Billionaires

I’ve noticed there is a conflation between paper net worth and consumption, and a misconception that the pie is fixed.

This combo of falsehoods makes people angry.

These dang billionaires are hogging all the pie!

But really, more often than not, they created a massive pie, and they are not even eating it.

Thank you billionaires.

Thank you Jeff, for Amazon Prime.

Thank you Elon, for electric cars with self-driving features, and rockets and tunnels and satellite internet and paypal and neuralinks and all the other stuff.

Thank you Bill, for the world’s worst computer operating system.

Thank you Larry, for Google Docs and Gmail and Chrome and the list goes on.

Thank you to the women billionaires too. I can’t think of any right now but I’m sure they are out there.

Thank you also to the multi-millionaires, who also took risk and worked hard. Not all of them, but most of them.

Thank you to all the people who are doing legitimate useful labor, instead of just consuming.

I think and write, allocate capital and coach people. It’s useful but pales in comparison to the work of a billionaire, or a mother or father.

Billionaires don’t actually consume much. And they don’t actually have billions of dollars.

Can you imagine having 100 billion dollars? That’s so much money!

That’s not actually what they have. They own company equity that is in theory worth that much. But as soon as they start selling their equity for dollars, the market price of said equity goes down. They also pay a massive amount in taxes if they sell [and don’t use loopholes].

So, often, instead of selling their shares, our beloved billionaires use their equity as collateral and borrow money via a margin loan.

This avoids taxes, devaluing their company, and they retain control of their organization.

But we want billionaires money to go to the government! Tax the rich!

Really? We want the bloated bureaucratic government to have more money, and the useful people to have less money?

But the deficit! The billionaires need to pay off the federal government’s debt!

The feds need to stop overspending. It’s actually really simple.

Even if you took all the wealth from all the billionaires, it still wouldn’t pay off the national debt.

But the billionaires are still hogging all the wealth!

It’s reported that the top 1% of America owns 30% of the wealth, $40+ trillion. That’s wild. Imagine one person owned 30% of a town. Seems like a lot, even if that person did a lot to build the town.

Generally America’s billionaires are people creating wealth. As they created billions of dollars of value, they created thousands of millionaires as well. The path to wealth is owning businesses. One way to own great businesses is buying them through the stock market.

My friend in college thought there is only so much money. I explained that’s not the case. Money in an abstraction layered atop Goods and Services - the real wealth. And that is unlimited.

There are unlimited resources. UNLIMITED.

New knowledge and new technology allows us to do more and create more resources. There is no limit on knowledge, technology, and resource generation. Almost all of the growth of human wealth, the availability of products and services, is thanks to technologies. This is why I invest in the inventors of new technologies.

I was skiing in -10 weather. A nice woman gave me her toe warmers. Little bags filled with dust that stay warm, despite it being -10. That’s an amazing technology.

Tech is not just electronics. It’s also chemistry, simple machines, and even programs like the US Constitution, and therapeutic practices like yoga and breath work.

Technology unlocks human potential, expands our ability to create. We can always do more with the hand god dealt us, thanks to our ability to use and create new technologies.

The availability of resources is determined by our level of technology, and that level knows no bounds.

Billionaires of today are the creators of tech companies.

An actual shitty situation, which I think people think we are in, would be if billionaires got their wealth from stealing it, then go around hyper consuming goods and services. Like buying food and not eating it, flying around the world skiing and partying, building houses no one lives in.

It’s true, billionaires have more food and bigger houses and do more flying than the poors. But that additional consumption is water under the bridge in the grand scheme. And anyway, they earned it.

Almost all billionaires in America get their money from working their butts off. Billionaires love to work. They can’t stop. They spend their days trying to be useful because that’s what makes humans feel good.

God bless our billionaires, and god bless America.

Have a great rest of your day.

And get “billionaire” out of the pejorative.

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If you like this story, you’ll probably like my book, All Outcomes Are Acceptable. Readers are loving it.

I’m a member of CrowdHealth a new way to find and pay for healthcare. They helped me out a lot, so I’m spreading the word.

My favorite investing platform is Public.

Photos

Wandering around DC before my grandfather’s 99th birthday party

Skiing in the Whites in subzero temps

Bonus:

Paper Net Worth, Sesame Street for Iraq, DOGE, Bring in Big Balls

If I have 1 million jelly beans, and John buys a jelly bean from Dan for $1, am I worth $1 million?

Some would say so. But really no, because I can’t sell my jelly beans and get a million dollars. But this is the logic used when people say how much money billionaires have.

Some people think Elon Musk has $300 billion in cash in a bank account. But really it’s tied up in the shares of the many companies he helped build.

There is an entity consuming billions upon billions every year. The US Federal Government is a trillionaire. And it’s not from creating more pie, it’s from taking it from taxpayers.

The government spends trillions of dollars every year on consumption, and things very few people want. Wars, DEI, gender programs, and many things we don’t even know about. There’s been a transfer of wealth from value creating taxpayers to parasitic rent-seeking fools. I paid the Feds tens of thousands of dollars. They spent it on Sesame Street for Iraq, projects at the Wuhan virus lab, and endless other crap that got us nothing.

Recently, wealth creating billionaires have taken over the federal government and are reversing the addiction to wasting taxpayer dollars, overspending, and fast-tracking the country to bankruptcy. The script has been flipped. Instead of value creators serving a wasteful and retarded government, the government is now seeking to serve the people.

The beauty of capitalism is it’s a game to create something other people want.

Long live value creators.

Bring in Big Balls

Elon Musk hired 19-year-old engineer and former Neuralink employee, Edward Coristine, to work for DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, created by Elon and President Trump. Edward’s internet name used to be Big Balls. Legacy media eating it up.

This is a video montage of legacy media investigating Big Balls.

Photos

Boston libraries