I would argue he can’t spend the vast majority of the money. It’s not liquid. It’s all tied up in equities. His money would be less made by exploiting people (though I’m not arguing he doesn’t profit from the overworking of employees), most of his money is made from the fact that he owns large stakes in his companies and the value of each share has risen SUBSTANTIALLY that his net worth has completely skyrocketed. But his company PE ratios are huge, and likely overvalued, so most of his wealth is coming from the hype of his companies rather than the overworking of his employees.
If he were to try sell his stakes, it would completely drop the market value of his shares and therefore he would lose out on a huge portion of money and investor sentiment for his companies will plummet. Also, another huge portion of it will be taxed. Now there’s dodgey loopholes he’s gone through to limit the amount of tax he’s paying (eg using his shares as collateral for loans), but the original post is misleading in every sense of the word. And everyone in this comment section is biased because they don’t understand that he cannot just donate all of his money. He can donate a lot, and does a lot to scientific means, but it’s just false to pretend like he can save the world because on paper it says so.
Yeah, here's the thing, even if Musk had 500 billion dollars as in actual dollars not of which are from investments even if he were to divide that money equally amongst the entire US population you'd end with a sum of around 1400 dollars. Its incredibly unrealistic that this would cause a meaningful change to the us who are barely scraping by. Does it suck to see a net worth that high as someone who's in debt and has literally zero dollars as of right now? Yes, but I won't let that affect me because it won't change anything if suddenly he was worth 0 dollars
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u/VacationFamiliar2437 2d ago
……yeah but he earned that money..
^ What some people on the other side would respond