Wealthy, sure, but becoming a billionaire effectively destroys your place in any of your social circles. It obliterates any dynamics of trust and interdependence you may have and replaces them with a gnawing unease about if they’re still hanging out with you, or if they’re hanging out with the money.
Not to mention, Graham entirely fails to differentiate between EARNING a billion dollars and HAVING a billion dollars. You can be part of a structure that earns a billions dollars without “cheating”, there are all kinds of companies that do that. But if you let that wealth accumulate in yourself? There’s something wrong there. You are almost guaranteed to be under-valuing the contributions of others, or the externalities of the systems in which you operate or SOMETHING.
And even if you’re not? That’s a dragon’s hoard of money. You’d have a very difficult time spending that much money on yourself and your lifestyle, and I find it hard to justify sitting on the rest, just to have it. It is literally a hoarding problem at that point. You do not need that money, it is actively making your life worse (look up the Billionaire’s Social Calendar: it’s the list of ultra-wealthy-only events that billionaires must attend if they want even a chance of interacting with people as peers instead of dependents), just let it go.
Do you have an example of someone doing that? I suppose the argument would be we wouldn't know - but personally I don't buy it. It's possible to not be "famous" as a billionaire, but it's not possible for people in your life not to know.
There’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the mechanics & incentive structure here:
Take Mr. World’s First Trillionaire, Elon Musk. He doesn’t have a dragon’s horde, his money is almost entirely invested in SpaceX and Tesla, building things he wants to build. SpaceX didn’t IPO so he could have bragging rights with his Forbes list peers, it IPO’d because it was the most efficient way to get more capital to grow and achieve its various strategic aims—largely set by Elon and its other preexisting owners.
You can take that away either proactively by making such ownership structures impossible or retroactively through taxation forcing current ownership to sell, but the end result is the same: No incentive for folks like Musk or Bezos to use their skills on big, ambitious, capital-intensive enterprises. Control is what matters, not $.
It's possible to have more than one reason for getting $75 billion from public markets. Paying off $20 billion of loans from people you don't want to owe money to (who, as far as I could tell, SpaceX borrowed money from to pay off people you really don't want to owe money to) and getting a really big number associated with your name are not mutually exclusive, and from Musk's previous actions (getting large compensation packages approved by conflicted boards) he obviously does want that number.
Even if only 5% of his NW is in cash, that'd be $50billion dollars in actual liquid cash. Even if it's 1% or less, he almost certainly has over $1bn in cash or practically liquid cash. That's already a dragon's hoard.
Which is why the term "cash," to those in finance or familiar with its lingo, is understood to actually mean "short term treasuries" and other things you would find backing a money market account, unless the context very specifically calls for distinguishing those two things.
That's exactly what I'm saying, “investment” has a precise meaning in economics, it's the increase of productive capital (example: building a data center is an investment).
Wealthy, sure, but becoming a billionaire effectively destroys your place in any of your social circles. It obliterates any dynamics of trust and interdependence you may have and replaces them with a gnawing unease about if they’re still hanging out with you, or if they’re hanging out with the money.
Not to mention, Graham entirely fails to differentiate between EARNING a billion dollars and HAVING a billion dollars. You can be part of a structure that earns a billions dollars without “cheating”, there are all kinds of companies that do that. But if you let that wealth accumulate in yourself? There’s something wrong there. You are almost guaranteed to be under-valuing the contributions of others, or the externalities of the systems in which you operate or SOMETHING.
And even if you’re not? That’s a dragon’s hoard of money. You’d have a very difficult time spending that much money on yourself and your lifestyle, and I find it hard to justify sitting on the rest, just to have it. It is literally a hoarding problem at that point. You do not need that money, it is actively making your life worse (look up the Billionaire’s Social Calendar: it’s the list of ultra-wealthy-only events that billionaires must attend if they want even a chance of interacting with people as peers instead of dependents), just let it go.