Musk lost $29b a few days ago, leaving him worth only $301b today. That’s like you or I with a house and a car and a savings account with a net worth $200k having to replace our AC/Furnace.
“Farm in trouble? I pay cash. Quick close, no contingencies. 1-800-HEY-BILL!”
Collectively, that’s ~430 square miles or a single square field about 21 miles on a side. e.g. Iowa alone has ~47,000 miles of farmland. So Bill’s holdings amount to about 1% of e.g. Iowa. Or about 0.03% of the 1.4M total square miles of US farmland.
So big compared to a suburban tract house lot. Not so big compared to the totality of the investible farmland assets. I’d not be surprised to find he owns larger percentages of other non-obvious assets.
shouldn’t that tell them something?!
Yeah, it’s a conspiracy against them. It can’t be them. They’re great! /s
As a certain Australian might have said:
That’s not a farm, this is a farm.
5,851,000 acres.
Yes, but…that would mean admitting to themselves that screwing over the public is bad for business. It would mean admitting that the common people are the most important contributors to the economy, not them. And it would mean that they willingly chose to associate with somebody who has a lifelong history of screwing over anyone who does that.
And their fragile egos won’t accept that. They are superior beings who are the source of all prosperity and innovation, not the 99% of the population who are subhuman parasitic vermin. The only true humans in a world of filth. And they certainly wouldn’t be so stupid as to link their fortunes to somebody with a blatant history of ruining anyone who comes near him - which means that association with Trump can’t possibly be a bad idea. Not for people as special as them.
I’ve heard that what he really hates are any diminutives. He wants to be called Donald. He doesn’t want to be called Don and he really hates being called Donny. He’s said that Donny is a child’s name and it’s insulting to call an adult by that name.
And here’s something that says a lot about Trump. He named his first son Donald Trump Junior. And he calls him Donny.
Put aside the way Trump treats the world and America and his own supporters. This is how Trump treats his own children.
Vance too - every time he referenced his kids during the campaign, it was to complain about them.
Losing ten percent of your wealth in a period of less than two months is a problem no matter how you wave it away.
Different problem, though.
If he ‘only’ had 10% of his wealth remaining, he’d still be wealthier than the vast majority of people on Earth and could enjoy a lifestyle beyond the imagination of the same.
If any of us only had 10% of our current wealth remaining, we’d have to seriously ponder questions about where we would live and how we would eat, if not now, then in the foreseeable future. Maybe some of us would be ok in the short term, but it would be a serious hit to most lifestyles.
With only $301,000,000,000, what problems would you expect musk to have that he could avoid with an extra $30b?
At the current rate, I expect Musk will experience some serious problems around October 2026.
They probably aren’t actually that worried about it, since everyone currently assumes the market will come back eventually.
“If Bill Gates woke up tomorrow with Oprah’s money, he’d jump out of a window and slit his throat on the way down saying, ‘I can’t even put gas in my plane!’”
–Chris Rock
As to the Zuckerburgs, et al …
I suspect their individual calculus is simple: They were each told by trump something amounting to: Give me any shit, any shit at all, and I will have the FBI & IRS seize your assets and hound you for the rest of your lives. So stand there and smile, because you all now work for me. Be nice and helpful whenever & however I tell you to and I’ll let you keep your cushy lives. Plus / minus a little stock market turbulence along the way. Act up and you’re out. All the way out.
Which is also what he said to each of the big media owners.
He probably didn’t deliver the message personally. Mafiosi don’t do that. But his minions did.
It’s a problem for their egos. It isn’t a problem for them, because this wealth is based upon stock market valuation. All of them are aware that if they tried to cash it out in say 2 months, its value would decline precipitously. After a certain point wealth becomes an accounting metric.
It does reflect their poor judgment in supporting Trump or not pushing back on him significantly. It does suggest that their opposition to wholly understandable and go-slow Democratic regulation is wildly disproportionate to the threat. They do well under Democrats. Bad Republican policy damages their business.
These spoiled plutocrats would have a situation on their hands if they had to choose between actual socialists and Trumpists. But even then, it would be wise to oppose fascism. Actual communists would be another matter, from their perspective.
Came across this fun song, right on point for this thread.
I feel it is an issue for Musk (and to some extant for Trump). They have built up their “brand” based on their personal reputation. Musk isn’t just selling cars or internet access or spaceships; he’s selling the idea that he’s a financial genius and people should buy shares in the companies he runs. So screwing up the economy and being revealed as a financial idiot is going to hurt his ability to sell products.
The same is true for Trump but in his case it’s more of a past issue. Trump was never a financial genius but his days of needing to pretend to be one are over. Now he’s making money by pretending to understand politics.
Technically, that is, using American English, that is not a “farm”, it is a “ranch”. Farms are where you put hard things into the ground and they become growy things. Ranches are where you have wandery things going around nibbling on the sparse native growy things. Ranchland is significantly different from farmland – the US has a shitload more ranchland than farmland.