What would happen if all of the billionaires in America were to all die simultaneously from natural causes?

Well, I do feel like a lot would go wrong. The billionaires who shared their wealth… Philanthropy? Or did whatever that is would stop.

The stock market might suffer?

Some billionaires are very involved in their companies. Sudden loss of leadership like that could be really bad.

I think economically it would be bad.

Most of these billionaires made their fortunes on others backs.
Gates stole the ideas for the original IBM computers.
Musk bought the Tesla product. He didn’t invent it.

The government would be wiped out and all that irreplaceable expertise would be lost – joking of course. But what would happen if all the poor people were to die? Then you wouldn’t have an America.

A ballistic trajectory is very natural.

Possibly, we would have an influx of a lot of money into the government. Billionaires protect their money from taxes to an extent, but they usually cannot escape them completely.

Older billionaires I think have a lot in place to keep their work moving forward. Take Bill Gates, his organization that is funding the eradication of Polio would probably not faulter. Younger billionaires may not have an apprentice working for him yet, may not be sharing all of their methods and thoughts yet, may not have a will well set up yet, may not have children yet, may not have organizations set up yet to carry on their missions to make the world a better place, for those who do philanthropic work. Most billionaires would have these things in place though, because once they are in the multimillionaire range they would already be thinking about this and getting advice.

As far as being smarter and the world losing some intellectual brilliance, my guess is maybe a little of this would happen, but plenty of brilliant people are not rich, they do their work for very modest salaries. Being wealthy has many factors: understanding capitalism, pursuing wealth, having opportunity, right place and right time. Many of the original inventors of pharmaceutical and technology are the people who make the most money from their inventions, it is the people who buy the information and then use capitalism for gain.

Some businesses or family wealth might get squandered if the people who inherit squander the money or don’t understand the work of the person who was the original billionaire.

Possibly some of them would have had created less societal problems than if they were alive.

There would be some really expensive and cool funerals.

I’d celebrate.

JD Vance would become President.

There would be a small but noticeable drop in CO2 emissions.

There would definitely be churn. Their heirs might carry on with their parents plans, if they were old enough and in tune enough with what their parents were doing. Others might make a lot of bad decisions and lose much of the fortune. The stock market might get some jiggles as the businesses they owned and/or ran bounced back.

You mean like if they all happened to be in the Oval Office at the same time, and a massive tornado picked the whole thing up, billionaires and all, and dropped it in the Bermuda Triangle?

I’d just like to think about that for a little while.

Meanwhile, I sincerely doubt that our greatest geniuses are billionaires.

They have better things to do than just grub for money.

They all have about the same personality. While they’re usually smart, they feel more comfortable taking big risks. Musk, Gates, Jobs, Bezos… they are extremely adept at finding angles and taking the necessary risks to exploit those angles. Gates was obsessed with poker. When you look back, he was playing poker with Microsoft. They sold an OS they did not even have to IBM, then bought 86-DOS., A.K.A. QDOS (Quick and dirty operating system) from another company for next to nothing to “license” to IBM for a fortune. That may have been one of the most lucrative tech business deals in history and it was essentially a bluff hand of poker. The modern UI we all use with a mouse and “windows” was invented by Xerox engineers, stolen by Jobs, and then by Gates. The rest is history. None of those guys “created” anything. The exception was Gates mostly wrote the OS for the MITS Altair. Apple was created by Wozniac, Jobs just recognized the potential. That’s what these guys do. They see potential and exploit it. This generation has Musk and Bezos doing exactly the same thing. Most billionaires who did not inherit the cash earned it just like this, by exploiting angles and taking credit. If they all dropped dead, we may be down a few fancy gadgets but mostly, nothing would change. Perhaps the real innovators would get the credit they deserve.

There will never be another Taylor Swift.

Oh I forgot about that^

Do we have an estimate for this natural event?

Ideally the Monopoly board resets.

That mortality list would include most of the major recipients of interest on the national debt.