Surprise: Elon Musk is still the richest man in the world — and his wealth has reached unprecedented levels, even as the last vestiges of Twitter crumble under his watch.
Since the start of 2023, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, the Tesla and SpaceX (and up until recently, Twitter) chief executive’s net worth has grown by more than $96 billion.
Musk is now worth $234 billion; he has gained $530 million a day in 2023. That means in a span of three days — say, in the three days since Musk introduced rate limits on Twitter and effectively restricted just how much anyone can use the site he bought for $44 billion last year — he amassed approximately $1.6 billion.
As of Saturday, most Twitter users can view only 600 tweets a day; that number goes up to 6,000 for Twitter Blue users. The reasons behind the limit — effectively reducing eyeballs on the site as Twitter struggles to win back advertisers — remain truly unclear. Musk claims that the restriction was introduced to curtail “extreme” data scraping by artificial intelligence firms, while reports float around about Twitter’s nonpayment to Google, which hosts key servers for the company.
Back to Musk’s staggering riches, seemingly in spite of himself: In 2021, when Musk was valued at $255 billion, Forbes declared him “the richest person to ever walk the planet.” For a few brief periods in the past year, the Tesla scion was not the richest guy in the world — ceding the title to LVMH co-founder and CEO Bernard Arnault, who is currently valued at a cool $200 billion, according to Bloomberg. Meta CEO (and Musk’s potential cage match combatant) Mark Zuckerberg also won big in 2023, snagging nearly $59 billion more this year even as his vision for the metaverse has all but collapsed entirely.
Rich people in and out of tech are having a great time; Bloomberg notes that this six-month stretch has been the best time for billionaires since the second half of 2020. Meanwhile, survey after survey has shown that a staggering number of Americans are experiencing stress over their finances — no doubt heightened by record inflation and, now, the Supreme Court's overruling President Joe Biden’s student loan debt forgiveness plan.
I remember when I was a kid, Bill Gates had a net worth of about $45b and claimed he was done with business and was now a
full-on rapistphilanthropist, and I remember wondering how long it would take to give all those billions away.
Alas, he now has over $130b, so it seems charity was more profitable than I realised.If you had switched to philanthropy back then you, too, could have $85b.
capitalist philanthropy is a combination of money laundering, reputation laundering, and tax avoidance. we should restructure society so that poverty is impossible, instead of an inevitable byproduct of the system, but that requires organized revolution, which itself requires mass class consciousness, discipline, training, dedication, education and years of planning. Capitalists realized a long time ago that they don't get any PR boost when they pay high taxes. If the government taxes you $1 million, it's not seen as charitable because it's an involuntary and invisible social machination. But if you donate even a tenth of that you get accolades, parades, parties, gatherings, fluff pieces and new segments in your honor. Everyone shines your boots over what a good little tycoon you are. So capitalists lobby to deregulate, privatize, subsidize their industries with public money, crush unions, brutalize leftists and pay as little taxes as possible, while laundering their reputations through the media spectacle of donating to their own charities, which, they might as well be redistributing wealth from their right pocket to their left pocket. Charity is a win-win for them, and hordes of gormless pundits will remind you how generous they are for "donating" (to themselves) the wealth they earned on the backs of their workers and public subsidization of their empires.
Don't forget evil supervillain plans. A lot of Gates philanthropy is ecofascist anti-natalism because he wants Africans to stop reproducing
Yes, and I'm sure you know this already, but I don't even think it's truly motivated by ecology. It's more motivated by eugenics and racism masquerading as teaching "reproductive responsibility" to "third worlders." The ecology excuse is just window dressing. Also the slower the population of the global south grows, the slower their economy develops, and the more easily they can be managed and kept as raw material exporting neo-colonies with IMF debt and foreign-owned infrastructure. The last thing the imperial core wants is for the periphery to develop/grow too fast and "catch up" with the imperial core. Quasi-environmentalism is a good way for the bourgeoisie to greenwash their racist, neo-colonial, imperialist tendencies, as well as their material interests.
Oh of course, I assume all ecofascism is purposeful greenwashed fascism instead of misguided environmentalism
looking through Gate's "Giving Pledge" signees and tracing back how their wealth has increased more and more each year, amassing (tens of) billions more each year, since signalling their commitment to donating half of their wealth is laughable
and libs still think billionaires are a net good, and that capitalism can solve problems it not only creates but demands
As much as i hate musk. Bill gates is the worst one. Most deaths in the pandemic were after the vaccines were already being given away. Because of his stupid lobing for ip there was and still is vaccine shortages. This killed 10s of millions of people.
So, his website is gone to shit, his rocket blew up because he ordered the launchpad to be made on the cheap (and now they're going to hot-stage their "reusable" rocket which is going to cause the exact same refurbishment issue that ballooned space shuttle costs), his self-driving car rollout was a castrophe, and his tunnel company has drilled one tunnel that didn't meet expectations...
his tunnel company has drilled one tunnel that didn't meet expectations
:thats-neat-you-dont: Actually, they're going to add more tunnels under Vegas, which an army of taxi drivers will use to move individual people up and down the strip.
private roads for rich people, hopefully similar to private submarines for rich people.
hmm, what is the drainage situation like down there and have they actually checked that it works
I like to mention that people imagined just having bands that move for pedestrians under cities in the early SciFi issues. Those were a better idea than doing tunnels and transporting people with cars that are designed for the over world (and have to have drivers!)
bands that move for pedestrians under cities
like the ones at airports
Yes, but usually faster. In Asimov's series about a detective and a robot (I can't for the life of me remember what it's called and I refuse to look it up), they have more or less freeways, complete with lanes for merging and signs for exits and shit, but it's all super fast moving walkways.
Imagine failing at everything but still raking in billions. This system needs to be taken out back and shot.
Gotta have a college degree and years of experience to get a job bagging groceries, meanwhile this asshole fucks everything he touches and makes bank doing it. I fundamentally do not trust any person who believes meritocracy exists.
I wouldn't be surprised if Elon Musk has been groomed since birth to effectively be the replacement for the Koch Brothers. WASP boomers live vicariously through the Koch's and younger CHUDs live vicariously through Musk.
Forbes declared him “the richest person to ever walk the planet.”
fake news. mansa musa stays winning
the higher valued the stonk, the more he can take loans against it.
Since it is so imaginary he couldn't for example buy a $40billion company and fire 6000 people. That of course wouldn't be possible with funny money.
Didn't he use tesla stock as collateral for a loan to buy twitter?
The thing about Elon musk is that a lot of his wealth is tied into personal / financial bullshit, so he is exceptionally vulnerable to any swings in the stockprice of TSLA / SpaceX. Hence the headline from a year ago about Elon being the first person ever to lose 90 billion dollars. He didn't actually lose any money, but the stonks that this is all based on took a dive and he looked like he lost something equivalent in value to the entire GDP of a small country.
2027 china overtakes US as the leading economy, american media is on fire with scaremongering and americans cant understand that the problem is the US cant help but steal from itself
winner of the cage match gets an all expenses paid trip to the guillotine
The vaster the Capital, the more rapidly it accumulates. In the world of industrial Capitals, that accumulation came from development of new industry and expansion of production and hiring of thousands of new workers to work those means of production.
Now the vast capitals are detached from direct productive capacity and are representative of those who can most efficiently destroy productive capacity and ratchet up the surplus value extraction on workers as mass swaths of them are laid off and factories shuttered to inflate prices.
The billions that exist in financial Capitals are billions gathered through a paradoxical play of decreasing value and increasing price. Something that ends only in absolute crisis.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Hong Kong Phooey is the right's collective fursona.
For anyone who does not know, Hong Kong Phooey is basically dollar store Lucario made in the 1970s and the whole premise of his show is that despite Phooey being completely incompetent, his stupidly good luck makes him fail upwards and save the day every time.
Sometimes he'd get stuck in the filing cabinet but his pet cat would bail him out. This is an allegory for the federal reserve.
next year he will be gaining $3i billion a day with a networth of -80 billion
