- 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.
When someone has this much money, it doesn’t matter if they buy the presidency, buy the media, buy the means to live, buy people’s rights… It doesn’t matter. They will never get the respect and love they desperately seek like all humans do. They will never love themselves until they understand that their wealth isn’t earned and they aren’t special. We don’t consider ourselves better than anyone as a human and then not get depressed and lonely. It’s not difficult for us to accept kinship with all humans, but almost impossible for them.
Daily Reminder:
That’s not enough
The Top 10 Richest Americans have a combined wealth total of $1,548 TRILLION.
$209 billion is only 0.13% of the of Top 10.
We need to get those numbers higher.
🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪
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.
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
THERE’S THREE AND A HALF YEARS TO GO. THEY’RE PLAYING THE LONG GAME.
THEY AREN’T UPSET. THEY’RE GETTING EVERYTHING THEY WANT.
Whisper it in my ear
^^they ^^lost ^^$209 ^^billion
🥵 That’s hot. Not nearly enough, but still great news
Rookie numbers. Needs more.
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”.
Oh ok, that’s sad, let me shed a few tears here before I go back to be exploited by the rich 😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹
and the American retirees who depend on their savings lost trillions to these idiots. A majority of those retirees voted conservative, but I feel bad for the ones who didnt.
As you get closer to retirement, the usual strategy is to shift from a stock-heavy portfolio to something less volatile. The retirees getting burned are the ones who were too ignorant or greedy to do that.
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.
Not mine , I know exactly how much cash I’ve got …except for the coinstar bucket but that’s for real emergencies
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
Unfortunately our own pensions and such are also getting wiped out by the same forces. And with less access to insider information.
They would become weak enough for us to start curbstomping
These are the same billionaires that donated millions to the inauguration. How’s that RoI on bribery going techbros?
Coverage like this makes me feel sad.
Do people honestly not realise that billionaires always enrich themselves during recessions?
This is all going to plan for oligarchs. People celebrating it are naive unfortunately.
and they have bailouts just in case they cant actually make money.
I would say most of it is meaningless other than Elon and specifically Tesla, Tesla stock prices plumetting will remove most of the power from Elon in the future, even Trump might turn on him once his main thing his net worth evaporates
Yes, the all-but-inevitable Trump decision to throw Musk under the bus is not something I’ve seen a lot of people discuss.
Musk is only a part of the problem, and Musk will have to lose another 110 billion before he even stops being the richest man in the world.
I’d love to see that happen but I’m not holding my breath. Meanwhile it does nothing but enrich powerful Disaster capitalists including Putin and his coterie.
Id be willing to bet that tesla is no bigger than 10% maximum of his worth. His big ones are space X that just chugs our tax money, and starlink, which I believe is being used as navigation in weapons systems being sold to nations. Tesla is effectively meaningless now.
I doubt that
Edit: Tesla’s market cap is now 722 billion, still making it more valuable than any company on this graph. We need to go much lower
This really puts into perspective how massively overvalued tesla is
But its a tech company
Said unironically by many people.
It’s a funny argument, because, yeah, a lot of tech companies are overvalued, but that’s not a good thing either
Yeah that’s what a bubble looks like all right
looks more like a cancerous tumor9tesla) crowding out healthy tissue.
That is absolutely wild… I cant believe how much of the industry they are! Well thats great then! I was worried the death of tesla would be unfelt by elon.
He’s hit the level of wealth where he’ll never be poor. But he can be removed from “buy governments” money until such time as he can be held accountable for his actions
I think you are wrong in the exact opposite direction, spaced just lost a 25 billion contract too
They deserve to lose so much more.