I explicitly made no such claim: "I am not talking about people who steal wealth, which is illegal."
> Keep in mind that Mush created 4000 millionaires the day SPCX was IPO'd.
while also asserting that:
> I am not talking about people who steal wealth, which is illegal. I'm not celebrating or making excuses for thieves or criminals.
Elon Musk is a great example of that "Lance Armstrong" concept. It would beggar belief for him to have beat everyone else that cheats at business, without breaking laws/regulations himself.
Some news [0] from today:
> The lawsuit alleged that by not disclosing the stock purchases before the legal deadline, Musk was able to keep buying shares at artificially low prices and underpay Twitter investors by at least $150 million for those shares.
> US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan said she “has significant misgivings about the settlement” between Musk and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and described “red flags” in the SEC’s decision-making. This isn’t surprising given that she previously questioned whether the deal is tainted by corruption.
It starts to sound a lot like "the Lance Armstrongs molding the law and its enforcement to their personal desires" as posited in my previous post.
0: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/judge-doesnt-lik...
Twitter is not the source of Musk's wealth. We don't know if it is profitable to him or not, many allege he loses money on it.
A lawsuit is not a criminal proceeding.
You do make excuses for those with capital who break the law, and even here you judge people's actions differently based on how much capital they have - if that $150M were the source of his wealth, your arguments would be different! Even though the actions would have been the same.
Would it be honest to simply state that those with vast wealth are the smartest, fittest, best humans among us and deserve deference from the rest of society? Vast wealth could then be a very convenient proxy for who should be granted the most power in our society, because they are the smartest, fittest, and best of us. They are smarter and better, so they would be the most adept at wielding that power - thus we should grant them as much power as possible so that it is all concentrated in the best hands.
My core thesis remains the same: An individual's captured/extracted value likely exceeds net value creation when examining the individual outliers who capture the most value. Therefore it is reasonable to tax them at a higher rate, to recapture some of that excess extracted wealth which went above and beyond their net wealth creation.
I would also say that even in the purest hypothetical case, it is reasonable for a society to decide not to grant 100% of all net created value to the individuals who created it, and for the society to capture some of it for broader societal purposes. I think reasonable people can agree that there would be real problems inherent in living in a world where the most extreme limit of income inequality is manifested - most of those problems would be related to concentrating power in the hands of those who break the rules to maximally enrich themselves.
This is all in line with my original assertion that the optimal choice between "maximizing greed is best!!" and "everyone should earn exactly the same as everyone else no matter what!" is....probably somewhere in between those two extremes.