This is my favorite visualization of how obscenely wealthy the mega rich are.
And it’s gotten much worse since then. The $185 billion number listed as the highest wealth would be around number 5 now, with Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Arnault all having more than that now I think.
My favorite statistic household net worth (includes cars, houses, retirement, everything).
Median from 2022 was 192,000 Mean from 2022 was 1,063,000
The ultra-rich are such incredible outliers that the mean is more than 5x the median.
The 10 wealthiest people in 2024 control almost 1.7 trillion dollars. That’s more than the GDP of the pooreat 100 countries combined.
And that is almost a decade out of date.
So you’re saying if we kill the 8, we can double the wealth of almost half of the population of the world?
Yeah but think of the impact on society, any of us could be those top 8 if we just worked hard enough!
/s
You know what? If that happens to be me just do it.
It won’t. The kind of people who would offer themselves up to be killed for the good of humanity aren’t the kind of people who make a billion dollars unless they hit the lottery a few times in a row.
I mean, they could just give away 90% of a billion dollars, leaving them with a pathetic 100 million dollars.
That’s what gets me when people defend billionaires. You could take 99 percent of that and they’d still have 10 million dollars which is still multiples of what the average worker makes in a lifetime. They could still live without a worry in the world.
You’ll never get a billion of you care enough to help anyone with your wealth
I’ll sign this pact too.
Once I’m into the top 1000 net worths on earth (practically a given to happen), I’ll just retire.
If my valuable assets force me into the top 100 (more likely than not), I’ll hire somebody to find good charities to prop up.
If I stumble into the top 10 billion/trillion-aires, go ahead and do what you gotta do and remind my widow to do nice things with the estate.
Shit if I ever end up in the top million let me know so I can solve that via charity and pro worker lobbying right quick.
Yes then with their superior work ethic and bootstraps they could earn it back again. It’s like an infinite money glitch for humanity.
Nah, let’s just eat them instead. Isn’t that how Jesus fed 5,000?
Since when does wealth be shared when someone dies ?
No, the money will go to their descendants who will try to get even richer than their parents. A large part of that money will also be taken by the state because ?? and ??.
Nothing would change.
A large part of that money will also be taken by the state because ?? and ??.
to make society work, and IDK, give food stamps to the single mother? it’s literally the theme of the post.
I want the same thing I just don’t think taking what is inherited is the way to do it.
I would much rather see the ultra-rich pay properly their taxes when they are alive.
It’s not like taking inheritance money is the only way to finance things. I don’t see the reasoning.
I can totally understand why someone with huge revenue would pay more taxes but I don’t see why someone who inherits has to pay taxes at that exact moment.
In any case, I think you are missing the point and answering the question “for what purpose?”. Instead of “why?”.
I want to know why it’s more logical to pay taxes when you die rather than paying them in the first place when you got the revenue.
Obviously, the money collected is useful I just don’t see why it has to be collected when it is a time of sorrow for a family.
Also where I live it’s like 50% of the inheritance that is taxed. It is not just significant, it is 50% of the work of a life that goes in one shot to the state when someone dies.Edit: I was mistaken, I did some calculations and a practical example: If I inherited 200 000€ I would have to pay around 18 194€ (20%)for one taxation and some additional applies but it’s nowhere near what I was told. This rate goes from 5% to 45% for the largest inheritance. In reality, to get a 45% taxation in France I would have to inherit more than 1.5 million euros.
I still think this taxation is too high and I regret that my comment is not clear. I don’t want less taxation overall I just think it makes more sense to take the money over time on the revenues. Anyway, taxation for inheritance is still something people here are very much concerned about. Parents want their children to inherit as much as possible of their wealth obviously so seeing a good chunk going to taxation is not great. Again I’m ok to pay taxes. But we have 192 different taxes here (that’s the exact number calculated in 2014) so I would prefer a system where most of the taxation comes from revenues and what you own and that’s it.
I’m curious where you live? Because many places have laws like that. Almost NO WHERE do the ultra rich actually pay that. There’s always loop holes built in for them.
You’re just not killing enough people. At some point the heirs decide to give it all away.
This has historical precedence. Many times over. Collective action works.
Your mistake is thinking that you are talking to people who think more than 2 feet in front of their noses.
Shhh, some people want an imaginative excuse to kill others.
We could kill the descendants of the billionaires as well.
We do not encourage violence, but yes
Maybe you don’t…
Yes, these answers are sanctioned by the proper authorities
I don’t agree with your math but I love your enthusiasm for murder.
math checks out tho?
Yeah, then we would all have so much more money all of a sudden, that would mean we could all buy so much more stuff. That’s definitely how money works.
You would also have to double the debt of everyone in debt. Students might be quite annoyed, but not nearly as much as Alex Jones.
more like based methodist church
If only. I went to one of their bishop factories as yooth, the people that matter to the organization don’t share these principles.
Your experience is certainly valid but for those interested there are at least 13 Methodist denominations in the North America alone, several of which exist because they participate in more progressive leadership :)
Interesting fact if you make $100000 a year and not counting any taxes or inflation or spending it would take you 10000 years to become a billionaire
One million seconds is 11.6 days
One billion seconds is 31.7 years
And a trillion seconds is 31,688 years
So you’re saying I can get there…
Absolutely! You just have to ditch those silly luxuries like food and shelter. You could even start working 80 hour weeks in hopes of getting passed over for that promotion again. Until then, you can just dream about how that extra $100 a month could possibly bring the total time down to 9,989 years.
Wealth is not money. You can build wealth much faster on $100k a year.
I hate agreeing with a church on anything, but when you’re right you’re right.
I’d like to see a loaves and fishes kinda miracle performed with the bodies of these 8 men.
But those 8 men deserve it! /s
I’m thinking of starting a crowdfunder to become the first billionaire in history to give all of their money away to people who are hungry.
That’s just a charity…
Yeah in a way. But also a charity is not a billionaire.
Y’all ain’t gonna eat the rich. You can’t stomach the violence of Hamas while they fight against a more powerful entity and you want me to believe you’re going to eat the rich. You aren’t willing to change your morales that change requires.
Additionally it’s more like the rich will force the poor to eat each other. The convicted felon is running for a president for a reason after all.
The 8 richest people in the world according to investopedia have a combined net worth of about $1,369 billion. Divide that by 3.6 billion and it is about $380 per person. Idk what the average net worth of the poorest half of the world’s population is, but I doubt it is below $380.
TL;DR: I’m calling bullshit.
You can’t imagine that half of the world’s population lives on less than $360? You sweet, summer child…
Not lives on, but net worth (total wealth).
What would be a realistic net worth of a person who earns less than $1 a day and lives habd to mouth for you?
The way net worth works, many people are negative. Meaning they have more liability than assets.
Hmm, that is actually an interesting point. If it is negative, does it bring down the sum in this? If so, how much of the world is my net worth greater than? A billion? Two?
I don’t know, I do know when you compare gross wealth something ridiculous like half the USA is in the top 10 percent. That of course takes nothing like Purchasing Power Parity or Required Goods, (like a functioning car) into account. You’ve got to be very careful with these kinds of statistics.
One thing we know for sure though, you can take 99% of a Billionaire’s wealth and they’d still never need to work another day in their life. And it’s not even like they’d need a strict budget to make that happen. (A lot of “financially independent” people got enough dividend stocks to bring in 100K a year and retired, they need a strict budget to keep not working.)
Well, my parents grew up in poverty. And based off what they’ve said, 380$ net worth sounds too high, unless it’s an average. At least back then (even adjusted for inflation btw).
People really don’t understand how poor true poverty is, and why things from poor countries are so much cheaper. I have literally seen families that subsisted off of dump sites.
Also, children usually have 0 net worth for obvious reasons, so if we include children that stat is ready to reach. Especially since children are counted in the world population after all.
According to this wikipedia page - Median wealth per adult globally is estimated at $8,654 for a total population figure of 5.5 million, quite a bit less than the global population estimated at 8.1 billion. I’m guessing because this is “per adult” rather than per person. The children of the world are all on the low end of the wealth spectrum and probably would be a large share of the 3.6 billion.
Also questions can be asked about how they value wealth, do we consider debts, etc…in which case there’s a lot of people with zero wealth or less, as well as a lot of people who don’t have bank accounts and whose wealth is hard to measure is any ordinary sense. Point being, this particular comparison is kind of meaningless without more context. There’s probably ways you can do it to get an even larger number than 3.6 billion.
But a more useful and perhaps more surprising metric is that 8 people have as much wealth as 158 million median people. Which is still ridiculous, like those 8 people are worth a Russia’s entire population’s worth of people. And not just of poor people, but your average adult person who likely has a job and may even be considered on the well-to-do side within some poorer countries.
Yes, that is a much better way to make the same point :)
It’s an interesting stat. Is this individuals or households? Is it “head of household” or is it also counting minors?
Regardless, there’s enormous disparity.
The median wealth in India, according to Wikipedia, is $3755. There’s probably hundreds of millions of people there who fall into the less than $380 category.
Again, Wikipedia, but Africa has just over 700M inhabitants with a median $1242 wealth. That’s $879B. For everyone on the continent. 8 people have 1.5X more wealth than an entire continent full of people.
But maybe it’s not 3.6B people. Maybe it’s 3B or only 2B people. It’s still not OK.
In the first place, looking at wealth is pointless. I could make a thousand dollars a day and as long as I spend them immediately on services, (e.g. permanently living in an expensive hotel, renting a supercar) I could have net worth of $0 while living like a king. On the other hand, a struggling business owner may have millions in equipment and still have trouble putting food on the table. “Wealth” is not a good indicator of anything.
