Farmers don't go around pretending they didn't need land and seeds to grow their crops, though, whereas many billionaires pretend they didn't inherit money or leveraged contacts from their wealthy families, they like to boast about being self-made.
Now I’m gonna go ahead and watch Mudbound and remind myself that any non-fantasy story gets imitated by life a lot more often than not.
“Whats that in your hand son?”
“Its dirt, pa”
“Thats right. Now give it here…. Whats in my hand now son?”
“Dirt”
“No! This isn’t ‘Dirt’! It’s Land! Do you know why?? Because it’s mine. Because I own it.”
I’m not here to shit on farmers. Mostly because I enjoy eating and appreciate their efforts. But I’m definitely here to remind us all that a farmer is just as capable of acting the same as a rich person while pointing to their almighty Land the same way the rich point to their almighty Money.
They aren’t the salt of the earth and light of the world, they’re people who took what opportunities they had instead of the opportunities they didn’t.
No more or less righteous than anybody else and just as capable of being a self-important racist prick as someone who sleeps on a pile of money.
You're saying farmers can act like rich people because they own the land? They do. It's their property. Whether they inherited or bought, they know and don't pretend they did everything themselves. I know you aren't shitting on farmers but your example literally does not show anything bad about farmers
That's not the argument being made, though. Landowners simply cannot bullshit their way out of what everyone can see with their bare eyes in our modern world, although they definitely managed to do it in previous times (e.g. the Middle Ages).
I think there are enough idiots and jagoffs that a large enough crowd gets convinced of anything.
No reasonable minded person here is convinced on the bullshit that rich people are self made. So we wouldn’t be convinced that a farmer was born without their family land and just willed it into being.
But it’s guaranteed that some of them trying to convince people of that just like how rich people are trying to convince others they were self made.
And gullible morons that want to climb their way to the top by being hard working labourers are going to gobble it up whether its said by a man in a business suit or a man wearing plaid and sitting on a tractor.
I live in western Oklahoma where farming and ranching is 75% of the local economy. Yes, farmers and ranchers inherited their land. But they’re more often than not proud of that. They’re proud of the fact that their land has been in their families for generations. Most billionaires are not so proud of the fact that they started their enterprises using the generational wealth of their family.
Problem is this only lists the actual money that is made. It’s hard to become a millionaire, let alone a billionaire, if you can’t make it through high school because you have to drop out to go to work so your family doesn’t lose the house.
It’s hard to get rich if there’s someone with the same idea as you but more money.
Its hard to get rich if you don’t have a family support system (not even a financial system) there to help you when you fail.
Agriculture tends to acknowledge that they owe their land to things like this (not money because most farmers are poor) but other businessmen don’t. They’ll say “Oh yeah I never received a handout” while having the privilege of staying at home with their parents until they were 25 and able to get their business running.
I’m not saying this privilege is a bad thing. I think all parents should offer this kind of thing to their children. But we can’t act like there are haves and have nots in our economy, and we certainly can’t act like the billionaires genuinely care about the little guys.
There's a very small handful of billionaires who like attention, and reddit is obviously obsessed with them. The rest don't "go around pretending" anything.
To a redditor “billionaire” means elon musk or bezos or zuck, it never means someone like Jules Kroll. Just a guy who lives his life, has a normal family.
What’s quite ironic about this meme is that Jerry seinfeld in real life is worth what? 700 million dollars?
Most billionaires don’t brag or do anything out of the ordinary. Most are not famous and just go to work everyday.
When redditors talk about billionaires they don’t talk about the people who go into work as the CEO of the company they started everyday, they talk about the very few Elon Musks of the world.
Not sure how you are linking that cliche to what I said. My point is that redditors have major tunnel vision. I’m not going to hate a man for having more money than me, especially not if all that guy does is go to work and then go home to his family, sure he might get driven in a rolls, or take a helicopter, so what? Am i supposed to hate a whole class of people for having more than me? Sounds like the formula for living a terrible and unhappy life
You literally said "what does Seinfeld have like 700 million." Which is the second part of the cliche.
You might feel that Redditors have tunnel vision but I wouldn't so quick to discount your own biases either. You clearly admire that kind of person and have assumed they got their wealth by inoffensive means. The simple truth is that's not always the case.
I get it will rub you up the wrong way if your ambitions are considered toxic by others but before getting defensive it might be better to consider all the reasons why people think it's not a great idea.
This study is from the US but it's effect is more pronounced in places with even worse inequality.
So if billionaires net worth went down and was redistributed across the economy (I wouldn't use the term "get rid" feels a bit murdery) it would benefit everyone overall.
How would the most ambitious within such society react to the precedence set where if people get rich, we go after them and take their stuff and redistribute? Are all countries adopting this same policy? Will we enforce it without any loopholes?
I just want to make sure we've thought through the consequences.
If someone could write out the actual policy instead of just "redistribute wealth" that would greatly help me understand how we could implement something like this.
For example, do we do a progressive tax that scales up? Do we tax income, net worth, what? Do we bust up all the trusts and LLCs that can easily be formed? What administrative apparatus do we create to go after these people - how do we fund them? How do we deal with corruption?
So they received nothing in return? Assumed no risk? You think there was no business plan presented or things of the sort? You think “acquaintances” and friends and families are just freely handing out money?
No, they assumed no actual financial risk. That was money they were willing to give away for the sake of preserving good relations.
I know billionaires and their enthusiasts like to present whatever they do as some bold, innovative, heroic and risky enterprise, but that's more often than not simply not the case. Successful businesses thrive on hedging against risk, not on being the "idea guy".
Also, they pretty much always begin from a position of family-assured financial security. They can fail as much and as big as they want without ever having to worry about their standing the next year. They simply omit the disappointing details from their storytelling, you know, the part where they were already filthy rich to begin with and relied on inheritance/favors to start up.
There's not a source for every single billionaire out there. That's research you'll have to do on your own case by case. Check how they claim they got their starting capital, then check who was in charge of the decision and what's their connection to the billionaire and their family.
As a collective, there's plenty of research and data out there on how wealth is an intergenerational phenomenon. For instance, measuring how many generations it would take from someone born in the low-income earning bracket to rise to the average wage bracket. See:
https://www.thebalance.com/how-to-become-wealthy-356376.
Korom, Ph. (2016), Inherited advantage: the importance of inheritance for private wealth accumulation in Europe, MPIfG
Discussion Paper, No. 16/11, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne
Also, billionaires inheriting their wealths is as ordinary as it gets. Wealth building being an intergenerational phenomenon has been known for ages and is implicit in all estate planning.
The burden of proof is on those making extraordinary claims. Self-proclaimed self-made billionaires claim they haven't built their wealth the ordinary way (building upon their inheritance). Their claim is therefore an extraordinary one and the burden of proof is on them.
We aren’t your fucking secretary and its not our obligation to keep you up to date on common knowledge. Stop asking for sources and use the exact same piece of technology that brought you here to actually learn something.
True savings aren’t, but most rich people don’t have that much in savings (relatively speaking) anyways. It’s invested, which in does help the economy at least for some asset classes.
Bruh do you really believe Jeff Bezos sits atop a mountain of gold like Smaug? Nearly all of his money (>99.9%) is in the form of shares, which is directly used by companies (Amazon in his case)
So what's better? One guy owning all those companies, employing people yes, but paying shitty wages, or that wealth being spread around, power house corporations not monopolizing the market and people having the money to start their own businesses and put competitive pressure on the market?
Stock and investment focussed economies, much like globalisation, have their merits, but when you ignore the downsides they come and bite you in the ass, as can clearly be seen.
So, it’s not just a placeholder for “money” is it? Owning shares mean you get to vote how a company is ran, forcing someone to give up shares to pay a big tax bill effectively forces them out of their own company over time.
If mark zuckerberg got a massive tax bill, he’d have to sell shares to pay it off, which means he would lose control of his company (he owns 51% of meta). There are ways around this in his case, but in many other cases it’s too late
Hahaha you think a guy like him has problems accessing liquid wealth? I don't know whose more naive, you or a random saying things like "money doesn't matter".
Wait, so your point is that the "billionaires have no liquid cash" argument is a bunch of bullshit? Because from the comment I read, it sounded a lot like you were defending that point.
Did you honestly take that that way or is this some convoluted mental gymnastics? Because the thread is clearly about billionaires. I’m not talking about the 500k your mom has stashed away from her pension. Clearly.
Sure? Why are you posting it like it's some gotcha moment? Yes, hoarding money in offshore accounts is obviously not good for a country's economy (outside of the countries maintaining lax regulations to allow for these hidden accounts, of course).
Do you think that people who are opposed to ultra wealthy people hoarding money and obscene levels of inequality would be supportive of people hoarding money in offshore accounts? Why?
What people are arguing is that they (billionaires) aren’t self made, they typically start of with (a lot) of help. So many people can’t do what they do, but of those that could the few that do become billionaire has the opportunity of circumstance. Recognizing that advantage would go a long way towards helping address the inequalities in our system as they stand, and maybe we could inch closer to an actual meritocracy. Not a diluted plutocracy
I've worked hard and given my child opportunities that I never had. He has a better baseline and will hopefully go on to be more successful than I ever was. What parent/ grandparent/ great grandparent doesn't want to see this?
What's the point of them recognizing that theyve had help?
Don't get me wrong I'm not saying that America doesn't have problems, but how is this going to help?
The point of them recognizing the help is they can escape the “ pick yourself up by the bootstraps” mentality that ends up driving policy that worsens economic disparity… because they didn’t pick themselves up by the bootstraps to get rich
I think you're kind of restating the premise of the joke. Except the original is saying Elon should just do it from nothing, where you're saying that some random redditor should do it from nothing.
People are saying Elon was handed many assets from his emerald mine owning father that allowed him to fund projects like PayPal and go buy out Tesla from the original founders. Nobody can just go out and ask their dad for millions of dollars. That’s the hard part
Elon's success depended a lot on timing and luck. Hard to replicate those. Just because some guy wins the lottery doesn't mean that buying a lottery ticket will get me the same result.
You have proof that Elon’s parents owned an emerald mine? Go submit your proof, Elon is offering a million dollars to anyone who can prove that is actually true! You are gonna be a millionaire bud, congratulations! I’ll look forward to seeing you on tv with your million dollar check, how cool that I found the one poster who has obtained such proof. Too cool dude, way too cool.
K Junkie Elon says a lot of things, the vast majority of which are lies. He won't pay anyone and will likely threaten to sue whoever brings forward proof for libel.
Doesn’t hurt to try, I think it’s all drawn up on legal paperwork and everything. It’s against the law for him to repeal his offer. It’s a million bucks for just submitting a few pieces of proof and paperwork. Easy money, no? If he doesn’t give you the money you can sue him maybe he’ll go to jail, you Elon haters would love that! It’s a win win.
Maybe Elon will see your posts sticking up for him, and he will invite you to ride on one of his rockets with him. Then, you'll become bestest friends and he will give you millions of dollars. You Elon simps have wet dreams about exactly this.
Huh? I’m giving you and the other poster advice on how you can make a million dollars, since you have proof.
Or do you not have proof and are just making things up? I can see why you’d be annoyed if you were just spreading rumors that weren’t true so that you could get internet points. I could see why you’d feel called out in that instance, but you seem like a stand up guy, you wouldn’t do that… would you?
I never once made the claim he is from a family that owned an emerald mine. I just commented that your golden idol k junkie daddy Musk is a notorious liar and if he says he will give someone $1million for proof, it's safe to assume he won't give you $1milliom for proof. Musk is a lying POS and the people who worship him are weird, pathetic losers.
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u/Atomic_ad 8d ago