- cross-posted to:
- trump_watch@lemm.ee
- cross-posted to:
- trump_watch@lemm.ee
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.
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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.
They deserve to lose so much more.
It remains to be seen if their kissing the ring was strategic or just tactical (apart from Musk, who is committed), but what they’ve bought wasn’t a good economy. They bought into the transition from democracy and capitalism to authoritarian oligarchy.
Dollars don’t describe the value of Russia-level corruption, which is where the country is now pointed. And the longer-term gains from captured institutions would far outpace a hundred billion dollars or two, if they succeed.
Small but important point. We’ve been an oligarchy for a while now. We’re just losing the pretense of it being a democracy.
Technically we’ve been an oligarchy since day 1. It just didn’t have oligarchy vibes.
How do you screw both the rich and poor at the same time?
Sheer incompetence. Whenever he says “I’m the only one who can…” I hear “I have no fucking clue how to even begin doing this”.
The rich didnt lost any money, their stock is just lower than in january, but still higher than last year. And it can still get up.
The poor have to cope with higher prices of basic goods, which never comes down.
Only poors are screwed until they eat the leech
These are the same billionaires that donated millions to the inauguration. How’s that RoI on bribery going techbros?
proof they’re not geniuses
So that’s what, about 5 minutes with of profits between them?
deleted by creator
Good let’s make it another 200 billion EACH and even then that won’t be enough as they’ll all still have hundreds of billions of dollars which is absolutely insane
They would become weak enough for us to start curbstomping
Unfortunately our own pensions and such are also getting wiped out by the same forces. And with less access to insider information.
That’s not enough
It’s a relatively small price to pay for the power they gained, and most of the losses are elons anyway
We need to keep pumping those numbers up
The Top 10 Richest Americans have a combined wealth total of $1,548 TRILLION.
$209 billion is only
0.13%13.5% of the of Top 10.We need to get those numbers higher.
Edit: I suck at math, as it was pointed out to me
You seem to have forgotten to multiply by 100 after you divided 209 by 1,548.
209 is 13.5% of 1,548, not 0.13%.
Edit: It is a bit disturbing how many people upvote things without making even the most basic sanity check.
That doesn’t stack up, Musk is the richest, currently worth $324Bn - they can’t be worth more than $3.24Tn combined.
I think they replaced the period with a comma.
The %s are all out of whack too, it’s more like 13%, which, while not enough, is a lot more than 0.13%.
For sure, Google tells me there’s only 21.2T USD in circulation.
🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪
But to them this is winning, right? Anything to “own the libs” that they so hate. There’s no such thing as failing, there’s only failing forwards.
The only solace to watching all my retirement and investments get cratered is the fact that the assholes that brought this all about are taking the bigger hit.
They don’t care. Stock prices only matter when purchasing and when selling. The day to day up and down has no affect on their direct worth.
False - these billionaires use their stock as collateral for loans. It’s all part of a tax avoidance scheme. If the stock goes down significantly, the banks come knocking.
Both of the billionaires pictured also head their companies in some way or another. Investors can vote to throw them out. Not that they would, but even the vote of no confidence is not a good look.
Banks may come to them, but hardly knocking with demands. ‘If you owe the bank $100, that’s your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.’ And how they interact with banks, loans, etc. is far different in scale and method than the average consumer anyway.
only meaningful if their stocks don’t bounce back, but too soon to tell
Stocks will always bounce back. But the people that live off their 401ks now have to sell at a loss to survive.
Also only meaningful if they can’t buy up actual, tangible assets in the coming recessions, effectively converting their dead capital into more assets. (+ getting more state money for being “too big to fail”)
Very similar to what happened just before the “collapse” of the Soviet Union, which seems to be Trump’s aspiration. It had turned into a free-for-all.
No, they’re gonna. It’s exactly what happened last recession. The pain got offshored to the workers, and the people with assets used the moment to leverage their assets to buy more assets on the cheap.
These companies will absolutely use these things as excuses to replace workers with AI chatbots.
Yep, every time the US is in an economic low period, the top 1% snatch up swathes of assets for cheap. It’s how we went from 1 billionaire, to several, then several billionaires to hundreds in the last ~20 years
We just need to keep going until at worlds population billionaires
Do what they do, put some extra cash away and buy an index funds
I can’t help but feel like this was some sort of Monkey’s paw situation. “I wish there weren’t any billionaires”
