1. If his company is worth $100B then who cares if he's only liquid at $20B? It's still unfathomably wealthy. Go as reasonably low as you want. So he can only get $10B for his shares? Wow that sure means he isn't rich! This person knows we're not toddlers right?

2. When you have a company worth $100B you can take lines of credit that are pretty much unlimited. I would bet that any billionaire worth their salt doesn't actually spend their money, but they put it on credit for as long as they can. Then they try to get rid of the debt through various tax schemes or what have you. Look at Trump. The guy has lived off credit for decades while blowing his actual cash on hand. He's been given hundreds of millions over and over and over, even when he did dumb business shit. So, again, who gives a fuck about liquidity?

3. Bezos just sold $3B of his own stock. Did Amazon stock drop? It's going to keep going up. Is $3B not a lot of money? See: #1 Bezos does this every year.

4. It's not like owning a house. It's not like having a home bank account. The range of freedom and options open to billionaires is completely unimaginable to some dork who sucks off billionaires. Can you do yearly sell-offs of your house? Can you push congress to make decisions that increase the value of your house? Is your house's value dependent on your ability to screw over anyone trying to make a basic living? Okay then fuck off with the dumb analogy.

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A house and a business is a shit comparison. Just because value can increase doesn’t mean they’re at all similar.

With a business you have employees who are generating that surplus value for you and deserve to be compensated for it. Once Musk businesses gets so big he shouldn’t even get to own it or have a share. That should be the country’s company and the workers should own the whole thing. He will still be compensated plenty for his initial start of the whole the racket. No one deserves infinite amount of money. It’s absurd to even imply that.

i donno, if Musk is so worried about money, as a billionaire, maybe he should learn to code?

But for real, musk has that wealth within his control - he is at a huge advantage over everybody else at that company, even if he were to sell 50% of his 50% stake.

Nobody is holding a gun to his head telling him to stay above 50%.

He could still be CEO under 50%. They still have a huge amount of control over the company they preside over.

Well for one thing you can have control with well below 50%. You just structure the company so that any shares you sell immediately convert to a class with 1% of the voting power (or something). That’s how Zuck has such a lock on Facebook.

"if Musk sold his shares the value would go down"

shut the FUCK up you FUCKING moron

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I just checked and the guy is an electric car lobbyist, so of course he would be defending musk so heavily

Its on a facebook group so I can't post the link sorry

He doesn't deserve to "control" the company. The stocks should be shared between the employees who are making the product which is what really creates the value of the company.

The idea that elon musk's name alone is what is creating the value of his shares is the most glaringly stupid take in this. Besides the fact that he's talking about a house as an investment, which in the majority of people's lives that is not the point of them.

But even then, they can just rent the fucking house and make loads of money so I'm really not sure why he's making this comparison.

Theoretically if he just sold all of his stocks at once, yes he would end up not gaining the full value of them, but that is never the plan. He'll sell them off at certain periods, after a marginal increase in the amount of stocks is decided by the shareholders, which he has majority control of, and will increase his cash in hand worth this way, whenever he wants, in a near infinite cycle until he is finally dead.

The guy you're talking to doesn't understand that wealth isn't just cash in a briefcase stashed under a bed.

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what he's saying is mostly true but the point he's making is meaningless. musk keeps his shares because he wants to own the company: duh. the whole point of being a capitalist is to own the means of production, not be able to buy 1000 Lamborghinis. owning a company is worth more than having cash on hand. the more allegedly valuable a company is the more you'd rather own of it. because, again allegedly, the "value" of the company is the predicted profit it will return. this is obvious - and precisely why the stock price would go down if he tried to sell his shares.

his point might be that since his companies are overvalued, his net worth is overvalued. but who cares about his net worth - we want to abolish the concept of a private citizen owning a company. and in doing so abolish money, which is clearly all made up if you believe billions of dollars are just being wasted on a company that will flop.

Immaterial analysis of the economy really be a type of way.

This feels like a massive disconnect between what seems real and reasonable when you're talking about sums of money that miiiiiiight make it to $1MM, but is so divorced from what if means to be a BILLIONAIRE. You don't get there by working, making good decisions, and pursuing a vision - you get there by taking advantage of labor and markets (and more often than not some kind of underhanded bullshit and/or slave labor). There is one nail he hit right on the head. Billions of dollars of wealth is an abstraction. They can't just take it all out as liquid, sure. But having that much money means that we have all agreed that the person has unlimited purchasing power. Their entire extended family could consume with all their might for 3 generations and not make a dent. We've decided that the system should just work that way - his ownership is worth more than the public good or, more recently, the environment.

https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/

and also the Communist Manifesto. I butchered it, but this was one of the major points