Celebrities like Taylor Swift have long used a little-known Federal Aviation Administration program to shield their private jets’ flight records from public view. Now ICE is using the program to hide information about its deportation flights.
Celebrities like Taylor Swift have long used a little-known Federal Aviation Administration program to shield their private jets’ flight records from public view. Now ICE is using the program to hide information about its deportation flights.
You’re literally talking about herself and her past creations as some illegitimate ownership. Tax her wealth away, criticize her insufficient philanthropy, but saying she has not earned the money generated from her own personal brand and performances is nonsense. Even if you think she’s due less of a percentage of the profit that the Swift brand has produced, the lights guys, the ticket takers, and the producers aren’t such a large percentage of that brand that she’s not still a billionaire. Individual people can be popular enough for millions of people to give them money and simply doing a job for them doesn’t make you a partial owner of that person’s personal brand.
Again, where is the difference to Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos?
Actually talking about personal brand, we need to add Elon Musk to the mix. We see that Tesla is strongly dependent on the brand of Musk, while not providing anything unique in their products. Thereby by your logic Musk deserves all his billions and the workers at Tesla got compensated the same way that the people at Swifts brand got compensated.
You retain the logic that the capital owner is right to be the billionaire, because he or she generates the billions off what they own with minimal work put in, while the workers are compensated much less for what they work.
You cannot criticize the US oligarchy without including people like Taylor Swift. It is the same oligarchs working in the same way, favored by the same system and exploiting workers in the same way.
The difference is literally between capital and a really rich worker. Capital is wealth extraction, they have accumulated wealth and therefore they should accumulate more wealth for reasons. The value in their investment is created by others and they nevertheless extract a percentage for doing nothing. If the workers could organize and buy their own equipment, the business would continue on just fine and they’d make more money.
Swift’s business is Swift. The Swift crew can replace the crew of a similar size for another performer and it will not boost the sales for that performer at all. There’s nothing extractive there because the extra value is due to her being involved. She’s no doubt got investments where she’s extracting value of workers through her capital, but it’s not meaningfully the case in her core business.
The Musk question is valid. His business do make more money simply because he’s involved, so you could say some of the extra “value” is due to him as its creator (he’s still extracting labor value from his employees as well though). He gained that stardom through appropriating the work of others though, so the issue is less his stardom and more the previous abuse. The additional value he generates is already stolen, whether or not it stems from his personal brand now. And also we should acknowledge that little of his company’s value stems from the actual sales to end consumers. Some people buy cars because Musk is CEO, but that doesn’t remotely account for the inflated market value of Tesla.
Swift isn’t a trading bubble. She sells more things and to more people because she’s doing it, and the people buying it enjoy the product they’re getting.
Billionaires shouldn’t exist, because our society doesn’t benefit from allowing that level of accumulation. They should be taxed away to serve the public good, or failing that be giving it away to worthy causes as fast as possible, and it doesn’t seem like Swift is doing that. So she’s bad in that she has immense power to do good and isn’t doing so, but there’s a very meaningful difference between wealth extractors and simply being a superstar who can provide value (and accumulate the wealth from selling that value) completely out of scale to any other worker.