This story first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
The rich and famous make such a big deal of themselves. It seems to be a loop and not a direction.
YA rich asshole, gaming the system. Eat the rich!
“Shocking,” according to Yass’s propaganda, that school teachers should make $117,000 a year including benefits. Well, of course, it’s not shocking at all; it’s perfectly reasonable. He’s creating and exploiting class resentment over small differences in income, while he makes millions and billions in marginal or illegal trades. Yet I don’t see how the billionaires who want to eliminate funding for public education altogether really have an interest in doing so, unless, like the execrable DeVos family, they make money from the charter school business. Maybe these billionaires just have education on their radar at the moment and will go after Social Security next.
Another excellent example of individuals with too much wealth, it doesn’t just corrupt you, it makes you into an utter douchebag. An amazingly clever man in such a narrow regard that allows him to start fantasizing everyone else belongs under his thumb.
Reverse the last three major Republican tax reduction packages and the impact will be felt by less that 2% of the country, I’d wager.
Thanks again to ProPublica
Thanks for doing classic old-style journalism here. Yep, follow the money. And imagine how hard it would be to do that without the anemic campaign finance laws we currently have… yikes.
ProPublica is a superb resource and this ‘introduction’ is done with their usual thoroughness but I confess to a certain degree of boredom with the subject and disgust with a system that makes it both possible and newsworthy.
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” – Frédéric Bastiat
Yass doesn’t seem particularly interested in the trappings of extreme wealth.
Yess, he does. The power to ruin other people’s lives in invisible ways. Power is the biggest statement piece for the wealthy there is.
.
Prosecute all these Mother F*ckers. Lock them up!
I really enjoy the ProPublica articles here.
I connected to the story of this little shmoo reading that he made big money on the Black Monday crash of 1987. I was a brand new mom, with a 2-month old baby, using some of my time to explore the market – never had any experience at all in investing. I had just rolled over some money from a 401k into an discount broker IRA account, and lost $10k. It was quite a blow to my ego. But I just kept with it and learned a lot and even did some futures trading in another account I set up, just for the hell of it. Did ok, but nothing like this guy. Sad how money can take over your life, and I am glad the appeal was just not there for me. I liked charting my trades on my new computer more than anything else.
I don’t know who once said this:
“The money you have gives you freedom; the money you pursue makes you a slave.”
No one needs a Billion dollars. There needs to be a net worth tax, anything in excess of 500M should be taxed at 90% or more. At 90% that would still give these chumps another 50M, more than the net worth of 95.5% of people in the US
People like this guy, Peter Thiel, the Publix heiress, are simply antisocial parasites whose continued existence is deeply detrimental to the public interest. Accordingly, they should be stripped of every dime in a RICO proceeding that “arrests their money.”
Let them appeal to charity for survival.
Great article about one of the oligarchs who is actually funding the GOP for profit.
By the way the horse race betting story at the beginning reminds me of a story about Ada Lovelace (the inventor of software), who tried a similar strategy in the 1920s to raise money to fund the first computer but failed because her mentor’s analytical engine wasn’t up and running yet.
Right. Any schmuck can mortgage himself to the eyeballs and get a McMansion, or a Bentley, or whatever. The truly wealthy are into dominating others.
Of course they have an interest. They don’t want an educated citizenry to challenge them. That’s why the Texas Republican Party has a platform attacking the teaching of “critical thinking skills” in education.
If public education is abolished, children either won’t be educated at all, or, if their parents can pony up, they will attend charter schools that are modeled on “tough love” [sic] juvenile delinquent boot camps, or on Liberty University and other fake schools.
So what the kids will get in terms of a curriculum is brutality, rote memorization, and Jesus. Billionaires want obedient wage slaves, not educated citizens.
If you had only stayed in your lane …
…been on many paths, many lanes – 
Which one do you think I should have stayed in? 
Which one do you think I should have stayed in
HA! When you figure your “should have”" out and I figure my “should have” out, then we’ll talk.
Just don’t spend too much time trying to figure it out is all I can offer.