Billionaires at Trump's Swearing-In Have Since Lost $209 Billion
As Donald Trump took the oath of office on Jan. 20, he was flanked by some of the world’s wealthiest people. The billionaires present that day — including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg — had never been richer, flush with big gains from frothy stock markets.
That is a good thing!
Don't let them take it back
$200bn of ownership has NOT changed hands.
They've just had a property revaluation.
Could only wish that caused them as much pain as the average American, Canadian, Mexican, European is getting walloped with every day under Trump.
If you're linking to a paywalled site like bloomberg, could you please provide the text in the post, or link to a archive.org copy? All I know about this is the title and the first paragraph of the article. Frustrating.
You can search for the headline plus "msn" and almost always find it:
Some places don't like people to do that. I'm normally somewhat against it, since I do think it's important for journalists to get paid, but in this case:
I wish this would only damage the billionaires.
Yeah. It’s a little bit of a misleading article, to be honest. They didn’t “lose” anything. Conditions changed for them, and they’re planning to clean up on a bunch of undervalued assets once this entire bullshit is winding down (whenever that happens), and they’ll wind up hugely ahead of where they started out.
There are other possibilities of course, but all of the other possibilities that I think are realistic involve complete collapse. Which they will, almost certainly, be positioned to survive much better than the average peasant will.
Sadly you are most likely correct. I'm not sure what to do because it doesn't feel like voting and volunteering are working.
After first having gained $300 billion? Y'all know that the stock pumping started two months earlier than Jan. 20?
Way to steal joy from me. But you're right to point this out.
Billionaires can afford to lose 209 billion because they can buy up the rest for cheap when we're all destitute.
Those MF are shorting the market right now making billions on the process. Once market hits rock bottom, the will buy back everything at the cheapest price and end up making even more on the way up. There's really no way to hurt them on that matter. As most people are saying, the only people being hurt from this is the working class.
Don’t worry, they will recover multiple times that amount when the ship steadies as they’re probably busy acquiring assets at rock bottom prices that they’ve caused by supporting the Trump presidency.
I’m hazarding a guess and would love for someone to fact check this but every time there is a recession I feel the rich get richer and everyone else loses.
Not just recessions, but the pandemic was a huge boon. I guess any crisis that hits the market just right will get milked by these assholes.
But not until they managed to poison the idea of masks, demanded the end of the lockdown so they wouldn't continue to lose money on commercial real estate, started enshitifying platforms and services, began inflating their products, and participated in shrinkflation.
The wealthy took out their shareholder losses from the COVID lockdown and made it all back by punishing everyone else. Not saying you're wrong, but they lost a lot before turning every trick they could think of to extract wealth back from the filthy peasants and that $1200 stimulus that didn't go to them to offset their losses. I mean how many of us got a PPP loan, which didn't need to be paid back?
This kind of shit is why we can't have unregulated wealth and so much unlimited money in politics.
You know that thing where chatbots talk to each other and it gets progressively more and more nonsensical and bonkers?
I imagine a scenario kind of like this, but with billionaires telling each other that they're billionaires and it's fine to loan money because they have speculative collateral. So billionaires will borrow from billionaires who cover the bill by borrowing from other billionaires who borrow from the first billionaire I mentioned, all because "they're good for it. Look at how much stock they own."
Meanwhile they all have functionally nothing in liquid.
Yes, 100%. They only lose money when they sell their shares at a loss. And I am sure they would only do this in ways that benefit them financially.
The billionaires will do just fine. Their companies may use this as an excuse to do some layoffs though.
When people are hurting is when it's easiest to take advantage.
Everyone ITT is cheering but my retirement account has taken a fucking beating for the same reason. The billionaires aren't hurt by the stock market falling through the floor, it's their slaves that are. A year ago I had a chance at retiring a little early. I don't see that ever happening now.
Welcome to the club. Us millennials never had the plan to retire.
Many good people in Ukraine don't have that problem anymore, because they're already dead as a result of Trump's decisions :/
And yes this isn't the most monstrous thing trump has done. Hanging Ukraine out to dry is unconscionable, but this post was about economics. The thing trump promised to be good about and he was believed. He's nuking our economy from orbit and no one can help us. It's as though he wants to hurt everyone "beneath" him.
Yeah, I know. I'm not saying my problem is the biggest. I am saying that billionaires aren't hurt by losing even large fractions of their wealth, but us normal people are, in tangible ways
Stock market ain’t nearly the same gamble when you have enough money to sway it.
Unless you are retiring soon, this isn't particularly important. For anyone still in the grind, this just means buying the dip.
But it sounds like you are retiring soon, and need more stable investments. I wish you luck on that.
It won't be soon, anymore.
Who were the people pushing for 401ks instead of pensions again?
All my investments are in the net negative now, thousands of dollars wasted, and I will still tell you this is the right direction for the human beings living on the planet. We really don't have forever to keep being crushed under their weight.
I'm a European that was heavily invested in British defense stocks. When your boy and his mutt attacked Zelensky in the whitehouse i bought more of them and expanded to Europe as a whole.
Trump throwing the American Economy and Hegemony against the wall has been great for me.
My portfolio has grown 20% since you numptys voted him in.
I moved my 401k from 100% stocks to 100% cash equivalents 3 weeks ago... the writing on the wall was right there
Great welcome to the club most of us were born into and had zero chance of leaving.
Okay cool, I guess the class division strategy worked
sorry, but i don't give a flying fuck about your retirement account. your country is literally falling into fascism and you're worrying about how that's going to affect your retirement plan?
people are being rounded up and put into camps.
your retirement plan should be to die fighting to stop it.
What do you invest in? Aren't you just adding fuel to the slave-driven global suicide machine?
Surviving is adding fuel to the slave driven global suicide machine. You don't have to leave society to try and change it without being a hypocrite.
They're called retirement accounts and we don't get much choice in the matter. Google it
Hell yeah. Just filled my Amazon cart with $3000 of good that I’ll never buy just to fuck with their inventory and I’ll schedule a test drive for a Tesla tomorrow that I won’t show up for to celebrate
Damn, does it really work that way?
I was reading that filling carts will mess with their resources and inventory and cause extra work for them that they otherwise wouldn’t have to do. I also did specifically Amazon branded products just to fuck with them more as well
209 Billion seems like a lot but it's not in comparison to their overall wealth. Us poors need to stop celebrating their financial losses.
And I certainly hope they continue to lose more of their value.
The 1st rule of Applied Spite: If you're going down, make sure to cling to the bastard who pushed you off the edge.
It’s always a nice headline to read at first and then you remember the real gut feeling is only felt when the losses are paired with a working class salary.
When you go from 400b to 200b, it literally changes nothing about your life like losing 15k when you have 30.
Losing half of 400 billion is absolutely NOT the same as losing half of 30k. One changes nothing you can still buy anything on Earth. One is the difference between getting a new car and getting one used.
It's a good start but not nearly enough.
It may be dangerous to be america's enemy, but to be america's ally is fatal.
I mean, stocks go down they could have been the ones that sold their shares and are holding cash now moving the market. Would have been much easier to have just taxed them so they really lost 200 billion and it was put to good use.
There is currently a way to tax them, but we'll have to act before the GOP closes it.
Oh no…
...anyway, ...
its not enough
That’s a start, I guess.
Oh my god ... those poor billionaires! .... will they survive?