Also, your solution is now how risk/reward works. The employees starting at Tesla today are not entitled to large amounts of the company because they are coming in on a sure thing. The early employees did get a lot of stock. I personally know someone that worked for tesla in sales in 2008 who walked way from 200K shares because he thought they were worthless.
Not a Tesla employee, but I bought thousands of TSLA stocks since 2012. Why? Because I was already a spoiled child whereas my coworkers haven't inherited shit and had to pay for their education. I'm a multimillionaire, just from TSLA. Now, my wealth is mostly financial so my tax rate is coming down as I get richer because I earn far more from the stock market than from work. How stupid and unfair is this? We're always focusing on those who earn more their hard work but most people winning are just benefiting from unfair advantages. It's so obvious when this happens to you but I guess few admit that in order to keep some pride in their situation.
You picked the (probably?) single highest performing stock in the past 10 years. Call it luck, but it's not luck because you were born rich. What if you invested in any of the other hundreds of companies that have gone bankrupt or lost most of their value.
In any case being born rich is lucky for many reasons, but not for you investing in the huge gamble that was Tesla
I'd arguing that buying 1000s of shares of TSLA in 2012 was a very risky, bad idea. Congrats, it worked out for you. If you hate the system that made you so rich, give it all to charity and start over from scratch.
Risky? No, I did not risk anything but money I did not need. Help me find the charity that will change the system, please. I can't find one and I certainly don't expect money to change anything anyway (since the reasoning itself isn't enough to make people change course).
How is it stupid and unfair? You played a direct role in Tesla’s success - you supported them financially at a critical point, which helped get them through the bottleneck
How does buying shares support a company financially? My understanding of the stock market is that buying shares would only help a company during a time when they issue new shares to raise capital, like during an IPO. Are there other ways it helps them?
Buying (and holding) reduces the number of outstanding shares, which supports the share price. So when the business needs cash to invest in new car research, they can issue shares at the higher price. This is exactly what happened at Tesla and also Gamestop. Now, they have so much cash, they are pretty much guaranteed to not fail.
Even a single large, stable investor like Warren Buffett can be a huge help for a company for this reason.
It's stupid and unfair because only rich people could have a seat at the game table. Of course I did better than other rich capitalists would preferred to invest in a loosers, but is that really the point? For one guy earning millions, thousands are fighting to get a job that pays for food and a roof.
My point is that as inequality increases (since everything is being monetized, without no other consideration than gains and profits), we're making the system even worse by lowering tax rate on the rich. Note that I'm French and both candidates for the presidency intend to lower tax on the rich and privileged. It was already reduced a good deal by making marginal tax rate on capital gains from 45 to 30% (1/3 a drop!) and removing tax on high wealth (I would be over K€50 a year, otherwise). I'm paying far less taxes than I'd have under Sarkozy (whose was said to be more fiscal conservative than Macron… go figure).
Even in the Florence example which seems globally unique, unless you're a scion of one of these families and willing to share how they did it I see no reason to think they did it by more nefarious means than anyone else. Setting one's descendants up for greater prosperity and freedom for the next 600 years seems to me like an ideal to be imitated, and I see no good reason why anyone would feel differently. Perhaps you know of one?
https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/automobile/do-tesla-employ...
Also, your solution is now how risk/reward works. The employees starting at Tesla today are not entitled to large amounts of the company because they are coming in on a sure thing. The early employees did get a lot of stock. I personally know someone that worked for tesla in sales in 2008 who walked way from 200K shares because he thought they were worthless.