I don’t know if that’s a fair characterization generally, but it’s not the case with me and it’s actually a frustration/lament I have when discussing this topic.

I’m not particularly a fan of Musk or any of the current crop of billionaires or their companies. But I care about the principles and the practicalities.

There’s this tendency to say “There are terrible problems in the world. We need to fix them with money. Where can we get money from? Billionaires!”

But when you do the maths, i.e., total up all the wealth that billionaires have and divide it by all the people/causes in the world who “need more money”, you end up with basically nothing.

And that’s before you consider what the billionaires’ companies are doing - which in many cases involves things like making phones/goods/software/knowledge cheaper/free, which benefits everyone including poor people, making electric cars affordable and ubiquitous, which will benefit all humanity and the environment long into the future if it leads to climate change abatement, and creating millions of jobs including many for low-skilled people, and also that these companies do generate vast amounts of tax in the form of sales taxes, income/payroll taxes, and capital gains taxes when shareholders liquidate their shares, and you find that it’s not necessarily true that taking money away from these companies/owners would be net beneficial for society anyway; it could easily make the problems worse.

And now for the obligatory disclaimer - yes I know there are plenty of valid concerns about the merits and ethics of what companies do, and worker pay/conditions and externalities and other issues; but these are matters for regulators and consumers to consider and are separate from the principle of how billionaires should be taxed or how beneficial it would be for billionaires to be taxed more.

I’m also not in the U.S., and I see plenty of dysfunction in that country as well as many others - though we also see many people, including some of the world’s poorest people desperate to move there for a better life.

For what it’s worth I devote a large number of my brain cycles to contemplating how life could be better for the worst-off; I’ve spent much of my adult life dealing with health challenges that caused great difficulty in achieving steady employment and financial security, which I’ve now largely overcome, and do I think a lot about how the principles that helped me could be applied more broadly, including for people far worse off that I ever was. At this stage I find myself thinking there are certain things that could work, but a lot of it is just really really hard.