If someone told me that Elon Musk borrowed ten bucks from one of his team to buy lunch with I would not be surprised in the least.
It simply means he had no cash on him to buy a couple of hot dogs from a street vendor that didn't take plastic. $hit happens.
People scream about billionaire not paying taxes and how the loopholes favor the rich and so on and so forth. I do not know about high finance tax laws but I know about income tax. It's about income.
When people scream about how some gazillionaire didn't pay income taxes there's probably a pretty good reason. He didn't make any money that year. He's still living off of the income from the big deal he made a while back. No income, no income taxes. Remember they call it an income tax.
But, what about all the stocks and real estate he owns?
What about it? He may simply be sitting on the real estate watching it increase in value. While it is doing that it is bringing him no income. The income will happen when he sells it for a profit. If he sells it for a loss, it's a loss and as such a portion of the loss can be deducted from his taxes. Any profit is taxable.
Same holds true for stocks. Say someone threw the dice on some penny stocks and the company grew very successful and their stock became valuable. The man has a net worth of 10 million and still works a $35K/year job. He pays taxes on $35K. The value of the stock means nothing. Nor should it, really.
The ten million is considered to be unrealized gains which should not be taxed because the game ain't over til it's over and the man sells his stock. It is also entirely possible that the company that issued the stock tanks and the stocks become worthless overnight.
In which case the man is no longer a millionaire. He's a stiff making $35K/year.
It's kind of like fish. If a skipper manages to put 100K pounds of fish on board which is selling for $1/pound he has 100K pounds of fish. He doesn't have $100K dollars until he unloads the fish and gets paid for them. If the boat sinks on the way to market he's got nothing.
He doesn't have to pay income tax on the fish until he sells them and turns them into money. The money is taxable, of course. The fish are not, needless to say.
People have odd ideas about the rich. They seem to think that like Scrooge McDuck that they have a giant vault full of cash somewhere and they are greedily sitting in it and counting money all day. It doesn't work like that.
Being a millionaire doesn't mean one has huge piles of cash laying around. It simply means that the person has assets worth over a million bucks. That's not too hard to do, really. Some people are and don't even realize it.
An example of this would be a guy that bought some logged over land in the middle of nowhere and he built a home of some sort on it and have lived there for 35 years. Last of the pioneers.
Over the past 35 years the forest has grown back in and some logging company wants to log it and offers you a million buck for the land.
Surprise! You are now a millionaire even if you don't accept the offer because you now hold an asset worth a million bucks. The offer has set the value of your property. It's now worth a million bucks simply because that's what someone is willing to pay you that much for it.
Actually if you sell it for a million bucks you will stop being a millionaire on April 15th. Your million bucks becomes income and is subject to taxes. You will be left with about $630, 000 after taxes because the tax rate on a million bucks is 37%.
Incidentally if you bank that $630K at 4% interest it will earn you about $25,600 annually and that is taxable income.
Most of this post is an oversimplification but you get the general idea.
It's easy to hate the rich because people are easily taught to. It's easy to appeal to a person's sense of envy. Hell, it happened to me at work. Early on I was promoted ahead of my time.
Why? Because early on I took the company test to become a tankerman and aced it. As a result of that I got sent to the company run training school, briefly apprenticed and was promoted. I got a substantial raise.
I took advantage of an opportunity. Most people didn't.
I also earned my Able Seaman rating concurrently. That meant a little more money in my pocket. For bettering myself I was called a kiss ass even though the programs were open to everyone. In less than a year my income almost doubled.
I noticed the people that slurred me were long time Ordinary Seamen, the entry level rating. The kiss ass name calling ended after a pretty good public verbal shoot out. I was pretty savage.
I pointed out that the tankerman program was open to everyone but he chose not to enter the program. I did.
While I was sitting home and during my off watch time I was studying and trying to better myself while he was down at the club swilling down beer after beer. Instead of sticking $20 worth of ones in some stripper's G-string I spent the $20 on the Merchant Seaman's manual. By doing so I had invested in myself. I told him it was about choices and instead of investing in himself he pissed it all away every payday. I told him it was about choices and he had gone through life choosing poorly.
The kiss ass insults stopped instantly.
He was probably 10 or 15 years older than me and I heard he took an early retirement (another bad choice) and retired a bitter, angry man. He was still an Ordinary Seaman.
I'll tell you about Vic later.
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