$500,000 is nothing to billionaires, or even people who make hundreds of millions a year. It’s a lot to average folks like us, but to them it’s the equivalent of going to the casino with money they can afford to blow.
But I do think you’re right about passing it on to the greater fool. They bet it’ll be the next hot product, regardless if they know it sucks or not. Then some bigger bag of money will come in and buy it up, thinking they’ll be able to somehow milk a sustainable profit out of it. You’d think by now that VCs would be smarter about the boom and bust of tech startups, but alas…
The bigger fool might also be the taxpayer. Oops the company we funded vanished - now we have a $500k loss to write off…
Overall billionaires wasting their money to pay for idiots that then waste it in consumption would be a tax positive, I believe. We should encourage that behavior instead of them buying assets and then extracting rents like the parasites they are. I don’t care if they get to write off the money they lose from their income.