Whenever I heard or read someone say, “Billionaires shouldn’t exist” I cringed. I reacted that way because in my mind there was no difference between saying that and saying, “Millionaires shouldn’t exist” or “Thousandaires shouldn’t exist” or “??????? shouldn’t exist.” Do we want to live in a free country where people can become whatever they want or do we want to have a central planning regime placing limits on people?
But my views started changing over the past month for two reasons. First, Elon Musk reportedly spent $500 million trying to influence and some say rig elections. The second is news this week that Jensen Huang has cost NVIDIA a market cap loss of $500 billion to $1 trillion depending on where you start counting and how much you attribute to Jensen’s activities.
As an added bonus, Elon Musk was rumored to be hurting Ukraine with changes to the Starlink satellite network. All of this reminds me of those old James Bond films with evil rich people and organizations trying to manipulate and control the world. None of this seems rational to me.
While I don’t have investments in anything Musk related, I did have some in NVIDIA and I was fortunate to be hedged with collars so I’m not taking any losses whatsoever but I know millions of people around the world are and it’s absurd that one man’s shenanigans can cost a trillion in investment losses. We still don’t know how worse things will get, the whole AI bubble may pop and there may be trillions more in losses over the next 12 months that everyone will point to at this week as the cause.
And while this isn’t a political blog, I will mention the current billionaire in the White House has done his own set of damage to the world economy probably in the $10 trillion range at this point.
All of it has me rethinking that maybe billionaires shouldn’t exist after all.
Share The Wealth
Should billionaires exist? Or should billionaires exist but only with very strict boundary conditions?