To think billionaires shouldn’t exist?

[ThisIcyWriter]

No one earns a billion through hard work alone - it’s exploitation. AIBU to think billionaires shouldn’t exist in a fair society?

That not QUITE what OP is saying though, is it?

I do hope you stretched before that reach

A bank account not even registering anything higher than £9999,999.99

That's it, you can't have any more. Anything else being paid in goes straight to a seperate account and automatically divided up between charities of your choice.

Hell yeah. I'd give the majority of it away and I'd STILL be filthy rich with waaaaaay more money than I need and waaay more then I could spend.

I like that! Charities would be filthy rich...

Yeah, and would be billionaires even be affected? They'd still have everything most of us ever dreamed of.

I like that! Charities would be filthy rich..
@BaMamma yes but according to to @LucyMonth:

Nope. Jimmy Saville raised millions for charity which lead to him being given privileges he would never have been given otherwise.
Billionaires often have unearned influence in the charities they donate to and/or their donations do more harm than good as they choose charities with harmful agendas. For example religious ideology. Pseudoscientific causes

Also there are billionaires such as the Sacklers from whom charities won’t accept money as it’s tainted. What would happen to this money?

I actually know a billionaire. He is one of the loveliest and most generous people I know. He earned his millions by working extremely hard but, he will be the first to admit, he was very lucky too.

I think billionaires are awful. They could give away enough every year to drop under the threshold and interest would pop it up. So they wouldn’t even feel the difference while being able to give away fortunes. Very few seem to even try to do good.

In what way is he generous? Just with friends & family? With charities?

He owns a thousand million. It's quite mind boggling really just how much a billion actually is.
I should say he must have been very "lucky" to amass that much.

The absence of billionaires won't guarantee a fair society. It's also not fair to deny someone the opportunity to be entrepreneurial, grow businesses, have great vision - which is how billionaires come to be. Fairness comes with equality of opportunity and some will make better use of that opportunity.

Most billionaires don't pay that much in tax though. Some Millionaires do. But billionaires are a different ball game. It's hard to tax their income - they put it in shell companies etc or live of loans leveraged against their businesses so they don't have to pay income tax. You can tax assets though.
We have very few billionaires paying income tax in the UK anyway. But lots of billionaires with London townhouses ets in the property portfolios

Yes I agree Billionaires should not exist.
That's far too much of the economy to be with one person with zero regulation of how the wealth can be distributed to those in need.

No one needs that much money

Spend it on infrastructure projects to make people's lives better.

She had non dom status and was legally entitled to that. She paid the correct levy to the UK government. In the end she also paid tax she legally didn't need to. She went above and beyond.

I don't know anyone else who willing pays more tax than they have to. I've never worked with anyone asking to be put into a higher tax bracket just for kicks.

Think what you like about billionaires and how they amass their wealth but Ms Murty didn't do anything wrong.

A lot of billionaires are where they are due to exploiting others though - just look at Amazon for a start.

Of course entrepreneurs are needed but do you seriously think if there were a cap of wealth ownership at, say, two billion per person any budding entrepreneurs would give up and decide " it's just not worth it"?

A billion is a thousand million remember, a thousand million.

When I was young people talked about becoming millionaires, a billionaire wasn't really a thing.

But now there are so many billionaires that level of wealth has become normalised and I don't think many people sit back and actually think about just how much money billionaires have.

Technically, you are correct, but it's easy to see how that wouldn't sit right with the British public. We are entitled to want our Prime Minister's partner to be a full British citizen, paying British taxes, even if it's not technically illegal for her to be a non-Dom paying non-Dom taxes.

OP, are you naive in real life too or just on this forum?

And by the way how does eliminating billionaires make you or anyone else richer. You do know that there isn’t some magic money tree which billionaires are shaking and if they weren’t, you’d get first dibs at shaking it.

But then I suspect, you don’t really understand how this stuff works.

Maybe you should read this CEO compensation has grown 940% since 1978: Typical worker compensation has risen only 12% during that time | Economic Policy Institute before you call others naive.

Why is it about just wanting to be a billionaire though or having their wealth for yourself?

I don't agree with the existence of multi-billionaires but that's not because I want their money just for myself. I want a fairer world all round.

Isn't it simply abhorrent that in 2025 people are living on the streets in so-called civilised and wealthy democratic societies such as our own? Isn't it abhorrent that many people in the world don't have clean water to drink or enough food to eat? And isn't it abhorrent that these things are happening alongside individual people owning vast amounts of wealth?

That's what I would like to change. I don't want the billionaires' money for myself.

If you want to run a space programme, you need more than 2 billion.

The owner of Amazon started in just a home garage with 2 people. You could do that, and so could I. I'm not motivated enough, or possibly genius enough to become a billionaire from my back room. But the opportunity is there if I want it. If I lived in Afghanistan, I'd barely be allowed out the house. There aren't many billionaires there. How fair would you say that society is?

I would say be careful about thinking the ills of society, the unfairness of it, comes from the existence of billionaires.

I'm not saying that the existence of billionaires is to blame for all the ills in the world at all but if that wealth were more fairly distributed it would make a big difference.

And don't nations run space programmes? Individuals messing around up in space for their own enjoyment just because they can afford to is something altogether different.

There is a happy medium between extreme wealth disparity and communism. It's a bit embarrassing to even think this.

should J K Rowling exist?

The idea that anyone commenting on extreme wealth and wanting to consider a fairer distribution is instantly a "communist" is so reductive, tired and depressing.

I think I basically agree that most billionaires have exploited the system and other people to get to that number and that no-one needs that amount of wealth.

There are exceptions of course who made their money through their own work,
Taylor Swift and JKRfor example, and I find it interesting that both of them consistently give money away to good causes or generous employment practices. I do wonder if their approach is influenced by how they made the money or if they are just coincidentally decent human beings.

So many of these super rich who have inherited wealth or who have made it through business or on the financial markets seem interested in nothing more than increasing that wealth and buying politicians to ensure the system breaks their way.

Anyone worth that much who isn't deeply involved in charitable giving really should be taxed to the max. Massive wealth differentials like this are incrediably bad for society.