$6,472,200,000,000

But what if I do want to reduce the number of billionaires?

You'll have to unclog the pipes of society. I'd recommend a good plumber.

Well yes, but unless you dismantle things it'll probably backfire. A ton of that wealth is in owning companies, and if that ownership transfered to the state, it would need to be liquidated by selling it to... someone. Which would tank stocks, which would then tank 401ks and IRAs and a lot of other retirement funds, etc.. It would get messy and a ton of non-billionares would be impacted.

Now you can argue that you then use your newfound government cash to pay a new universal social security, and that's possible but you'd need to design all that ahead of time. Plus if your goal is to not impact people with less than a billion... well, no dice. It's hard to target just the billionaires, basically.

Still, if we could at least start the process that'd be lovely. Dismantling the whole system is more effective and way better, but my money would be on gradual socialist improvements paid via higher taxes and not a system overhaul. As it is, we're going backwards, though, so meh.

Aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Thanks for listening.

It'd be complicated to extract this from companies they own without destroying the companies. It could maybe work by force emmiting stock and the payments for it going directly to the government, so the company doesn't owe debt. The stock price will drop, so it will be affordable for workers to buy it and the former owner would basically be disowned at least partially.

It’d be complicated to extract this from companies they own without destroying the companies
In that case, let's do it and destroy the companies at the same time. Two birds with one stone.
The same companies most possibly destroying our planet? The horror
- you mean like tesla? if the government dismantled it to use the profits to solve world hunger it creates two more problems:
  employees losing their jobs
  one less electric car manufacturer
I mean, we’re talking about taking the wealth and distributing it for more constructive purposes, if it doesn’t demolish a handful of fortune 500s in the process we’ve made a mistake. Those fortunes would then be able to be used to take all the workers pointlessly generating wealth for the billionaire class and start working on socially useful ventures

Why would we flood the streets? Invest the money in public projects, services, etc. People work them as jobs, now we have more middle class - other businesses make money selling them services - the economy grows.
For an example of this working in America look up Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal”.
They didn’t suggest giving everyone a million dollars, they suggested using the seized money to pay people to do work on giant social issues.
It could feed everybody - by paying farmers the normal rate for their food.
It could halt climate change - by paying people the normal rate to install renewable energy.
The number of jobs would increase, and society’s problems would be solved, all without causing hyperinflation via huge handouts.
You're confounding redistributing money versus injecting money.

The worst part is most of that money would end up right where it started.

Yeah true. El problema es el capitalismo.