Hacker News Reader

Comment by xiaoma | Hacker News Reader

>Although NFL stars win big with pay, it's the Gates and the Zuckerburgs who loom high in our minds.

That's interesting. I have the opposite view: people in tech tend to earn more, but it's the LeBron James's and Taylor Swifts of the world that loom in our minds.

View on HN

People like LeBron James and Taylor Swift make most of their money from endorsements, and I'd argue that endorsement income doesn't really scale very well. There's a limit to what your brand is worth if you're a celebrity - you can make hundreds of millions of dollars by diversifying across a huge range of products but that's pretty much it. You'll never earn more than a small percentage of the marketing budget of the biggest company in any one market multiplied by the number of markets your celebrity brand is applicable to. Whereas a tech founder has a practically unlimited upper bounds to their net value; if you start a company that becomes the defacto monopoly in a space (operating systems and office software, or social media for example) your fortune tops out at some percentage of that entire market, multiplied by the number of markets you can leverage your product in to. That's a far bigger number.

I don't think that's true. Its common for a big name to negotiate a % royalty of gross sales not just points on the marketing spend e.g. U2 edition ipod. Its also increasingly common and amazingly lucrative to blur the endorsement/investment line and obtain equity e.g. Beats, Vitamin water etc.

The reality is that the chance that an individual can convert being significantly smarter than the rest of their generation into becoming the largest shareholder in a de facto monopoly in a particular tech space is negligible. Whereas the chance of converting being significantly better at basketball than the rest of their generation into becoming a multimillionaire basketball star (with or without well-planned endorsements) is extremely high, with only injuries and attitude problems to hold them back.

If you're a young LeBron James (or Usain Bolt or Lionel Messi) your chances of becoming a multimillionaire owe very little to where you start and who you meet. Talent in sport is very efficiently identified, promoted and developed. You can't expect the same probability of outstanding success from a young person with the same personal characteristics as Mark Zuckerberg.

Startup founders are rolling the dice with Taylor Swift and the musicians. Massive talent coupled with attitude helps a fair bit, and above average talent is a basic requirement. But the sharpest minds have no reason to expect they'll make it to the top, and not everyone that makes it to the top owes it to "genius"

Yes, tech founders are making more money, but athletes and musicians are more famous.

Unsurprisingly brains tend to win at the economic game while physical talents dominate the social one. Of course being truly exceptional at either can help a person with the other.

... and there's hundreds of millions(billions?) of people who wouldn't know any of those names.

That's mostly a factor of disjoint cultural spheres. I don't know the first, I vaguely associate the second with music but I wouldn't recognize her voice or any of her music (assuming she sings). They could both be movie stars I really have no clue, they're both in a bin labeled 'celebrity, safe to ignore' together with a whole pile of other names that I do know but refuse to further invest in because there is limited time in a life and if you waste it on the celebrity pages then you end up with a less interesting life.

Someone published a plug-in a while ago to remove a certain group of celebrities from your life, I've been toying with the idea to extend that to a more general solution to ban news about people from an extensible list from your life.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com