RAW, video, anything that grabs stills in real time...

And everyone should keep in mind that this is true for basically all of the billionaires. Not that there isn't real wealth there, but it's a lot fuzzier than the numbers appear. Basically everyone with astronomical wealth mostly owns shares in companies, and how much of that value is real in any near-term sense depends on a lot of factors.

Musk's wealth is more speculative and fuzzy than most because his companies' valuation is based not on the revenues the companies generate now but theories about what they might generate in the future. Tesla's high valuation is all about the promise of self-driving cars restructuring transportation. SpaceX's is a little bit about cheap access to space changing a lot of stuff and more about AI. In all cases the high valuations are bets on world-changing technology being becoming real, and on Musk's companies being able to capture a good chunk of the resulting revenues.

Switch your pension funds, if you can, from NASDAQ to S&P.

... by getting angry at a person for not knowing a definition of a word that you have to use Urban Dictionary as a reference for.

It'd be fun to be that rich,

The funny thing is that he seems to constantly be miserable, at least when he's raging online inside the anger-echo chamber he built for himself.

I think wealth taxes are fundamentally a distraction from the giant loopholes in current systems, and even if you oppose wealth taxes, you should still fix said loopholes.

First off, people like Musk just take loans against their stock. This is not a realizing event, so they get to enjoy their gains without paying taxes on them. Using stock as collateral in any way should be a realizing event. If you're doing something that lets you enjoy the gains, you should be forced to realize the gains and pay taxes on them.

Secondly, capital gains are just income. They don't deserve a special lower rate. They should be taxed the same as other income, at normal income rates.

It's fair to argue about whether we should be doing more on top of these things, but can we at least agree that we should be doing these things, and make this the standard globally?

I haven't seen them in ages they hadn't been bothering with slashdot. I guess this IPO event is so big that there isn't a single forum they're not canvassing.

The crazy thing is that so many people have figured out that having trillionaires is bad news and that Elon Musk is a piece of shit that even with all their bots they can't control the conversation here. And this is a forum that used to have a big soft spot bordering on a hard-on for Musk because he looks like one of our own that made good...

He can tap more than enough money to control governments let alone individual people. What he says, goes.

Folks don't seem to understand that when the numbers get that big it's not money anymore it's power.

The pension funds are mostly tapped out they have been getting raided for ages.

The tricks he did with NASDAQ and that NASDAQ allowed are there because it lets him raid your 401k. It basically makes SpaceX look like a much safer investment than it actually is and because of that when you were making your 401k elections it is virtually guaranteed to include a lot of SpaceX. Even though the company has no path to profitability and its valuation is based entirely on vibes and promises from a man who has been breaking his promises for 30 years.

A shitload of older Gen x and even some boomers are in for a rude awakening when they find their retirements wiped out and they're sleeping on their kids' couches. I don't know how but they'll blame Joe Biden or maybe Barack Obama though. Maybe even Hunter biden's laptop will come into it...

It's lust for power.

Think of it this way, when you have more money than you can spend it's savings.

When you have more than you can save it's investment.

But when you have more than you can invest, it's power.

One of the things small government conservatives have a tough time with is the realization that money is power and that if somebody has a fuck ton of money they can order you to do basically anything and you pretty much have to do it or else.

The way I find a lot of them cope with that if they realize it is by pretending they can always just go out homesteading. Which is why homesteading is so popular with small government conservatives. It's a mental safety valve to deal with the fact that they aren't willing to take away Elon musk's money because they're scared of letting the government do that and the only organization that's powerful enough to do it is the government.

What most of them don't get is that at that point when you have a trillion dollars you are the government. Because you can make the rules by just spending limitless amounts of cash.

If for example any of us was even the slightest inconvenience to Elon Musk he could just phone up whoever is employing Us and order them to fire us and they would and then we would be blacklisted and become completely unemployable.

If we had a small business he could just start up a competing business and run us out of business and there would be fuck all we could do about it.

Elon Musk could at any time he chose cut any one of us off from food and medicine and shelter.

And the only reason that's not happening right now is he can't be bothered because none of us is all that important as individuals.

It's basically cosmic horror at that point. You just don't think about it because it's too much to think about. That there is this massive unimaginable force that could squash you like a bug at any moment but doesn't because you're beneath its notice.

And that's what he was like when he was a multi-billionaire. He's a trillionaire now and he's worse.

That analysis is utterly wrong. Far, far worse than the smartphone theory.

It is, in fact, the almost exact opposite of the truth. The truth is that wealth is what causes fertility decline. Wealth and female education, actually, which come hand-in-hand. This story is strikingly visible everywhere around the globe. As a population becomes wealthier and its women become better-educated, fertility falls. Without exception, and the effect is so powerful it overrides culture, religion, everything.

This is the primary driver in the US, too. In fact, wages have not stagnated, not when you look at the full picture including government transfers, and every generation is wealthier than the one before. Somewhat surprisingly, given the current housing price bubble, each generation even has higher home ownership rates than the previous generations at the same ages. Houses and apartments are also significantly bigger and more luxurious (which explains most of their higher prices, actually; do some comparisons on a per square foot basis over time, then adjust for the higher quality and greater amenities we have today).

But if you look at how Americans spend their money over the years, the biggest change you'll find is that we spend less on housing, food and clothing as a percentage of our income (in spite of bigger, nicer houses, far more restaurant and delivered food, and much larger wardrobes) and much more on entertainment -- and that in spite of the fact that entertainment has gotten dramatically cheaper.

So that's kind of the problem. One of the most powerful men in human history is a insecure ketamine addicted asshole. That's going to have serious implications on your life and mine.

Go watch Patrick Boyle's videos on this. They bypassed several rules related to stocks so that they can take SpaceX and cram it into otherwise extremely safe investments even though SpaceX is completely unprofitable and has no path to profitability. Again Patrick Boyle will explain to you in detail why that is the case.

That money has to come from somewhere and it's sure as fuck not going to come from the Epstein class. When you steal their money you rot in prison like Bernie Madoff and Elizabeth Holmes.

And there isn't enough money in the pension system anymore either. It's just not there.

The only thing left is your 401k. Previously you could structure your retirement savings investments to avoid these kind of high risk investments you can't do that because like I mentioned they changed the rules designed to protect you.

I've said it before and I will say it again, every single system designed to protect you has been dismantled. You aren't on your own though. On your own implies that you just got a bootstrap. It ignores all the people gunning for you and your property.

You're not on your own you have a predator on your back ready to take everything you have. And again they have dismantled the barriers you put up to protect yourself. They did that while you were sleeping.

The US solved this problem 150 years ago. First with the observation that immigrants acculturate. Second with the acceptance that elements of their culture are going to get melded in to form a new culture. Culture is never static, anyway, it always drifts and morphs. Immigration just changes it a bit faster. But it's good! This ongoing immigrant-driven culture change is what made the US a superpower. Embrace it.

However, immigration is only a stopgap solution to the problem of population decline, because fertility is declining everywhere on the globe, fast. The global fertility rate is basically at replacement now, but the decline is continuing, and accelerating. We'll drop below replacement as a species in just a few years. Even then population will keep growing for a while due to the "filling out" effect, but then it'll start dropping, fast. And it will quickly become top-heavy (more old than young).

Probably not just our economic system, our civilization as a whole, though AI may change that. A highly technological civilization depends on having a large population because it depends on a vast amount of knowledge, which requires a tremendous amount of specialization. Some of this is the obvious sort, such as the scientists and engineers who are focused on increasingly-narrow areas of expertise, but a lot of it is not at all obvious, especially in industry, where everything we make requires a huge amount of knowledge that was learned by doing and isn't -- and maybe can't be -- taught anywhere but on the job.

To some extent we could probably manage with a smaller population if more of the population became highly educated (not necessarily in the academic sense, though we'd need that, too), but that transition wouldn't be easy, in part because there are lots of people who simply aren't interested in highly-technical work. We'd need a lot more of them to become willing to learn and do it anyway. Obviously the first step would be to bring the whole remaining population up to what the developed world considers a basic level of education -- that would enable us to tap new supplies of scientists, engineers and technicians. But the population reduction that seems likely to come means we'd need a lot more than that to be able to maintain our knowledge base and production diversity.

AI might change all this, of course. It could make it completely unnecessary for humans to participate in any of the above. But without something like that, it seems unlikely that our technological civilization could survive with less than a billion people or so, and technological progress would likely take a severe hit long before we hit that level of population reduction.