Tax away… all the Meta stock? We’re talking about ownership of assets, not about income. What do we do when we take his stock - do we sell it back on the market crashing the price or do we establish government ownership of every large company? How did you come up with 1 billion as the appropriate number? Do we get to decide that part democratically?

You are presupposing that Meta should be allowed to exist at its present scale and market share. I am not.

Then what are you proposing? You didn't answer a single one of GPs questions about the details of what you're proposing. You're just throwing out vague one-liners and expecting everyone else to see how this plan of yours is supposed to work.

> It is immoral that we allow people to control that much wealth

In my mind, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are inalienable rights. Maybe you don't share this view, but quite a few people do.

Is being a billionaire necessary for any of those or even related? Possibly on the liberty angle but someone controlling that much wealth is decreasing the liberty of everyone else in the economy

It's the pursuit of happiness. Zuckerberg is pursuing his own happiness. You claim we, as a society, have to curtail that at a given level. I for one don't subscribe to that theory.

I’ll be very frank on the fact that if your pursuit of happiness requires millions to billions of others to suffer, I will ascribe zero importance to what makes you happy.

Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose and all that. I’m also gonna quickly cut ahead on your libertarian style argument here and ask you how you think negative externalities generated by individuals should be handled. If your opinion is to ignore them because you should be allowed to do whatever you want, then I will treat you the same way you treat others and completely ignore your political opinions.

I legitimately hope you surprise me

> I will ascribe zero importance to what makes you happy.

You are saying zero, but it appears to me you ascribe quite a lot of importance. Enough to propose to put limits on what he is allowed to do.

Externalities and tip of the nose? I fully concur with you here. If he's hurting anyone, he should be punished. But the externality you are talking about here is a very vague one, that him being rich makes the life of other people in some sense harder.

And that may be so.

But then, maybe not. The way you are saying it, all rich people are guilty. I'm against blanket statements like that. Maybe some rich people are guilty, and some are not. How will you tell which?

How do you account for positive externalities? Musk did more for the advancement of electric vehicles than any other person on Earth. And even more for the space exploration renaissance. Does he get any brownie points for that?

Musk did not do anything for the advancement of electric vehicles. the Tesla Engineers did that, a company he bought into and was operating without him.

Jesus libertarians drive me up a wall.

> the Tesla Engineers did that

For some reason the Lucid Air engineers are not doing the same. Or the engineers at Rivian, or Fisker, or Lotus, or Koenigsegg. Are those engineers really so bad?

> a company he bought into and was operating without him.

When Musk took over Tesla, half a year after it was founded, Tesla was producing exactly zero cars per month. And per year. And next year, and the next, and the next.

After that they started selling the Roadster. Many other businessmen would have been perfectly happy to have a boutique car company focused on delivering luxury sports cars at a good margin.

The decision to move downmarket and towards mass production was not an engineering decision. All the Tesla engineers deserve zero credit for that. That's a bold business gamble. Musk bet the house, and won.

It's very easy to claim leaders are just leaches sucking the blood of the workers who work for them. And we should confiscate their wealth, because they don't deserve it. It's a bit more sobering to accept that some of these people do actually bring something to the table. Something that an additional 1000 or 10000 engineers in the company can't bring. Look at Microsoft under Balmer and then Nadela. Same engineers. Just a different leader. Or look at Apple before Jobs came back onboard to save it from bankruptcy in 1997. Same engineers, just a new leader with a different vision and different drive.

Finally, welcome to HN. In time you'll come to appreciate the level of discussion around here. A good read to get familiar with the etiquette is [1]. It's all really, really good, and this one paragraph in particular

  When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." 

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> How do you account for positive externalities?

The market did by assigning them enough wealth to not have to care about any needs anymore. I’m saying there should be a cap on that since eventually they accumulate enough wealth to distort the market and harm everyone else by their existence, like a financial singularity.

The idea that you’re asking what extra brownie points you can assign to people who are so wealthy that they can buy a company as a joke and then get rid of thousands of jobs, already implies that you see zero value in human lives and are full on the lolbertarian train

It’s looks like I remain unsurprised

Society often prevents people from pursuing their happiness, when such pursuit would be harmful to others. This doesn't mean the pursuit of happiness isn't important, only that it isn't an absolute.

So it’s somehow more moral to gang up and take someone else’s property by force?

Can you explain your idea of morality?

Yup, it was done when abolishing slavery, you just need to think outside of the box on what "property" means to you :)