Most of this wealth is in stocks, though. Their worth is based on the number of shares they own of these companies. For every share they sell the value of the other shares drops a bit. So if Musk or Bezos sold all their shares, to have this money in actual cash, not only would they probably bankrupt their company and crash the stock market, but the cash they got out of it would be only a fraction of what this shows on paper now.
You do a structured sale overtime and those do take place even in the billions of dollars without destroying the value of the stock. Also, they can borrow against the value of the stock, usually for extremely low interest rates, to quickly infuse cash. This argument is nonsense. The best recent example is elon buying Twitter. Yes it hurt tesla stock in the short term but it is almost back to the presale value with little impact on his overall networth. The wealth in stocks is very real.
Edit: The elon case isn’t even a good example because he was forced to sell the stock much faster than normal.
I’m not sure how to edit comments so I’m adding this… I agree with the sentiment and how insanely low the minimum wage is. But these billionaires don’t actually have the amount of money most people believe they have. Functionally, it’s nowhere close.
They still treat that money as a real value though. Musk put up a shit ton of Tesla shares to cover the Twitter buy. I think I understand that you mean the big numbers should be slightly smaller big numbers but if they are wielded and function at those levels then that’s kinda the same thing.
This is a good point as well that gets left out. If you can take out loans against that wealth and spend that, how is that functionally different than having the money yourself in the first place?
Most of this wealth is in stocks, though. Their worth is based on the number of shares they own of these companies. For every share they sell the value of the other shares drops a bit. So if Musk or Bezos sold all their shares, to have this money in actual cash, not only would they probably bankrupt their company and crash the stock market, but the cash they got out of it would be only a fraction of what this shows on paper now.
You do a structured sale overtime and those do take place even in the billions of dollars without destroying the value of the stock. Also, they can borrow against the value of the stock, usually for extremely low interest rates, to quickly infuse cash. This argument is nonsense. The best recent example is elon buying Twitter. Yes it hurt tesla stock in the short term but it is almost back to the presale value with little impact on his overall networth. The wealth in stocks is very real.
Edit: The elon case isn’t even a good example because he was forced to sell the stock much faster than normal.
I’m not sure how to edit comments so I’m adding this… I agree with the sentiment and how insanely low the minimum wage is. But these billionaires don’t actually have the amount of money most people believe they have. Functionally, it’s nowhere close.
What do you mean by this?
They still treat that money as a real value though. Musk put up a shit ton of Tesla shares to cover the Twitter buy. I think I understand that you mean the big numbers should be slightly smaller big numbers but if they are wielded and function at those levels then that’s kinda the same thing.
This is a good point as well that gets left out. If you can take out loans against that wealth and spend that, how is that functionally different than having the money yourself in the first place?
“But billionaires’ cash isn’t liquid! They can’t access it until they need $44b to buy a social media company!”
The one good thing about Elon Musk is how he disproves the myths of capitalism like this and meritocracy.