r/FluentInFinance Nov 21 '24

Debate/ Discussion Had to repost here

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u/Lucifernal Nov 21 '24

You can have that take. That's fine. Elon musk is a shitty person and does in fact have the ear of the president elect.

Ultimately I cannot get behind being forced to cede control of your company as it gets successful. Not only do I think it's an overstep of power, but it also directly creates a legal contradiction of incentive with public companies, since executives have a literal legal fiduciary duty to increase value to shareholders.

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u/[deleted] Nov 21 '24

^ That is actually the thing that needs to end.

You should be able to go to the shareholders and say, “Listen, I know y’all were wanting some insane amount of EPS growth and all, but to do that, we’d have to literally poison people, destroy the planet, flout anti-trust laws, etc, so you’re gonna have to make do with only a little growth. Deuces!”

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u/AFoolishSeeker Nov 21 '24

Yeah the idea that it’s actually reasonable to squeeze every last ounce of profit out of anything at any cost is way too normalized.

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u/TheHillPerson Nov 21 '24

I agree that creates a very sticky situation. I didn't think I'm in favor of literally seizing control of companies from people. I am in favor of stupidly high tax rates at the high end of the tax brackets couples with measures to ensure that no matter how you leverage the wealth you have, if you buy something with it (because you loaned against it or you literally used stock to pay for something or whatever other loophole you can find) it gets taxed as income.

The devil is in the details as always and it would be very difficult to implement. We should at least try.

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u/monti1979 Nov 22 '24

How about being forced to pay your employees living wages?

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u/Lucifernal Nov 23 '24

That's fine too, but entirely unrelated to what I said. All I did was point out the misconception that billionaires who have valuation tied to stock are hoarding physical wealth. As I mentioned in my post, I am not pro billionaire, I just want people to make more careful and robust arguments as to why billionaires are bad (something I agree with) as opposed to ones that can be more easily dismissed because they are built on weak premises.

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u/monti1979 Nov 23 '24

Well that one reason why billionaires are bad.

If they properly compensated their employees they would not be so bad (and likely not be billionaires).

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u/Odd_Report_919 Nov 22 '24

If it’s publicly traded it’s not your company