• danc4498@lemmy.worldEnglish
    20·
    4 months ago

    Has a billionaire ever lost all their money? Outside of criminal cases. Seems impossible.

    • CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      191·
      4 months ago

      There was a browser game some had developed where you had to spend all your money. It was similar to cookie clicker.

      The point of the game was that once you have a billion dollars, you have so much money that you literally could not spend that much money.

      • Wilzax@lemmy.world
        23·
        4 months ago

        I could easily spend a billion dollars but most of it would be doing Mr Beast type shit like building houses and wells and hospitals or paying for people’s medical procedures

        • _g_be@lemmy.world
          2·
          4 months ago

          I couldn’t not do that as well, which implies that to get that stinking rich and stay that way you must be some degree of sociopath

    • Frozengyro@lemmy.world
      12·
      4 months ago

      Even in a criminal case, they will have more than the rest of us to live on after there 3 year, club fed sentence

    • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
      4·
      4 months ago

      Perhaps Mikhail Khodorkovsky. I’m sure he managed to squirrel away some of his wealth and now lives comfortably in exile, albeit with a huge bullseye on his back. But if your standard is “lose 100% of their wealth” then that almost never happens to anyone, even working class people who declare bankruptcy due to overwhelming debts.

      Does Muammar Gaddafi count? He lived like a king with an anime-style cadre of elite female bodyguards, being essentially the emperor of Libya. He died after some soldiers dragged him out of a ditch and summarily executed him.

  • ChicoSuave@lemmy.world
    111·
    4 months ago

    Maybe Ayn Rand was onto something, we should tax the most wealthy people people since they are the wealth creators. We should expose John Galt and marvel at how well the billionaires can rebuild their wealth from nothing in any field they enter. Atlas Shrugged is a guide on what to do to help stop billions from going to the few.

  • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
    01·
    4 months ago

    Oh, I’ve somehow remembered that weird period when I was kinda leftist. (Usually I’m ancap.)

    Not because I stopped believing that people are not born equal or that people deserve and need different things, and that voluntarism is good, but because evolutionary mechanisms, which are one of the main arguments in favor of markets, invisible hands, bootstraps and such, are skewed by inheritance and starting with different base.

    This led me to believe that the Marxist division of private property and “personal” property (doesn’t sound right in English, private seems more personal than “personal”, while it’s less in Russian), where the latter was what formally existed in USSR and the former was some bad, bad capitalist concept, has the right to exist.

    The former shouldn’t be inherited or gifted. The latter is complete property.

    This would kinda make sense by removing generational wealth, but there’d be a question of criteria separating these two things. I guess it would involve the concept of “means of production” and land and resources would be something that can’t be personal property. But it’d be all a question of amounts anyway.

    And then there’s a question of whether such a society will or will not be eaten by another, where not only wealth is accumulated by clans, but also sometimes knowledge of power.

    EDIT: It feels so good to put the A-word in any comment involving politics. You just know that every fool out there won’t think further. It’s as if you had a dam defending your little cozy town from sewage sea around.