DESTROY WEALTH IN THE NAME OF EQUITY.

Common Dreams regular Sam Pizzigati never fails to amuse.  Last year, we noted him channelling his inner Balph Eubank. "The distribution of income and wealth will remain ridiculously top-heavy until we start limiting the 'rewards' gushing into corporate executive suites."

The top got a little less heavy thanks to the Biden bear market, but even a serious haircut to the largest fortunes isn't good enough for him.

Last year, for instance, ended with a torrent of news stories about how poorly the world’s billionaires fared in 2022. Bloomberg tagged the 12 months that had just gone past “a year to forget,” with almost $1.5 trillion “wiped from the fortunes of the richest 500 alone.”

All global billionaires taken together, Forbeschimed in, lost $1.9 trillion in 2022. Some 148 of the world’s 2,671 billionaires even lost their billionaire status.

The year’s biggest billionaire losers? Some of America’s deepest pockets. Larry Page saw his Google-driven fortune drop $40 billion, Mark Zuckerberg watched $78 billion evaporate off the wealth Facebook created for him, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos had to swallow a minus $80 billion.

But honors for the biggest nosedive of all have to go to Elon Musk. The world’s richest man at the start of 2022, Musk ended the year losing both his top slot and some $115 billion off his personal fortune.

Sammy could have stayed on his inequality hobbyhorse and noted that small wealth holders suffered a greater loss proportionately, meaning that the usurpers usurped a greater share of a smaller total stock of wealth.  That deprives me of the opportunity to be shown wrong in this conjecture.

[A] great deal of net worth has evaporated just this year.  There's no offsetting benefit to people who had no net worth to begin with, but simple arithmetic says there's less wealth being held, and there's less of it held by the wealthiest people.  "And thus, understanding the dynamics of capital accumulation, or wealth concentration, might be much more work than simply noting the presence of either."

Heck, he didn't even rile up the groundlings by lamenting that, under the current tax code, all those capital losses meant billionaires being able to reduce or eliminate their 2022 tax liability.

No, he went to a truly silly place.

The world’s most celebrated purveyors of pure extravagance actually registered record years in 2022. Rolls-Royce had its best-ever annual sales total, selling a record 6,021 “motor cars,” up 8 percent over 2021.

“Our clients,” Rolls-Royce’s CEO crowed on New Year’s Day, “are now happy to pay around half a million Euros for their unique motor car,” a sum equal to about $540,000 in the United States, the company’s single largest market.

“Our order book stretches far into 2023 for all models,” the Rolls-Royce chief added. “We haven’t seen any slowdown in orders.”

Lamborghini had an even better 2022, with 9,233 vehicles sold, a 10-percent jump over last year. The company’s biggest market? The United States. Americans drove off Lamborghini lots with 2,771 new cars in 2022. The automaker’s most popular model runs about a quarter-million.

Realtors who cater to the ultra-rich set had an equally boffo year in 2022. In a down overall real-estate market, the highest of high-end residences still pulled in mega sums at closing time. The year’s top ten home sales in the United States, notes the luxury-oriented Robb Report, “totaled roughly $1.165 billion, proving that, impending recession or not, luxury real estate will always be traded.”

Yes, and if I had been successful in shorting stocks at the right time, or unloading my FTX holdings, and wanted to give myself a trophy, a Lamborghini or a beachfront house might be just the thing.  But if you're a socialist of Sammy's caliber, all you can do is call attention to is those big houses and whine about how horrible it is there are still people living in small houses.  Real estate trading at higher prices?  Burn your woke manifesto if it raises the possibility that it's not a Musk or a Bezos or a Zuckerberg bidding up those prices.

Sammy?

How can all this luxury be? How can the richest of the rich be spending fantastic sums in a year when they’re seeing fantastic falls in their personal net worths? Simple. In the realms of the super rich, losing a billion — or even many billions — off your personal fortune makes no difference whatsoever in real daily life. Net worth down a few billion? You can still afford anything your heart could possibly desire.

No one alive today needs fortunes worth dozens of billions to live astoundingly large. A mere billion will suffice. So, truth be told, would a mere tenth of a billion. Indeed, in the neighborhoods of our super rich, the number of billions a billionaire may have holds no practical significance. The number of billions our super rich have accumulated essentially only matter as a way of keeping score in the ongoing status competition our deepest pockets so relentlessly wage.

Tell Sammy to put down his keyboard and go to bed early.