It's interesting that he states right at the beginning that he uses money as a proxy for power and then leads us to the conclusion we should object the concentration of money. Why don't we just go straight to the source and eliminate the mechanisms that allow for the concentration of power?

I'd like to propose two very simple rules:

   - no business entity can have more than 150 people.
   - no individual can take part in more than one business. 

You can have as many non-controlling/non-voting shares on any business entity, but you can only contribute directly to one.

Put those in place, and you destroy corporatism and with it you destroy the concentration of power. Politically, it's much easier to sell "no one should have this much power" over "no one should be allowed to amass so much money". Left and Right could easily be united on this.

> I can't see any good reason to let any individual claim ownership over more than a billion dollars of assets—even $100M is pushing it.

> Can you?

Yes I can. It’s called freedom. These guys are free to do whatever they want as long as they don’t break any laws.

I value my freedoms a lot. I was born in a non-free country, and I don’t want to go back to living in a non-free country.

I'm not seeing any new arguments here. Summarized:

  They don't need that much money.
  It's not even that much money, relative to the world.
  That much money doesn't make you live forever.
  They didn't even build the things that they're known for.

Am I missing something new and interesting?

My main gripe with this article is the equating of networth and marginal market value of assets with spendable currency.

1. Networth is not something you can easily spend in it's entirety 2. Instantaneous networth ignores the fact that liquidation would cause a sell pressure that would cause it's own decline in value. Just because 100 shares of XYZ stock most recently sold for $N , does not mean that the entire shares outstanding could be sold at that price. There is a curve of open interest, a normal daily volume, and it's unlikely you could divest of 100% of a mulitbillion dollar asset in any short order, especially not for the full market price at the start of the divestment. "Billionaires" rarely have close to that much cash available to them.

> He didn’t found Tesla

Oh not this crap again. Perfectly good article ruined by petty pedantry.

You’ve only heard about Tesla because Elon became a co-founder.

This boils down to "eat the rich" at the end.

> I can't see any good reason to let any individual claim ownership over more than a billion dollars of assets—even $100M is pushing it. Can you?

If they got their wealth "fair and square" within the systems of rules that we all are subject to I feel it would be wrong to just take their assets by changing the rules and taxing it away (or whatever form it takes.)

> And when one person holds the purse-strings, we lose [accountability].

It seems to me that that increases accountability. We know where the buck stops.

> I can't see any good reason to let any individual claim ownership over more than a billion dollars of assets—even $100M is pushing it. Can you?

I'm in general disagreeing with major points in the article, but it's too large topic to have a full discussion here. The idea is that billionaires can better focus resources on things they seem important than governments.

I'm not sure how he proposes to limit people to less than a billion dollars (or $100m as he also suggests) without completely overhauling the financial system. Seems like the harms of that are greater than the harms of having some extremely wealthy people (most of whose wealth is tied up in their businesses).

Tl;dr

Even if you are #1 of 8,000,000,000 , you are still just 1 in 8,000,000,000

To be perfectly fair I think many of the leaders cited in this piece know perfectly well that they are easily replaced.

Like, take the most traumatic instances such as JFK or Lincoln being shot. Yes there were a couple of days of sorrow (or better yet fake sorrow) but after a couple of days everybody moved on.

Pyramids were supposed to be monuments to the Pharoahs, but after a while the fame of structure managed to surpass the fame of the person buried underneath.

When there are so many humans the marginal value of any human plummets to record lows.

Take Jesus, he's unrivaled at #1, but if we are being honest what's really the % of waking hours that humanity as a whole spends thinking about him during a fiscal year?

It gets diluted into almost insignificant levels of attention.

I always think that many people overthink things and tend to make them more complicated than they really are.

If you live in NYC you get to see all leaders come around for the General Assembly, you'd see Presidents , Prime Ministers etc. Including people who have been in public office for 20 years.

It's not like servers at NOBU get on their knees to worship them when they take their order.

It's people like the author of this piece who make a big deal about it or even Lex Fridman who see such figures and would become a doormat for the privilege of an interview with Putin or Musk, interview during which they'd just repeat over and over again the same talking points they have been fed by their PR managers or lawyers.

So I don't see the need for a numerical ceiling to wealth, at least in the US the ceiling is provided by the self-respect of the avg. citizen. Americans are very proud and don't allow anybody to buy them out easily.

Like when Musk tried to bribe that kid tracking his jet with 5,000$ . The kid asked him 50,000$. Had Musk accepted 50,000$ , he'd have asked 500,000$. Had Musk accepted 500,000$ he'd asked 5,000,000$...

There might be some crazy people who easily fall into cults, but by and large they are the minority and the halo effect vanishes very early.

I'm anti-capitalist too, but I think the capitalist argument is that wealth is the incentive to innovate in the marketplace - it doesn't matter whether it's actually useful, but that it motivates hard work. I think this argument is easily debunked by pointing to the comparative innovation of businesses versus state-funded research, or that wealth is created by the work of the employees moreso than the founders, but that's the argument.

Utterly disingenuous characterization of the impact of Musk in his capacity as Tesla's first major investor, first chairman and 14 year long CEO, and of SpaceX on commercial space flight:

But before you point at Musk and Tesla or SpaceX, I need to remind you that he didn't found Tesla, he merely bought into it then took over: SpaceX's focus on reusability is good, but we had reusable space launchers before—the only really new angle is that it's a cost-reduction measure. Starlink isn't an original, it's merely a modern, bigger, faster version of 1990's Teledesic (which fell victim to over-ambitious technology goals and the dot-com bust).

I sometimes wonder what kind of psychopathology motivates this kind of mindset and ideology, that prioritizes the demonization of the most financially successful over even basic integrity and truth.