Whales on X, top 1% of American households hold 30% of US wealth, a massive 44.6 trillion. Now on one hand that sounds pretty bad that 1% own that much wealth. On the other hand, whenever the news talks about economics they get so much wrong that I feel like I have to add at least this clarification. Billionaires technically have billions of dollars but it's not in the mattress where nobody else can get to it or have any benefits from it. No, it's employed. All their money is employed. It's invested. It's either in a business that's operating, it's in stocks that are boosted by their ownership, it's in banks where the bank can then lend it out.

If you didn't have people who had more money than they needed to spend you wouldn't have much of a country. You need to have some people, and ideally lots of them, who have so much more money than they have a need to spend it that it gets employed in places that it wouldn't normally go. Do you know why the United States has such a good entrepreneurial culture and other places don't? Here's why. If you told me Scott you're doing better than just getting by, you are saving a little extra money so you're saving 10% of your paycheck every year and you're doing good, you saved up $100,000 in your retirement account and it's growing 10% a year, that's not enough for me to invest in a startup. Are you kidding? I'd be like oh my God I'm going to need every penny. I'm not going to take a chance on a startup.

But if you give me a hundred billion dollars and say here's a hundred billion, what the hell am I going to do with a hundred billion? If I tried to consume all day long the most expensive things a person can consume I wouldn't even get close to that. So what does the world need? Okay, to go to Mars. So that's how you get Mars. You don't get Mars unless you also have 1% of the top Americans own 30% of the wealth. You don't get Mars and there's probably a whole bunch of things you don't get because you're not going to get the big crazy investments that sometimes work out. You need somebody to be crazy enough. How do you think Uber got started? It was just a whole bunch of rich people who could put in massive amounts of money because they had it and then that one works out. They don't all work out.

So I think that when we look at how much the rich people own, as someone with an economics background I say ah that kills me. I know it's unfair and I do understand the argument. It's just that the whole system depends on our smartest people having the most money. You don't want to take the money away from the best investors and give it to the people who are buying cigarettes and wine. Now if they need health care and food, well then yes we got to do something about that. But you don't want the smartest people not to be making the decisions. You want Elon Musk to have a trillion dollars. Well obvious example. Do you think the world would be better off if Elon Musk had his 250 billion whatever he's worth or do you think the world would be better off if he had half a trillion? Well what is he doing with his money? Has he spent it on his big mansion? I don't believe he has one. Has he spent it with gold encrusted candy or something? I don't know, whatever rich people do. No, he's building new businesses. He's putting satellites up. He's going into space. He would do more of that. So we have to keep it in perspective.

Here's potentially some good news in the Daniel Penny case. And I can't believe that the public is just finding this out. So his trial started and now we have learned that Neely, the person who died tragically, he was the erratic guy who was threatening people on the subway and Daniel Penny put him in a chokehold and he died soon after. But here's what we didn't know. When police arrived he was still alive and he was already in recovery hold. In other words the way he was being restrained when police arrived was not in a way that would be dangerous. He had already released the more dangerous hold for a less, you know, more of a recovery hold they call it. And he was breathing and his heart was beating when police came there. Police instead of giving him mouth to mouth because quote he seemed like a drug user, so they gave him Narcan instead. So Narcan as if it were an opioid overdose. Probably it wasn't because the Narcan would have worked otherwise. But we will need to find out more about what he actually died from.

But if you tell me that the police arrived when he was alive and they administered what appears to be the wrong kind of first aid, is Daniel Penny going to be liable for anything? This feels like one of those situations where the criminal case will release him and the family will sue him and ruin his life because they could probably get a majority which is all you need for a lawsuit to say oh yeah the majority thinks you probably did something wrong so you need to give us a billion dollars that you'll never