"If you're making $300k a year, you have more in common with someone making minimum wage than you do with Elon [Musk, the founder of Tesla and other corporations]. There are people that walk among us that have so much wealth, that even generations of mismanagement can't squander it. These folks you speak of are not those folks."
definitely not. you can get paid 120k in san francisco and LA and still live paycheck to paycheck unironically because of how expensive housing is there. 150-200k would be in the comfortable range, as insane as that is
ultimately, passive income is what defines your class character. workers that own their own house and nice things are the same as workers that do not have those things. its just workers without those are overexploited in comparison to the rich worker's exploitation lite. a landlord makes money passively, a small business tyrant makes money passively, someone with a ton of stocks makes it passively (and im not just talking about hedging against inflation), and so on. its easier for these richer workers to accrue money to get passive income, but that doesnt necessarily mean they have it.
And even on that note, most of the true movers of the markets are not those former or current workers. You can have 10 million in the stock market and still be completely subjected to the whims of capitalists. You're going to be better off and mostly secure, but your ability to manipulate the stock market is basically non-existent. That being said, if they are using that money to manipulate their local or forgien markets, then they are into petite-boug territory. But passive income is a better marker.
I always situate the conversation around control of the market, rather than anything else.
id say having 10 million in the stock market, S&P is usually at around 5-10.5% returns. that means youre accruing a million, more or less, each year. sure, its petit booj, but lets not kid ourselves by calling them a worker
There are plenty of guys who started their careers engineering in the 80's for whom this is the case, due to the enourmous inflation of the markets. They are still workers whose labor value has likely been extracted. Likely not close to the rate of the factory workers who actually executed their designs, but saying they are in the same class as even C-suite people, let alone owners is absurd. Are they likely to side with workers when the revolution comes? Not really. But are they workers whose primary generated income was the exchange of labor? Yes. They are some other class, idk what to call them though I guess the moniker is PMC, though I'd hesitate to call most engineers managers.
Interestingly enough, it's these kinds of people who are mostly in charge of running China atm.
Edit: So are they our enemy? Yes, but not really. They are easily paid off if you actually are able to sieze the means of production, and they are unlikely to fight you, but they will probably be passive aggressive dicks about the whole thing.
possibly dumb and granular, but honest question: what about those in sinecure type of positions? like the true, high income bullshit job. i'm thinking of dean and above level positions in the academy, nepotism-style no show non profit/foundation jobbery, VP of whatever at a fortune 500, paid board seats, etc.
my heart tells me those are passive income with a varyingly thin veneers of of working class character.