, but I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up being only a small portion, and well less than a trillion dollars.
I get your point, but it is impressive (or depressive, let's call it}.
It doesn't matter whether it's imaginary numbers in stock or imaginary numbers in a bank account. Just as stock values change, so do liquid asset values, with inflation and macroeconomic effects.
Either way, the numbers represent the proportional value of current human society that has been captured by an individual. Billionaires have captured and withdrawn thousands, ten thousands, hundreds of thousands of lives' worth of value just for themselves. Whether that value is held in stocks or cash is immaterial.
Yes, even if the numbers are at least partly fictitious (or even mostly), it is still true that a very large percentage of real wealth is owned and controlled by a relatively small number of people. The way we understand and measure value needs to change, because it is very skewed and not based in reality (our current system is apparently operating on the premise that we can create a seemingly infinite amount of value, but that's not physically possible on a planet with finite resources), but the wealth that has "real" value is very unequally distributed and that needs to change, as well.
Well part of what they're saying is that a dollar is only a dollar if it's liquid.
And if, for example, Musk were to cash out all his stock positions, many of them would be worth vastly less by the time the transaction was done. Not only that, but without those positions, many other wealthy individuals would see their positions suffer and their wealth evaporate.
It is still an obscene amount of monopoly bucks though.
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No man is an island, just the GDP of most
They have lots of islands
Let's go Bezos!! We finna hit that big 1 trill real soon
The nice thing with having a list of billionaires - and trillionaires - is that you have a list to go through when the day of reckoning comes, after the American Reich falls.
So like in 100 years? Well I guess that will be nice.
We should be so lucky, we’ll be dead by then. Because it’s going to need to get a lot worse before things change. It won’t be pleasant.
We still have a lot of steps to go. Heck, we haven’t even had civil unrest, let alone civil disobedience. At this rate Civil War II will happen via social network. I guess that lowers the casualties?
Tomorrow will be that round-up in Chicago. That should be very telling.
But it can’t happen on social network.
It can if we just use emoji.
🖕🇺🇸🔥✝️👎🔫🤑😵🏴☠️
Don't despair. The last Reich lasted 12 years, and then (most of) the guilty had some explaining to do, and a lot of them ended up with an acute case of lead poisoning or at the end of a rope.
12 years is long. But if you're younger than I am, you'll live to tell your grandchildren.
I plan to die in the water wars, not the civil war.
HYDRATION!!!!!! 🔫💪
That's the thing about history. I think if you were standing in Imperial Russia in the early 1900s (or France in the late 1780s/early 1790s), you would have never guessed what was coming, even with the chain of catastrophes that seemed to continuously arise from Nicolas being an self-assured idiot.
That’s also the thing about history, there’s always some dead person to blame everything on while doing absolutely nothing now to stop it
A generation terrified of Big Brother let the Landsraad and CHOAM set up shop in the back