https://x.com/bskimike22802/status/2058934662337007833?s=51&t=cLq01Oy84YkmYPZ-URIMYw
"People get their mental model — that wealth is like water in a drought or food in a famine... But you can't hoard investment. If you have stock in a company, that's not hoarding, that's investing. And investing is more like farming — you definitely want to farm in a famine."
Operating costs run $25 to $50 million per year. Every dollar of that — fuel, provisions, maintenance, docking fees, port services — circulates into local working-class economies. Industry economists have documented a 2x to 3x multiplier: for every dollar spent operating a large superyacht, two to three dollars of economic activity are generated in the surrounding community.
"Let's say you start a burger joint and you have 10 employees... People love your burgers. So you open a second outlet. By the time you've opened a thousand outlets, you are a billionaire. At what point did that money all of a sudden become unethical? There was one outlet, then there were two, then there were three."
"On day one, you get full health care. The same health care program that our senior executives get, the same one I'm on."
"Even though I'm going to give away the majority of my wealth, if I do my job right — the value to society and civilization from my for-profit companies will be much, much larger than the good I do with my charitable giving."
"You don't want to create dependence with your wealth... Does this giving create dependence or independence? You want to do things that create independence."
Jeff Bezos didn't hold a press conference about food deserts. He wrote a $4 billion check to actually fix them.
"I pay billions of dollars in taxes. And if people want me to pay more billions — let's have that debate. But don't pretend that's going to solve the problem. You could double the taxes I pay and it's not going to help that teacher in Queens. You can't connect those two things. Not logically."
I will make this simple. The day one of these 'Tax the Rich' Democrats files using nothing but the standard deduction, takes zero itemized deductions, and voluntarily pays DOUBLE what the IRS says they owe — publicly, with a published return — that day I will begin to listen. Until then, they are as useful as a cordless extension cord and about as principled as a used car salesman with a loyalty oath.
I work in a high-need career tech district. I teach the kids the public school system gave up on. More federal money is not what those kids were missing. What they were missing was someone who refused to give up on them — and that has never been funded by a continuing resolution.
"If we have a problem at Amazon, we do the five W's and try to get to a root cause. We try to find a root fix. And when we fix it at the root, you're fixing it forever. What we don't do — because it doesn't work — is point fingers and blame people. Might feel good for ten seconds. But doesn't accomplish anything."
The wealth the left screams about doesn't sit in a vault doing nothing while people go hungry. It builds. It employs. It powers supply chains and server farms and rural delivery routes and construction crews and port workers and ship crews and local shops and everything downstream from all of them.
"We live in the wealthiest country in the world. America is the greatest country in the world. We have more entrepreneurial dynamism here than anywhere else in the world. This is the best time to be alive in America."
