I do feel like statements like "Musk has $180 billion dollars" are too easily argued against and only work if you're talking to people who already agree with you, because he kinda doesn't.

I'm not well versed in economics and I don't wanna look like a clown when confronted about it, so could someone explain what this $180 billion dollars figure actually means?

Like, how could it be taken away? How much money do these billionaires actually have, and on the other hand, how much do they have direct or indirect control over?

Also, this might be a stupid question, but I really would like to understand this and google hasn't given me a real answer:

If Elon Musk has $180 billion dollars, but "only" in the form of assets: Is that, simply said, equal to $180 billion dollars that the rest of the population doesn't have?

Is it fair to say that he is hoarding that money when it's like, not really money? Like, could a theoretical socialist state feed it's hungry by taking away stocks and assets from Jeff Bezos? Granted, even if he "only" has a couple hundred million in his bank account that's still way too much.

I guess the overarching theme is the net worth, how real is it, how much can be done with it and should we maybe stop bringing it up in debates based on the answers? I hope you guys can help me out.

  • Mouhamed_McYggdrasil [they/them,any]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Musk is actually kind of a special case because all of his wealth is in the form of shares of Tesla, which is massively overinflated right now. Its basically the result of a bunch of investors "bluffing" each other and trying to raise the price as high as possible to make some profit off of it. So while those shares might have $800 or whatever it is now as their "real" value for an investor just trying to buying a couple dozen shares, waiting for it to go higher, and then selling it, its not the same case for Musk. Should he try to do something with all/a lot of his shares (like sell them to get liquidity), it would cause the bubble to burst, since everybody knows Tesla isn't actually worth as much as they are claiming it is.