It’s Shopify’s Tobi Lutke.
A reminder that he’s behind Build Canada and Build Toronto, and that Build Toronto’s Eric Lombardi is running for the Ontario Librral Party leadership as we speak.
I used to work at Shopify. Wouldn’t recommend it.
Anything you can share without doxxing yourself too much?
Assuming Tobi Lutke makes at least 8% roi on his investments, he could give every homeless person in canada 20grand a year using just the interest.
Yeah, solving homelessness actually wouldn’t cost that much. Juuust enough that nobody wants to pay for it. And then there’s the matter of putting them somewhere, when NIMBYs are everywhere…
Billionaire people shouldn’t be able to vote.
They have power through capital already, they don’t need more.
Devils advocate, but given this was a two word response to another tweet, it’s possible that something was misinterpreted here. For instance that response could be about billionaires who pay no taxes losing their right to vote (which I can get onboard with). This kind of just feels like rage bait.
I would generally agree with you, but here I don’t.
Tobi has always been blunt and kinda rude, but he was smart, usually right (and readily admitted when he wasn’t), and willing to do hard things that other people wouldn’t.
He’s done more for Canadian tech than anyone else in the last 15 years and it’s not even close.
So he is worth hearing out even with initial hard disagreement.
This one is pretty hard to defend. It’s an obviously bad take, especially for someone who preaches systems thinking. It’s too short for it to be nuanced.
We all post dumb shit sometimes and when you’re famous it’s amplified, but this one is very dumb. I wish for the good of Shopify and himself that Tobi would spend less time on twitter… this is just bad for business.
In my opinion, Tobi changed sometime in the last few years since Covid and it’s been hard to agree with him much since.
Counter-argument: the interpretation is not out of character for Tobias. He’s got a history of assholery, and does not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
“Poors under fire for thinking that killing billionaires should be legal”.
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Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but trillionaires should be forced to transition into billionaires, and billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
I feel like this is a copypasta from somewhere. I think I saw it before I need to start using it.
I throw it at any thread I find relating to financial inequality.
It’s lazy, but it’s honest work.
I love that term
Financial obesity
I love it.
I just want world wide wealth caps. 10 million is the max that any person canboen or control. Any additional income after that goes 100% straight to taxes.
This simple rule has wide spread implications from ending poverty to likely ending wars, removing power from narcissist politicians, and souch more
I do understand the frustration with the fact that people who are working have less time to be politically active than retirees, but I don’t really see any way around it. The flip side is that a lot of great volunteers retire into community service and have a lot of extra time to help the community because they no longer work.
Doing political things, like attending town hall meetings or party fundraisers, could count for tax rebates like donations do, and a certain amount of days off work each year could be required to be available for such things.
Election days could be national holidays, and local election days local holidays.
If being poor or being required to work is really that much of an issue, I’m sure a billionaire could afford 60k UBI for ten thousand people.
Having a day off for elections (or even a half day) feels like it should be a pretty low hanging fruit to really improve voter turnout
Every single billionaire admits they’ve been lucky. They aren’t special, they’re just lucky to have than their fair share.
That’s not my experience. I’ve only ever heard them claim that they worked hard to get what they have. Admitting that luck was involved would mean they don’t deserve to be that wealthy, and they would never admit that.
He’s right though. The oligarchs having to own news and social media to get the election outcomes they want, and then also having to lobby those politicians to enact the right policies is incredibly inefficient. It would be simpler if the politicians were unelected and simply payrolled employees of the owner class.
That sounds an awful lot like Feudalism in the making.
Pretty clear sign that democracy is an impediment to capitalism.
It used to be that only property owners could vote. The laws all favoured the property owners.
He should be on fire, not “under fire”.
under fire
Oh?
figuratively
Oh.
I just want world wide wealth caps. 10 million is the max that any person canboen or control. Any additional income after that goes 100% straight to taxes.
This simple rule has wide spread implications from ending poverty to likely ending wars, removing power from narcissist politicians, and souch more
On it’s own that won’t end poverty, but coupled with something like a basic income it could. It would definitely end all the extreme wealth stupidity, and if it was retroactive nobody could really flee with their wealth, like they might manage to with a lesser wealth tax.
You might want to go up to 15, though. There’s bound to be some sympathetic retiree couple with a house in inner Vancouver.
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The multimillionaires would end inflation very quickly.
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Inflation would steadily decrease their real wealth cap. Wealth includes investments.
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Why?
Why 100 million?
I get that the number of 10 million is arbitrary, hell, I just semi randomly picked it, but a 10 million net worth gets you A LOT more than you actually need.
Why allow 100 million, though? 10 million is more than any person would need to love an actually full life with travel and plenty of whatever, and you could still invest some money in a small company. Want a bigger one? Join a bunch of people and make a bigger one.
100 million gets into the range where youncan project power over others and that is the entire thing that got us where we are. No person should hold large amounts of power, humanity has shown over and over that that is a very bad idea.
A 100% income tax means there’s no incentive to remove profits from a business beyond that income, since you can’t spend any of it, so it will just encourage increased accounting trickery to justify “business expenses” for things like purchasing private islands, sports cars, and luxury vacations.
80% is high enough; for every $10 million they withdraw for personal spending, they keep 2, and the other $8 million would go to pay for the services requested to run the rest of the country that enables them to produce their wealth. (Including all their employees and customers.)
Then we still benefit from the efficiencies inherent in the profit motive while having the ultra wealthy pay their fair share.
I might argue that if any single individual is in the position to collect $10M+/year, the economic system is already dysfunctional. That individual is operating as a gatekeeper rather than a value center and the position they occupy needs to be broken up and reorganized.
I could imagine a top surgeon or pro athlete legitimately earning that much from their own labor alone.
a top surgeon
Tops are a dime a dozen. Bottom surgery is where the big money is at.
a top surgeon or pro athlete
Entertainers and life savers are very different categories of value to society.
They also dress differently
That was a wealth tax, not a tax on income. So, nobody would be worth more than 10 million, and earning 10 million is almost out of the question. That means you can’t own a huge business by yourself to start with.
Get a high salary, “lose it” on crypto, retire in Belize.
Well, the “get a high salary” part is definitely doing most of the hard work.
That being said, yes, there’d still be a way, if you’re patient, have the income and don’t care about legality. There’d be a risk of getting caught, which always scales with the amount you’ve hidden. But, maybe you’re smarter than the next white-collar criminal.
If the point is to flatten out the class system, this policy would do it, though.
Yes. but corruption always exists. Caps just push that wealth underground. There are no simple answers like that.
Under fire? Put him in the fire.
A slow burning fire
