A billionaire will have an extensive amount of credit - Amex alone will probably let you put millions on one of their charge cards without any questions asked - and the ability to have nearly instant access to enormous amounts of cash.

credit needs to be paid back, no?

Sure. With the "making more money than you can spend" profits.

If Musk wants to spend $100M tomorrow on a frivolity, he can.

Banks won’t do same day spot loans collatoralized by equity? Since when?

Loans need to be paid back in the future, with intrest, or did you think it's free money?

Are we moving the goalposts from “access to cash” to “unlimited gifts of cash with no obligation”?

If you

> use a brand new luxury car as a dinner table … every day

then you will have to find a way on how to repay that money back to the bank.

I thought the assertion was that equity ownership can't be used for liquidity. Apologies if you were just saying wealth doesn't mean you can spend money without net worth declining.

We live in a renteer economy. Nobody owns anything, nobody has money, it's all about credit lines and liquidity.

And Elon literally was able to leverage billions of dollars to buy out Twitter (and then saddle Twitter itself with most of that debt because leveraged buyouts are a thing). He wasn't able to leverage that kind of money because his creditors think he'd do a so much better job at running the company. He was able to do it because they figured he'll be able to make sure they'd gain more from giving him the money than holding onto it. It's not a meritocracy.

Heck, ultimately this is what political power boils down to: not how much you have but how much you can do. And billionaires can do a lot more than a single person with a net worth closer to the median. Framing that in terms of purchase power is just a visual shorthand that's easier to understand without unravelling how the entire system operates.