#8 Michael Bloomberg: $40 billion
#7 Larry Ellison: $43.6 billion
#6 Mark Zuckerberg: $44.6 billion
#5 Jeff Bezos: $45.2 billion
#4 Carlos Slim Helu: $50 billion
#3 Warren Buffett: $60.8 billion
#2 Amancio Ortega: $67 billion
#1 Bill Gates: $75 billion
I don’t even buy these are the richest men bc I’m sure the richest men in the world would: A. never be named in a magazine list like this without suing, B. Likely have more wealth and assets that are unreported than they do reported. Also, didn’t Peter Thiel recently become a trillionaire?
Regardless, I do just want to point out what most of the richest men in the world have in common, is a strong belief in natural heirarchies and social darwinism.
This list is supposed to exemplify survival of the fittest, or those “chosen by God” to rule over the rest of us…? I can’t even imagine how sickly the men on the real list would look.
The masses wouldn’t be able to function without them guiding the way and making the rules…
Does this look like a list of men put together by God or nature? As in, survival of the fittest rules where nature allowed this or God considered every human being on earth before selecting who he ordained worthy of steering the reigns of society, and this list was the final result?
#1 Bill Gates: $75 billion
musk just reached 500B - is this list from the 90s?
Ortega, Blomberg, Ellison, Slim and Buffett are all going to croak within 20 years and I’m being very generous there. They are all in their 80’s.
That leaves Zuckass, Bezos, and Gates. Bezos has a good 40 years left and Gates 30 years…again being generous by hitting 100 years old. That leaves us with the one and only Zuckass. All hail the ruler!
It seems to leave out autocratic leaders of countries with equivalent wealth and greater power, such as Prince Bonesaw and Vlad Putler.
Also, both allegedly religious men presumably chosen by God to lead their people. Sawing people apart or poisoning their tea when they speak against you is just God’s will.
I guess when the argument is convenient, it pivots to their brute strength and willingness to do things most people find unspeakable being what allowed them to gain/maintain power. Putin at least got his his hands dirty for the KGB before he came into power, and grew up poor. But, if it came down to him actually maintaining power in a battle that relied only on brute strength would he actually be the victor?
I kinda doubt he or the Saudi royal prince would last 5 minutes if either had to face the general public, in order to defend their titles, without intervention of loyalists rushing to protect and defend them.
If something like this ever did happen IRL, the vast majority of the world would cheer.
I mean, one got shot and killed, and there was celebration.
Yeah right. There would be 500 security guards and probably 1mln to get in.
All the politicians need to do is say ‘we know this is about money. So we will hire you for double your pay and benefits to come work for us’ and they’ll defect. It is a job after all.
Then who will save the billionaires?
… They’re all in one room?
A guillotine is unnecessarily complicated.
… and also too humane.
The world’s wealthiest eight men control net wealth of $426 billion, based on estimates from Forbes.
Took me until this sentence to realize this article was from 2017. Muskrat is getting close to that all by himself - I saw something the other day that had him around $350 billion.
I’m sure the numbers are much much worse than they were 8 years ago.
Elon musk has between $470B-$500B to his name, according to bloomberg and forbes. That would make him richer than the world’s wealthiest 8 men in 2017.
Yes. Yes they are.
Hasn’t the USD also decreased in value since then? Actually a good way to “make more billionaires”
Top 3 today are just shy of 1 trillion dollars…
It’s just a matter of time before all that wealth flows down and everyone gets rich. Trust the system, it’s working as intended.
They don’t call it a “golden shower” for nothing!
Ohh let me see what flower that is…
Panels are in the wrong order. It should either be 3, 1, 2, 4 or 3, 2, 1, 4. These orders offer different feelings to the progression. Either way, you have to set the stage for the joke with 3.
The best part is you can lure them there by inviting them to give a Ted talk how they made so much money and the rest of the world needs to learn from them as an example.
In the words of some CEOs… “Execution is everything”
Why limit it to 8? Why not just take the most recent Forbes rich list as a list of undesirables
Because
- Forbes doesn’t even list everyone
- There are rare cases of absurdly rich who don’t deserve harsh punishment (but deserve their fortune to be taken away and fairly distributed, of course)
- Taking info from a private company to do so would be… questionable.
There are no ethical billionaires. All of them got their wealth by exploiting people. The ones that seem like nice people still got there by causing untold harm to thousands or millions of people, and they continue to exploit people and personally benefit no matter what ideals they pay lipservice to.
And by killing those 8, the wealth would be distributed such that 8 people would own the same wealth as half the world.
I mean, Musk has how many kids? That definitely dilutes things. If you include the mothers, none of them would make it to 1 billion if evenly distributed.
I guarantee Musk has an estate planned by very expensive lawyers and bankers. The vast majority of his loved ones won’t recieve jack squat.
Yeah I hate the 1% but you have to be extremely naive to think that just killing them is the answer when all of the mechanisms that led to their existence are intact.
Even if you killed the top 10 richest people every month you’d still have insane wealth consolidation, just with different family members on the chopping block each month.
The French revolution ended in utter chaos because they had no plan beyond killing the crown.
Yeah I hate the 1% but you have to be extremely naive to think that just killing them is the answer when all of the mechanisms that led to their existence are intact.
Ah, but who paid for those mechanisms to exist?
It’s not a perfect fix, but it’s a fix of some kind.
Worked out for the French eventually, and one could say Napoleon was mostly bad for the rest of Europe rather than all of France.
I wouldn’t call the reign of terror, the Thermidorian Reaction or ultimate rise of capitalism “working out”.
The entire system we have now came into place because they had no plan and just let the merchan class become the new royals.
As opposed to what they had? They could be the UK right now.
At the “guillotine billionaires” stage, I wouldn’t assume that billionaire heirs would get their inheritance as usual.
If you’re going to go to the courts and the banks in order to overturn inheritance, why even guillotine billionaires in the first place?
Because billionaires who aren’t dead or in danger won’t just let it happen. Also, they aren’t exactly innocent for the state of things - most if not all of them engaged in vast amounts of unethical and often outright illegal behavior to attain their wealth. They have been actively working to make life shittier and deadlier for everyone else, and they deserve some justice for that, if only to discourage the next people who consider imitating them.
Even still, that wealth is not liquid cash you can just redistribute. Most of that wealth is in properties, assets, stocks, etc. Even if their heirs get nothing, you can’t feed people with yachts and overpriced paintings.
You can of course just force them against their will to liquidate 99% of their assets, and then oversee redistribution collectively, maybe by some previously agreed upon framework for that, or maybe pledge it toward some government coffer, nationalize it, many different options.
And that would be a whole hell of a lot more kind than what Lenin or Mao did.
What is most important is the reformation of the workplaces, the business’s structure and ownership itself into democratic entities in and of themselves, as opposed to little business dictatorships/oligarchies, this way, going forward, proceeds of a productive enterprise are at least not as easily siphoned into new giant private collections of wealth, held by some other person or group or class.
Outlaw private corporations beyond some small headcount size, mandate they are instead worker run co-ops that adhere to some bare minimum standard of representation for all employees.
Compromise: we’ll just take the factors of production, and they can keep their stocks and dollars.
It’s fun how people make this stupid “they’re not actually rich” argument while they buy politicians to fuck everyone over.
Bullshit.
“Stocks” are “ownership of the means of production”.
You absolutely can feed yourself on your share of “the means of production”.
Most of that wealth is in properties, assets, stocks, etc
All of those can be sold in exchange for currency.
Only to other billionaires. The yacht moves between owners. It doesn’t turn into healthcare.
The problem with a yacht is that it exists
I like how are talking about yachts like that’s some significant portion of their wealth and not all the land these people own. Not to mention their investments into residential housing.
You picked the frivolous thing instead of the very tangible useful things they horde
A yacht could transfer from a single owner’s luxury item to a public owned means of production though.
Instead of a billionaire taking it out a handful of times a year for intimidation parties (because of the implication) it could instead be used to generate wealth for the public purse by being used daily for cruises or a multitude of other things.
Doctors Without Borders use large boats as mobile hospitals to go to places most in need, if you’re really determined it must be used for healthcare I’m sure some renovation to an existing super yacht is cheaper and easier than building a boat from scratch.
Yeah you can rent it for recreational use, no, it can’t be repurposed into anything else, they kinda suck as boats
You’re still making the best of a bad situation though. You’d rather the original resources were available. Seizing “wealth” won’t get you the full book value.
Who the fuck cares if we don’t get ‘full book value’ or ‘making the best of a bad situation’ when the implied alternative is not doing anything.
How about we do something? Given how badly the situation has gone, taking that wealth back and making the best use we can with what they’ve wasted money on is one of the best paths forward
That’s not an argument against removing billionaires though, right? You’d rather want to stop the spread of cancer instead of bemoaning the fact that we got sick at all. The best we can do is reposes their frivolously purchased assets and recycle them as much as it’s reasonable, and cast away what remains. It’s not all yachts, some of that wealth is locked in empty flats/houses, and giving those back to community would be very beneficial without needing to transform those assets further.
bootlicker
You can run companies without billionaires. Nationalize them, or turn them into worker-owned cooperatives. Or even just sell them to investor groups, if we aren’t going full marxist.
We gather the top 8 and tell them #9 is being promoted to #1, either through a wealth tax, or a head tax.
Repeat at least annually.
So a return to monarchy.
At that point we should just utilize democracy to tax them.
How about the highest number gets to do the deed. Lowman gets to take out highman.
Edit: *Lowman on the totem
then don’t stop. just keep going.
this must be what Reagan meant by “trickle down economics”
Where do you draw the line for inherited wealth without qualifying for execution, what is the grace period, and how do you enforce it unilaterally without exceptions?
Or is the plan that you and your friends make the decisions case by case and are yourselves also exceptions?
Trickle down
“It’s a trickle…of blood!!” *da-dum!*
They have to have more than one heir at any time though right? So like that can’t be true unless they own enough wealth that even when split and taxed their primary heir’s still have too much.
In that case I agree, rinse and repeat. No one should own more than something like 20 million in wealth.
Theres this thing called estate planning where you decide how and when your wealth gets used after you die.
It doesn’t automagically get dispersed, it’s given to a chosen heir or select few at most.
Yeah, it’s not enough to simply kill the wealthy.
Sure, it will upset the market. Certain people in certain positions may change their mind about certain things. Perhaps some will rightfully fear the masses. But ultimately it’s all temporary so long as the system that allows for such individuals to appear still exists.
I would argue killing them was always an unnecessary extra step that we could just skip over.
Scare them like we scared the last power-mad authoritarians. Publically and painfully parade the suffering of the oppressor, condemn them to death, and then pointedly scan the crowd for any more that want to express their undying loyalty to the fuher.
Worked for 80yrs last time. Bet if we record a few select billionaires getting drawn and quartered by their own delivery vans and electric vehicles might push it to a century.
Step 1: Kill billionaires and Trump to prevent them from stopping a new system being established.
Step 2: Establish the new system.
“and in that system I will be the billionaire”
Shucks, I thought the blood coming out would magically irrigate every bank account and solve all unfairness.
gives a brand new meaning to doomscrolling
this also illustrates it pretty well, though not nearly as seriously: https://neal.fun/spend/
That’s fantastic. Thanks for sharing.
This is so simple and so good at visualizing what dimensions we’re talking about!
The thing that people always forget about billionaires is that their wealth is nothing compared to nation states and the people that control said nation states.
If this is anything to go by, if Musk becomes a trillionaire he’d be at 37, just behind Ireland but ahead of Greece.
that is why they all live on islands
Help. I can’t unsee Loss.
