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Television

Trevor Noah boils down the problem with the mega-rich using 'unrealized gains' as money

"It's such a fun game that billionaires get to play."

The Daily Show/Teddy Schleifer/Twitter

Trevor Noah's talked about Elon Musk's Twitter purchase in a Between the Scenes segment.

In the era of the mega-billionaire, much has been made of how such gargantuan wealth is built and what kind of taxes on wealth are fair and unfair.

The intricacies of economics can make such questions a bit tricky both practically and ethically, but there's no question that billionaires get enormous tax breaks through loopholes in our tax system and through straight-up tax legislation favoring the wealthy.

For the average American who will never see so much as one percent of a billion dollars in our entire lifetime, wrapping our minds around the financial workings of extreme wealth is like trying to learn another language. The whole "here's how much money I earn, here's what I can write off, here's what I pay in taxes" thing is pretty straightforward, but not how the uber-rich life works. Wealth doesn't equal money in uber-rich-land—except when it does.

In a Between the Scenes moment from a 2022 episode of "The Daily Show," Trevor Noah highlighted the weird way billionaire wealth sometimes counts as money and sometimes doesn't in a segment on The Daily Show. In his signature funny-but-smart way, Noah broke down the hypocrisy of billionaires being able to treat their stock shares as money when it comes to buying businesses, but not when it comes to paying taxes.

"I'm by no means an economist, nor am I an expert on stock markets and all things finance-related, but you have to admit, a lot of what happens on Wall Street seems like a scam," he began.

He talked about how the stock market went up one day because of what Chair of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell said about raising interest rates, then plummeted the next day because of people misinterpreting what he said.

"First of all, how does that happen?" he asked. "How are markets changing because somebody didn't read something or understand—and all of you at the same time? And secondly, why do markets do that?"

He said the nature of stock markets going up and down feels "scammy," and somehow we're supposed to be convinced that the stock market is good for us.

"I get it for people's retirements, and I get it for 401Ks and I understand those aspects of it," he said. "But I've realized there are so many things that are designed in such a slick, scammy way."

He gave Elon Musk's pending purchase of Twitter as an example.

"People argue that you cannot tax billionaires on the shares that they hold in a company because it is an 'unrealized gain," he said. Then he explained that he understands that argument because the shares haven't been sold, so there's no actual money in hand. "So you're worth the money, but you don't have the money…and it could also crash, and then you have nothing, so we can't tax you on it."

"You can't tax the people on a thing because they don't have it, it's just there," he says. "Okay fine."

Then he talked about Elon Musk's offer to buy Twitter, in which Musk put up his shares of Tesla stock as collateral. Noah explained how using his Tesla stock as collateral to get banks and investors to put up the cash for him to borrow to buy Twitter.

"So you can buy a thing based on what you have, yes. But when we want to tax you, you can say 'I don't have it,'" said Noah. "It's such a fun game that billionaires get to play because all their money is in that."

Noah points out how we can't fudge around with the IRS due to where our money is located. "You can't be like, 'That money's in the bank, I don't have that money. What money? It's in the bank. Only when I take it out, then you can tax me. For now, it's in the bank, IRS."

That's not something the IRS would accept.

"But if you have billions in shares, you can then use that as money, to then get more money, but not get taxed on any money, because you 'don't have money.'"

Noah said he's not suggesting that we tax people on unrealized gains.

"But I am saying, it seems to me that you then shouldn't be able to use a thing that's unrealized as collateral," he said.

That last point is worth restating. Noah isn't saying that billionaire wealth in the form of stock shares should be taxed like liquid money. He's questioning whether people should be able to use their untaxed wealth as collateral to get liquid money loans to avoid having to liquidate their own wealth (which they would then have to pay taxes on).

Food for thought. Watch:

This article originally appeared on 5.10.22

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Pop Culture

The data proves people are completely right when they say Twitter 'isn't a real place'

Twitter is not real life.

via Pixabay

A smart phone connecting to the world through Twitter.

There has been a lot of hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing over the past few weeks after billionaire Elon Musk took over Twitter.

Although, Musk presents himself as a free speech advocate, his critics fear he will turn the place into a fertile breeding ground for hate and misinformation.

“The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence,” Musk wrote.

The nationwide reaction to Musk’s takeover is due, in part, to the fact that Twitter is extremely popular with people in the media and "very-online" news junkies. This makes the platform a great place to get breaking news but also creates a skewed version of reality for both the media and those who overconsume it.

In his controversial 2021 Netflix special “The Closer,” Dave Chappelle made light of the public’s overestimation of the platform’s importance. "Apparently, they dragged me on Twitter,” he said. “I don't give a f*ck because Twitter's not a real place."

A new poll by Pew Research Center does a great job of putting Twitter, and Musk’s involvement with the platform, into proper perspective. Around 1 in 5 Americans (23%) use Twitter, about the same number as those who use WhatsApp (23%) and Snapchat (25%).

Can you imagine the world freaking out over someone buying Snapchat?

The top 10% of active users on Twitter create 138 tweets a month, while the median user in the bottom 90% tweets an average of twice per month. To put it simply, Twitter amplifies the voices of a very, very small percentage of the American population.

This imbalance makes it very easy for Twitter users to develop a funhouse mirror version of reality and it also bleeds into the real world. As the preferred social media tool for journalists and media types, it plays a huge role in shaping public opinion. But given the small number of voices actually speaking on the platform, is it an accurate representation of reality?

Travis View, host of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, a show about conspiracy theories in the “post-truth era,” reality-checked the forum on December 11 and it received nearly 5,000 likes.



When it comes to politics, Joe Biden’s White House has found success by proudly brushing off Twitter’s influence over his party. When Biden ran in the 2020 Democratic primary, his campaign’s mantra was “Twitter isn’t real life.” Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin notes that the media’s fixation on the party activists who dominate Twitter created a skewed version of the average Democratic voter.

“The hyper-partisan left-wing rhetoric on social media — a realm where many media personalities live — is not representative of the party,” Rubin wrote, and Biden won “despite the media’s fixation on the loud but less politically viable left wing.”

A former White House staffer told Semafor that Twitter is an “afterthought” in White House communications.

The idea that extreme views on Twitter aren’t representative of the general voting public was confirmed in a 2019 New York Times study, “The Democratic Electorate on Twitter Is Not the Actual Democratic Electorate.”

When you look at the data, it’s pretty obvious that Twitter isn’t “real life” or a “real place,” but social media never was supposed to be in the first place. If the internet has taught us anything over the past generation it's that the trouble starts when we confuse the digital world with reality. That’s why it’s important we all find the right balance in our lives and take time to put the phone down and touch grass to see what's really happening.

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Pop Culture

Don't understand Elon Musk? Here's the theory that makes simple sense of a complicated man.

We may have cracked the code.

via Steve Jurvetson/Flickr

Elon Musk presenting Tesla's fully autonomous future.

Elon Musk is the wealthiest person in human history because he changed how we send money and drive cars. He’s set his sights on taking humans to Mars and just bought Twitter, one of the world’s most powerful platforms for the exchange of ideas.

He’s loved by some, hated by others and, for the most part, a mystery to all. How can someone develop such an incredibly broad, positive vision for humanity while at the same time being able to reduce himself to a Twitter troll?

Three months ago, Musk gave a little insight into his inner world and what drives his decision-making. On August 1, he retweeted a plug for “What We Owe the Future,” a book by the Scottish philosopher and ethicist William MacAskill. “Worth reading. This is a close match for my philosophy,” Musk captioned the retweet.

MacAskill’s book is a call for the embrace of a philosophy known as “longtermism,” which he defines as "the idea that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time." He argues that we can make the future better in two ways, "by averting permanent catastrophes, thereby ensuring civilisation's survival; or by changing civilisation's trajectory to make it better while it lasts ... Broadly, ensuring survival increases the quantity of future life; trajectory changes increase its quality.”


The philosophy strives for the common good by focusing on the long-term goal of humanity’s survival. But long-term good may sometimes come at the expense of the short-term. “Because, the theory goes, giving a poor person a blanket isn’t likely to be as useful for the future of humanity as building a rocket to Mars,” investigative journalist Dave Troy writes on Medium.

Musk’s development of the Tesla fits right into the longtermer view of the world. “The fundamental goodness of Tesla … so like the ‘why’ of Tesla, the relevance, what’s the point of Tesla, comes down to two things: acceleration of sustainable energy and autonomy,” Musk said.

"The acceleration of sustainable energy is fundamental because this is the next potential risk for humanity,” Musk added. “So obviously, that is, by far and away, the most important thing.”

To achieve this goal, Musk had a long-term master plan that was an extremely rare thing in the auto industry. It was more akin to John F. Kennedy’s call to go to the moon than the auto industry's usual vision, which is boxed in by quarter-to-quarter thinking.

Musk’s work to drive to normalize space travel and eventually colonize the moon and Mars fits nicely into the longtermism theory as well. Musk has called interplanetary travel and colonization “life insurance” for the human species. While some focus on the medium-range goal of reducing the planet’s temperature, Musk is focusing on a possible future that may never come to fruition. However, aside from climate change, we may face other cataclysmic events that make Earth unfit for human life such as a meteor or ice age.

So why did Musk buy Twitter? Troy believes that the acquisition fits perfectly into the longtermer worldview.

“The goals are more ideological in nature,” Troy writes. “Musk and his backers believe that the global geopolitical arena was being warped by too much ‘woke’ ideology and censorship, and wanted to fix that by first restoring voices that had previously been silenced—and then implementing technical and algorithmic solutions that allow each user to get the experience they want.”

It appears as though Musk believes that the more regressive forms of progressive ideology work to stifle the spread of ideas and opening up the platform to all voices, regardless of how vile they may be, serves the ultimate goal of broadening human potential. Again, he's sacrificing the short-term problems that stem from hate speech in favor of the potential for good ideas to emerge from the platform without being squelched.

Musk also alludes to longtermism with his stated mission to “extend the light of consciousness.” If Musk believes that humans are the only truly conscious beings in the universe, our demise would effectively extinguish the universe’s knowledge of itself. The universe would be nothing more than the proverbial tree falling in the woods with no one around to hear it.

The thought of the world’s richest, and potentially most powerful, man making world-altering decisions with no rhyme or reason is a scary proposition. It’s woefully inadequate to simply label Musk a visionary or a troll. But if he’s driven by a moral imperative, then we can get a better handle on the objectives behind his work and make sense of him accordingly.

The problem is, given his focus on results that won’t be apparent for generations, will we ever truly understand what he’s about?

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Family

Elon Musk answered a critic on Twitter. He forgot something very important: his fans.

Twitter can be a remarkable tool.

The ability to instantly send a message to your favorite athlete, a movie star, or even the president of the United States still seems like something out of a sci-fi novel. The platform's ubiquity also means you may even get responses from the famous people you reach out to. That's a good thing, right? As we're learning with each passing day, maybe it's not.

When a science writer tweeted criticism of billionaire Elon Musk, she got a personal response from him — and many of his followers.

Writing for The Daily Beast, Erin Biba recounted what happened when she addressed Musk's recent anti-media tirades and his criticism of nanotechnologist Upulie Divisekera being "100% synonymous with BS" on account of her job title.

"A billionaire w/massive power @elonmusk lashed out at two of the most under-attack industries in the country: Journalism and Science. Both are essential for democracy. We should criticize our important institutions, but we shouldn’t threaten their existence w/powerful ignorance," wrote Biba in a series of now deleted tweets. She also noted:

"In this country we deify self-made men who create empires and when they behave irresponsibly we call them 'eccentric' and say the good they have done for the world excuses their bad behavior. But instead we need to make these men look at themselves and recognize the true scope of their power and the RESPONSIBILITY TO HUMANITY that comes with it."

Musk replied, "I have never attacked science. Definitely attacked misleading journalism like yours though."

Now, there's nothing too terrible about his response. In fact, it's the exact kind of reaction any of us might have when facing criticism we feel is unwarranted or unfair. The difference between you, me, and Biba is that Musk has, at the time of this writing, 21.9 million Twitter followers.

A number of those followers took Musk's response to Biba as an invitation to attack her. (She illustrates a number of examples in her story; they're pretty graphic.)

Her story raises a great question about what responsibility people with large followings have to mitigate harassment done in their name, if any.

There are no easy answers here. The truth is that there's a big difference between someone with 20 followers and someone with 20 million followers. Both people can respond to criticism in the exact same way with massively different outcomes.

In response to Biba's article, author Neil Gaiman opened up about some of the lessons in responsibility he's learned in recent years and why "with great power comes great responsibility when you have millions of followers."

Photos by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images and Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.

He began with his own experience, saying, "I screwed up very badly almost a decade ago a couple of times, and was called out by friends, before I understood that arguing on Twitter in front of millions of followers can be bullying."

For the next several hours, Gaiman responded to occasional questions about his worldview and what he sees as his social responsibility on social media. "If you set people on other people it's bullying, even if you think you have right on your side," he wrote.

But really it comes down to "not being a dick."

Gaiman brushed off criticism that saying that people with large followings should take extra care not to subject people to an onslaught of harassment was itself a form of censorship, chalking it up to etiquette.

Most importantly, however, he said this: "I learned long ago that there are ways of doing Twitter that discourage followers from 'dogpiling,' and that's an important thing to be aware of when you have many followers. I learned it from doing it wrong, and being called out kindly by friends I respect."

This story could just as well be about any celebrity with a large following or intense fanbase.

This isn't about Elon Musk, specifically, but the way we navigate technology and the new ways it has enabled us to communicate with one another. Again, Musk's response to Biba was fine. Look at it in a vacuum, and it'd be hard to pinpoint the issue beyond a bit of mutual snark. The overwhelming majority of his Twitter followers are also, I'm sure, good people who don't harass others. But if even just one out of every 1,000 followers is the type of overzealous user who views criticism of Musk as something they need to personally address, that still amounts to nearly 22,000 people.

[rebelmouse-image 19469695 dam="1" original_size="750x397" caption="After a writer tweeted "Hey has @elonmusk denounced his antisemitic followers yet or is he still yelling at scientists?" he received a number of threatening images." expand=1]After a writer tweeted "Hey has @elonmusk denounced his antisemitic followers yet or is he still yelling at scientists?" he received a number of threatening images.

This issue plays out all the time and is often framed in a way that suggests the celebrity has cultivated a uniquely toxic fanbase, but that's not true. The issue — whether discussing fans of Elon Musk, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, or anyone else — is that all it takes to completely ruin someone's day (or worse) is for a tiny minority of any of these individuals' fans to lash out. An overzealous Musk fan isn't Musk's fault nor is Swift responsible for the most outrageous acts undertaken by her legion of "Swifties."

There are things celebrities can do to discourage dogpiles.

Some celebrities, such as President Donald Trump, bring out the worst their fans. After being elected president in 2016, Trump was asked about instances of his supporters harassing minority groups. He half-heartedly turned to the camera and said, "Stop it." Given that this came after a campaign filled with racist rhetoric and violent imagery at his rallies, his on-air plea to his supporters came across rather unconvincing.

Even if he'd been more careful about his language or been more convincing in denouncing harassment, a number of his supporters would have probably have done it anyway. Like Musk, Trump cannot be held responsible for every action by his supporters. Still, if you're a celebrity, there's definitely some benefit in letting people know you don't want them to cause harm in your name. It won't solve every issue, but it will almost certainly help.

That's what Musk did, clearing the air a few hours after Biba's article was published:

He took a proactive step to minimize the effects of harassment.

The lesson here is about empathy and the importance of not causing others harm.

A common criticism, as posed to Gaiman, is that suggesting people take into account how their followers might react to something is tantamount to being forced to give up "free speech." What this fails to examine is how the fear that posting criticism of the president or a billionaire CEO will result in days of harassment might also have a chilling effect on "free speech" as a concept.

Social media also has a flattening effect in which people see someone like Trump singling out a family who criticized him as him just pushing back — failing to take into account that he is the president of the United States (and before that, a candidate for president and business tycoon).

These types of power dynamics exist everywhere, but we're usually able to navigate them a bit easier in the offline world.

For example, imagine you're at a baseball game and someone sitting in the row behind you deliberately spills a drink on your head. You might pop up ready for a fight, ready to get in their face. Now imagine the drink was spilled by a toddler. Would you still be ready to fight the toddler? Would you still get in the toddler's face? Probably not. This is because we all understand the importance of proportional responses. On the internet, this gets lost.

If we can find a way to bring offline proportionality and understanding of power dynamics to the world of social media, we can improve the way we communicate and live up to some of the platform's loftier ideals.

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