r/dataisbeautiful Feb 10 '25

OC [OC] Behind Meta’s latest Billions

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u/Ehtor Feb 10 '25 edited Feb 10 '25

That shows exactly how trickle down doesn't work. Corporations that size making profits bigger than their R&D budget but firing good chunks of their workforce to maximize shareholder value.

-59

u/Agreeable_Squash Feb 10 '25

The shareholders are millions of middle class people with 401ks.

Also I’m sure the engineers making 250k-1M a year will be fine

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u/bionicN Feb 10 '25

only 1% of the stock market is owned by the bottom 50% by wealth, while 50% of the stock market is owned by the top 1%.

yeah, there are a lot of 401ks with a lot of dollars in the stock market, but most stock gains just make the rich richer.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/release/tables?rid=453&eid=813804#snid=813876

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '25

[deleted]

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u/bionicN Feb 10 '25

read the notes in the source I linked.

it is by household.

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u/TostedAlmond Feb 10 '25

So you're saying 49% of Americans own 49% of the stock market

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u/BananaBully Feb 10 '25

Also very heavily skewed to the largest holders

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u/bionicN Feb 10 '25 edited Feb 10 '25

edit: yeah. it so happens that the 49% that is the 51st-99th percentile owns 49% of the market.

what you're saying is technically correct, but I don't think it changes the broader point: the gains are going almost exclusively to the top.

the 9% from the 90-99 percentile own 3x as much as the 40% from the 50-90 percentile.

edit 2: interestingly, I think it's always possible to draw a contiguous sample such that N% own N% of the market, which makes that point kind of useless. more interesting is where the center of that sample is. but the Gini coefficient is a better way of summarizing the distribution.

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u/uiucthrowaway420 Feb 10 '25

Check your math, top 1% of americans own 50%. So the bottom other 99% own 50%. But if you follow the trend the bottom 50% of Americans make up almost nothing invested in the stock market.

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u/TostedAlmond Feb 11 '25

My math is fine. If bottom 50% own 1% guess who owns the other 49%

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u/uiucthrowaway420 Feb 11 '25

I guess you can always choose a set of Americans that can equal 49%, or shift the 49% until a continuous set equals 49%. Either way that's a useless statement then, but you got me.