jdm2212

When your job pays you a dollar, you get an actual dollar. Your job never claws that money back. Unrealized capital gains are not money, and they routinely get clawed back. Unrealized capital gains just means someone in New York traded GOOG/GOOGL at a higher price than they did yesterday.

And, sure, super-rich people can in theory use the appreciated stock as collateral for loans and not pay taxes, but in practice Larry and most other centi-billionaires actually sell loads of stock and pay a lot in capital gains taxes because having your status as super rich dude who owns a huge yacht be totally dependent on Google's stock price is a dumb risk to take on, and it's worth paying some taxes to eliminate that risk.

You sort of can make more land -- by building tall buildings. Unfortunately the Bay Area has mostly outlawed that, too. And we can't blame that just on homeowners. SF "tenant advocates" are just as violently allergic to developers building new structures as homeowners are. But the worst offenders are definitely Peninsula and South Bay homeowners.

Then you'd have two (or three, or four) companies that Larry owns 5% each of that are collectively worth $4T.

You can't solve a shortage with demand subsidies. You need to expand supply. SF has too little housing relative to its population, and has perennially tried throwing money at the nonprofit industrial complex which has (obviously) perennially failed to solve the problem because it doesn't generate new housing units, it just bids up and reshuffles the existing ones (and steals a lot of money in the process).

Larry has sold tons of Alphabet stock and paid lots of capital gains taxes. This is easily available public information. The whole buy-borrow-die thing is sort of a stupid myth. Actual centibillionaires diversify because the risk of having a huge concentrated position is much greater than the liability of having to pay some capital gains taxes.

Google doesn't have much power. It can't arrest you or pass laws or vote. It just happens to produce a lot of profits for its shareholders (who are, overwhelmingly, average people with 401Ks) and a lot of profits means a big market cap.

If we need revenue to fund useful government programs, great, let's tax Larry. But I don't understand what problem is solved by expropriation qua expropriation.

Sure, yeah, but which of the two numbers I was multiplying together is, in your mind, too big, and should be made smaller, and by what mechanism?

Larry Page owns about 5% of Alphabet, which is worth $4T, so he has $200B give or take. Which part of that do you think reflects a "broken tax system"? Companies should get kneecapped if their market cap gets too high? Founders shouldn't be allowed to keep even a single digit percent of the company?

Their business model is based on making money from LLMs. That is some mix of (a) selling API access to businesses and (b) making money from ads / referral fees / whatever from consumer usage.

The businesses API usage will disappear overnight if OpenAI doesn't honor its contracts with businesses.

The actual money will be made because the driverless car manufacturer is self-insuring and cutting out the insurance company. Competition among manufacturers will then pass most of those savings on to you.

Similarly, many car makers offer heated seats without a subscription fee, because of the magic of competition.

I've worked for three different companies that all use some mix of enterprise agreements, self-hosting, and AWS Bedrock to ensure that proprietary data doesn't get trained on. It's not a difficult or complicated problem.

You are, again, flatly wrong about this. ZDR involves infrastructure separation that prevents any data flowing back.

Insurance will just be bundled with the self-driving car software. Insurance and car are separate today because driver and car are separate today. Once they're the same, there's lots of money to be saved by bundling the sale.

This depends on local defamation laws. It's an issue with all online reviews in countries like Germany where the onus is on Google to establish a review isn't defamatory.

This is flatly false. ZDR means the customer request is processed and nothing about its content remains on the model provider's servers.