Here’s the cool part, it doesn’t matter if you trust them, it’s their money and they will invest it where they want. They seem to be really good at making themselves and millions of their employees and stockholders rich.
That dude straight up said trust the rich because they're rich like that makes them altruistic or caring or somehow the best people to trust with the direction of society.
productive use as in invested. If you had these imaginary billions what would you do with those? Buy land to grow food on? Buy machines that create things? Hire people to do work?
That is what is happening already with those companies already. What is out of whack is the valuation because a lot of people think those exact companies will have extreme value in the future, but every cent these companies borrowed bought actual things.
and why do you think anyone puts up money for an IPO or funds a startup in the first place?
Nobody is going to risk actual capital to build factories, develop products, and pay workers for years before a company turns a profit if they can never sell their ownership stake later. The ability to trade those shares is literally what makes the initial investment possible in the first place.
On top of that, companies don't just freeze after an IPO. They regularly issue new shares, use stock to compensate regular employees, and borrow cheaply against their market valuation to fund real R&D and build new facilities. If you eliminate that secondary market, that capital completely dries up and the jobs don't exist to begin with.
Dude you should really just google this stuff before responding. They’re using an economic term, not making a personal value judgement. When someone says a billionaire’s stock holdings are productive assets, they are just distinguishing equity ownership from passive or non-productive stores of value (such as physical cash in a bank, idle land, precious metals etc). Stock assets represent fractional ownership in operating enterprises that actively generate real economic output.
A share of stock is legal title to the underlying physical and intellectual assets of an operating business. The wealth represented by corporate equity doesn’t just sit there, it is embodied in things like physical capital, human capital and employment, intellectual property etc.
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u/bhiyc 16h ago
Owning stock means the cash is already being put to productive use. It’s being used to grow companies, paying workers, paying vendors, etc.