OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says he's 'politically homeless' in July 4 post bashing Democrats

[lapfog_1]

28. the "tech bro billionaires" are not monolithic

There are a number of them ( I think all male ) that are autocratic libertarians... Peter Thiel, Eloon, Sam Altman, etc and include some of the Sand Hill Road billionaires like Marc Andreessen ( created Netscape, Mosaic - first web browsers ).

These are truly evil people... all of them. They believe that they are geniuses and rest of us are useless peons. Most built their fortunes on the efforts of other people AND government funded university research grants. Paypal ( Thiel and Eloon ) would never have been built except for nearly unbreakable secure communications between computers ( starting with RSA encryption that people like me worked on in college in the 1970s... on a government sponsored research grant ).

Then you have the old line tech billionaires... Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs ( his heirs ), etc.

They are a mixed bag of people with different philosophies. When Bill Gates was running M$, he did everything he could to create a near monopoly business, shitting out crappy software that, over time, became better and better... but always tied in with the rest of M$ software. Now that he is "retired" and a philanthropist, I think he expects to gain entry into heaven by giving his money away to various causes ( immunization in Africa, tech innovations in nuclear energy, systems to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, etc ). Larry Ellison... still a rich asshole AFAIK.

Then there are quite a large number of "quiet tech billionaires" like Jensen Huang ( Nvidia ). 10th richest person in the world, not know for either right wing or left wing politics ( or politics of any kind ). We will see what happens to him and others in the same boat.

BTW, not to defend multi-billionaires... but these people are billionaires on paper, not like they have billions in either banks or gold deposits or whatever. If they sell the stock that makes them "billionaires" the value of that stock would plunge... netting them a fraction of what the current value is. So taxing the wealth of these people will a) wreck the stock market ( thus causing a deep recession for all of us ) and b) not net the government nearly as much as the current paper value of the stock they own. In addition, taxing the really wealthy will not yield much revenue either... the true billionaires don't need income. Instead of paying themselves income ( $50M or whatever ), they could pay themselves $50K/year. They then can borrow money from banks, pledging their stock assets as collateral, park some of that money in t-bills, tax free muni bonds, etc to pay the interest on the loan from the bank... and live on the rest of the loan ( buying the mansions and yachts and blowing $50M on weddings, etc ). They never have worry about paying the bulk of the loan back either... they simply roll over the loan into a new loan... and repeat as needed until they die. So taxing the billionaires is a lost cause, at least until a new system of taxes is created just for them. Taxing their assets... bad idea. Taxing their income... they have ways around it. Taxing their luxury assets, that might work... but many will just do without or lease rather than own.

We should have never let people become billionaires to begin with. But that is too late now.