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Comment by junofan | Hacker News Reader

> Can you give an example of a billionaire bringing tens of thousands times as much value as an average employee at a company? Imagine that they are not already a billionaire.

Yeah, Jeff Bezos took his idea for an online bookstore from working as an employee at DE Shaw and delivered way more value by systematically derisking the business over decades.

There was a market worth many trillions: online retail. When Bezos created Amazon, owning part of that company was very risky and therefore Amazon was nearly worthless. Now anybody can buy a share of Amazon. Bezos was compensated for the value he created by derisking.

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What you're talking about is using other people to leverage the value of your judgement, right? This is similar to what a manager does when they manage a team - they make sure that things flow well in the team or the whole project fails. In that case, at the end of the project, is it fair for the manager to get up and say, "I personally created all of this value because without me it wouldn't exist"? No, of course not. Because without literally everyone on the team who made a contribution it wouldn't exist.

Imagine Jeff Bezos trying to create Amazon literally _on his own_. It just doesn't math; it can't. The good judgement required to grow a company is definitely worth something, but it isn't worth like twenty thousand times more than everyone else involved.

Why can’t ‘good judgement’ at the right time be worth 20000x more than a mediocre judgement at the right time? (Or good judgement at a mediocore time?)

In the most extreme case, say some military general’s correct judgement to avoid launching a nuclear missile during a false alert, may be worth more than everyone else’s combined. i.e their ‘good judgement’ during a critical few seconds would be worth 8 billion times more than the average.

This only works if you're leveraging your judgement through other people. The people who put you in a position to make the meaningful judgement are just as important. For example, if the person who made the monitoring system that you're using to inform your decision didn't mess it up, then they're just as responsible for the good outcome. Same with the people who made the parts that they used to build the system and on and on.

It's still the same thing: Taking credit for other people's work and claiming it as your own. It's also probably a good reason to democratize decision making when there's a lot on the line. Because, ultimately, everyone suffers from the bad decisions that people in power make.

Leveraging other people’s work doesn’t invalidate your own work…

Even if assuming the ‘leverage’ is of overriding importance, Isn’t it fairly obvious that in this example the general could also make the wrong decision which will also leverage the work of millions, missile builders and so on, to a very negative outcome?

If that occurs, do the millions of folks who worked directly on some aspect bear collective responsibility? And the general’s decision then becomes inconsequential in the mass of millions of other decisions?

Your line of reasoning leads to an absurd conclusion in which no one’s decisions can have a disproportionate impact.

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