Ctrl-F “employees”
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It’s crazy that so many of these companies with billionaire founders have thousands of employees who are not billionaires, nor have a meaningful stake in the decisions the company makes. Wonder what that’s about.
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It’s crazy that so many of these companies with billionaire founders have thousands of employees who are not billionaires, nor have a meaningful stake in the decisions the company makes. Wonder what that’s about.
Just because these companies have built amazing products that people want doesn't mean they still don't actively take advantage of their own employees. It isn't black and white.
If I dump all my time and savings into founding a company and it fails, will my employees bail me out and help me get back on my feet?
Second, the point here is that PG is misapprehending (or deliberately obfuscating) what people mean by “exploitation.”
When Marxists talk about exploitation what they mean is that employees (workers) are not paid the full value of their labor. This is usually explained away with “risk profile” by capitalists, as you did above, but most employees don’t have a choice to accept a higher risk profile in return for getting paid the full value of what they produce.
Would it be nice if employees were given options to wiggle fixed comp to adjust to their own risk profiles - so they could choose more guaranteed pay with less risk, or more possible upside with more risk? Sure, absolutely. But I don't see how that should be a requirement, nor do I think companies not offering part-ownership are doing something wrong.
And I don't understand why employees would ever be compensated for the "full value of their labor". When you work for a company, your labor generally only makes sense within the context of the larger organization. Could that context explain the differences between what employees produce for the company, versus what they are paid?
This is a good point. I've never understood why people who claim the full value of their labor is being stolen bother to involve themselves with the purported thieves at all. Why not work independently and take the "full value" of your labor for yourself?
The answer is of course because your Vue.js skills (or what have you) are not very valuable on their own without the whole organization; being capital, management, customers, suppliers, etc...
Would it be increasingly easy to convince yourself that it was actually all just you? Not the employees, not the hand full of high producing employees, certainly not the infrastructure provided by the government and society that enables wealth collection.
No, it was all the efforts of the Billionaire. I mean, you do have a billion dollars to prove it...
Full disclosure: Not a billionaire
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If billionaires build, they have to build something. That something should have value. Throwing money at creative destruction à la WeWork isn't building value but Adam Neumann sure made out well as did BenchMark.
At a company / systemic level, if say Musk or Bezos fail right now, their companies might be at risk and that can lead to thousands of people unemployed. But they already reaped the fruits high reward you're talking about.
And a LOT of people take the risks you're talking about, since new businesses are started everyday. But we're talking about billionaires in this context, and the current crop took a risk that the general population would consider it negligible.