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I absolutely hate stuff like this.
My net worth has grown substantially in the last several years, however my income has actually gone down in that time.
So do I have an income of millions of dollars? I haven't sold anything that has appreciated (and I don't intend to).
Elon Musk's net worth may have increased, and most certainly Elon Musk is much, much richer than I am, and has a higher income, but this shell game of conflating "income" and "net worth" is just stupid.
There are examples here like:
"If you buy a donut, thats like Elon buying a dunkin donuts franchise!"
Yeah, except I don't sell property or land to buy donuts. How much money does Elon actually take per year in income is the relevant question here.
Once you reach a certain level of wealth, your net worth increasing becomes a substitute for income because these people live off the debt backed by their illiquid assets. That allows them to avoid a large tax bill.
Take out a $1b loan using $10b in assets as collateral. When that $1b loan comes due, your net worth has grown to $15b. Take out a $2b loan, pay off the original loan and have $1b left to live on. No taxes are paid because no gains have been realized and loans aren't taxable.
Elon was able to leverage his vast personal wealth to secure loans to _buy Twitter_. His purchasing power doesn't extend solely to what he is able to liquidate. In any case he can liquidate a million dollars a day in holdings and burn it in a barrel and it wouldn't move the market in a meaningful way. In fact he could tweet that and people would probably buy more of his meme stocks.
You seem to be peeved about a distinction that is not worth making at the scale we are talking about.
I agree whole-heartedly with you and that too was my initial reaction, yet you obviously did not persevere. The website is not about how trivial your income is compared with Elon's but how significantly wealthy most of us are vs "10% of the world, or over 750 million people, (who) live in extreme poverty on $1.90 or less a day." Take a moment to do it again and take it to the end. Having the wealth to even participate in this conversation makes us all truly fortunate.
Well, IIRC Musk doesn’t technically have a salary and maybe (?) the target audience for this site doesn’t know their own net worth off-hand. So I could see why they’d make that choice.
I hear you, I am not keep of this type "propaganda" either, it's inciting to say the least.
It compares and contrasts the 0.01% with the rest of the world. Silly? Maybe. Maybe the intent is actually malice.
People should study and comprehend Normal Distribution, and how it applies to virtual everything.
Mic drop.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
Why is it the relevant question?
Elon Musk borrows against his assets to pay for things. You could too.
Since I'm unemployed, I just put in '0' (not quite true, I own some dividend stocks lol); every comparison was just infinity (∞).
Also the scrolling is a bit broken on Firefox on Linux.
Seems to be broken in Firefox on all platforms.
What are you doing in your mini-retirement?
This doesn't seem to account for the cost of living; living off $100/day in San Francisco might very well result in a lower quality of life than living off of $5/day in somewhere else in the world.
The general premise still stands of course.
I'm curious; are there any organizations where donations help build regions economies? One would think that if a region relied on donations to survive then, without change, they'd continue relying on donations which isn't a great long term solution. The ideal solution seems to be helping these regions jump start and build their economies through education and financial support. If people can afford to go to school and get an education then hopefully they are able to start moving their local community and economy forward.
Tough problems to solve, anyone know if there's any good books on the subject? I know there's nothing I can do to help but I'd be interesting in learning more about the problem and potential solutions.
Check out GiveDirectly (https://www.givedirectly.org/), a nonprofit which does what it sounds like. They give money to the poorest people, directly. You can browse the site to find out why that's incredibly effective at alleviating poverty.
Website scrollbar thing is completely broken in latest Firefox on Windows. I get 2 scrollbars and have to scroll the 2nd one manually for the effect to work.
Same here..
Can we tag this ‘thinly veiled website asking for donations’? I dont mind donating, but I don’t like getting sales pitches the way the website did. It’s cheap and nasty.
If you can’t take this sales pitch you need to get out more.
Was that irony intentional?
Moron confuses increase in net worth with income, news at 11.
By this token, anyone who owns a house probably made a $100k+ extra in income the last couple of years.
> Moron
As opposed to needlessly pedantic hackernews readers deliberately miss the point of the exercise? It doesn't matter if musk is hoarding jelly beans, people don't realize just how rich billionaires are.
Personally I am a temporarily embarrassed startup founder so I'm alright jack
This demonstrates something I kept say while people were dunking on Bloomberg for spending a bunch of money to try to get the Dem nomination in 2020 were being silly; for him, it was like the equivalent of buying new furniture or taking a vacation. He paid that kind of money to have a non-zero chance at becoming POTUS, and probably had a decent-enough time working on it. Made perfect sense.
I would have actually liked Bloomberg as president. He seems like a reasonable man that could be reasoned with.
If Elon runs for the republican nomination I'll take him over Trump. Or Bloomberg will do, yes. Or a small and friendly but fiscally conservative billionaire turtle.
This is a neat data visualization but ultimately unpersuasive. The idea is that I am much richer than someone earning $1.90/day (I am), and that in consequence I should donate $5 of my money to help that poor person. But why ask me? Why not ask Elon Musk, the presented point of comparison, to donate $2,000,000, which as this site points out is worth less to him than $5 is to me? Not only would he be giving up less, he'd be helping 400,000x as many people as me.
It genuinely sickens me that people let billionaires walk all over the rest of humanity like this. Musk and his ilk could single-handedly transform the economic prospects of whole communities in poor countries. I can't. So why am I the bad guy for not donating the $5 I want to spend on a coffee to get me through my workday?
I can't remember where I read or listened to it, but apparently giving away money isn't really that easy. I mean, sure, you can just straight up give away cash to random people, but that's not really what we need.
Finding trust worthy organizations that have a good mission, know what they're doing, and can efficiently distribute large sums of money without a significant portion of it going to "administration fees" is apparently rather difficult.
There are far more middle class people who might give up $5 than billionaires who might give up $2 million.
The middle and upper middle class has far more spending power than billionaires. That’s why society generally revolves around catering to us instead of the rich (the most successful companies make products for regular people).
>>Musk and his ilk could single-handedly transform the economic prospects of whole communities in poor countries
So why can't governments do this? They own way more money than billionaires and it is theoretically their responsibility. Shouldn't your anger really be directed there? Musk is not really responsible for other people's well being.
> But why ask me? Why not ask Elon Musk
Why not both ?
I really don't need a website to know that I make/have at my disposal far less money than any billionaire. Or even millionaire.
I think you didn't get to the end. There is a plot twist.
No, you don't get it. You can't just live your life. This must enrage you.
it's quite a fun thought experiment but the guy really needs some lessons in economics.
imagine billionaires cashed up all their assets, I doubt they'd get the full amount, probably 15% of their way into cashing it will crumple the rest due to market confidence etc
The point isn't to compare if you took all your money out of the bank and put in your pocket vs Warren Buffett doing the same, it's that the proportional every day capital deployment/purchasing power that these people have compared to us is impossibly hard to conceptualize, so you have to start somewhere. This is almost certainly why the thought experiment focuses on menial, everyday purchases.
On the other hand, Elon Musk could use his existing assets as collateral to attempt to buy Twitter without offloading much stock, and this web page is talking about tiny amount of disposable income purchases like a cup of coffee (or a few dozen coffee franchises with Elon's free cash)
Ooof, I did not like this site. It feels like it's trying to take away from the hilariously disproportionate wealth of Elon Musk by shifting the focus to "the world", with the implied message being "see, you don't have it so bad!". Nice deflection.
In addition to GiveWell (which I definitely support), you can support politicians who want to make people like Musk pay their fair share.
I don’t understand the underlying math. Musk’s net worth went up by $121B yet he couldn’t afford to buy Twitter for 1/3 of that?
I don’t think the numbers are right. If you make $59,000 you are not in the global top 1%.
I put in $0 and got infinity for every answer.
I'm more of an undefined kind of guy.
> In 2021, Elon Musk's net worth grew by an estimated $121 billion.
And it's dropped by more than that in 2022... So I guess we should all be happy we've made billions more than Elon this year.
kinda broken in firefox, nice try though
Tl;Dr: you are extremely wealthy compared to the world's poorest
doesn't work on my firefox
So I get that this is a click-baity way to get people to donate to people living in extreme poverty. But why compare yourself to billionaires? I'm not Elon Musk, and I'm cool with that. I haven't started multiple industry-changing companies. If I start the next Paypal, Tesla, AND SpaceX, I sure hope I am worth many billions - because my companies would be worth a ton.
It’s fantastic that Elon is so wealthy. He deserves it. The world needs more hard core engineers leading breakout innovations and stirring things up.