He’d have to give them this as equity in the company, he’s not liquid for that amount. None of the “richest Americans” have near the amount of wealth they appear to have.

This is what people mean when they say workers should own the means of production tho

I got into an argument years ago with someone who appeared to start on the conclusion that co-operatives must be bad and tried to work backwards from there.

There was this notion that it was somehow unfair for one delivery driver to earn $1,000,000 and another to earn $10,000 just because they worked for different companies, since it was mostly the efforts of other people in the company that gave it its value. He wasn't able to then take the tiny extra step required to apply the same logic to CEOs and shareholders.

I realized there's a kind of proximity bias; billionaires are so far removed from our lives that we just accept their existence as part of how the world works, whereas if a regular employee like us is getting something we're not then the jealousy becomes palpable. It's the same thing that drives hatred towards minorities and immigrants.

You could just use the top .1% and not drop that figure much. The differences as you go up are huge.

Anybody saying that co-ops don't work or whatever should check Mondragon which thrives in thoroughly capitalist Spain.

The Behind the Bastards episode about him is really mind blowing. Like, he sucks way more than you could ever imagine. When I was in college, Amazon was the company that you could get used textbooks from. Now they're the default web shopping platform.

Going by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis the 1% are valued at ~49 Trillion works out to be ~$145k per person. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLT01026

So that was 5 years ago. Which means he could give them all a $20,000 annual raise and still be making money.

Will that keep them from parking like assholes?

And then the State Department starts flooding Amazon warehouses with drugs and guns to ruin the co-op and make people nostalgic for the good ol days when the Bezos junta was around to control the gangs.

Some people who don't know any better would say that poor Jeff innovated the world into a better place by inventing Amazon, that he's being justly rewarded by the free market.

But Amazon became so successful because it killed off all of it's competitors - not through a better service, but using investor capital to artifically lower it's prices, systematically targeting it's rivals and taking them over.

Amazon is so profitable because it has killed the market and replaced it with itself, and the tech giants and uber and so on are doing exactly the same thing.

So turn it into a co-op, let it's workers decide if they can piss on the clock or not. Give it's sellers a say in whether they want to pay 40% markup and hidden fees to get pushed to the top of front page. Amazon abuses workers, businesses and the market - this is a great solution to a problem that everyone ought to have, regardless of politics.

Math is beautiful.

I like the energy, but you're not going to sell 92 Billion dollars worth of stocks for 92 Billion dollars.

cooperatively owned

This usually means employee, or sometimes, customer owned. You described fair taxation and UBI/freedom dividends instead.

What needs to be nationalized with 99% shareholder dillution and zero compensation in the US is oil, weapons companies on the basis of their warmongering lobbying, and other zionist first rule over America media and political funding terrorists.

UBI is first and foremost power redistribution. The wealthy stay wealthy, and through economic growth and faster money multiplier, get even richer even at higher tax rates.