• ObjectivityIncarnate@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    the reason you are a billionaire or your company makes billions in profit is because you overcharge your clients

    This is an assumption.

    Costco’s founder, who was also the CEO up until a few years ago, is a billionaire. And that’s a company that is famous both for its very competitive prices on the customer side (insert infamous story about ‘threatening’ to kill someone if they raised the price of that hot dog), AND for how well it treats its workforce.

    You can become a billionaire just by creating something that a large number of people find valuable, and continuing to own it as its value in others’ eyes increases over time. Because that’s what net worth fundamentally is–it’s the price tag of how valuable everyone else thinks shares of that company are worth.

    The implication that you HAVE to be ripping people off to acquire wealth (and when it comes to increasing one’s wealth, ‘billionaire’ is just a distinction of scale) is just plain wrong, an ignorant talking point.

    • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      It’s not an assumption, the surplus generated to make someone a billionaire comes from the pockets of the customers, they don’t make it appear out of nowhere. Just because something looks like a deal it doesn’t mean that it is, if you’re always paying 5$ for an orange, 3$ feels like a deal because you’ve gotten used to paying 5$, the truth is it’s just not worth either price when you look at the actual cost to bring an orange from the tree to your house.

      • ObjectivityIncarnate@lemmy.world
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        30 days ago

        You are suggesting that $X in profit = $X of having “overcharged” the customer.

        This is completely ridiculous on its face. No private entity will or should ever go to all the effort and time and resources to start a new business if there will never be any profit. Obviously.

        And ironically, even if the government gets involved in providing X instead, without profit in mind, the bureaucracy is such that its ‘no profit’ price for X is invariably higher than a price a private entity can charge while profiting.

        • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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          30 days ago

          No I’m saying that if their profit didn’t need to take a useless billionaire leech into consideration then prices could be lower.

          That last part is complete bullshit as well and you would know it if you knew anything about crown corporations.

          • timestatic@feddit.org
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            30 days ago

            Have you ever considered people becoming billionaires of companies that haven’t made a single cent of profit? Spotify never made any profit for example and is still valued at just 96 bn USD

            • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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              29 days ago

              Stock valuation has nothing to do with the current conversation but billionaires shouldn’t exist at all whole homeless people exist, it’s that simple.

              • timestatic@feddit.org
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                27 days ago

                I don’t think billionaires shouldn’t exist necessarily, I do think homeless people shouldn’t exist tho.

      • timestatic@feddit.org
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        30 days ago

        Thats not how the net worth of a company works. You don’t have to make massive profits for people to value your company highly