Summary
Since Trump’s second-term inauguration, five top billionaires have lost a combined $209 billion as markets react to policy uncertainty.
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Elon Musk’s net worth plunged $148 billion as Tesla shares collapsed amid declining European and Chinese sales.
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Jeff Bezos lost $29 billion as Amazon stock fell 14%.
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Sergey Brin’s fortune dropped $22 billion following Alphabet’s weak earnings and regulatory pressure.
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Mark Zuckerberg and Bernard Arnault each lost $5 billion as Meta and LVMH stocks tumbled.
The S&P 500 is down 6.4%, reversing gains seen post-election.
Acting like they have the billions as liquid cash is weird.
IF, and its a big if, they would start selling their assets in order to liquidate their stocks, the assets would nosedive in value to fucking hell. Most of their wealth is smoke and mirrors. Most of them spend money by borrowing cash against their assets.
Tax them so they have to lend or sell some assets to pay their fair share.
It’s pretty common knowledge how these billionaires leverage the value of their stocks/assets as collateral against loans, in order to avoid having to pay capital gains tax.
Even though it’s not liquid cash, there really isn’t much to preclude them from taking out cash loans up to like 70-80% of their value if they ever wanted to (not that they would, as cash depreciates in value due to inflation).
So while you are correct that if they ever had to liquidate their shares the value would plummet significantly - unless something catastrophic happens and the value of those assets plunges well below an acceptable level to their financiers, it will never happen.
If you owe the bank a $100 and can’t pay it back, that’s your problem. If you owe the bank $100m, that’s their problem.
I think we might be nearing a catastrophic economic collapse. It will be interesting to see how these billionaires react.
The whole monetary system is smoke and mirrors. If people don’t consume more than last year the entire system can collapse and central banks buy up all the debt that is suddenly considered bad.
Then we wonder how stores of value like housing, gold, and bitcoin can rise so astronomically in nominal terms.
Capitalism does not “collapse” with 0 or negative GDP growth. I don’t know where people got this idea. You only really see any sort of “collapse” if the social structure breaks down - the basic behaviors of trading continue even in extreme crises, insofar as a society operates with property assigned to individuals like that. Not counting “bubbles” and such as a “collapse”.
We will see the next recession. I’ll bet you that the bailout is bigger than the last, and I’d bet gold continues to rise as QE is unloaded into the market. Its done 10% a year since the Fed started QE every bailout.
What is your prediction for what will become of it, though. GDP growth stops and people start bursting into flames? You know we’ve actually observed this before, right?
Now, if you do mean “capitalism” not in the plain definition of “an economy based around private ownership”, but the more specific version where control of capital is highly centralized - there’s some truth to the idea that economic decline can cause people to start looking to reform that system. True of any system, really, because people generally don’t want to see their quality of life decrease. But that’s very different than an economic system “requiring” it to function.
Not mine , I know exactly how much cash I’ve got …except for the coinstar bucket but that’s for real emergencies