Billionaires should not exist

The slogan assumes billionaires are zero-sum extractors — that the existence of a billionaire mechanically corresponds to wealth taken from others. For wealth created by founder-led growth in industries that didn't exist before, the math doesn't work. The wealth was created by the company existing; it was not removed from anyone else's pile.

The alternative most people imagine — confiscation above some threshold — has been tried. The actual result is paper-only wealth held in trusts, in offshore vehicles, in unrealised gains, in foundations, and in jurisdictions that didn't sign onto your tax regime. The behaviour you produce is wealth hiding, not wealth redistribution.

The productive version of this argument is about how billionaire-level wealth gets taxed (often badly), how power concentration gets checked (often poorly), and how charitable foundations get accountability (often none). All of those are real problems. Disappearing the people doesn't fix any of them; it produces refugees from your tax regime and removes the funders of a lot of basic research nobody else will pay for.