The world’s richest 1% own 43% of global financial assets, and the wealth of the top five billionaires has doubled since 2020, while 60% of humanity got poorer, according to a report by Oxfam.
Category: Billionaires
Meanwhile, Swiss bank UBS for the first time found a greater number of new billionaires entered the exclusive club through inheritance rather than grit in 2023, underlining how the wealth transfer is intensifying.
Bitter feuds over inheritance are about to become much more common in the world’s richest families as the greatest wealth transfer in history picks up pace.
Source: ‘It will get ugly’: Nepo babies brace for billionaire inheritance battles
It seems we’re going to be needing a lot more clever kids like Akash Shendure to keep the kajillionaires honest—and the rest of us on our toes.
Source: Billionaire Beware: This 17-Year-Old Is Tracking Your Carbon Emissions – Mother Jones
High wealth individual wants court protection from free speech
Texas gas billionaire Kelcy Warren is taking Beto O’Rourke to court over an old campaign talking point. It could keep future candidates from bringing up the influence of corporate money in politics.
Source: A Texas Billionaire Is Suing to Stop Free Speech Against Billionaires
It wasn’t so long ago we said this about millionaires how the fuck did we come to this so quickly? Whatsmore why the fuck did we make Trump President?
Worse, billionaire giving is subsidized by ordinary taxpayers. Under current policy, only the roughly 10 percent of Americans who itemize deductions on their state and federal tax returns—as almost every wealthy family does—get to deduct charitable donations from their taxable income. So when a billionaire with a 20 percent effective tax rate gives $100 million to his own foundation, or makes a huge donation to Harvard—as Jared Kushner’s daddy did to help him get in—or bankrolls “charities” that spread hate and misinformation (because eligibility rules for tax-exempt nonprofits are shamefully lax), that donation costs the US Treasury $20 million.
Without all the perks and subsidies afforded to super-rich Americans, billionaires might never have emerged in the first place, or at least we’d have a great deal fewer of them. Kill those perks—the tax favoritism, the pay-to-play, the cheating, legacy admissions, self-interested philanthropy, retirement subsidies, the Walton GRATs and all the rest, and maybe those undeserving billionaires will one day fade away.
“Billionaires represent 0.000002% of the American population, but they’re responsible for 7.4% of all political donations so far this cycle,” according to Americans for Tax Fairness.
Source: ‘Drowning Our Democracy’: US Billionaires Have Pumped Nearly $900,000,000 Into Midterms
Instead of counting on an allegedly benevolent billionaire like Elon Musk to guard free speech online by buying companies like Twitter, we should just take our digital public square out of rich people’s hands and into public ownership.
Here comes Trump
With over 82 million followers, Musk has been a prolific Twitter user and a sharp critic of its use of content moderation, saying that he favors temporary suspensions over permanent bans. It remains unclear what changes, technical or philosophical, Musk’s stewardship will bring to the platform. In interviews, he’s floated a series of potential ideas, including installing an edit button, allowing for longer tweets, culling bots, and making Twitter’s algorithm open source.
Billionaires now hold so much of the world’s wealth, their apologists argue, there’s no choice but to rely on them for philanthropy. But we can’t take our eyes off the ball: We need to tax the ultrarich out of existence.
“This country made him rich,” said one critic. “He owes us.”
Source: Elon Musk Thinks Elon Musk Is Taxed Enough Already? Please | Crooks and Liars
“What if it was your family starving to death?”
olddogthoughts 
You must be logged in to post a comment.