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Nobody earns a billion dollars
(lemmy.world)
Hi comrades, I'm new here, how do we feel about posting Mastodon content on Lemmy?
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.
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?
If you have $10 billion is STOCKS (which is what ALL of these billionaires have, NOT cash)… then even if you sell your stocks you’ll end up with WAY less because of how the stock market works. Also taxes.
Let's say you only get 10% of the value, which is a massive stretch. What's 10% of $10 billion? $1 billion. That is still an absolutely insane amount of wealth.
The point "they don't have as much as you think" is meaningless, because the amount they do have is still exceptional. There's no functional difference past a certain threshold.