I think that, somewhere north of $1 ~ $5 million is life-changing on its own. There’s no need for someone to have tens of millions or hundreds of millions. Tens of millions is like, changing multiple lives in a family with how much that can stretch.
Whenever someone has billions to their name, it is boggling to think about. That it becomes just ‘fuck you’ money at that point because more often than not, not a lot of billionaires out there being charitable. When they know they’re set for a few lifetimes just by a single billion alone.
No single person should ever have that amount of gross wealth.
$5 million is the threshold where you start to not need to work full time if you’re not old age. Like, you can basically have 40 working years of your life back and not sacrifice on milestones like owing a home, having a family, security in your elder years, and a comfortable life…
I think 5 million is ok number as a top. As long as it has been earned working.
The problem with “wealth” or taxing it while someone is alive is that there’s a problem when it comes to businesses.
If you taxed Zuckerburg, Musk, or Bezos 90% of their wealth, they would lose control of their companies because that’s where most of their wealth exists as the stock they own in their company.
I’m a big fan of a limit on wealth transfer to your children though, cap that shit at 10 million and give the billionaires a reason to spend or give away all their money before they die. Spent money stimulates the economy.
If you taxed Zuckerburg, Musk, or Bezos 90% of their wealth, they would lose control of their companies
Not seeing the downside here.
Yea, because you don’t have an economics degree.
Musk may be an asshole, and Tesla may be absolute shit, but SpaceX is a good company and would have never existed without Musk’s wealth from other ventures.
That process of making a fortune, then investing in other companies so that they can become successful is a critical factor for many organizations.
Google is another example, it took millions of dollars from a few wealthy investors before it blew up.
SpaceX is a good company
Wait, wut?
Google is another example
SpaceX has advanced what humanity can do in space by a significant amount. It achieved something no government was even considering attempting until they proved it possible.
Google has added some massive value to the world, making information more accessible and advancing hundreds of other services and companies. From Gmail to Waymo it too has advanced humanity significantly.
If that’s what you learned from your economics degree, you’re part of the problem. Spend a lot more time on business ethics, moral philosophy and humanities, maybe get some degrees in that too before you start feeling like you’re qualified deciding how the world ought to work.
Economics is about studying how it works, not forming opinions on how it should work.
If you want to discuss changing economic systems entirely, then discuss that, not ways to break the current one.
Our current economic system would not function with the changes proposed. All sorts of problems occur if you try to tax wealth when it’s created. Companies would receive no investment because anyone with money would have already hit the threshold and wouldn’t benefit from investing it. Not to mention that founders would be forced to walk away fairly early in the business even if they succeeded without investment.
Capitalism is inherently exploitative. You can’t have a profit as a company if you pay workers the same amount that you earn. If you pay workers out the entirety of the value and cut out the shareholders, you’ve just created socialism.
In my opinion, guided capitalism is the best system. Which means adding taxes and regulations to prevent the worst problems.
Like the fact that we already tax wealth somewhat when it’s sold off, and my proposal adjust inheritance taxes to 100% over a certain dollar value (10-20 million for example)
Great, they did it and were successful. Now they can fuck off and do something else with their money, hopefully not something so destructive to society.
How does that statement make any sense? If you tax them, they won’t have the money to fuck off with.
You have hurt yourself in your confusion.
And a lot of social good can come from this.
From which, taxing people on death or taxing them while living?
¿Por qué no los dos?
Hooray.jpg
Progressive income taxes until 100m, then 100% wealth taxes. Estate taxes of 50%. The kids will be fine as a 2 kid family would get 25 mil each.
So as the company you founded gets bigger, you’re forced to just give more and more of it away to the government until you don’t control it anymore?
I would much prefer to see a higher estate tax, 100% of all amounts over 10-20 million.
If you know you can’t keep it you’re far more likely to do something useful with it while you’re alive.
Good point, but easily resolved with share classes.
Estate taxes don’t help, for example we can’t afford to wait for Musk to die to rectify the political and institutional damage he has done and is doing.
You don’t need to prevent rich people to remove money from elections. There are laws that other countries have passed that effectively nuter their influence on that.
They’re in the trillions now. It’s like a disease.
No they aren’t. Musk is only around 700-800B as of the end of 2025.
Oh, Ok. I was worried.
likeDragon sickness
sounds too cool
canceris a better term is imowealth addiction
Maybe instead of solely focusing on capping the top, we focus on raising the bottom.
Drop the envy. Pick up the compassion.
Yeah, how much is enough? The answer does vary a lot by where you live too. But it is interesting hearing people with 5x my income in the same country complain having no money left each month. Meanwhile I have always been doing fine even on minimum wage.
Agree. Billionaires shouldn’t exist.
Personally, every penny you have in money/assets/stocks over £1b is taxed at 100% in exchange you get a medal that says “I beat capitalism” and a statue.
While I agree, then you are giving the government massive power to decide how much you shouldn’t make.
And what happens with all the “tax” money? Straight into politician pockets.
I’m not bothered about the specifics, its the principal.
The money could all goto charity for all I care. Point is, no person on this planet should have that much wealth at the expense of others.
I agree.
But its still dangerous to give government that power. however, if you can actually elect the politicians, its fine. But we all know its rigged bullshit and votes dont actually matter anymore, if they ever did.
It’s gotta be less dangerous than letting individuals have it. I mean, look around.
Its a compromise. You can have 999 mil as long as you invest back 100% into society thereafter…though, no one ever needs 999 mil either.
as long as you invest back 100% into society
Taxes
Yeah but then they find ways to slurp up the tax money through bailouts and BS government contracts.
Yes, but we are talking tax policy, not how to solve human greed and corruption.
Getting to direct where every dollar goes above a billion is a huge amount of power. A single person deciding how to spend millions or billions of dollars to do what they deem to be improving society? They may do some good things, but a democratic process would probably do better overall.
Exactly
Enough to cover their needs: from shelter and food, to enriching experiences and opportunities. We could all have this if we taxed the rich and corporations adequately as we once did.
But the yachts. How would you get yachts with a mere $1M - $5M? And jets?
No one needs more than $5 million. That’s enough for a conservative investment portfolio to give you a mid six figure income without doing any labor. Watch TV all day and eat chips, still net six figures.
Maybe then no one can afford mega mansions and mega yachts, but I’m okay with that. We don’t need that much concentration of wealth.
I mean, maybe I want to go after a passion project and not waste away on someone else’s dream of what having money looks like?
$5mill ain’t gonna start & fund a lot of impactful projects
Just enough to escape capitalism. 5 million invested in stocks means you would never have to work again. Any more than that and you are part of the problem that everyone is trying to escape.
Honestly though, really we should all be working for an escape for our entire species, not individual escape pods.
Like why the fuck do we need money anyway? We just use it to get other stuff. Cut out the middleman and just give me the stuff I was getting with money.
Because the guy you want wool clothes from wants beef instead of the lentils you chose to grow, and the person who wants your lentils only has chickens, and the guy who wants chickens has cabbage, and the guy who wants cabbage builds houses, and the guy who wants a house has pork.
Money exists to make transactions easier. Barter sucks as a primary trade mechanism unless everyone already makes almost all of what they need themselves and the barter is just on the side to spice things up a bit.
A simple estimation based on investing that amount of money into a total world stock market index fund (e.g. VTWAX) would be your yearly expenses divided by 3.25% (pretty conservative rate). The idea is that you withdraw 3.25% of your wealth from the stock market every year, and you’ll be able to withdraw that much purchasing power every year forever due to compound interest pushing the number up as you withdraw. Realistically if you’re not withdrawing the full amount blindly during market downturns you can kick that number up to 4% or even more, but 3.25-3.5% is basically impossible to go broke with, and most likely will quickly increase your nest egg to double/triple/etc in most universes.
So, if my expenses were 50k/year in post-tax money, I would need to invest ~1.5 million in order to withdraw 50k of “free” money per year forever, inflation-adjusted. You can do the rest of the math on how many post-tax expenses a normal person/family has and will quickly reach the conclusion that hey, a billion dollars is kinda fucking crazy.
This right here is why everything is so fucked up.
but 3.25-3.5% is basically impossible to go broke with,
Historically it has not been enough to draw down funds that are invested in a broad American stock market index like the S&P500. But that doesn’t make it impossible. A 20-30 year run that looks like the Nikkei 225 between 1990 and 2020 could wipe out portfolios on a 3% withdrawal rate. Even a 2% withdrawal rate would’ve run out of money in 32 years.
I’m kinda bearish about the continued dominance of the “invest in publicly traded large cap American equities” strategy over the coming decades, so I’m a bit more conservative in my savings rate, and what securities/assets I’m actually invested in, including soft assets like my own earning ability if I were to bail on this country and move somewhere else (fluency in another language, job skill sets that translate outside of the US borders, relationships/network with people who don’t rely on the US).
And I know that’s not the central point you’re making. But there are plenty of people who might not feel secure with $1.5 million or even $3 million or $6 million in investible wealth, especially if it’s tied up in one particular asset or asset class, or otherwise less liquid than publicly traded securities.
I did say VTWAX (i.e total “world”), which diversifies out of a lot of problems like the Nikkei 225 and the potential collapse of America, but yes the math is not 100% gospel because at the end of the day anything can happen. Oftentimes, when calculating for a decades-long downfall of the entire world economy, the real answer is that if that happens everything is super fucked no matter what you planned for. All we can do is run simulations on historical data and get statistical significance for numbers we’re pretty comfortable with. If someone is actually pulling the trigger (i.e. retiring) for real on these numbers, I’d strongly suggest they get more familiar with why these numbers are what they are and are prepared to spend less when needed in a rare edge case scenario.
And as you said, for this thread in particular it’s just an estimation to ballpark how much capital realistically translates into what sort of wealth for someone’s life. IMO it’s very useful to be able to estimate how a layman’s capital generation/retirement works because most people just give up on finances immediately and have no concept of what wealth even means. Does someone ever really need 20 million dollars? I’d wager most people just aren’t sure. Now we know which people we can eat.
Billionaires don’t have billions in their bank accounts. That’s not how wealth works. It’s not like they’re sitting on a pile of cash and just want more. The vast majority of it is tied to property and businesses. Thinking that just because one could comfortably retire that they should is kind of like telling a runner to stop running after having completed their first marathon. They’re a runner - runners run. A person who became a billionaire views making money the same way. It’s what they do. It’s what they’re good at and derive meaning from.
Means the only solution is the guillotine sadly.
Billionaires don’t have billions in their bank accounts. That’s not how wealth works.
This is a strawman argument used by dishonest business types who think everybody else is dumb about how wealth works. Nobody is saying billionaires have billions in their bank accounts.
The vast majority of it is tied to property and businesses
Right you are on the same page as the rest of the people arguing against the existence of billionaires.
The number of properties held by a person should be limited to one. Ideally having a clause saying that it has to be on rent for a regulated price. And individuals cannot own a majority of business unless it’s a one man job. I would like the world to head towards worker owned cooperatives instead of 0.01% hoarding 90% of the wealth.
Thinking that just because one could comfortably retire that they should is kind of like telling a runner to stop running after having completed their first marathon. They’re a runner - runners run.
So the entire neo-liberal thesis is that we should reward psychopaths. That’s kind of a non-starter for sustainable living.
A person who became a billionaire views making money the same way. It’s what they do. It’s what they’re good at and derive meaning from.
I can’t begin to tell you the enormous amount of problems with this statement with regards to somebody’s mental health. You can’t be a billionaire without causing suffering to other people. Without leaving somebody else with the short end of the stick. Kindness is alien to people who think this is okay and should be encouraged. This level of worship of money is quite deviant because civilization evolved and thrives on cooperation, not on some misconstrued notion that a single person can derive so much “value” such that they can demand 99% or more of wealth.>
My number is between $2,000,000 and $3,000,000. It’s enough to live off investment income in a 4% down market, and that’s all I will realistically need to have a comfortable life without having to touch the nest egg itself. Psychologically, there is no difference between having $10,000,000 and a billion, so it would seem to me that the upper limit of need is $10,000,000.
As soon as I hit 2-3 million I will retire, no matter how old I am.
As far as ‘life changing’ goes, I was fortunate to have a few thousand to invest when the market tanked in 2020. Those few thousand turned into $35,000 when the market recovered a few years later, which I used to pay off my student loans and put a down payment on a condo. It wasn’t fuck you money, but definitely life changing.
I’m cautious about using the word “need”. No one needs almost anything. That is not the standard we should be judging things. Anyone can point to anything you love and say you don’t need it. It can get miserable quickly.
Excessive wealth does corrupt, in many ways so a limit on personal wealth is easily justifiable.
Without writing an essay, a somewhat arbitrary 100 milion seems like a reasonable upper limit if there are some appropriate checks in place. For example, fines need to be proportionate to wealth. A speeding ticket serves a social purpose, but extreme wealth defeats the purpose. Proportionality, so it hurts the rich the same way it hurts the working man making a $200 speeding ticket becomes a $10,000 speeding ticket for the hundred-millionaire. Similarly taxes need to be progressive and at the limit, become 100%.
The key is to never allow personal wealth grow to where it can corrupt the state. Buying up media companies, funding political orgs, buying politicians etc, is a key goal of the wealth limit.
