I’d arguably like to think the major ramification would be the guillotine.
You and everyone you care about would be the constant target of kidnappers and extortionists. I doubt you could trust any close family, friends or employees, since some of them are going to be after the money. Honestly, it would suck.
I don’t think the kidnappers and extortionists would be that big of an issue. You could have an army like Canada or Turkey on your payroll protecting you and your family just on the interest. Without even noticing you could be a top 20 military power in the world.
How do you trust that your army doesn’t just decide to kidnap you?
That’s not demonstrably different than the risk current billionaires face, though. It’s not like kidnappers are going to scoff at the payoff they might get from someone with a net worth of $4 billion but salivate over the payoff from a trillionaire.
The same way you trust that you have a trillion dollars. At a certain point without other people its all meaningless what happens if your army kidnaps you and your banker says you don’t have any money?
Ike Witt wasn’t giving an opinion; he was reporting that other people had an opinion.
I could say that many people are speculating that the coronavirus was manufactured by the North Koreans. In fact many people are, and it’s just as stupid.
And I don’t care that some analyst for Goldman Sachs was having a fun day. They are not “pushing the idea.” The original paper by Noah Poponak said space mining “was not outside the realm of possibility.” That’s possibly true and everybody should have stood still there.
That’s because none of the initial reports, taken from Business Insider, mentioned a trillionaire. That word appeared in later articles on the article, as with this one.
She’s quoting RT, the batty Russian English-language newspaper! No wonder the stupidity rose to the surface. And even so, a passage later on undercuts that flaming lead paragraph.
Aha, the industry might be a trillion-dollar one, not a person. Or maybe not. The Insider column did this bit of actual reporting.
So who’s saying that a trillionaire will result? The Inquistr quotes Neil DeGrasse Tyson as saying so. But he wasn’t talking about the Goldman Sachs report. That quote by the world’s most over-enthusiastic astrophysicist appeared years earlier on Salon, part of his typical space-happiness.
I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it.
At the risk of being called an idiot, asteroid mining seems like a plausible source for the world’s first trillionaire to me. It’s one of those open field blue sky things that could conceivably happen in the next few decades, so if it’s actually economically feasible to do so, there aren’t any incumbents to stand in the way of massive wealth. And the regulatory regime that stands in the way of the vast accumulation of wealth in many industries would be difficult to coordinate, given the challenges of multinational regulation of activities that might take place largely outside the jurisdiction of any state. It’s not a coincidence that software magnates are overrepresented among the richest people in the world. Regulations on software have been extremely limited for decades.
If I had to choose between “someone involved in asteroid mining” and “Jeff Bezos” as the most likely first trillionaire, I’d choose Jeff Bezos, although I acknowledge that I’m getting a little bit of a free roll there, as the existence of Blue Origin suggests a non-zero chance that the answer will be “asteroid-mining magnate, Jeff Bezos”.
If I may junior-mod/steer the thread a bit, I am not asking about how someone can *become *a trillionaire, but rather, what the ramifications would be if someone were one (in today’s dollars and today’s world/economy.) We don’t have to analyze the how-one-got-there.
I don’t think there’s that big a difference in the real-world capabilities of a 100-billionaire and a trillionaire in today’s world.
I’m not trying to discount the thread. I do think that the question is an interesting one, I just think that most of the effects you’re speculating are already in play at current levels.
Here’s a story about a group of senators urging Bezos to make changes for the good of the country. Not passing a law to make him do it. Just asking nicely.
I’ve seen lots of people requesting that the very rich focus their resources on public works. And to some extent this works. Bill Gates has been focused largely on trying to end disease worldwide for like two decades!
It’s like any place where there are mega-rich. We live in a society of laws. And those billionaires and hypothetical trillionaires who don’t? I suppose they can buy their own laws.
I’m not sure I understand your comment. My comment was that the kidnap and ransom risks of being a trillionaire aren’t appreciably different from being a billionaire. Because $billions in net worth is already sufficient to inspire kidnapping attempts, and ransoms are already limited by the amount of value that can be meaningfully transmitted to kidnappers in a way that they can hope to use it without being tracked down, which is way way less than $1 billion.