How is it possible to be worth a trillion?

I just don’t get “the race to Space” thing and Space X being so valuable.
I would much rather that the money was spent on making this planet, Earth, a better place for the poor and marginalised people living on it.

But what a thoroughly unpleasant and ignorant man !!

They say if you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gives it to.

Let’s start by putting a wealth tax in place for the billionaire/trillionaire class to ensure that they pay taxes at a broadly equivalent rate to those of us who have no choice but to pay it through PAYE.

Tax is supposed to be progressive, those with the broadest shoulders should be paying the most. Instead we see them take full advantage of a system that lets them claim they have almost no income, and so instead they carry a fraction of the tax burden that the rest of us labour under.

Musk and Bezos and the like will say you can’t tax their shares unless they sell them, but will then use inflated value of those same shares to borrow against in order to fund their next private jet, or half billion dollar yacht. Bezos apparently boasted that his “income” was so low he received child benefit payments. It’s just a joke to them, and we are the punchline. They will use the media they own to tell you that nothing can be done about it, that you should accept it as a fact of life. Don’t be fooled. We have structured our tax system in the past to prevent this sort of vast disparity from happening, and with sufficient motivation we could do it again. Just be aware that the billionaires on the other side will do everything they can, with all the vast resources at their disposal, to prevent it from happening.

This is a problem that should really unite all sides of the political spectrum. If you ever wanted to “take back control”, then these are the people you should be taking it back from!

Loads of people do it. Some are good at it and some are bad at it. Some countries make it easy for people to start up businesses and some put lots of barriers in the way so only big business and multinational corporations can survive.

Well people do….are you saying Musk monopolises the entire wealth and innovation in the world? He doesn’t. So stop frothing at the mouth….

No it really isn’t… it’s the regimes and the leaders of the world who dictate whether their people live their best lives. Behind every poverty stricken country sits a very reach leader, who gets richer on the back of foreign aid. Fiddles while Rome burns kind of thing.

And X.

Paper wealth- you can’t divide it up and make everyone richer - because the real problem of poverty is the availability of food, shelter services and materials. More money doesn’t mean more resources suddenly become available, it’s just not that simple.

I agree with you. It's not something to be celebrated tbh. It's actually very concerning.

Yippee, let's be spied on in our daily lives with all this super technology and rot the minds of the next generation to sit staring at their ipads and gadgets all day. We need to make physical exercise a priority for all. Battling obesity would be more effective rather than focusing on faster Internet. It's because of technology the world is having so many problems!

And what is the most depressing thing about it is the way that so many people think it's ok and actually applaud him, and others like him, for becoming obscenely rich.

That is almost more depressing than him becoming a trillionaire in the first place.

Depressed? Seems strong, just read it and move on with your day.

It is fucking awful. I felt so depressed when I read this article about it yesterday that I went for a nap to escape how shit this world is

I think it's the monopolisation of wealth that many have a problem with. Let others get a chance to create and develop new technology or companies? Why should only one person have that right?

"He hasn't got that much money though"

Uh-huh.
Just quite a few billion then. That changes everything.

It's impossible to ever have a sensible discussion about extreme wealth because people always boil it down to "envy" and then say things like "he worked for it, what's wrong with that?" or "Why don't you go and earn the same?"

Those simplistic views and arguments work when the discussion is based around the kind of inequality we see every day - people on six figure salaries and others on benefits.

But the discussion around very extreme wealth is entirely different. It's simply not good for the world for a small number of people to amass huge amounts of wealth because they also amass a lot of influence and power with it and that starts to skew the way the world works.

Musk, for example, is a man with dangerous views who is happy to get involved in world politics when he feels like it and can push his far right agenda - and no one will stop him because he's so rich.

Add to that the fact that it's just immoral and wrong for one person to have so much wealth & not use it for good.

And I think if he was giving a lot to charity we would know about it. He is not the type to keep anything quiet.

I am grateful to Elon Musk for highlighting the child rape gangs and for standing up for the 13'year old Scottish girl vilified for carrying an axe.

That you, Elon?

This is an excellent way to loop
at it.

It's all 'tied up in things'. He doesn't have an instant access account with 1 trillion in it! It is the value of the shares and the businesses that he owns, over inflated in my opinion. All wealthy people have huge assets. Wealth is assets not cash.

This is quite literally the stupidest comment I have read on here in a while.
As if "everyone started with the same opportunity to thrive"???

Imagine what a world like that would look like - everyone starting life with the same opportunities?
People like Musk amassing obscene amounts of wealth for themselves is what actually stops everyone starting from the same point.

Surely you can see you are spouting nonsense here can't you?

That depends how you That depends how you define benefit. Hilenhas stated numerous times that he intends to spend all his money getting a han colony on Mars. Which may actually save the human race in the event if a catastrophic event on our current planet.

He is a neo-Nazi whose actions at DOGE have demonstrably killed tens of thousands of people

Musk is a very dangerous person. He is poking his nose into politics, interfering, stirring up trouble, trying to manipulate.

He thinks his wealth gives him a platform to influence the world. Why else would he buy Twitter? It was to give him a platform to spout his ideas without any recourse.

Any political leader should be very wary of him. Trump needed his money and was stupid enough to give him responsibility but even Trump took a step back and distanced himself.

At the moment here in Ireland in the news there’s so many people looking for various drugs to come into Ireland and be but on the list of being available. There’s twins on my TikTok feed I can’t figure out if they’re uk or Ireland with duchenes (apologies if that’s not the spelling), and a girl with at ataxia and a dad trying to get his some medication for same. I think of all the billionaires that could solve problems like this.

There is honestly only so much wealth a person needs