>The former is ludicrous to the point of being a strawman, and I don't understand what it proves by being true. The latter is trivially true and demonstrates that billionaires do choose to passively grow their fortunes.

The point is that it's a direct refutation of the real strawman argument: that Michael Dell, self-made billionaire, is an idiot because he could have _possibly_ made more money at some point by engaging in a different economic activity. He didn't become a billionaire by passive investing, he became a billionaire by actively building businesses, which he continues to do.

WRT to liquidity let's say that Dell wanted to invest $15B over 2013 in the stock market. That's $70MM every single trading day of the year. The SEC, thinks that $20MM in a calendar day is a large investor that could affect markets, and require 13H form registration. So it's clear the SEC at least doesn't agree with the premise that a single billionaire cannot affect the market.

That's not the argument you were responding to, though. This was: "His investment and turnaround of Dell was successful to be sure, but not nearly as spectacular as the article seems to be implying."

I think you might be interpreting the original claim too harshly. Yes, literally parking $15 billion in the SPX wouldn't have worked (or at least, he couldn't have done so immediately without altering prices).

But attacking that example doesn't diminish the spirit of the claim. If we step back from the SPX and talk about investing in a diversified portfolio of equities in general, it's fully possible to quickly invest $15 billion without meaningfully altering the price. The reality of the past decade's bull market is that Michael Dell could have invested $15 billion into the market and turned it into $26 billion.

Of course, that's just the positive claim; it remains a normative as to whether or not he should do anything. But from a purely numerical perspective: yes, he could have invested in diversified stocks and gotten a comparable return.

Responding to your edit:

> So it's clear the SEC at least doesn't agree with the premise that a single billionaire cannot affect the market.

Rule 13h-1 isn't a useful heuristic here, for two reasons:

1. It was philosophically inspired by, and designed to track trading activity of, HFT firms. In particular, the idea is to keep a closer eye on very fast trading activity which could suddenly correlate in the same direction. If the aggregate activity of many amateur investors begins to correlate it's not necessarily a problem; it is a problem if many traders over a certain threshold begin to correlate strongly. Notably, this is why the rule includes a "circuit breaker" clause for halting trading.

2. The rule specifically excludes ETFs exchanging hands. In other words, this rule wouldn't apply to someone who approached a very large firm with billions of dollars to pour into a collection of ETFs.

You're moving the goalposts with each post.

These are the questions:

Could you have made $2700 in 2018 out of $1500 in 2013 easily by investing in an index? Yes.

Could Michael Dell have used the exact same method to make $27B in 2018 out of $15B in 2013 by investing in an index, without changing the conditions of that index such that the method wouldn't work? Yes.

You seem to now be focusing on the question "Is Michael Dell a stupid dumb idiot or a saint?"

You're assuming that investing in stocks does not create economic opportunity for people.

Of course it does, every bit as much as if the person created a company with the money instead.