Management The Master Plan: Biotech player turned Ottawa Senators owner Eugene Melnyk faces off against COVID19

[GCK]

By capitalism, do you mean easy-to-manipulate tax laws, a lack of government structure to hold companies accountable for abusing employment standards and a massive lobbying agenda that basically helps write the laws the companies they represent would like to see passed?

Nope. That’s just human nature.

 

[Rand0m]

Capitalism is the system that enables the creation of billionaires, and it is also responsible for lifting millions out of poverty, according to the director general of The Institute of Economic Affairs, Mark Littlewood. He recently told the BBC that reducing the wealth of billionaires “won’t lead to redistribution, it will destroy it to the benefit of no one”.

He believes that society should be focussing on “economic growth” rather than “criticising” billionaires.

Ah yes, this Mark Littlewood? sounds like a great guy that definitely doesn’t have an ulterior motive for saying eliminating billionaires would do no good...

Rightwing UK thinktank 'offered ministerial access' to potential US donors

Seriously, is that all you have?

 

[BankStreetParade]

Nope. That’s just human nature.

It's actually not. The vast majority of people on earth would say it's not in their nature to want to exploit other people for their own gain. These are calculated efforts to subvert and exploit a system that's supposed to represent everyone participating in it. Instead it has become a sickening display of what the people with the most resources can accomplish by deploying their agents to overrun the structures that we all agreed might be our best hope at maintaining an equal playing field.

The majority of people didn't agree to tax sheltering schemes, offshore shell companies, legal financial maneuvering that reduces tax burdens on the wealthiest companies in the world, etc. These were all put in place by the lobbyists for the companies that hired them.

 

[PlayersLtd]

Being “rich” is one thing, being a billionaire is on quite another level though. One thing I can say with certainty, is that if a person becomes a billionaire, they most definitely exploited a non-insignificant amount of people to get there.

I know someone quite closely that started a tech company from their basement with one partner. He eventually resigned from his post when it was a tight knit company of 50 people or so showing a lot of promise but the relationship with his co-founder had soured a bit. He left with 40% of the shares and after several rounds of venture capital funding that went down to about 10%. The company eventually went public and nearly overnight he became a billionaire. As the stock has grown he and his family have become multi billionaires. Exactly the type of people, on the outside, that you are choosing to paint with a broad brush right now.

That person has a foundation that gives away tens of millions of dollars per year, massive self sustaining amounts when you consider the growth of the investment portfolio in the foundation alone. They lead multiple charities themselves and personally employ 5-7 people who do nothing but provide services to people for free or give money away. On top of that there is a micro economy of trades people that have built business' working for them on various projects. This family is very gracious and good to work for and do a lot of what they do because they carry a sense of guilt for their wealth. On top of all that this is just them getting started on organizing their wealth and helping others with it.

His old business partner is even wealthier and carries himself the same way. The 50 people that were there at the start, including another couple hundred that got stock options as the company grew, are all multi millionaires, many still working for the company, and happy. They are in the tech industry so naturally they pay well and provide an emphasis on a healthy work environment. The company now employs tens of thousands of people.

Tell me again, with certainty, how these people are so terrible?

You don't know a single billionaire. You are judging based on your political science and history books and what you see on TV and movies. You are painfully biased and choosing to put your head in the sand when it comes to all the good that many wealthy people do and the good will (or guilt) that they are driven by.

 

[Johnny Hanson]

I know someone quite closely that started a tech company from their basement with one partner. He eventually resigned from his post when it was a tight knit company of 50 people or so showing a lot of promise but the relationship with his co-founder had soured a bit. He left with 40% of the shares and after several rounds of venture capital funding that went down to about 10%. The company eventually went public and nearly overnight he became a billionaire. As the stock has grown he and his family have become multi billionaires. Exactly the type of people, on the outside, that you are choosing to paint with a broad brush right now.

That person has a foundation that gives away tens of millions of dollars per year, massive self sustaining amounts when you consider the growth of the investment portfolio in the foundation alone. They lead multiple charities themselves and personally employ 5-7 people who do nothing but provide services to people for free or give money away. On top of that there is a micro economy of trades people that have built business' working for them on various projects. This family is very gracious and good to work for and do a lot of what they do because they carry a sense of guilt for their wealth. On top of all that this is just them getting started on organizing their wealth and helping others with it.

His old business partner is even wealthier and carries himself the same way. The 50 people that were there at the start, including another couple hundred that got stock options as the company grew, are all multi millionaires, many still working for the company, and happy. They are in the tech industry so naturally they pay well and provide an emphasis on a healthy work environment. The company now employs tens of thousands of people.

Tell me again, with certainty, how these people are so terrible?

You don't know a single billionaire. You are judging based on your political science and history books and what you see on TV and movies. You are painfully biased and choosing to put your head in the sand when it comes to all the good that many wealthy people do and the good will (or guilt) that they are driven by.

Tell your buddy to buy the sens

 

[AchtzehnBaby]

I know someone quite closely that started a tech company from their basement with one partner. He eventually resigned from his post when it was a tight knit company of 50 people or so showing a lot of promise but the relationship with his co-founder had soured a bit. He left with 40% of the shares and after several rounds of venture capital funding that went down to about 10%. The company eventually went public and nearly overnight he became a billionaire. As the stock has grown he and his family have become multi billionaires. Exactly the type of people, on the outside, that you are choosing to paint with a broad brush right now.

That person has a foundation that gives away tens of millions of dollars per year, massive self sustaining amounts when you consider the growth of the investment portfolio in the foundation alone. They lead multiple charities themselves and personally employ 5-7 people who do nothing but provide services to people for free or give money away. On top of that there is a micro economy of trades people that have built business' working for them on various projects. This family is very gracious and good to work for and do a lot of what they do because they carry a sense of guilt for their wealth. On top of all that this is just them getting started on organizing their wealth and helping others with it.

His old business partner is even wealthier and carries himself the same way. The 50 people that were there at the start, including another couple hundred that got stock options as the company grew, are all multi millionaires, many still working for the company, and happy. They are in the tech industry so naturally they pay well and provide an emphasis on a healthy work environment. The company now employs tens of thousands of people.

Tell me again, with certainty, how these people are so terrible?

You don't know a single billionaire. You are judging based on your political science and history books and what you see on TV and movies. You are painfully biased and choosing to put your head in the sand when it comes to all the good that many wealthy people do and the good will (or guilt) that they are driven by.

Amen, brother.

 

[JD1]

Ah yes, this Mark Littlewood? sounds like a great guy that definitely doesn’t have an ulterior motive for saying eliminating billionaires would do no good...

Rightwing UK thinktank 'offered ministerial access' to potential US donors

Seriously, is that all you have?

What good is it that you think eliminating billionaires does? Seriously what is achieved thru that? What do you want to do? Take every billion beyond the first billion and redistribute it? What problem does that solve? If you took every extra billion from Canadian billionaires and redistributed it, it wouldn't total what's been handed out in the past 8 months thru Cerb and other federal support

Seriously what problem are you solving?

You're not going to solve a f***ing thing. Humans are different. They're blessed with different talents, interests, work ethics, personalities and on it goes

Short of making us all robots with the same talents, work ethics and abilities....taking away the wealth of the few and redistributing it doesn't solve the inequities in the human race

 

[thinkwild]

The Munk debates held one a while back about: Be it resolved, a society that allows billionaires to exist is immoral. An interesting debate.

Apparently many of the worlds billionaires have signed the giving pledge where they philanthropically give their money away to good causes. Some obvious ones havent. Tough call whether gov't would spend that better.

They talked about Scandinavian models which turn out not to be as socialist as we thought. Again we apparently misunderstood the Swedish model.

Income inequality does seem an issue though. But some of the simplistic solutions presented lately may benefit from thinking it through a little deeper if the issue is to solve it rather than make political hay.

 

[BatherSeason]

Interesting that now (because of the pandemic) the city of Ottawa now needs the Ottawa Senators in their downtown core more than the Ottawa Senators need to be downtown. An interesting turn of events really.

Downtown is dead and with more people going to be working remotely post Covid, there is really no need to even live in the downtown core.

 

[Xspyrit]

Seriously, it's not my fault if I'm a billionaire. It just happened.

 

[jhutter]

Did you see how far Mayor Jimbo bent over for the 2 Amazon fulfillment centres in town. Bezos took money from your family.

I don't see any missing cash from my home in Southern Alberta

 

[Tnuoc Alucard]

I saw a stunning stat a few days ago, if Jeff Bezos gave every Amazon employee (all 876,000 of them) a $105,000 1-time bonus, he’d still be as rich as he was pre-pandemic less than a year ago.

My point is, if a person can extract such obscene amounts of wealth out of a company, they can pay their employees significantly better.

Sounds anti capitalistic?

Don't think anyone is forced to work for Amazon at their current rate of compensation... if they think they're worth more, they are free to seek higher wages elsewhere.

 

[Rand0m]

I know someone quite closely that started a tech company from their basement with one partner. He eventually resigned from his post when it was a tight knit company of 50 people or so showing a lot of promise but the relationship with his co-founder had soured a bit. He left with 40% of the shares and after several rounds of venture capital funding that went down to about 10%. The company eventually went public and nearly overnight he became a billionaire. As the stock has grown he and his family have become multi billionaires. Exactly the type of people, on the outside, that you are choosing to paint with a broad brush right now.

That person has a foundation that gives away tens of millions of dollars per year, massive self sustaining amounts when you consider the growth of the investment portfolio in the foundation alone. They lead multiple charities themselves and personally employ 5-7 people who do nothing but provide services to people for free or give money away. On top of that there is a micro economy of trades people that have built business' working for them on various projects. This family is very gracious and good to work for and do a lot of what they do because they carry a sense of guilt for their wealth. On top of all that this is just them getting started on organizing their wealth and helping others with it.

His old business partner is even wealthier and carries himself the same way. The 50 people that were there at the start, including another couple hundred that got stock options as the company grew, are all multi millionaires, many still working for the company, and happy. They are in the tech industry so naturally they pay well and provide an emphasis on a healthy work environment. The company now employs tens of thousands of people.

Tell me again, with certainty, how these people are so terrible?

You don't know a single billionaire. You are judging based on your political science and history books and what you see on TV and movies. You are painfully biased and choosing to put your head in the sand when it comes to all the good that many wealthy people do and the good will (or guilt) that they are driven by.

I'll preface this by saying, ANY charitable work is good, any time a person can help a less fortunate person it's a good thing. It's at the basis of my argument, so many people need this charity while you have this group of people that's hoarding amounts of wealth that could improve the lives of millions of people. Maybe if all the billionaires had paid their faire share of taxes, many of these charities wouldn't be necessary in the first place. I do admire Bill Gates & Warren Buffet for what they've done, they've literally saved thousands and thousands of lives. If only more billionaires did more than just sign giving pledges.

I'll make a few assumptions for your friend:
I'll take the term multi Billionaire as having ~$4B, you say they give 10's of millions a year in charity? Lets say we do $30M, that's about 0.8% of their net worth, probably less than what they make on interest on their investments in that same year. That $30M in charitable donations is like a person with a net worth of $1,000,000 giving away $8,000/year to charity (while also benefiting from a tax write-off.) A little bit less impressive put under that perspective no?

The wealth he currently has is enough to sustain a lavish lifestyle to the next 10+ generations of his descendants without any of them ever having to lift a finger. If you know him, what would he be missing out on with a net worth of $500M that he wouldn't have to worry about with $4B? Are all the hospitals in his city world class facilities? Are none of the public school classrooms in his city overcrowded?

What good is it that you think eliminating billionaires does? Seriously what is achieved thru that? What do you want to do? Take every billion beyond the first billion and redistribute it? What problem does that solve? If you took every extra billion from Canadian billionaires and redistributed it, it wouldn't total what's been handed out in the past 8 months thru Cerb and other federal support

Seriously what problem are you solving?

You're not going to solve a f***ing thing. Humans are different. They're blessed with different talents, interests, work ethics, personalities and on it goes

Short of making us all robots with the same talents, work ethics and abilities....taking away the wealth of the few and redistributing it doesn't solve the inequities in the human race

Pretty good idea actually.

Did you know the top 20 Canadian billionaires increased their net worth by $37 Billion during the pandemic?
Canada’s top billionaires are $37 billion richer since start of the pandemic, CCPA report finds

According to the article/report, about 1,9M Canadians are under or unemployed due to the pandemic. If all 1,9M of them got $2,000/month of CERB over the past 10 months, then that adds up to ~$38B. Literally the amount of money these 20 Billionaires INCREASED their net worth while these nearly 2M Canadians were unemployed. Now imagine with we combined that amount with what was already given, with $4k/month to stay home, we'd be over this in 6 months.

All that would still have left them with $141B collectively, literally zero would have changed in their lives.

 

[Xspyrit]

I'll preface this by saying, ANY charitable work is good, any time a person can help a less fortunate person it's a good thing. It's at the basis of my argument, so many people need this charity while you have this group of people that's hoarding amounts of wealth that could improve the lives of millions of people. Maybe if all the billionaires had paid their faire share of taxes, many of these charities wouldn't be necessary in the first place. I do admire Bill Gates & Warren Buffet for what they've done, they've literally saved thousands and thousands of lives. If only more billionaires did more than just sign giving pledges.

I'll make a few assumptions for your friend:
I'll take the term multi Billionaire as having ~$4B, you say they give 10's of millions a year in charity? Lets say we do $30M, that's about 0.8% of their net worth, probably less than what they make on interest on their investments in that same year. That $30M in charitable donations is like a person with a net worth of $1,000,000 giving away $8,000/year to charity (while also benefiting from a tax write-off.) A little bit less impressive put under that perspective no?

The wealth he currently has is enough to sustain a lavish lifestyle to the next 10+ generations of his descendants without any of them ever having to lift a finger. If you know him, what would he be missing out on with a net worth of $500M that he wouldn't have to worry about with $4B? Are all the hospitals in his city world class facilities? Are none of the public school classrooms in his city overcrowded?



Pretty good idea actually.

Did you know the top 20 Canadian billionaires increased their net worth by $37 Billion during the pandemic?
Canada’s top billionaires are $37 billion richer since start of the pandemic, CCPA report finds

According to the article/report, about 1,9M Canadians are under or unemployed due to the pandemic. If all 1,9M of them got $2,000/month of CERB over the past 10 months, then that adds up to ~$38B. Literally the amount of money these 20 Billionaires INCREASED their net worth while these nearly 2M Canadians were unemployed. Now imagine with we combined that amount with what was already given, with $4k/month to stay home, we'd be over this in 6 months.

All that would still have left them with $141B collectively, literally zero would have changed in their lives.

I really don't disagree with the principle that the wealth should be more spread out. The problem is that the whole world would need to do something collectively because rich people will take their money elsewhere if taxes are too costly. There is many different "tax shelters"

Have you seen what happened in France and that 75% supertax?

France forced to drop 75% supertax after meagre returns

 

[JD1]

I'll preface this by saying, ANY charitable work is good, any time a person can help a less fortunate person it's a good thing. It's at the basis of my argument, so many people need this charity while you have this group of people that's hoarding amounts of wealth that could improve the lives of millions of people. Maybe if all the billionaires had paid their faire share of taxes, many of these charities wouldn't be necessary in the first place. I do admire Bill Gates & Warren Buffet for what they've done, they've literally saved thousands and thousands of lives. If only more billionaires did more than just sign giving pledges.

I'll make a few assumptions for your friend:
I'll take the term multi Billionaire as having ~$4B, you say they give 10's of millions a year in charity? Lets say we do $30M, that's about 0.8% of their net worth, probably less than what they make on interest on their investments in that same year. That $30M in charitable donations is like a person with a net worth of $1,000,000 giving away $8,000/year to charity (while also benefiting from a tax write-off.) A little bit less impressive put under that perspective no?

The wealth he currently has is enough to sustain a lavish lifestyle to the next 10+ generations of his descendants without any of them ever having to lift a finger. If you know him, what would he be missing out on with a net worth of $500M that he wouldn't have to worry about with $4B? Are all the hospitals in his city world class facilities? Are none of the public school classrooms in his city overcrowded?



Pretty good idea actually.

Did you know the top 20 Canadian billionaires increased their net worth by $37 Billion during the pandemic?
Canada’s top billionaires are $37 billion richer since start of the pandemic, CCPA report finds

According to the article/report, about 1,9M Canadians are under or unemployed due to the pandemic. If all 1,9M of them got $2,000/month of CERB over the past 10 months, then that adds up to ~$38B. Literally the amount of money these 20 Billionaires INCREASED their net worth while these nearly 2M Canadians were unemployed. Now imagine with we combined that amount with what was already given, with $4k/month to stay home, we'd be over this in 6 months.

All that would still have left them with $141B collectively, literally zero would have changed in their lives.

No, i didn't know the 37 / 38 thing. Quite a coincidence and I'll trust your math on that

But you didn't address what problem you're solving. Human beings are not equal and we're actually not unique in not being equal in this world. You could equally distribute the world's wealth tomorrow and in a generation you'd be back at square one with an inequity in wealth distribution, not as severe but it would be growing every year. That's just a fact. It's an unfortunate fact but it is true.

You know what is not mentioned in that article? Canada pushed out more money in support than income lost. But you won't find mention of that in an article from the left.

Your disdain for the rich is in my opinion sad. Look at a guy like Lutke. He couldn't figure out how to sell a snowboard online so he built his own site, is now worth many billions (on paper) and in the process has made many that sell thru his platform wealthier. I think he should be applauded. He had an idea, a vision and the guts to take risks.

On the other hand, a guy like Bezos is getting rich(er) exploiting the work of his massive minimum wage workforce.