Make it a public (or heavily regulated private) utility.
I also don’t discuss the evidence for the existence of leprechauns. I’d love to discuss the implications of a wealth tax, but you seem to be only insisting that they exist and they’re disastrous.
Except… it didn’t really happen the last time Democrats were in power, did it?
In effect you’re saying that you don’t like the thing he’s doing, but that’s not as important as the fact that nobody should ever touch the base of power that allows him to do it. The reason he’s not being stopped is that he has too much wealth and power. If you don’t want anyone to touch his wealth or power, you’re protecting his ability to run Twitter as he pleases, which leaves your position incoherent and insincere.
No need to obfuscate things with a bunch of hand-waving about “how on earth would it be sold”. What do owners of private companies normally do when they want to sell them? It was publicly traded once, it can be publicly traded again.
It doesn’t need to be Twitter. Musk gets his wealth tax bill, he decides what he’s going to sell to meet his obligation. If indeed it is Twitter, then he does what every other business owner does when they want to sell a business. He can find a buyer, or he can take it public again and sell shares on the NYSE, and we go back to status quo ante. Twitter’s moderation was robust and effective when it was in public hands, until a singular white supremacist decided it needed to be a Nazi bar.
@Babale’s objections are not trivial. The devil IS in the details.
Unless the standing assets of wealth such as real estate, stock and control of an ongoing business are to become nationalized, they would have to be liquidated in some fashion. That means someone with liquid capital would have to buy them; in which case why not tax that liquid capital in the first place? If they’re bought by trading other standing assets, that just postpones the problem.
I think the sheer hatred of Musk is distorting this debate. I’m reminded of Stalag 17, when Holden’s character J.J. Sefton made himself so dispised that at the first suspicion that he was collaborating with the Germans, he was beaten and his trading goods confiscated.
Details matter, but much more complex issues have been legislated and regulated. Dwelling on the complexity is really just a backdoor argument that it shouldn’t be done at all.
When I pay my property tax, it’s on me to figure out how to come up with the funds. If I don’t have it, I have to put the house on the market myself, but nobody tells me what to sell or how to go about it. The details matter, but this is not nearly as insurmountable as we’re pretending.
We can’t talk about exactly why billionaires are bad without pointing to the most egregious and dangerous examples of the same. Musk is the guy.
And hopefully you’re not arguing that this is simply some kind of unthinking Musk derangement syndrome, rather than based on actual terrible stuff that he’s actually done. But regardless of how you feel about the things he’s done, whether they’re all that bad, it’s independent of the point that nobody should have that much power.
I couldn’t even begin to defend Musk except to say that summary execution by a lynch mob would be an extreme overreaction and confiscation of his businesses only somewhat less so. There are excellent reasons with historical examples why this sort of “justice” is always a bad thing in the long run.
No one should have that much power? Perhaps, but the dream that somehow we’ll change the rules in a way that causes that predominence of power to simply wither away isn’t going to happen; realistically, his power could only be destroyed by a greater power, a badass getting gored to death by a bigger and stronger badass.
The US government is bigger and stronger than Musk and should take that power away from him (as well as ensuring no one else can ever have that kind of power).
You mean… Before Elon bought Twitter, do you?
The difference between leprechauns and the disastrous effects of a wealth tax is that the many European countries that previously had wealth taxes didn’t reveal them because of leprechauns.
Does his wealth magic stop at the US border? And doesn’t work in California or any of the other states that are going after him or his businesses?
That makes zero sense. What if someone buys a publicly traded company and grows it to the point where it is as dominant as Twitter is again?
I thought you said you wanted billionaires to not exist? As long as Musk owns Twitter, a company valued at multiple billions of dollars even after losing most of its value, he is a billionaire. Wouldn’t the tax bill that you are proposing be so high that he is left with less than one billion dollars?
I meant what I said. Check the date of the Twitter acquisition and reconsider.
Wealth tax! If the asset grows that large, then shares of it would need to be sold off to meet the tax obligation. This should result in less likelihood of any single person controlling it.
I will say that the wealth tax isn’t a complete solution to that problem, nor is it intended to be. It puts some limits on the conditions that allow it to emerge in the first place, it prevents anyone from becoming so powerful that they are immune from regulation.
No. I do stand behind “Billionaires should not exist”, but it’s a rhetorical statement of principle. I don’t expect a wealth tax to eliminate every existing billionaire overnight (some people do, but I don’t find it realistic).
I would foresee something more like a tax assessed on the fraction of net worth exceeding, say, $500 million. Over time people who currently exceed that limit would gradually converge on it, and others would never exceed it in the first place.
That’s not a fully fleshed policy idea, again it’s an aspirational and directional statement. Yes there will be nits to pick and details to nail down, but it’s nowhere near the most complicated problem that’s ever been legislated.
He’s not a badass. He’s a jumped-up dweeb living in a fortress of paper that can easily be cut into whatever shape is required, if the political will exists.
There is no real obstacle to solving the problem except that so many people bizarrely feel that the richest bully in the world is some put-upon victim that needs special rules and protection, that imposing any kind of accountability or regulation on him is no different from being lynched.
A few days before the midterms? I guess Biden had a couple of months after the purchase to act 
…and you don’t see the obvious problem with that?
Actually I was channeling this old post of mine (YouTube embed updated)
Anyways, all this talk about Elon Musk’s money is a bit of a distraction, isn’t it? We agree that the problem isn’t Musk’s net worth in and of itself but what he uses his control of a platform like Twitter to do, right? So what do we do if we bust up Twitter, make it a publicly traded company, and this publicly company decides to continue operating the way it is now? I assume the answer isn’t “it’s Ok If it’s not a billionaire doing it”, right?
No. My problem is the concentration of capital. No single person (natural or incorporated) should be holding so much.
The executive branch of course doesn’t need Congress’s approval to exercise its regulatory and investigative authority. And Dems did control the Senate which does have investigative and oversight power. They had a lot of levers they could’ve used. But again, to zoom out from the tendentious quibbling, the overarching point is that Musk has never faced any real scrutiny from the federal authorities who are tasked with the oversight of things like antitrust, securities fraud, contractor accountability, and so forth. Nobody wants to touch him, partly because they’re afraid of the blowback, partly because everybody’s got a finger in his pie.
Do you? I think if you did, you’d have mentioned it rather than playing coy about it.
No. This is the argument that you want to have. What it actually is, is one example of the type of excesses that arise from excessive concentrations of wealth and power. It’s a salient one, and worth fixing, but the real problem is that anyone can accumulate enough power to do things like that.
What if aliens landed and decided they’re going to let North Korea run the world government? Who knows. The answer is that we set the conditions for the kind of society we want to live in, and deal with exceptions/eventualities as they arise. Nothing in politics or governance can ever be 100% predicted with entirety, and insisting on this is just a weaselly back-door way to oppose the underlying principle that no individual person should have that much power over the rest of us. We know you have no problem with wealthy people having massive unaccounted power over your life. Just say that instead of pretending like it’s harder than solving quantum gravity.
It creates an extremely weird incentive structure where companies want to grow up to a certain arbitrary limit.
On that, we agree. For example, I don’t want to live in the sort of society where the government can decide that you’re doing too well and it’s time to knock you down a peg, which is why I’m opposed to your ridiculous confiscatory scheme.
I’d much rather live in a society where, if you behave unacceptably, we go after you for that unacceptable behavior. Which is why I want to prosecute Musk, not abolish the concept of billionaires.
And it’s pretty rich that you’re telling me that regulating Musk is an unrealistic pipe dream while pitching massive wealth redistribution as the alternative.
I see. “Weird”. Seems like a matter of taste, unless you want to develop a little further why that’s a problem, because I actually don’t see that this situation necessarily follows, and I’m not sure why anyone should care if it does.
See? It’s not that hard to just say you’re fine with the status quo, there’s no need to pretend it’s some unsolvable Byzantine problem.
And yet you don’t seem able to look around you and see that this isn’t happening, and process the reasons why it’s not happening. Why do you think the US government never seems to get around to holding Musk (and people like him) to task?
To be clear, I’m saying if we happen to get a political window to act, we should do both of those things. And more. What I’m saying is that it may be moot because it may already be too late. But it may not be. It shouldn’t stop us from naming the problem or talking about remedies.
I am not pretending it’s an unsolvable Byzantine problem. I’m the one advocating for a simple solution - regulations. You’re the one calling for a radical reformation of our entire economic system based on populist slogans and little else.
I see him being held to task all over the place in European countries that don’t follow your bizarre model.
Technically the largest companies (Nvidia, Google, Apple, Broadcom, Microsoft, etc) make money by getting you to stare at a screen for hours.
But I think there is some truth to what you said. There is this entire class of rich people and aspiring rich people who don’t really produce anything or add value - Ivy League MBAs, lawyers, private equity, investment bankers, hedge funds, management consultants, venture capitalists and the ecosystem of businesses that support them. The just seem to create these structures designed to funnel wealth from the working and middle classes through a corporate theater of granting each other lucrative contracts for business busywork.
“just tax them” doesn’t work because they are an inherent part of that structure and their jobs are incentivized to perpetuate their class.
A “Pied-à-Terre Tax” on homes worth over $5 million that aren’t your primary residence as I recall.
Plus I think NYC already also has a property tax.
And it’s peculiar that billionaires paying a tax is an insurmountable problem but the houses of the poor being sold by the state to pay back property taxes are, or were, a regular feature in your local newspaper.
I can understand where rioters in, e.g., France are coming from that want to burn it all down. What I do not see being advocated clearly are forthcoming solutions, probably because so many people are