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0 pointstrollbridge4h ago0 comments

I’d be more impressed if this article weren’t obviously written by AI.

Regarding the idea of a rise of “trillionaires”, gobal wealth is about $470T. Unless there is a gigantic expansion of the middle class from formerly poor people, it is impossible to have more than 470 trillionaires.

The idea of a 1 person billion dollar company or 5-10 employee in the Fortune 500 is laughable. Any business doing that much turnover is going to be hiring lots of vendors and contractors. I guess they could decide to outsource nearly all operations to keep headcount low, but the idea of one singular person generating a billion dollars of value from labour alone with no assistance from capital of an employer is likewise laughable.

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torginus4h ago

I wonder what percentage of that wealth is tied up in speculative assets, such as stocks whose value is predicated on the company being worth that much at some point in the future, or 'land', as in things like real estate that used to cost a whole lot less, but now that speculative wealth created a lot of spending power for a scare resource, it now costs a whole lot more.

I would say an absolutely non-trivial amount, especially in the developed world.

fhdkweig4h ago

I'm not an economist, but if we have runaway inflation (not saying we will), the value of the dollar will plummet and it won't seem too strange. In the 1960s, Gilligan's Island talks of the Millionaire and His Wife. My parents recently retired as millionaires and are definitely not upper class. Inflation can easily change the definitions of millions, billions, and trillions while doing nothing to change the class struggle.

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torginus4h ago

I would say an absolutely non-trivial amount, especially in the developed world.

fhdkweig4h ago

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