this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
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Then you would not reach 200 billion. In order to reach that number you need to basically be a dragon sitting on your hoard. Bill gates would probably have been richer than Musk if he didn't start doing stuff with his money.
It is also relevant that these kinds of numbers are imaginary anyway. If they were to put all that money into actual use they would basically break the economy and a lot of it would evaporate.
I think a lot of people forget that Bill Gates was on a similar (if less public) fuck face path as Musk is on now. His complete turn toward philanthropism is pretty incredible.
I'm not saying he hasn't done awful things, I'm not saying he hasn't crushed the little guy, I'm not even saying at a basic level he's a good person. But he's used his incredible wealth to do a lot of good in the world, and with incredibly flippant monsters like Musk showing us the alternative I feel like it's worth re-acknowledging.
I think Bill Gates just reached the age where he seriously started wondering if hell exists or not.
Even if 99% of it would evaporate that would still be a ridiculous amount of power.
But Bill Gates proved that diversifying a stock of mainly one company while having that company keep all its value is possible. Elon Musk is horrifyingly rich like it or not. His power and the damage he can do is huge.
Yeah, he has power for sure. He singlehandedly killed twitter because his kid liked using it and is now playing with the corpse.
My point is that the actual number he has to his name is arbitrary because the economy would not be able to handle him using all that money in the way normal people would use money. The system requires him to sit on most of it and not do anything with it.
He blew $20 billion dollars on a website that he’s treating like a broken toy, so not sure. Anyway Musk didn’t get rich from being thrifty. He got rich first from inheritance, then getting lucky that PayPal was dumb enough to merge with his crappy site, which did them no good, then got extra wealthy from buying Tesla. None of that involves a need to be stingy.
This proves that there isn't a hoard after all, and it's all just wishful thinking that they could sell those imaginary shares all at once to get that money.