Elon just created 4,400 millionaires in a single day.
400 of them are now worth over $100 million.
These aren't VCs. They're SpaceX employees, and the list includes welders, technicians, and cafeteria staff, because for two decades the company paid every level of the workforce in stock instead of higher salaries.
Juan Hernandez immigrated from Mexico and took a $28 an hour contractor welding job in 2015. He says he didn't even know what SpaceX was. The company gave him a $10,000 equity grant and let him buy more shares through payroll deductions. That stake is now worth $880,000.
Trevor Hise's parents wanted him to take a stable job at General Electric. He picked SpaceX instead, stayed 12 years, and accumulated over 100,000 shares. At the $135 listing price that's $13.5 million. He's 37 and semiretired. His words: "The magnitude of this has been ridiculous."
The most telling detail came before the listing. Over 100 employees quietly banded together and negotiated a group wealth management deal covering up to $5 billion, because none of them had ever needed a wealth manager before.
Software IPOs have minted millionaires for 30 years. This is the first one where the money went to the factory floor.
“In 2016, [@SundarPichai] had declared Google would be an “AI-first company,” and began cultivating a series of projects—custom chips, Cloud, YouTube, and deep AI research—that seemed to have nothing to do with Google’s core search product. All of these bets have paid off, and then some.” — @TIME in their new #TIME100Companies cover story on Alphabet and AI → https://t.co/Uii9dpkzka
📷: Daniel Dorsa
The Artemis II crew named a lunar crater after Commander Reid Wiseman's late wife, Carroll. What a beautiful and touching moment.
I'm not crying, you're crying 🤧
@eladgil@dreamer@dps@swyx Send any link, article or video to an agent’s repo to summarize and score resourcefulness, with a follow on action to add to agents knowledge base.
Knowledge is power.
The Cybercab has two seats because ~85% of car trips in North America have just one or two people. For the remaining 15% of trips that have more than two people, you'll be able to hail a Model Y robotaxi, or even a couple of them.
why not just raise income tax rates?
because your real intent is not to just “provide healthcare”.
you’re masking that you are proposing the creation of, for the first time in the 250 years of this American republic, an organized government seizure of private property from citizens.
you’re calling it a “wealth tax” or a “billionaires tax” or “millionaires tax” or whatever nom du jour polls well. but at the end of the day, it’s the seizure of private property from citizens by the government. citizens that earned money, paid their fair taxes on those earnings (53% if they live in California) and are now being told they need to hand over after-tax assets because the government has failed to provide promised services with the revenue it’s collected, and are now re-casting their own failure to be a socio-economic inequity that must be justly resolved... a slippery slope that has never gone anywhere good (see economic effects in USSR, Cuba, Venezuela, France and Norway wealth tax etc.)
the American founders fled tyranny in Europe and this amazing nation was populated by immigrants (myself and your parents) from around the world not just looking for a “better life” but for a place where they could have freedom from tyrannical governments that can take what they want from private citizens. a great nation borne of property rights, the rule of law, and endowed freedoms to believe, speak, or act. these principles led to the greatest run of innovations, successes, and widespread increase in prosperity, for all citizens, ever seen.
the citizens, the individuals, not the institutions, delivered this progress. those who invented, who toiled, who bled, who sacrificed, who took risk and persevered, who led, and who changed the world, are not charlatans, kleptocrats, or oligarchs. they’re what made us all better off. prosperity is a measure of america’s success, not its failure.
it is your principle that is so offensive, as evidenced by the broad disdain for your flippant flirtation with the darkest of human fantasy - socialism. you and other neo-socialists have led so many of us to reflect on America’s history and what it is becoming. that now leads so many to consider, so unnecessarily, leaving their homes for a place where everyone stands up to shout down the principle you suggest. because if your ideas are now considered moderate, it’s clear this titanic is sinking.
that a “simple tax” of taking assets that have been earned, through toil and tribulation, rightly taxed, and preserved, should now be unjustly seized, is your solution to a problem of obvious government mismanagement and outright fraud, tells us that your true motivation lies not in giving people healthcare but in cutting down success and deleting the system of prosperity and opportunity for all.
i don’t care, and neither should anyone else, what the sum total market value of a private citizens private assets might be. it is none of my business and should be none of yours. because, again, once you open that pandora’s box, we might as well study Lord of the Flies … there is literally nothing stopping 51% of citizens demanding that their government go out and seize 100% of the private property of the 49%.
want to give healthcare to people in need? do your job and fix healthcare. make it affordable. want to be lazy about it? then do your job lazily and raise income taxes.
want to take private property from private citizens who have paid their fair share of taxes and legally earned their property, then honestly declare that it is envy, not inequity, that you strive to resolve…