>By owning stock.
Yes often stock, although this can be confusing for ownership portions in private equity because the incorporation often does use stock as a form of ownership but not the publicly traded kind as one often thinks of (this why I prefer a more generic 'capital'). The key here is ownership of things that facilitate the production of goods and services. These usually represent by far the largest portion of wealth billionaires have, its almost never mostly horded as mostly unused or non-productive wealth but rather representative of ownership of productive assets that bring goods and services to fruition.
>I'm not sure that "on paper" is a particularly interesting qualifier. I'm not a billionaire, but most of my wealth, such as it is, is "on paper". I have some cash on hand to pay expenses (technically, a checking account, and less than $50 in physical bills and coins), but you're probably losing money if you're keeping most of it in cash and not investing it on something with returns.
A large portion of people have their assets mostly in real estate, vehicles, demand accounts, personal tangible assets. The median household stock ownership is $~50k of $~200k in median household net worth. Having most wealth "on paper" is very much a situation of note from the viewpoint of the common person, and your position puts you closer to the billionaires in this regard.
>IPOs
Stock ownership is literally the ownership of the company and thereby the productive capital. Wealth tax on stock is a punishment for owning productive assets, and also a punishment for creating productive assets. You are trying to sidestep this by arguing whether the purchase of the stock itself adds investment while ignoring the stock itself is a fractional title of the productive assets.
>It's questionable how much these investments actually benefit the community. For example, if labor is brought primarily from outside the community, then existing residents do not necessarily benefit from the spending, and they may find themselves priced out of their own community by the incoming labor force.
This is a fully informed acknowledgement you simply don't seem to care if the investments leave the community.
Your attitude seems to be something akin to, well, if the biggest productive capital holders want to leave then it probably doesn't matter for the community anyway. I can respect that. You know what you want and you're willing to work to get it.
I wish you the most sincerest of luck. Although I'm not in favor of these kind of zero sum games, I will definitely welcome the movement of investment out of California and into my state where it definitely will not benefit my community.