By all accounts, Trump inherited something on the order of $400m.
Can you push society forward? Is that a worthy goal? Can you be of value if you do not push society forwards? And who decides what is forward progress?
More specifically it seems to me that neither extreme is supportable. Whether you talk about Bezos or Newton neither was a Superman standing uniquely above all others in their field. Yet both did accomplish things that are worthy of note even if it seems clear that similar things would have been accomplished by others given time.
BTW for me the answers are that of course people have value even if they do not push society forwards. And I am fairly lukewarm on the idea of forwards anyway.
Timex
3183
I think this is what we try to do, right?
Let’s take this notion, and apply it to someone like Martin Luther King Jr. We could say, “Well, he wasn’t really a great man. If he hadn’t fought for civil rights, someone else would have. After all, all those other folks marched with him. The civil rights movement would have happened regardless of his actions.”
I just don’t think that’s a useful way of thinking about anything. It suggests that nothing we do matters, because someone else would just do them eventually anyway, so whatever.
I mean the unsung heroes of Amazon are the parcel delivery services. You can’t imagine an Amazon without them, and you could certainly imagine a world where they’d be unable to handle the additional volume.
Of course the externalities cost to this is not just the warehouse workers but the environmental cost of moving individual goods and packages, the waste involved in such shipments in packaging materials ect.
I view MLK as great for his bravery, his perseverance, and his rhetoric. But I do not give him personal credit for the civil rights movement.
It simply means we have different philosophies about the value, meaning, and purpose of life. My feeling is that I value the process more whereas you value the results more.
Banzai
3186
I sure hope so. Marx was absolutely right about this. But that’ll need a new thread :)
This is just another straw man. The proper analogy, the one that follows the argument you are making, is that King was not just a great man, he was the essential, unique great man without whom there is no civil rights movement. That’s the argument you’re making about Bezos, whether you realize it or not. And it’s a silly argument.
Personally, I don’t believe that Bezos is the essential, unique man who is the only one who could have done what he did. But if someone else came along and did the same thing, then that person would have earned the wealth that comes as a result.
Timex
3189
Ya, I said as much earlier… if some other alternate universe Bezos did what Bezos did, we’d be having this thread about how THAT guy has too much money.
Yeah so? I wasn’t comparing Bezos to Trump. I was pointing out that just having wealth can insulate one from being a incompetent moron.
Again… yeah? What exactly are you arguing against here? Somebody else WOULD have been Bezos. Amazon had a shit ton of competitors in the run up to the dotcom bust. There were no doubt some who didn’t buy into the bubble either but never made it because either Amazon’s existence pushed them out or they fell victim to circumstance. Bezos isn’t a unique super visionary that appears once in a generation. He was a person who made a bunch of right calls at the right moment when some of his competitors made slightly worse ones and the greater remainder made terminally stupid ones.
Does that make him better than his peers? Yes it does (or maybe because luck matters). Does it make him a divine champion? Fuck no.
I’m not minimizing the impact because the results are clear as day. What I take issue with is the hero worship many have for succesful CEO’s like Bezos or Musk. Musk is a particular good example of a guy who managed to skirt around all the edges.
A $5b+ fortune that will never, never, never be taxed.
I look forward to all the comments about how Thiel has changed the world, how he deserves this fortune he earned by…gaming the tax system and a retirement savings vehicle intended for poor people.
Alstein
3192
I think a question that isn’t being asked is why internet tends to result in so many monopolies and what can be done to make sure competition remains a thing after the initial wild west wave.
Facebook is worst offender here, but Amazon is pretty bad too.
Matt_W
3193
There’s clearly a huge loophole in how Roth IRAs are structured that could have been easily foreseen and could be easily fixed by merely capping the amount of non-taxable distributions per year. Not sure why that’s not a thing.
It advantages people who can get in on the ground floor of an investment for pennies. They can put a piece of that investment into the Roth IRA because it’s under the $5k annual contribution limit and of course the money they used to buy the investment has already been taxed. When the investment pays off in a big way, it can be sold and the huge gains reinvested in yet another ground floor investment, without ever coming out of the IRA. Repeat as necessary. No taxable events have occurred, and if you wait until you are 59, the money is yours tax-free.
Matt_W
3195
Right. I have a decent chunk of money in a Roth now. I’m just flabbergasted though that there aren’t caps on distributions, e.g. if you withdraw say $250,000 or more in earnings in a calendar year, everything above that amount should be subject to normal capital gains tax.
I guess I don’t think this is an accident.
Not only Roth.
I interviewed with a company that did something similar with 401(k).
If you had a big enough 401(k) with a different company, you could start a paper company, with you as the Trustee. Then, roll your money into this company. And then, as the Trustee, use that money to buy a franchise or other company. Now, the Trust owns the franchise, and the company controls the trust.
Then you close the trust to new money, so the as the franchise grows or earns money, it goes into the 401(k).
The only downside is that it would need to be valuated every year, but it’s an interesting way of using your 401(k) to invest in something, and since it is all owned by the trust, you never have to pay taxes on it.
The tax benefit for contributing to a Roth IRA doesn’t require itemizing deductions, right? I should consider that.
Timex
3199
The primary limitation to a Roth IRA is twofold:
- You can only contribute a few thousand dollars a year
- If your income is over a certain amount (I think like $150k?) you can’t contribute to a Roth IRA at all
So, in order to amass some huge amount of money in your Roth IRA, you need to be able to hit it big in the stock market, because there’s no real way to get a huge amount of money INTO the IRA.
In the case of someone like Thiel, he would have turned some relatively small amount of money into a huge amount, via some very specific huge wins in the market. It seems like such wins might be running afoul of some other regulatory hurdles in terms of trading.
It doesn’t even have to be the stock market. It can be private equity investments. That’s surely what Thiel has done.
