Some good? You’ve become British on us Kevin, with that understatement. The BMG foundation has been a major force in developing a distributing vaccines that have saved 122 million lives in developing countries over the last 30 years. Now they aren’t responsible for all or even most but certainly ten million at minimum. If we took his $100+ billion and distributed it to every American family it would be a bit under $1,000 for each one. I challenge you to explain that giving American family a $1,000 is going make the world a better place, than what the BMG has already done. Much less the program they have in place to eradicate polio, Malaria, and a bunch of other diseases we’ve not seen in this country. Or their world changing program to develop affordable toilets that provide clean drinking water and sanitation for the couple billion people that don’t have access to clean water.
I feel confident that no government agency and very few NGOs would have a long-term outlook to fund such a project.
Ok, Gates is the exception, the good billionaire. What about Zuckerburg, Bezos, the Google Boy, or your favorite Republican villain, the Koch brothers.
The vast majority of the top billionaires made their tremendous wealth one way. They founded a transformative company the changed the way Americans and often the world lived. As the company became more dominate, the value of the shares of the company they founded become more valuable, making them worth $20,50 or $100+ billion.
Here is the thing they didn’t become rich by being paid a huge salary, Zuckerberg and Dorsey get paid $1/year. Bezo, Musk, Buffett <$100K and most don’t even get stock options. They don’t have many billions, sitting around in stock, bonds, gold, or real estate. Typically well over 90% of their wealth is tied to their company stock. This means they only way to pay a 5% wealth tax is to sell 5% of their shares each year. After 13 years of doing it that they’ll own less than 1/2 of the shares they started with, which means the founders will find it increasingly hard to control the destiny of the companies they founded.
Who is going to own and control shares the founders sold?. Mutual fund and pension fund managers, hedge fund guys, and Wall St. trader looking to score a quick buck. Are these types of owners willing to spend decades funding moon-shot projects? Such as developing internet for Africa, delivery drones, quantum computers, much less crazy ideas like reusable space ships, or putting men on Mars. History has shown that almost none of these people take a long-term view; they want to next quarter to beat expectations so they can look good.
I think this is bad for the country for two reasons. People who are good inventors and founders, who are also able to scale their companies are damn rare, I hate to see them pushed out by the typical short term focus of Wall St. But even more, importantly, most of these billionaire don’t really care abou the money. What they want to is to build fabulous companies that change the world. Right now that place is still America. But if founders are force to sell share in their baby every year to pay the wealth tax, I’m sure the Elon Musk and Sergi Brin of the world will go place some else, and lots of Chiness will simply stay home.
