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Comment by csin | Hacker News Reader

I don't have an opinion on the moral aspect of being a billionaire.

I just want to point out that billionaires don't just magically create more money for charities. Someone had to lose that money.

For the sake of simplicity, lets say... Goods & services were priced optimally to reduce the middle classes disposable income. The billionaire throws the poor-and-starving a bone every now and then.

Should the middle class have more disposable income? Or should charities get their bone? It's a matter of philosophy.

Being rich is being in control. You get to decide who gets your money.

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Someone had to trade the money that ended up in the billionaire's pocket. Presumably they received something of more value to themselves than the money, otherwise they wouldn't have made the trade.

This applies on the employee side too: employees have the option to go into business for themselves and take their skills directly to the marketplace, but they make a choice to trade surplus profits beyond their salary back to their employer, usually for the security of knowing that they'll continue to receive a paycheck even if those profits never materialize. This was a very conscious choice for me last time I took a job - I looked at it as "Well, I'll be doing the same thing I was as an entrepreneur, but my employer bears the risk of it not working out in the market" - though I suspect most people don't think like that. It is a choice, though, and once I felt like taking more risks, I left.

You gain other intangibles being an employee... namely training, working within an industry and learning customs/norms, and meeting people.

I was an employee for years before I left to do my startup. I definitely thought about the purely monetary risk/incentive issues you raise, but I thought about many others:

- if I stay longer as an employee, will my training make my startup more successful?

- am I prepared to be alone, not relying on a boss to tell me what to do and provide guidance on my work quality?

- will I become isolated running my startup not relying on an employer for exposure?

- will being so independent make me more motivated or less?

There's no question I thought about monetary risk/reward, but it's so difficult to calculate any risk/reward with any new company. Often, all you have to go on are these softer questions that you have to answer for yourself.

>Someone had to trade the money that ended up in the billionaire's pocket. Presumably they received something of more value to themselves than the money, otherwise they wouldn't have made the trade.

That abstract reasoning seem to miss a lot. Where I live, rent is crazy expensive. Rich people own their own homes. Almost everyone I know rents, giving a lot of money to people who need it less than they do. (I don't even dream of ever owning a house here. A cheap one is >$1m.) It's like a Monopoly game near the end, all the money going one way. So sure, you could say not-being-homeless is 'of more value to themselves than the money' but it would be a weird way of putting it.

Moving may help, unless you have other serious ties (like your spouse's dream job, etc). Just saying.

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