this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2025
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I'm a bit torn on the topic of entertainer billionaires and millionaires. Is it our opinion that they should just retire as soon as they hit 2 or 3 million, and end all contracts with royalties? It's not really their fault, at that point, that they keep making money.
Likewise with people who bought stock shares before a big merger or bought crypto a decade ago which made their wealth more than decuple in value. They certainly didn't start at the same low as the majority of people, but that's also not really their fault.
Let's say that there can be some, that it's possible to be, a good billionaire but let's all agree we should be taxing the fuck out of them.
Tax is the answer
Tax alone isn't the answer. if the richest man in the world were to pay 200 billions a year in taxes they would still be a billionaire and if these 200 billions ends up on building a ballroom for politicians not much is achieved.
A billion is an amount of money so ridiculous that it should simply be illegal to have that much.
I don't think there is a tax authority with the power to do that, not in the west.
Power is the answer, and I'm not sure any current governments have enough of it or the wherewithal to use it, certainly not globally. They seem to be able to find a weak government and lawyer/accountant their 'wealth' to appear there.
Maybe somewhere like China can control it's local billionaire problem more effectively than some others, but I don't really know.
I don't think it's that unwarranted to calculate that there's a certain amount of money that you could realistically spend in a lifetime, and anything after that might as well be passed on to taxes and other charities/community initiatives to help everyone else.
It's probably not something us common folk think about, but I'm certain that these people have thought about it at least once before, and their decision to keep the money for themselves is what makes them evil. There are no good billionaires because to reach that level you need to have made that decision long ago; the "good billionaires" are still millionaires.
That's exactly the point I think anyone reasonable would make.
It's not necessarily how they got the money, it's that they keep it. If I won the lottery, and got a multi-billion dollar payout, I could wire most of that money to a DAF, tell it to distribute the money to 200 different charities I like, and it could be done within the week.
Keeping that much money is a choice. Continuing to spend it all on lavish expenses while the poor suffer is a personal choice, not one they're forced to bear the consequences of due to their fame.
They don’t become billionaires off of royalties. Taylor Swift is selling tickets to her shows for hundreds or thousands of dollars. She could be paying her staff more, and charging her customers less, but she chooses not to, because she is greedy.
Ticketmaster actually takes the most from sales to her shows, but yes she specifically could be making better use of her money, such as not renting a super-yacht and not flying everywhere on a private plane.
Lmao, you cited prices of tickets but the actual cause for those prices is somehow whataboutism?
She made bank off her tour, don’t speak as if Ticketmaster took all the money and she made nothing. Her “company” took in about 2 billion in revenue from the last tour and after expenses she made out with like 700 million in profit because she, like all shitty billionaires, extracts wealth from workers. I’m sure the roadies, people selling merch, tour musicians, etc are just doing great and definitely all have health insurance and aren’t being exploited because they work for Taylor and isn’t that so quirky and fun. She gave the musicians bonuses! That’s much better than a livable wage for everyone with benefits and definitely not a pr move slash a gift for the peons Taylor actually has facetime with and developed some empathy for.
Also Ticketmaster takes a smaller cut from people like her. Don’t get me wrong, they still take a monster cut and that’s part of why your concert tickets are stupid expensive now as you say, but part of the unfair advantage she has is the resources to negotiate far better terms than say, band z getting off the ground. Both she and Ticketmaster knows she will 100% sell out every single ticket of the entire tour in seconds and she and her team leverage this for a more advantageous contract. The capitalist calls this shrewd, everyone else calls this an unfair advantage that makes the already rich and famous even more rich and famous.
You know who is a good billionaire? Steve Wozniak.
Because he got his, more than he could ever need, and then he decided to stop. Since then he's lived on his ranch and participated in tech outreach ever since
You could self publish and live in luxury at $100 million. You could keep making music, hell you could do it in complete creative freedom
Why would you want to become an avatar of wealth?
Power. At some point money stops being what it is to most people and becomes leverage to do things. The truly wealthy don't have to worry about having the ability to buy things, they shift to being able to influence and control stuff. Now, that can certainly be used for good, so there's the difference between the perceived good and bad billionaire.
Now that's a totally different argument, but it's bullshit
Being a billionaire means you cease to be a person. Your personal finances are a corporation that does nothing but take
Point to a good billionaire. I'll point you to a PR firm and probably pictures at Epstein's Island with half naked children
There are no good billionaires. That's both prescrive and descriptive, it's just not a real thing for a whole host of reasons
Woz isn't even close to being a Billionaire
Woz would have been a billionaire if he didn't sell his shares, which is my entire point. Good billionaires would've cashed out long before reaching that crazy level of hoard
Nope. They are in fact able to spend money to help those that need it, so you can pack away your ridiculous strawman.
It's their fault if they hoard vast riches rather than meaningfully contribute to the betterment of the people, though.
ABSOLUTELY not. You don't accidentally become a billionaire in a day. You become a billionaire by hoarding ridiculous amounts of money long past the point where you have enough for everything you could ever need.
That’s a lot of words to say “I didn’t understand the meme”
You don't become a billionaire by hard work. You exploited a lot of people, you fucked over a lot of people. If they were a billionaire but literally everyone that worked for them was a multi-millionare I'd shut up. If I made $100,000 (of current USD) for 2,000 years... I wouldn't have made a billion dollars.
Taylor Swift released a crap load of different versions of her last couple albums, each one having different songs and artwork knowing that at least her most die-hard fans would buy every single one. It is 100% on her that she became a billionaire.
she also has the power to break the harmful status quo of the industry if she so chose. her concerts are bigger than ticketmaster. she could refuse to do ticketsales through ticketmaster and give a lot more power to audiences and artists in the ticketbuying marketplace. she doesn't because the status quo benefits her because she's more entertainer than artist
She may be bigger than Ticketmaster, but, much like Pearl Jam, I suspect she has found out that she isn't bigger than the contracts that the venues have with Ticketmaster which say that they can only host artists and events that sell tickets through Ticketmaster.
I don't even like TS, I'm just saying other groups that were just as influential in their day, couldn't do it when they tried because of those contracts.
Also, it's always Taylor Swift.
I feel like this is seeing in action the thinking that led to the cultural revolution. "Sure, he's just a chemistry teacher. But he's one of the evil ones. He's in the bad group. Into the labor camp!"
Fixing the awful problems with our society requires changing a lot of things, among them taxes and the power of the wealthy to distort government and public opinion. Demonizing Taylor Swift relentlessly will do fuck all.
The problem is that Taylor Swift is the only billionaire that I see other leftists simping for. Anyone can say Musk bad and expect a lot of agreement and absolutely no meaningful discussion. If you think there's no such thing as a good billionaire, but you make exceptions for ones that make music that you like, you need to reflect on why you feel the things you feel. Are you actually morally opposed to billionaires, or do you just personally not like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos?
I am opposed to systems that create oppression and injustice. Taylor Swift had fuck-all to do with creating any of that.
She benefits from it, sure, and she shouldn't. But targeting her as the problem just feels like the vicious habit of just targeting the weakest example you can think of and pretending that if we keep shitting on that target, it'll make everything better.
Fighting the billionaires people actually like is a terrible strategy to deal with the billionaire problem. We need to motivate people to go out and vote against and write laws against billionaires as a whole.
Of all the rich and influential people in US Taylor Swift is the least of your problems. She's an absolute winner for opposing the power grabbing ppl. Take it out on Jeff Bozos or Elon or some other undemocratic capitalist.
I'll agree with you that Taylor Swift is not a billionaire of biggest concern. It's not black and white, it's a scale of grey. That said, anyone with over a billion UD dollars in personal and private wealth is in the you shouldn't have that much money club. Full stop. That's black and white. The grey comes in with how much over are you and what did you do to get it. Taylor Swift is not like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, or Peter Thiel, but she does have too much money and probably doesn't do enough to encourage new talent who would be her competition. She's a capitalist, just not the worst kind.
I’d love to see entertainment democratized. That was kind of the promise of Netflix and YouTube that was sold to us 20 years ago. It was supposed to allow room for many artists to bloom and prosper and find audiences. Unfortunately, that was kind of a false promise and now we still have superstars who suck up the world’s entertainment resources. I want to watch more local bands. I want to watch more independent movies. Taylor swift is just an advertising agency at this point. She’s just a marketing agency with one client.
Our household has a subscription on Nebula we're quite happy with. Some good independent content.
A billionaire is 999 times richer than a millionaire, you may end up a millionaire by chance but there's no way you can magically become a billionaire. Assuming you bought 1000 bitcoins when they were worth a cent you would have sell them at 1 or 10, assuming you win a billion at the lottery you would give some of it away and cease to be a billionaire as a result.
Keep also in mind that these people work hard to secure contracts and royalties, the more investments you have the more work you have to do to manage them.
Once you have a few million I imagine getting to a billion is a lot easier. In any case, idk why you're so opposed to taxing the hell out of them.
How so?
Who said i'm opposed to that? In another comment i argued that taxing billionaires is not the answer to get rid of them because in fact it doesn't.
As a hypothetical to explain how these things work.
If I, personally, had like 5 million dollars I would buy some furnaces, heavy trucks, rock crushers, floatation cells, crystal seeding equipment and I would crush quartz and other silicates to refine into electronics grade silicon powder and solar panels. If I had only 1 million, then perhaps metal and fiberglass fabrication, glass and plastics also within that price range. Some people would probably get into real estate, buying up existing buildings to remodel them or building new ones, and renting out units.
The evaluation on these businesses alone once operational would probably double the investment, but that's only in the assumption of a buyer.
Operations like this are exclusive to the wealthy. Elon Musk's first big break after getting lucky with stocks and upper middle class parents was to create the backbone of Paypal. Bezos took $300k to start Amazon.com and the public offer for it was $54M USD, in four years he was a billionaire.
No one needs more than 5 million dollars. That's enough for a comfortable life without laboring every again.
If they make a shit load of money doing concerts, that money needs to keep moving. Tax it so it can go into schools and infrastructure and such. They don't need a mega yacht. People are starving and suffering from problems money would solve.
I would expect in our lifetime we will see median house price around that mark, it really depends on the country, somewhere it's enough for a whole extended family but I don't think that's universally applicable
I am sure the Aryan Goddess is completely unproblematic and earned all her money without hurting anyone. Truly, a self-made billionaire.
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https://www.tmz.com/2009/10/29/swastika-guy-to-taylor-im-sorry/
I think you could argue the swastika written in blood red paint is supposed to be symbolic, but regardless the guy in the photo doesn't support nazis or racism and had never met her before that photo at a party.
So she posed with a complete stranger wearing a swastika. I don't think anyone I know would do that. I sure as hell wouldn't.
This is the same lady who sued a blog for questioning why she doesn't speak out against the Aryan Goddess thing, but is perfectly okay leaving the people calling her their Aryan Goddess alone.
If you sue people asking you why you don't denounce nazism, but leave the ones calling you their nazi queen alone... well, sounds like she's a nazi queen to me.
Maybe just maybe we should not reward people who bought fake internet money to speculate with. Or pay entertainers the salary of 1,000 people lol
All money is fake, the vast majority isn't even physical.
You have a brain, you should probably use it. How do you feel about billionaire entertainers?
I'll use a metaphor to describe my feeling. It's not a dragon's fault if gold simply continues to fall on its hoard, but it is that dragon's fault if it continues to greedily hoard that gold instead of redistributing what it doesn't need to people who need it.
Perhaps if you had made it to the end of my brief comment you might notice.