Are people getting tired of all the billionaires and their billionairing?

You have focussed again on me mentioing a "wealth tax" specifically.

Sorry, I used that for a lazy shorthand for US govt. taking a bigger share generally than they do now and redistributing it. Critcising "wealth taxes" and crying over poor rich job creators being abused by the govt. doesn't negate the wider point (that the wealth/resources distribution in the US has gone out of whack).

How exactly are the poor put upon rich people who lose some % extra to Uncle Sam in tax going to "disengage" from the US in a huff? (still the richest country on earth by a good distance with a giant consumer market, also a global superpower) I wonder? It would not be easy! Good luck to them finding Galt's Gulch.

(Sorry) just have to say that is a little weird to pull up your sticks + leave country you live in over the taxes going up if you are "not even a millionaire"? But then your political beliefs are a (massive) outlier in this country. The wringing of hands over US govt. (theoretically) taking a bigger % out of the hide of their own extremely rich people + the large companies that wish to operate there is touching.

As for "impact being magnified" when it comes to the billionaires, while it might be easier to move your bank accounts or spend more time in one of your mansions in a foreign country or some such (as regards reducing personal taxes), well you can't take a company employing Americans + selling in US with you in the suitcase if you do decide to leave/burn all bridges in a snit because the regulations/laws have changed and some larger % of what was profit is now going to US govt.

"There's always better places to conduct business" and "what matters is the bottom line, not where business is conducted" (i.e. the current net profit above all other concerns) is a sentiment that has somewhat been overtaken by world events of past few years IMO.

Musk is an intelligent guy and did well with Tesla to become a billionaire. I think his purchase of Twitter will prove to be a mistake.

I’m glad the $8 blue tick has backfired on Musk. It’s a silly idea. It would only provide a temporary financial boost imo as people only want one to appear important.

If they can’t figure out how to ensure the mess over the insulin tweet can’t happen again then blue tick is doomed anyway.

While I agree with the bit about luck, the rest of your post is manure.

Those people working for Amazon are not physically tethered to the warehouse, if they can get a better job elsewhere, why don’t they? These are quintessential low skilled manual jobs which unless they are responsible for the performance of colleagues/ie in a management position, they are minimum pay jobs. If pay was related to hard we worked, then nurses and labourers would be billionaires, but only a fool equates the two. Bezos and his wife started selling second hand books from their spare room, saw a gap in the market and exploited it, if you can do the same thing, go ahead and do it.

Everytime I go on Amazon to buy that item without leaving my house, that item I can’t get in my local shop or sometimes in this country, damn right I think Bezos is a hero.

A society that allows a small cohort to become obscenely wealthy will only continue to function as long as the vast majority of the population is also becoming wealthier.

One where the small cohort becomes obscenely wealthy at the expense of the majority and with an ever widening wealth gap is destined to end badly imo.

Prior to the French Revolution, the top 10 percent of the population held about 90 percent of the country's wealth with the top 1 percent holding approximately 60 percent. As it stands today, it's estimated that the top 10% of households in the United States hold approximately 69% of wealth with the top 1 percent holding 32.3%. Not quite at the same level but certainly heading the same way and in a society that champions unfettered capitalism while regarding the word "socialist" as an insult, heading there fast.

The UK wouldn't be that dissimilar but despite the Conservatives best efforts to completely dismantle the NHS and social welfare system they haven't managed it yet so we're not seeing the same dystopian levels of homelessness and medical bankruptcy as the US. With it looking pretty much inevitable that Labour will win the next election, and assuming they actually stick to their socialist principles should at least slow, if not somewhat reverse, the centralisation of wealth going on there.

Ultimately though, with the current centralisation of global wealth into an elite billionaire class, and despite their control of print and broadcast media, I believe we're going to see a bloody socialist revolution in a major western power (most likely the US) in the next couple of decades. Trump may have been a grifter posing as a populist leader but the demographic he tapped into are still there, they didn't all die as a result of his handling of the Covid pandemic and I'm not at all convinced that these supposed right-wingers couldn't be lead against the elite by an enigmatic ideologue.

All employers benefit from the hard work of their employees, if you are a business owner, you do too. But scale of course is different here, Amazon is an online behemoth which also makes its owners/shareholders vast amounts from their cloud based technology.

If people get rich from it, fair **** as long as they act legally. If the jobs are minimum wage type jobs, then they are doing nothing illegal by paying minimum wage, again, the employees do not have to work there. Minimum wage levels exist for a reason, and like it or not, some jobs are minimum wage jobs.

I lived and worked in the States, there is a lot wrong with it, but there is a lot good about it as well. One of them is that failure in business is not seen as a spectre hanging over you, you dust yourself off and try again, some succeed, some don’t, for the very few that success is spectacular, and fair does.

I really don’t see why you think you deserve some of what Bezos or any other wealthy billionaire has, it doesn’t bother me what they make, but I sure as hell love being able to research and buy **** online, for that we can thank (and pay) Amazon and eBay.

Why doesn’t he or anyone else have a right to amass such wealth?

So what?

There are a minuscule number of billionaires in the world, and apart from inheritance, they all have one thing in common, they cater to our needs or desires, that is what makes them rich. If you want to be rich, find something that no one, or few can do, then sell it to the masses. If you are just like everyone else, you don’t deserve to have what they have.

So what?

The ten richest people on the planet hold the same wealth as the bottom 4Billion (Apparently it's actually much grater than a disparity than that, but let's go with that). And these 4Billions quality of life could be vastly improved if this wealth was more equally distributed.

None of these billionaires, at least those in existence today, can do something that no one else can do. Elon Musk is proving to us daily just how much this is the case. The main thing that most of them have in common is that they they have been lucky enough to benefit from a society that allows those who get ahead, to more easily keep expanding their wealth. Some to an obscene degree.

Keeping it from them is a bigger problem.

Bezos exploited a gap in the market to sell second hand books online. Now we can all sell **** online, but few of us can identify an opportunity, and then build it into a huge business. A lot of these people started with nothing, or very little, but had the foresight and/or talent to build extremely successful companies. It shows an incredible level of stupidity to say they are no different from everyone else, because the obvious retort would be, why then can’t everyone else do what they do/did?

It is also hypocritical, why should you earn more than anyone else who has your level of intelligence or your work ethic? The fact is that not all things are equal, and when Communists tried to make it so, it failed miserably. Saying that successful people shouldn’t accumulate wealth because others can’t, is to assume that everyone tries the same, thinks the same and has the same talent, which we all know simply isn’t the case. I wonder how many of those 4billion you speak of are layabout good for nothings who never worked a day in their life, will do as little as possible when they are working, or couldn’t be arsed trying to do/earn more?