Esprit Tesla

@DarrigoMelanie claims below that @elonmusk could solve all the problems in the US by paying for a menu of social benefits totalling $598b out of his theoretical $600b or so net worth. This is the kind of financial ignorance often displayed by so many...the assertion is so silly that not even Community Notes could cover all the errors she incurs. The first problem - that @DarrigoMelanie herself points out when she responds to her own assertion - Elon would virtually exhaust, within a single year, his own $600b net worth by paying for all the benefits she asserts he could afford. What would be the value of that? Within a year, all the unfortunates benefitted for the year would once more find themselves in the same situation, and Elon would have nothing to give them. The second problem - that escapes Melanie - is that if Elon decided to spend the $598b she details - he would NOT be left with $2b - or the theoretical balance of his assets. He'd be left owing a fortune of money on his debts. That is because if Elon elected to sell his shares in order to realize this theoretical $600b plus to fund the $598b Melanie would have him spend, his shares would plummet in value. He would be hard pressed to realize $300b after taxes, and certainly substantially less. The proof is clear - when Elon decided to sell 10% of his Tesla shares in order to pay taxes in November 2021, the stock dropped 16% within 2 days. He sold $16.4b of stock, and paid $11b in taxes, realizing less than $6b of cash, and his net worth dropped by about 10%. So the clueless Melanie doesn't get the simple fact that taxes would take at least half the net worth, and the stock price would - if Elon attempted to realize all of his net worth - decline by a huge factor, perhaps even more than the tax bill. It is unlikely that Elon would emerge with more than even $200b. But far worse would be the impact on his 150,000 employees, and the 200,000 employees of his company's suppliers? Sans Musk in control, there is little doubt that his companies would not only halt expansion, but would in all probability decline. Not to mention the loss of all the future expansion that only the genius of Elon's imagination promises. That's another, much longer conversation. But the most essential element of the silliness of her assertion is that at the end of the exhaustion of Musk's theoretical ssets - at the end of year 1 - all the people he had helped would be left to pay their own tuition, childcare, school meals, sick leave, solve their own homelessness, and once again face hunger and have no UBI. And all these problems would still be left to be solved, and no value would have been created for society. But this is never in the calculus of the socialists. They are in the business of destruction, rather than the creation of value.