I think GP's point was that 1 billion is also completely unfeasible.
'there should be no billionaires' is just a dumb idea put out for impact more than any hope of achieving it. When I try to steelman the idea I come up with the fact that smaller amounts of capital can be allocated more efficiently, and that society should therefore try to ensure capital naturally flows to individuals with less rather than more assets. Not a bad point, Warren Buffet definitely made higher returns early in his career and he credits that in large part to being able to pick targets better when investing millions than when investing billions.
But going from 'billionaires are a sign of capital inefficiency' to 'lets ban billionaires' rhetoric posits using violence to seize or suppress billionaires capital, which requires a larger concentration of capital than the billionaires have now. It's a statement at war with its own ideals, I shouldn't even be giving it the oxygen necessary to refute it.
Try and introduce that and you'll run right into the impossibility of measuring wealth. E.g. what if Bill Gates just gives all his many over 1 billion to a charity or trust? Say, the Gates foundation (see wikipedia for the good work that charity has done)? Is the wealth "his" given he still has a great deal of control over how it gets spent?
Try a wealth tax like that and the Musk charitable foundation is founded with the goals of fighting climate change via electric cars and making a Mars colony.
once again, assuming someone can impose that tax already implies a greater concentration of power than the billionaire himself. It's a classic case of the cure being worse than the disease.
'there should be no billionaires' is just a dumb idea put out for impact more than any hope of achieving it. When I try to steelman the idea I come up with the fact that smaller amounts of capital can be allocated more efficiently, and that society should therefore try to ensure capital naturally flows to individuals with less rather than more assets. Not a bad point, Warren Buffet definitely made higher returns early in his career and he credits that in large part to being able to pick targets better when investing millions than when investing billions.
But going from 'billionaires are a sign of capital inefficiency' to 'lets ban billionaires' rhetoric posits using violence to seize or suppress billionaires capital, which requires a larger concentration of capital than the billionaires have now. It's a statement at war with its own ideals, I shouldn't even be giving it the oxygen necessary to refute it.