You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more
Your job, @fmanjoo, only exists because Carlos Slim - a Mexican billionaire - bailed out the New York Times in 2009 and saved it from a $1.1 billion debt cliff.
There's a lesson there.https://twitter.com/fmanjoo/status/1093303211820146689 …
So, @fmanjoo, billionaires don't swim in cash a la Scrooge McDuck because cash depreciates. Instead they buy securities e.g. share warrants in @nytimes, allowing issuers or their groups to service debt, survive crises and create jobs, such as your own.https://twitter.com/fmanjoo/status/1093539440130023424 …
You don't have to like billionaires to like an abundance of risk capital. I like people who invest in businesses like new healthcare startups, electric cars, and reusable rockets. This creates jobs. I like jobs. Therefore I like risk capital. Billionaires provide it.
To do $250MM convertible debt deals, e.g. the 2009 @nytimes bailout, it helps to have one guy worth $50bn. 500 people worth $2MM shouldn't invest $500K of their net worth in one high risk investment, but 1 guy worth $50bn can absorb a $250MM hit.https://twitter.com/fmanjoo/status/1093564524244791296 …
If you had ever closed a deal with just one investor, @fmanjoo, instead of just writing "soak the rich!," you would know why closing one with 500 is considerably more difficult.
But you're an opinion writer, not an opinion doer. It's understandable why you might not get it.
The existence of billionaires provides the scale of investment required for complex international enterprises - Tesla, SpaceX, and yes, the New York Times - to exist. Lose the profit motive and you lose the billionaires and the scale. See: Venezuela and the collapse of PVDSA.
Otherwise, the only organizations that will be able to do these deals are states and banks. States will make a hash of it because they're incompetent and banks are bureaucratic and expensive. HNWIs by contrast can move quickly and introduce dynamism into a market economy.
You referred to 500 millionaires. 1bn/500 = 2MM. If you meant "2x $500MM," it means you need to herd more cats to close the same deals. This means the deal terms will be worse for the borrower e.g. the NYT because that's what happens in syndications.https://twitter.com/fmanjoo/status/1093572577631465472 …
More friction, higher cost of funds = bad for the economy, harder to get financing.
Less friction, lower cost of funds = good for the economy, because the NYT can borrow cheaply and apply the savings on debt service to employee salaries and investment in the biz. @fmanjoo
And incidentally, one can be "too poor" for risk capital. The U.S. has a legal threshold of e.g. $1 million for "accredited investor" status. Anything below that and public policy may block certain investors from making certain kinds of investments.https://twitter.com/fmanjoo/status/1093572577631465472 …
The reason is because folks with a net worth of less than $1 million shouldn't make risky bets. They should be accumulating so they can retire.
Billionaires don't need to worry about accumulation, so they deploy their capital. Creating jobs like @fmanjoo's in the process.
Think bigger. One man with $1bn net worth wouldn't have been enough to save the NYT in 2009. Slim had $50bn. Without him, it's likely NYT would have folded during the Great Financial Crisis and your entire newsroom wouldn't exist. Chew on that for a bit.https://twitter.com/fmanjoo/status/1093576903749861376 …
"But why would it have folded?"
Because in 2009, regulated banks, the @nytimes' only other financing option, had their backs to the wall, wouldn't really start lending again for years, and the NYT needed to refinance. Bank-sized family offices saved a lot of good businesses.
The best responses to this thread: "durr haven't you ever heard of a PE fund? We don't need billionairz to make investments 'cause we have those!!!111!" The stupid. It hurts.
Another favorite. Wealth isn't zero-sum, people. It's not like rich people have "our stuff" because they're rich. They have money, which they spend, which keeps other people employed.https://twitter.com/delmoi/status/1093648916292214784 …
e.g., Jeff Bezos is "rich" because he owns a lot of shares in a company which he turned into a global juggernaut. People will buy those shares at their fair market price. To the extent his wealth derives from the value of Amazon stock, it was wealth created ex nihilo, not stolen.
Amen. The perennial gale of creative destruction giveth and it taketh away. See: Theranos, where the risk of a potentially very lucrative venture was borne by billionaires - and the bet went south.https://twitter.com/TurbulenceFlow/status/1093669161782439936 …
Billionaires didn't force NYT to take out a $1.1 billion loan, nor was anyone obliged to step in and refinance it. The subprime crisis wasn't created by HNWI family offices but by middle management compensation at G-SIFIs + lax rules around risk retention. https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1093866963556880384 …
Oh, @mattyglesias, *and* something referred to as the "Greenspan Put," whereby the Fed carried on a ridiculously expansionary monetary policy for decades, at the behest of the U.S. political class, which manifested itself as rampant asset price inflation.
What's the word for a person who has $500MM? Quincentimillionaire? Nobody appears to have used it before (per Google) but, seeing that the "it's better to have 2 people with $500MM instead of 1 billionaire" argument is a thing now, I think we need a word.https://twitter.com/prestonjbyrne/status/1093575131207819267 …
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.
