pg's reading of it is so blunt and misrepresentative that I'm nervous about what kind of content he's consuming.
But the meat of the point is: if the economy is growing at 2.5%, how do you sustain 15% over 5 years?
Look, I’m a startup guy, I buy into the premise that it’s an intensely value-creating activity. But I think it’s self-defeating to pretend like the monopoly and regulatory arbitrage problems don’t exist.
I get that PG and his customers need to be able to cash out, but also, the monopoly rentiers make it more difficult for startups to compete by buying up competitors early and offering crazy salaries that make startups uncompetitive.
All that said, the subtext here is that PG is providing politicians with stories they can tell, nobody in this conversation is trying to describe reality in the most precise or honest way.
"You're young, and usually young founders should make something that they themselves want. You don't have enough experience yet to know what other people need. But at the same time your own needs are uniquely valuable, because your needs predict future demand. You're the age when people start using new things. Whatever you and your friends start using now, everyone is going to be using in ten years. Since your intuitions about other people's needs are usually a crap signal, and your own needs are an especially valuable one, you should usually listen to the second signal; you should make something you and your friends want.
Making something you and your friends want doesn't mean you have to build a consumer product. Maybe you and your friends are molecular biologists, and there's something cool that could be done now to DNA that everyone else has overlooked. Maybe you and your friends are into drones. The idea doesn't have to have a wide appeal. It literally just has to appeal to you and your friends."
By growing better than the average?
The most poignant example is tobacco. Tobacco is a net-negative product for the world. But many people find it very valuable, because it helps them with the stresses of their life and they have a biological dependency on nicotine. And so, it’s a multi billion dollar industry. But, for the world as a whole, it generates negative billions of dollars. Because of the health cost and the cost of lost work. If you did 10, 20 years early then that’s a lot of human productivity burned.
Of course, most products are not tobacco. But every product is tobacco a little bit, I think, in the sense that they merely move some money from externalities into the product. In that sense, it’s not all value creation, it’s value siphoning or moving.
Im not going to disagree that externalities are everywhere though. The question is to what extent and if, after correcting for them, there are still products which create so much value they make their founders billionaires. I think the most obvious case for this are artists. JK Rowling sold her writing for over a billion dollars. The work was, as far I know, created pretty much solely by her. You can point to the book publishing system as a whole, but she has nothing to do with that. All she did was write some books and sell them to an already existing system.
You’re moving value later to value now, in the form of enjoying smoking.
Consider: if the conditions of our work were different, many people would not smoke. If nicotine didn’t happen to have a biological effect on the human brain, then nobody would smoke. The value created is only in the context of those constraints, and many more (including regulatory ones, which is why we see less smoking today).
I view it as a type of loan. Is loaning money a productive activity? Of course not, because no value is created, it’s merely moved. If the entire economy was just loaning money, then GDP would maybe go up but no value would be created. Smoking is a loan from the tobacco company. You get immediate relief, in the cost of more value paid back to society at a later date.
Consider: if the tobacco industry has sold 5 billion in tobacco products, but tobacco as a whole results in 20 billion dollars in lost productivity and healthcare, then the value generated is -15 billion dollars. In actuality the estimates are much worse, because typically models only consider healthcare cost, not suffering or lost productivity due to death. Suffering, too, has a cost. How well do people work when a loved one dies?
Growth comes from innovation, and innovators get rewarded with faster growth as non-innovators decline.
I suppose it depends on how broadly you define "innovation".
Lots of companies grow because of, among other things: regulatory capture, regulatory arbitrage, questionable use of other people's IP, offshoring, misclassification of employees/contractors, profit shifting and transfer pricing, subsidized predatory below-cost pricing, dark patterns, aggressive collection and monetization of user data, acqui-hires to stifle competition, implementing high-switching costs to create vendor lock-in, round-tripping, channel-stuffing, business models that intentionally externalize costs, outright fraud.
If we believed that the only people who should be morally allowed to benefit from asset appreciation are the people who actively work for that company, the entire economy would collapse.
For example, every pension fund, endowment, retirement fund, etc. are all invested in financial assets that they had NO role in. All they do is own something that become more valuable as other people labor and innovate! Shall we cast them as evil capitalists?
AOC’s criticism is that “own stock, share in gains” is not the same as earning money.
My position is that this is not a good thing.
Also, a large share of the value I add to society is attributable to the person who set up the institution I'm working in. I work hard and am friendly but without someone setting up an organization that employs programmers usefully, the most I can do for you is fix your Wifi. I would vote to keep paying the builders after they leave.
Look, I know this is a tech forum and we don't claim to be good at the social sciences, but this is a central debate and r>g, the idea that the rate of return to capital tends to exceed economic growth over the course of history, is a major result from Piketty's Capital In The 21st Century that people interested in "grow the pie" vs "trickle down" really ought to be familiar with. Even if you disagree, you ought to be able to articulate why, and "the average includes winners and losers" ain't it.
"But life has improved, r>g couldn't have been true forever" -- last time the inequality bubble popped because of a great depression and two world wars. The capital was incinerated, metaphorically and literally. It's a cautionary tale and we should aspire to do better.
Why is it a cautionary tale? Sounds like we should have a bunch of incinerations of capital, ideally let the capital mobilizers that are actually competent survive.
I haven't read the source but for one, there wasn't really even a US dollar until 1935. When banks failed, and they did unlike now when they artificially don't, you lost everything. There was no FDIC. All of those mechanisms are artificial and serve to make the banking industry large and profitable.
Not to mention currency debasement, another aspect of the modern world that makes finance uniquely profitable and, really, white collar work existent in any major form at all. It's ingenious. Since capitalism is naturally deflationary, as competition removes all profit over the long term, let's interfere and make it so workers make less money every working day. Hence, in order to make even the same amount of money each year, one has to either rise in the hierarchy, or argue for raises, which is inherently risky.
Basically, before 1935, it was hard to accumulate that much wealth. It wasn't generally backed by any nation state guarantee. Real estate has always been a great store of wealth, but it has physical limitations. The world since 1935 is now a world of nation state wealth guarantees. The only reason this amount of wealth is allowed to occur, is because of it. We took a strange path since 2008, when the banks were not allowed to fail. Everything eventually comes to pass.
I'm surprised someone who picked the name "engineeringwoke" has no love for FDR. He's the GOAT!
The largest bank in the US is #14 on the S&P by market cap. If the Federal Reserve is a conspiracy to make banks profitable, it is doing a poor job. More to the point: I challenge anyone who doesn't like the Fed and the compromise it represents (money printer exists, but is guarded from the politicians by a council of 12) to name their alternative. Hard money? Politicians can print? You picked "hard money." Let's go!
Everyone who learns about the Cantillon Pump thinks they would love to run it in reverse. This is because they don't understand that it does not run in reverse. It is not symmetrical. They underestimate the pain of a deflationary shock, where everyone (namely your employer) gets an incentive to not participate in the economy and then stops participating in the economy (namely by employing you). Rent and debt is still due, of course. This is the pain that inspired the USA to split from Britain (scrip/specie). This is the pain of the Great Depression -- you threw out that 1935 date like it was the culmination of a Bond bad guy plot, not the capitulation of a country tired of deflation. We even have the counterfactual: Germany, having just escaped the Weimar inflation, decided in 1929 to take the deflationary response to the Great Depression. It led them to a very dark place.
Returning to the USA: they weren't called "robber barons" because they failed to accumulate wealth. Capitalism does not guarantee competition (quite the opposite, strong property rights are the nexus of anticompetitive opportunity) which does not remove all profit over the long term, it squeezes it onto assets, which is where that unearned income we were talking about originates from. If you have ever heard or given a business pitch, attended a class in business school, or listened to a VC for 30 seconds you have heard some heinously anticompetitive scheme and their plan to leverage it for personal gain by turning it into an asset they own. Network effects, platform effects, two sided markets, returns to scale, etc etc etc. Usually they don't work, but when they do and you get a stock or a deed or a title to a money fountain (exploitation fountain, seen from the other side) you get to stack trillions while the competition spends decades trying to cross your capitalism-created and capitalism-guaranteed moat.
Yes, in recent times the money printer has been used to exacerbate inequality. But it isn't the cause of inequality -- certainly not if you look at what happened in the 1935: https://ceprdc.tumblr.com/post/87307310830/piketty-in-one-gr...
Turns out you can have an inflationary adjustment and unwind inequality and boost the economy at the same time, so long as you remember to tax the rich. FDR sends his regards!
You'd like Capital in the 21st Century.
I made this point many times a number of years back and gave up. It's incredible how an entire message board of HN that supposedly is extremely pro market competition, seems to entirely be unaware (or just collectively puts it's head in the sand) that the #1 strategy that most VC backed firms seem to target is "figure out out as quickly as possible how we can get out of having to compete with others". And they do so under the name of "a moat".
Building a moat is one of the most anti-market actions that can be taken. You hear commenters post non-stop about the ills of communism as it avoids market competition, but somehow every seems to just gloss over or ignore the fact that moats are designed to do the same thing and cause the same issue. Terrible allocation of capital.
If you think of inflation as money supply growth, or growth relative to gold, the economy has barely grown since 1971 when Bretton Woods was ended. However, the economy did grow in gold terms in the period beforehand. Why would that be? Is your theory from a textbook truly applicable or just a way of enforcing the current economic norms that heavily benefit nation states? If you force all assets to go up, you bleed your asset holders via tax as well. They don't want people to believe in ideas that could break their hegemony.
> Capitalism does not guarantee competition (quite the opposite, strong property rights are the nexus of anticompetitive opportunity) which does not remove all profit over the long term
This is a different conversation, regulatory versus monetary. It also weakens your r > g business book pseudoscience argument. I studied economics and finance enough, I don't need some cheap armchair economist slag.
> tax the rich
Nice, if I didn't need any more proof that this is just another diatribe based on another faddish idea about how to fix the economy. Wait, did I say that earlier? Something about how ideas can be used to control the bounds of policy, the Overton window.
You still haven't explained why we should expect hard money to fix America when hard money broke America in 1750 and America and Germany in 1929.
PG just completely misunderstands and hand-waves over this basic concept and makes the excuse that "hey we worked really hard and made an amazing product that people loved, we aren't harming anyone."
For one thing, founders and employees don't share equally in the high growth rate of the company even though at most a founder is working let's say 2x longer hours than a salaried employee. You can do nothing wrong but you're still taking more of your fair share by the basic structure of how the business is setup.
I think anyone who is running a successful company and doesn't have a path to converting to an employee-owned enterprise is immoral, especially if you have managed to capture $1 billion just for yourself while your median employee is just making market rate salaries, or maybe they happened to gamble on your stock options and have a modest nest egg about 1/100th-1/50th the size of your wealth as a founder.
So yeah, Jeff Bezos made $260 billion dollars, but an alternative that could have happened was "Jeff Bezos makes $50 million and every Amazon employee gets a much more fair share of the happy customers' money."
More importantly, if you have $1 billion in net worth, that means that you can choose to do anything with your life on a daily basis.
When I'm over here working my job in my cushy upper middle class life, it's still an objective truth that I need to be selfish in order to secure the future of my family. Nothing is guaranteed and we need to fend for ourselves. I can't stop working or the home finances collapse within months or a short number of years if I'm very lucky and have something significant saved up or my house paid off. I legitimately don't have the time or money to help many other people outside of my nuclear and extended family.
But when you have a billion dollars (and some people have hundreds of those and one person even has a thousand of those), that means you have no limit to what you spend your time on. You can do anything, and deciding not to work on capitalist endeavors anymore has zero chance of turning you destitute.
In other words, when you are a billionaire, what you choose to spend your time on says a lot about the content of your character compared to someone who is not that wealthy.
Paul Graham is out here giving speeches to rich kids at Oxford Union, but he could be spending his morning in the local soup kitchen or building homes with Habitat for Humanity. He could be mentoring people who are struggling to escape housing insecurity, or he could be working with advocacy groups to expand healthcare access and end childhood hunger.
He doesn't have to go to work every day like I do. But he is one of the people who has dedicated his life to capitalism, even after successfully taking care of his family for many lifetimes, and that says a lot about him.
What is fair? Obviously hours worked is one metric to determine what is fair. But another way to arrive at what is fair is through negotiation. Neither the founders nor potential hires are obligated to work with one another. The only way it happens is if an early employee believes the compensation they are offered by the founders is fair. If it was unfair, they would presumably reject the offer outright.
My first startup was one where I was hired because I was young and cheap. I could be paid in free lunches rather than 401k matching and decent healthcare plans.
Big companies often pay better salaries.
Your last sentence you’re saying it’s fair to make this assumption that most other jobs are worse.
So that means if a non-startup offered you a better pay package your assumption and bias might steer you away and take worse compensation to do the same job.
I ask you this question because I made a similar mistake in my youth. I took a pay and benefits cut for a startup because it sounded a lot more fun. 6 months later and the company was going under and I was out of a job.
There are also plenty of employees who just didn’t get a job offer elsewhere. When I took my first startup job I didn’t have a competing offer.
Meta is paying a Security Engineer (not a lead) $271,000/year to $347,000/year + bonus + equity + benefits across the following locations: Bellevue, WA, Menlo Park, CA, Washington, DC, New York, NY
I find it hard to reconcile that salary difference, and I think the only way to explain it is that startups offer dreams of upside like a smoky Vegas casino.
Working for Meta [1] is "boring" and corporate, but it's also objectively a better financial decision unless Glimpse becomes the next Uber. My point is that I am hypothesizing that tech culture encourages people (especially young people) to prefer objectively worse financial outcomes to do the exact same work at a more "exciting" startup company.
At the time you joined those startups, you considered those other opportunities to be worse, but I wonder if that was true or if that was perception? Of course, I don't intend to tell you that you were wrong, in fact I think it's highly likely you were right. I only mean to say that it's worth introspecting on the concept.
[1] Or insert any other large and slightly more ethical company, if we want to disqualify working for Meta due to its "evil empire problem."
But there are also genuine advantages that others simply might not see. For example, many would rather apply to work at a startup because it's an easier job to get than one at Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, etc., and not having to study as hard for interviews is a genuine advantage to some that's worth the money left on the table. Or for others, maybe they want a more casual work environment. Or others might just want startup experience because they hope to start a startup someday. Etc.
Your definition of "fair" is questionable.
If you're negotiating from a position where you've taken on debts and rent that you can't afford to pay, and time has run out to the point where you're desperate for a paycheck as soon as possible, that's unfortunate. But that's not the fault of the person you're negotiating for a job with. Exceptional cases aside, 95% of the time that's likely due to your own risk-taking, neglect, poor decision-making, or financial mismanagement. And you had a "fair" chance to not get into that situation to begin with.
But regardless of blame, it's certainly not the fault of the counterparty in your employment negotiations in that you're in that spot. Nor is it their responsibility. Nor should we want it to be! What kind of system would that be, exactly? A brutal one where many more people fall through the gaps than would otherwise. A much better system is the one we have, where people pay taxes, and do so at higher rates the more fortunate they are, and that tax money goes into programs like unemployment, which helps people in exceptional situations.
What's so unfair about this, exactly?
> What's so unfair about this, exactly?
We don't roll the same dices at birth.
Especially because in America at least, over 200 million people are born middle class or above. An even lower class in America is doing much better than many other countries in the world.
At what point in your mind does personal accountability come into play? How prosperous does a nation have to be for people to have some responsibility for the consequences of their own actions? Or are people never responsible?
When we're discussing policy for our society however it's too easy to blame people for the choices they made so we don't have to think harder. The world's complexity is beyond what the humans brain can hold at any single time. Some people are dealt bad hands, born in a difficult family, born in a body that slow them down or drag them down. Some people make one bad choice (even something mild like a financially unprofitable carrer choice) at 18 because millions of parameters that played since their birth compulsed their brain to make that choice at that moment in their life. Not even mentioning meeting the wrong people. You can do everything well and cross the path of someone who breaks you.
Truly and without getting too philosophical,looking back and learning about people's stories I've come to realize that we have little agency and by the time we understand how the world works and what we should have done instead it's often too late to change the outcome drastically.
To tie it all back to the topic of this thread, the 19 year old who's been pushed by his parents all his life to get good grades, study well, get involved in the right extracurriculars, ends up at Stanford, starts a startup because that's what people do around him, is told to apply to YC, is accepted, is taken care of by YC, tell me how much is he responsible for his success?
To me, this inspires empathy and care, and it's why I believe that society should have a very high floor. But discussions like these, and the current "eat the rich" zeitgeist seem to focus so much more on lowering the ceiling. Which to me is the wrong focus.
Luckily, we've never actually capped the ceiling, and it's unlikely we ever will.
There should be a ceiling or we reach the current state where accountability is nothing a million dollars can't buy.
More than one million people die of TB annually. We have a cure for it. Elon Musk could pay for testing and treatment distribution for the entire world without noticing a change in his wealth.
A million people a year.
Millions dead every year from TB. A curable disease.
I live in a country where “oopsy doopsy your insurance denied this so now you owe us 20,000” isn’t terribly uncommon and your employer can fire you without any warning or severance. “I need money for the rent this month” is not consistently some moral failing.
We might as well just say “I exploited my structural power over my employees and got a better deal for myself.”
Of course the employees agreed to the deal presented to them, what other option did they have? They aren’t like all these founders that have the luxury of being unemployed because their dad will pay the rent.
That’s another point I forgot to bring up entirely: PG also hand-waved over the quantity of billionaires from his accelerator that came from families of very decent means where they have the luxury of risking failure. The quantity of true rags to riches billionaires is extremely slim.
What? The employees had infinity other options! They could have negotiated harder. They could have declined the job. They could have taken a job somewhere else. They could have taken the risk to start their own startup, and been in the founder position, instead of choosing to be in the employee position and getting the security and reduced stress that comes along with it.
> That’s another point I forgot to bring up entirely: PG also hand-waved over the quantity of billionaires from his accelerator that came from families of very decent means where they have the luxury of risking failure. The quantity of true rags to riches billionaires is extremely slim.
Over 200M Americans come from middle class backgrounds are above. YC also provides founders with the funds to pay themselves while they start their company. I did YC when I had almost $0 to my name and no well-off family to rely on.
But you said earlier that YC pays founders for living expenses. What risk are YC founders taking?
In contrast, every startup I’ve worked at has offered equity in the form of options where I had to stake my personal finances just to own company equity. None of them granted shares to me as a reward for my labor. I was taking more of a financial risk than the founder of the company just to own a stake!
VC-backed Startups are much different than small businesses where founders take personal financial risks. The VC itself is also not taking any kind of outsized risk as it has mitigated that risk by betting on dozens of companies. They expect most of their companies to fail and leave their employees high and dry, but that’s not their problem and is baked into the formula.
Essentially VCs have plenty of capital and no ideas, so they pay outsized equity compensation to founders for ideas. But the early employees are just interchangeable implementers and get basically nothing by comparison.
If I started a cupcake truck with my friends, they wouldn’t be my friends anymore if I decided I get 50x their equity stake just because it was my idea.
In my opinion, our business systems have been allowed to get away with much more inequality than should be legal. Each caste is orders of magnitude away from each other rather than being linear steps above each other.
Importantly, people are free to walk away from a bad deal. If you don't like a store's wares, you can go to another store. If you don't like a job offer, you can apply to a different job. Freedom of choice creates competition, which puts pressure on buyers and sellers alike to actually come to terms.
Your post comes across as someone who is consistently in the seller position (selling your labor for compensation), and who's simply advocating for his own personal interests in wanting higher wages. But for some reason, you think your own personal opinion about exactly how much you should be paid is what the bar is for "fair", rather than the prices set by the market, that is, the repeated agreements by tens of thousands of people day after day for years.
And that perplexes me. Why are you so special? Why is your opinion or anybody else's opinion supposed to be the basis of what's fair? I've never met someone who's not just going to argue for their own interests here, exactly as you're doing.
If you don't think it's a good deal to work at a startup and get the equity that you're offered, then you can negotiate or you can just walk away from the deal and work somewhere else. There are many tens of thousands of jobs that I personally don't think are a good deal, or I wouldn't work there. But for other people, they are a good deal. I don't really understand where this belief comes from that, because you personally don't find it to be a good deal, that it's objectively unfair for everyone else, even as they're accepting it willingly.
> But you said earlier that YC pays founders for living expenses. What risk are YC founders taking?
I could have easily gone and gotten a job at Google and made a lot more money very easily. Instead, I spent a ton of time and effort trying to create something new in the world and take it from zero to one. That was a lot of personal sacrifice, giving up my nights and weekends and living off Ramen noodles and almost no money. Just that I could get something successful and useful enough to be in a position to realistically even apply to YC and hopefully get accepted. And I was still rejected twice before finally getting in.
If you think being a founder is so risk-free, so easy, and such a good deal because of how much equity you get to keep, then presumably what should happen is many more people should find the prospect attractive and become founders, relative to becoming early-stage employees, and that should drive up the prices that early-stage employees are able to charge.
Selling labor on the labor market, well, you can just go find whatever offer is on the labor market (e.g., your first five paragraphs)
You had to beat out a bunch of other people and get rejected twice in order to go the startup route. However, I think you are mistaking hard work and low pay for risk in this transaction.
There's no risk because, like you said, "I could have easily gone and gotten a job at Google and made a lot more money very easily." You can always go back to selling your labor on the market.
You aren't risking any personal property or savings. A college student is also living on ramen and giving up nights and weekends, but they are actually taking a bigger risk than a VC founder by paying tuition to the school.
What is happening here is that VCs/incubators are using scarcity as a quality filter since they're trying to buy good ideas/stake in early stage companies and dangle the founders' lottery ticket/casino jackpot to buy those ideas.
I think that startup founders are in weird sandwich between being exploited by VCs in the worst case and being unfairly over-compensated by them in the best case. I'm sure many of your early employees also worked nights and weekends just like you did, but they have less of an ownership stake than founders do.
Maybe the founder's scenario is similar to an NFL player, where average players have short careers and are left with broken bodies and dreams, while the star quarterbacks leave as billionaires. This is why the NFL has a players union.
The risk is the opportunity cost. Going and getting a job at Google pays a lot of money. Repeatedly starting and failing at startups, or getting rejected by YC, doesn't pay you anything. I was a student and then a recent grad with lots of debt, so I had all the normal risk of a college student living on ramen and giving up nights and weekends.
> I think that startup founders are in weird sandwich between being exploited by VCs
What makes an agreement between two parties exploitation, exactly?
> the star quarterbacks leave as billionaires.
I think it sucks that the NFL destroys people's brains and bodies. But why is it so bad that the star quarterbacks command such high pay?
There are many other definitions of fairness as well.
This comes back to the thread we’re discussing. What a fair wage means is a philosophical and moral question. Not just a math problem.
If someone inherits a business and earns higher wages than their workers is that fair? What did they do to earn that?
Hey, that 8 year old was willing to work in the asbestos factory, that’s just fair market value!
My word do people actually believe this. What theoretical econ 101 textbook are you living in?
Which of those would provide the most benefit to the world?
Grombobulous says "But he is one of the people who has dedicated his life to capitalism, even after successfully taking care of his family for many lifetimes, and that says a lot about him."
You're simply anti-capitalist. Please post about that instead of mounting personal attacks on people who make more money than you. And please cease telling other people what to do and not do! Try to put yourself into their shoes and think harder about their situation.
This is the most ironic comment I've seen in a while.
Nonsense. You are a simple study and you are envious. There are good reasons why envy is listed as one of the "Seven Deadly Sins". See Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Envy
Reading "St. Augustine on Envy" might help:
https://fountainofelias.blogspot.com/2019/08/st-augustine-on...
Thomas Aquinas on Envy:
https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3036.htm
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Envy:
People like you are so sociopathic and unaware that it's simply comedy.
> people who make more money than you.
One of the things I realized, as I made more money... was how much _easier_ every aspect of earning gets, as you are already earning more, and as you need it less.
We live in a system that almost _automatically_ overallocates wealth to people who do little for society. It's pathetic.
Jeff Bezos famously took an $80,000/yr salary. Bezos didn't make $260 billion, or anything within 1/1000th of that. He built a company, that through some inane estimations his share of which might be $260 billion.
For him to not have that imaginary $260 billion would be for the company to not be built at all. So, if that's what you want, you're at least consistent... but no one else would think that a particularly good idea. Quite a few people like being able to order things online and receive them quickly. They don't want to have to go back to stomping through Walmart, hoping that the store has what they need.
I think part of the problem is that if you can slap a label on someone of "Eleventy billion dollars", everyone's brain malfunctions and treats it as a literal fact, regardless of the truth of the label. When you don't want billionaires to have billions, what you're saying is that you don't want them in control of those billion dollar companies. But do you not want the companies to exist, or do you just want someone else in control of those companies? And who?
This seems to come up on every thread like this. Owning 9% of a company that generates ~$80B in profits and employees 1.5m+ people is literally a massive amount of wealth and putting a dollar figure on that is both straightforward and accurate.
Anyone who owns a house can understand that liquidity and net worth are two different things. But shares of Amazon are far more liquid than a typical home.
In case you need a real example, Bezos personally funds Blue Origin by selling around $1B worth of Amazon stock each year. That's 11000 people earning their salaries + a huge amount of capital investment that are all funded from this so-call "imaginary" money. I can assure you that each time those people get a paycheck, it's just as real as yours.
Sure, but we also attach imaginary dollars to things that wouldn't and can't sell for those imaginary dollars, or even large fractions. And I expect older children to at least catch on to that fact, but a great many adults never seem to.
> and employees 1.5m+ people is l
So is that what the leftists hate? That he employs 1.5 million people? You want that to stop. That's the the part of the him being a billionaire that hurts the most?
>and putting a dollar figure on that is both straightforward and accurate.
If that were true, he could sell it for that valuation tomorrow. But as soon as he tried, the amount would drop, and the company might even be in peril. So it's neither accurate nor straightforward. It's convoluted and overestimated.
>In case you need a real example, Bezos personally funds Blue Origin
So that's the part of his wealth that you despise... that he employs people making spaceships? Those 11,000 people are the problem?
My point is has nothing to do with despising blue origin - it's just a direct contradiction to your absurd belief that this wealth is imaginary. You can't fund that big a company on imagination!
Are they earning (collectively) $260 billion? Are they earning anything like a significant fraction of $260 billion? Is the amount they collectively earn, whatever the total, coming out of Jeff Bezos' wealth, subtracted from it, or are they paid out of several different funding streams such as the government contracts and commercial revenue?
And you think this is somehow some sort of gotcha question. "Look, I've proved that Jeff Bezos has $260 billion!" (or whatever the amount was supposed to be). You're unable to think clearly or correctly on the matter. It's scary how confused you are.
And again, he only owns 9% of Amazon. Of course if he dumped all of that stock at once the price would go down, but Bill Gates sold almost all of his Microsoft stock for cash and Microsoft stock has continued to go up. Jeff Bezos could certainly do the same and come out the other end with around $260B in cash - but he has zero reason to go do that..
Here's another way to look at this: do you have a retirement account? Is the money in there imaginary? If not, why not?
worth mentioning that our current system is setup by and for the people who own the stuff so its no surprise that we need them to make new stuff.
To get a billion from a million you need to do 15% for fifty years, and that ignores inflation. Or 25% for thirty-one years.
These numbers are ludicrous.
They are also speculative, not real. They are based on the notion that the company would be worth that much based on projected cash flows, expenses, etc. If you actually tried to cash it all out at any point in time you could not get anything close to that because the very act of selling will lower the value by destroying confidence in the speculative valuations.
None of these SV billionares have billions in cash or cash equivalents. Maybe a few of the largest companies do.
US GDP is $31.82 trillion dollars per year. Taking the 2.5% growth rate, that's nearly $800 billion dollars per year in new GDP.
The economy very obviously does not progress as a bunch of soldiers marching in a straight line. Some firms will shrink 100%, some will growth 10,000%. This much is obvious by just looking around. But even if no businesses shrank, no wages were docked, nothing bad happened... even still there would be $800B in more GDP.
So if the economy is growing at $800B per year, it's extremely obvious how a company could even grow from $1M to $1B in revenue per year without doing anything shady... Just capture some of the new economic activity that cropped up this year!
And it's even easier when we're talking about an entrepreneur's net worth. Their net worth is going to be mostly holdings in company stock. The value of company stock is some multiple of the company's theoretical future financial earnings.
So if a company is making $1M revenue today, and growths to $5M revenue by the end of the year (15% MoM growth), at let's say a 30% EBITDA margin, they have made $1.5M EBITDA. And let's say that fast growth is rewarded at an extremely rich 50x EBITDA multiple. That company is now worth $75M. If this founder is lucky and owns 50% of their business, they now are "worth" $37.5M.
If they were only at $1M * .30 * 50 * 0.50 = $7.5M net worth at the beginning of the year, and then were at $37.5M at the end, their net worth increased by 500% in one year! And all they had to do was capture $4M / $8000M = 0.05% of the increase in GDP.
Like, none of this is either shady or complicated.
I agree you’ve demonstrated that there is enough economic growth to not contradict PG’s hypothetical numbers. But I think we should strive for a deeper understanding than “all they had to do was capture… 0.05% of the increase in GDP”.
Just as a counter-example, a Robber Baron could monopolize all the profits in the rail sector and run a drug mafia on the side, and it would show up the same in your numbers; “all they did was capture 5% of the increase in GDP”. In other words, like PG you don’t actually prove the point you’re arguing; you just provided a story that doesn’t contradict it. (Capturing the annual wealth creation of ~350m*0.05% ~= 175,000 people doesn’t seem on its face to be obviously fair or routine, rather it seems like a tail outlier worthy of further investigation.)
The way I would frame it is, what we actually need to do is look at the firm level metrics and figure out what is going on. (A founder becoming a billionaire typically means their company grew to the order of $10b - let’s look at the business practices of $10b companies or founders with confirmed liquidity valuations in our range.)
If you look at founders like Jobs, I think it’s pretty clear he made his first $b (via Pixar) just by making things people loved. Companies like Uber obviously relied to some extent on regulatory arbitrage, and you can debate the timing of e.g. Google founders’ shift to monopoly rent extraction, I would likely argue they got their $b “fairly”.
The second order question of course - would markets price your company at $10b if they didn’t think you had a future monopoly opportunity? Expectation vs current reality makes this all more complex.
But I think for PG’s purposes you can ignore the second order and just talk about successful, billionaires who built things that people loved.
The problem of course is that nobody likes billionaires these days (except politicians of course) and so it’s a much less marketable narrative. And there is the crux of the problem; this post is not an honest attempt to increase our understanding of the world, it’s a political slogan.
That said, I think there are a great many people who believe that all forms of wealth acquisition (above a certain scale) are fundamentally immoral. And that belief is held because they believe, "The only way you get a billion dollars is taking advantage of working people, not earning it."
So, my read is that PG's point is not to defend all billionaires. But instead, to debunk the incorrect folk-belief that all billionaires necessarily are exploitative.
I don't think anyone reading PG's blog is clueless about the power of compounding or the difference between salary and wealth through asset growth.
Her point is essentially whether the entire capital system is "fair." And to be fair to PG I don't think AOC articulated a particularly strong point either.
> What [AOC] meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way... The reason [my founder's] startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built. So she could feel from her own experience how wrong [AOC] was. She wasn't exploiting anyone. Exactly the opposite in fact. The reason her startup was growing so fast was that she and her cofounder had been working their asses off to make their users happy, and as a result the users had been telling their friends. And that gets you exponential growth.
In other words, he's saying that rapid wealth creation can (and often does) come from creating and selling things of value to willing buyers, at scale, and that that's not unethical to do.
I do agree with you that AOC's point is not particularly strong, though :)
You've ascribed to them an ideology they don't hold. They don't hold that view "simply because they are billionaires".
A million is hardly buying mansions, yachts, and champagne-filled swimming pools in the current economy
Which is something that is not an option for most people.
Look at where y combinator founders come from. It’s 99% people from elite institutions
That is a core part of AOC’s point
Getting a startup funded is just not something that is possible for most people. They just aren’t in the right circles. Does not matter how good of an idea you have
However, if you’re in the right circle, you’ll get shitloads of chances even after repeatedly failing. Just look at how many of these founders that “made it” drove multiple companies into the ground before making it. It’s a lot easier to find “good fortune” when you have a lot of chances than when you have 0 chances
How else should it work?
Should investors give funding to people who haven't built anything, whose startups don't have any users, who had bad test scores and did poorly in school, and who have no references? If you think so, why? And how is that fair?
If you believe that, should professional sports teams draft mediocre players? Players who didn't play in college or even in high school? Players who didn't make the JV team? If so, why? If not, why not, and how exactly is that so different?
We all know there is no such thing as a perfect meritocracy. There never will be. Things will never be perfectly fair. That's life. But we can try to come as close as we can. And that obviously requires offering more opportunities to people who perform the best. Otherwise, what incentive is there to even strive and try to do well? The alternative isn't fairness, it's randomness.
Look, if you think people who go to elite schools have all the good ideas, just say that. You don't have to wrap it up in high-minded pragmatism.
Your comment and the one I'm replying to are so far removed from reality that I'm worried you know nothing about Y Combinator, elite institutions, or startups in general.
You do not just waltz into elite institutions. Let's take my alma mater, MIT, for example. The average SAT score there is probably around 1500-1550. The average GPA is near perfect. College admission are insanely competitive. Pretending like getting into these institutions is zero signal is bad faith.
Followed by the claim that it "having a good idea is the only qualification for an incubator." What? No it's not! Out of the thousands of admission advice poss that are publicly available online, written by YC's founders, partners, and successful applicants over the past 20 years, I challenge you to find a single one that even kinda sorta comes close to echoing that sentiment. What matters WAY more is demonstrating technical, sales, and marketing prowess by building something and attracting users at a high growth rate.
This is very obviously not what the person you responded to was saying. It's so far off that it's hard to believe you are even arguing in good faith anymore...
And if you do have a good idea but are not in the right circles, someone from the "right circle" has the "right" to use your idea as their own.
Furthermore, the company motivated by profit that does not have to pay for polluting the environment will also pollute the environment. Regulation is also necessary to pay for long term externalities and other boom and bust cycles. There is nothing new in PG take except COPE and blame shifting about the increasing inequality and other societal and environmental issues.
Without regulations (just a fancy word for "laws"), few people would bother to do any of these things. As it would be much more profitable to simply sabotage competitors, form cabals or monopolies, oppress and steal from the populace, conquer and loot your neighbors, lie and deceive and trick your partners, etc. And even if it weren't, anyone who did want to truly innovate or produce something useful would be discouraged by the fact that, due to others engaging in the above activities, they wouldn't see any profit.
So, to answer your question…
> How often does this actually happen?
All the time! Hundreds of thousands of times per year! Because we don't live in an unregulated free market, because there's no such thing and the concept is absurd on its face.
There are plenty of gaps and inefficiencies where new businesses can provide value to customers at scale who will happily part with their money in return.
Not to mention the fact that the constant march of technology (as well as changes in policy, culture, environment, knowledge, etc.) are constantly tearing open new holes in the market.
The actual comparison would be to look at all the startups with billionaire founders (so likely $10B companies) and then analyze the market dynamics that enable them to keep growing so fast.
She has made vague, handwavy, and (depressingly) oft-repeated statements that "there are no ethical billionaires" and that "it's impossible to earn a billion dollars," but she has rarely supported with these statements with any facts or evidence whatsoever.
The fact that her detractors have spilt gallons of ink arguing against her point without providing such a counterexample speaks volumes.
But here's a quick list from the top of my head: Judy Faulkner of Epic Systems, Hamdi Ulukaya from Cobani, the founders of Canva, the founders of Stripe, Tobi Lutke from Shopify, Paul Graham himself, Taylor Swift, Beyonce, George Lucas, Roger Federer, J.K. Rowling. Probably dozens/hundreds of others.
If you do something that somebody likes and they give you $1000, that's ethical. But if you do something a million people like, and they give you $1000, then you're a billionaire, somehow you must be unethical?
Umm - a healthcare company selling patient health records. I'm willing to bet a lot of those records were not obtained through ethical disclosure and most patients would refuse to have private details of their health sold to anyone who wanted it.
Ok, let's take a look at the next: Hamdi Ulukaya from Chobani
https://www.kirkland.com/news/in-the-news/2014/04/chobani-ce...
Right. I'd better stop now.
1. One started a healthcare company, and bad things happen in healthcare, and you aren't going to look into any more than that.
2. One is a rich man being sued by an ex-wife who wants his money/stake in his business.
By these standards, not only are there no ethical billionaires, but there are also no ethical millionaires, or thousandaires, or taxpayers, or politicians. Because they're almost all going to be a degree or two of separation from someone or something doing something unethical or making a claim. "Ethical" is such a high bar that no one meets it, and it becomes a meaningless standard. AOC herself isn't ethical[0][1].
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/25/politics/house-ethics-aoc-met...
I did some more oldfashioned lmgtfy:
This is not just "bad things happening in healthcare". It's how you become a billionaire:
https://prospect.org/health/2024-10-01-epic-dystopia/
> Epic became the dominant vendor of databases because it was better than anyone else at combining regulatory compliance with maximizing hospital income. Epic enables the hospital to maximize the use of codes that determine the payment. “Before Epic, nobody was able to systematize upcoding,” says an executive of one hospital system.
> Epic’s software can enable doctors and hospitals to overcharge patients, insurers, and Medicare and Medicaid.
Edit: so really, "billionaire healthcare company owner" is all you need to know about the ethics of that person.
As I already pointed out above, your bar is going to be incredibly unrealistically low for what counts as evil, and I was right.
You're also just ignoring most of the people on my list anyway, picking on one person (quite poorly), and then trying to generalize that to all billionaires.
> I guess most software developers are evil.
Not most. Anyone who willingly works for Facebook/Instagram/Tiktok/Advertising/Palantir and other exploitative companies is.
>Anyone who makes silverware is evil. Etc.
Umm, silverware?
>picking on one person (quite poorly), and then trying to generalize that to all billionaires.
Yeah that was my bad - to clarify: anyone who became a billionaire through their own work/talent and without exploiting anyone is an ethical one in my book. Anyone who became one by stealing (yes, "upcoding" medical charges is stealing, unpaid labor is stealing) is not.
What's your definition of "through their own work/talent"?
What's your evidence that somehow up-coding medical charges was some crucial part of what led to Epic's initial success?
He said nonsense! If you start as a two millionaire and grow 95% every month you can be there in 9 months!
I say if I start with one cent and grow 10000000000000% every millisecond I can be there in a millisecond.
Edit: I’d like AOC to publicly say Taylor Swift is unethical and immoral too. Heh the swifties would have her head over that.
But his example doesn’t demonstrate anyone earning $1b. It just demonstrates a very high growth rate at $1-2m.
She captured the truth, that our current system vastly favors capital over labor (etc etc etc), and did that in around six or seven words.
You can't really do better than that when communicating ideas at scale. What she said is true, it's for essays, economic papers, and laws to provide the nuance.
The actual opposing argument is that it's impossible to create a billion dollar enterprise without a group effort, and for one person to end up with a billion dollars necessarily means that they made decisions within that enterprise that resulted in a lopsided allocation of resources at the end.
Period. That's it, and it's inarguable.
Every single aspect of the system is arbitrary and is a policy decision made by society. The basic building block, the limited liability joint stock company as a legal concept with some form of independent rights and entity status is arbitrary. Every lever, every part of the system, is created by people making decisions about how society is organized.
The people he is arguing with are basically saying "we want the system structured differently because this one is producing too much concentrated wealth." That's a political choice and an eminently reasonable one.
So if it's that simple, why would he feel a need to straw man instead of just addressing the actual argument? Well because he'd lose. The reality is is most people agree with this assessment of society and want it to change.
And by the way the question of how resources get split between labor and capital is the oldest and most central political problem in human history. To adopt a condescending tone while pretending to be ignorant of stuff you learn in the first couple weeks of any real study of politics or history, betrays the deception inherent in his essay.
George Lucas made a movie with a (small) group effort. But what made a billion dollars is his Star Wars universe which is almost entirely his creation.
It literally creates wealth for other people. If my toy sells $10,000 without Star Wars and $100,000 with it, did I participate in making George’s billion, or am I benefiting from it?
> means that they made decisions within that enterprise that resulted in a lopsided allocation of resources at the end.
What do you mean? Every good and service involves many people, but the degree to which they participate in its creation and risk vary. For example, a Farmer may create a more efficient way to grow food. Is the grocery store now entitled to a piece of the reward? They didn’t change anything, all of the improvement is the farmer side.
Once again, lopsided allocation - George benefited from and is directly responsible for keeping the cost of labor low: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/100...
Would he have been a billionaire without that? Who knows? But it definitely helped him get there.
If you say the original crew did not do all the labor required to make the franchise grow in the future (obviously true), you are now arguing different people have had incremental impact on creating the wealth, which is kind of the point.
Are you saying that he/the small group are solely responsible for Disney wanting to pay 4 billion for it?
The Star Wars franchise earned a tremendous amount of money before the one-time Disney payout.
Jk Rowling and LeBron James are additional examples.
The reason is that the conflict here is between labor and capital. And those two, at least in their primary roles, are labor, as a writer and an athlete. One of them is even a union member operating under a collective bargaining agreement.
They're just the absolute pinnacle top of anything that could possibly be put in that category.
But if I'm arguing that this is really about the division of of the spoils between labor and capital, and you have to resort to picking members of the labor class to make your argument then you have essentially conceded my point, which is that returns to labor are different than returns to capital, and returns to capital are much harder to defend. You didn't pick Bill Ackman for a reason.
If that were actually true, how come we can't predict what the next Star Wars universe will be?
Same for pop songs etc. If it were actually about objective qualities of the creation, and not just luck, the next winners of the lottery would be apparent even before they hit the theaters.
There is null inherent quality in the Star Wars universe causing the billion dollar revenue. If George Lucas wouldn't have been there at the right spot at the right time, the dominant IP would simply have been something different.
If you have kids, you can directly observer what actually happens: The IP owners dump huge amounts of money into merch and product placements everywhere, resulting in them getting in contact with the franchise before they are out of their diapers. My kids came home from daycare roleplaying lightsaber fights without any previous contact with the franchise at our home. The trick is implanting the meme (in the original meaning of the word) into kids' brains before another meme can nest in there.
That’s absurd. Obviously they are creating incremental wealth and their particular toy didn’t make or break billions.
The post I replied to allocated all of the monetary value of the Star Wars branding of a toy to George Lucas personally, which I think is obviously wrong.
in the same way that Lebron didn't go where with his own feet, he benefited from coaches, support, doctors, nutrionists & cooks, all dedicated to putting everything into this one man. Do you think merely being a freak of nature nets you a billion ?
Can you quickly break down which players on the team are fairly compensated and which are oppressed by LeBron?
> The actual opposing argument is that it's impossible to create a billion dollar enterprise without a group effort, and for one person to end up with a billion dollars necessarily means that they made decisions within that enterprise that resulted in a lopsided allocation of resources at the end.
--
> And I would guess the NBA made a lot more money than LeBron.
And yes, in this case I believe the NBA is extracting asymmetrically, from Lebron and others.
It's also important to note that Harry Potter making billions of dollars also prevented any other similar books or ideas from making any large profits. The entertainment industry is very much a winner takes all industry. HP didn't hugely grow the children's entertainment market, it just outcompeted other works. This is extremely important to understand, because it directly implies that a huge part of the value is simply that media execs decided to bet big on HP instead of trying out many other possible properties. The money would have happened either way, more or less the same - they just would have been distributed to one or many other authors instead, if JK Rowling hadn't hit it out of the park. People would have bought a roughly similar amount of books for their children to read, a roughly similar amount of toys, would have taken them to a roughly similar amount of movies.
Well yes. That is in fact exactly what I mean.
My argument is this: the core disagreement here is about the allocation of resources between labor and capital.
I’m right. It is.
That doesn’t mean I have settled the argument about what those allocations should be which nobody has, it’s a core organizational element of politics.
But I think his argument is bullshit. It’s a purposeful misdirection because it refuses to recognize the terms of the discussion at all.
In fact, my argument would be that the more regulated, industrial-policy-driven economies of the recent past were better at generating wealth and improving society.
For the most part, the real conflict that we're having around these topics is about the reorganization of the economy that happened starting in the mid-1970s.
This change shifted the focus of the US economy to financial extraction and away from industrial policies, a role that we sold out to China for the benefit of our elite classes and the severe detriment of our working class.
> “There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned,” she said. “You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that.”
You can produce a motte-and-bailey-type argument where the "get market power" and "pay people less than their worth" are doing all the heavy lifting in that statement. But I think we can agree that she is very much tying the accrual of wealth to various kinds of villainy. That is what pg is taking on. And that matters because the common person would agree with the statement that you should be rewarded for what you create - if wealth accrual is all theft, that perception would make a much stronger argument for the reallocation of resources.
Now I'm not saying that the employer is necessarily morally culpable here — I'm sure most employers would like nothing more than to not have to worry about their employees' healthcare, and certainly I doubt many people enjoy having the ability to take it away. But it doesn't change the fact that it's impossible to have a real negotiation when inelastic demands are (potentially) unmet. Someone under threat of losing health insurance or housing is negotiating under duress, contrary to the comment I replied to.
It's especially insufficient to generalize the working of the entire system from an example of a market in which employees currently have enough power to not really have to worry about the prospect of physical harm because it would be disadvantageous to the employers to cause it. Even if we take the current state of the SaaS startup market as reliable (which it isn't) the original argument was not limited to SaaS startup employees, and in other industries (including ones that are a bit down the pyramid from the SaaS companies) things are a lot less rosy for employees.
This is a ‘no true Scotsman’ so I don't think I can really respond to it directly. But I'll point out that my claim is not that some contracts bargaining for safety of life and limb are a form of duress but that all inherently are (to some extent). Especially when the other party's BATNA is ‘no guarantee of safety’.
This would also imply that the best thing ethically is not to give people goods in exchange for labor because the simple act of interaction with them puts their housing and food needs under your responsibility.
I don't really think that companies (or other parties in trades) bear moral responsibility for this inherently — a company that accepted every job applicant to try to meet their inelastic demands wouldn't last long, so the company itself is also under some duress even if it might like to. Trying to assign blame for complex distributed problems isn't really that simple. Your example in particular is a trolley problem, and I (personally) don't believe that pulling the lever makes you more culpable than deliberately choosing not to pull the lever.
But regardless of your chosen ethics, my point is pragmatic — while it's not correct to say that people take jobs only because they are under duress, it's also not correct to base arguments on them acting on their own free will based on their personal preferences. UBI experiments show significant changes in employee behaviour when inelastic demands are guaranteed to be met and negotiations pertain only to elastic quantities.
They don't hold me down and force me to hand money to a landlord, mind, they just lock me in a cell if I don't, so maybe it doesn't meet your standard of proof.
No it's not, it's actually extremely easy to prove wrong: J.K. Rowling.
Which is, as I pointed out, inarguable. No one is spawned alone in the woods to start their adventure independently of the society they are in.
He takes that as a given but this is, in fact, the argument and you can't wave it away.
By doing so he's being disingenuous. The argument here is about who gets what. And the startup founder and its employees are not the only participants in the economy.
The revenue flowing in to his hypothetical startup is exogenous to the startup so you have to talk about where it's coming from, who's affected, and how that fits in with policy goals.
For an extreme but accurate thought experiment, imagine concluding your analysis of FTX by noting that their employees were "fairly and properly" paid and then moving on.
The other thing that we're often ignoring is that it's impossible to create a billion dollar enterprise without luck. You have to be at the right place at the right time.
For the most part only capital gets to roll the dice, but even before that it's a sign of the times that we take it seriously at all when people talk about "earning" a billion dollars. We could all do with a bit more humility.
The existence of housing is an example of something vlauable being created. The price of housing is not relevant to the example.
TheTayTay said "wealth can be created". Avicebron asked for an example of wealth creation. cm2012 provided one, housing. saghm misunderstood the intent of the example. I pointed out the error, and then you came in and have apparently repeatedly failed to understand again multiple comments, both the people who literally are saying that some quantity of wealth cannot be created, and myself.
If you didn't get that after a reread, all I can suggest is that you seek out a literacy class at a local community college. It will improve your life, because this certainly won't be the first or only time you misunderstand written words.
What you bring to the discussion is the straw-man argument that "wealth can be created, not only stolen." Nobody was disputing that. Nobody is disputing it now. It's common ground.
Saghm tried to return to the actual topic, but you don't seem to have understood (or you aren't willing to acknowledge) what that topic actually was. People were talking about how to fairly divide wealth, not about whether it can be created or not.
The thing you say was not claimed, was claimed by multiple commenters.
Considering you are neither truthful nor literate, I won't be replying again. Feel free to get the last word in if you like.
Here's a paper on uncertainty logic to expand from. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1506.03123
If this is indeed the case, then it is very much not unique to the West, nor is it most tightly ingrained in the West. I'm not sure in how many different countries you'd live, but I can tell you this from lived experience. It could well be that most of the West is above average on a global scale in terms of belief in supremacy. I too have not lived in a 100 countries so I can't place "the West" as a block with accuracy. What I can tell you is that it does not land at #1.
Unless you call any vaguely US-aligned high-HDI country "The West" regardless of ethnicity, but that would be completely opposed to how any reasonable person would interpret your stance given the mentions of racism.
It would be in a sense Eurocentric and patronizing to suggest that supremacy-based thinking all the way from the Middle East to East Asia stems from Greek culture. And if you're trying to say that dualism is universal and arises everywhere, then Greece becomes almost irrelevant and there's no real point to be made that the West has particularly relevant unique or exaggerated characteristics when it comes to the pervasive supremacy-based thinking.
Dualism is not universal. And its wide spread in this world was brought about in large part through brutal colonization carried out by Europeans and their descendants with the help of various Christian denominations. They used Christian spirituality and forcing their own languages on people to disconnect them from the land (which includes the people themselves, as we are all land).
Which is a topic of intense discussion in economics over the last few hundred years, BTW, and the discussion here so far has shockingly few references to those.
musk isnt a trillionaire because his assets would equate to physical product. his valuation is an inflated target of market manipulation.
when you add up all the physical goods in the world that directly benefit people, that comes nowhere near these valuations.
and externalities are one way wealth is taken from the environment. then theyre parlayed.
That sounds like a pretty impoverished world to live in. No music, no art, no communication with our friends and family beyond speech…
The point was that the real money comes from finance games, like the stock market, forex trading, etc - things of much more dubious value when you actually look at them objectively.
in common parlance, theft
- Documentary
When I buy an iPhone from Apple, I suspect quite a few folks in the mines, factories, shipping, and retail chain that gets those "two happy parties" connected aren't so happy.
They are, however, deeply important to the transaction.
Sure. The kapos at concentration camps got better food and treatment, too.
That doesn't make it a fair, happy, or good arrangement.
Oh no, not accurately stating history!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labour_under_German_rul...
> The use of slave and forced labour in Nazi Germany (German: Zwangsarbeit) and throughout German-occupied Europe during World War II took place on an unprecedented scale. It was a vital part of the German economic exploitation of conquered territories. It also contributed to the mass extermination of populations in occupied Europe.
Titrating the nastiness of it from "will definitely kill you" to "will make you die miserable, broke, and broken" isn't, IMO, a great fix. People are not required to be satisfied with a tiny pittance just because it's more than their neighbor has.
But modern factory conditions are nowhere near what that regime did. If you want to know, work in a factory. That is what I mean by not equating concentration camp contidions to working in a modern factory.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53481253
> Reports by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and the US Congress, among others, have found that thousands of Uighurs have been transferred to work in factories across China, under conditions the ASPI report said "strongly suggest forced labour". It linked those factories to more than 80 high-profile brands, including Nike, Apple and Gap.
> China, which is believed to have detained more than one million Uighurs in internment camps in Xinjiang, has described its programmes - which reportedly include forced sterilisation - as job training and education.
(We're not above doing a little bit of it ourselves, as a treat, either. We left slavery legal in the Thirteenth Amendment, even. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/15/us-prison-wo...)
This was also bad, yes.
> there's a reason that Roosevelt is looked upon more fondly than goddamn Hitler
Sure, but "less bad" isn't the same as "internment good", and the winners write the history. I am a fan of FDR! But he did some miserable shit to win a war that needed to be won, some of which we cringe at now.
A handful of Nazi war crime prosecutions fell apart because Allied troops widely did the same thing, for example.
Not to make light of poor working conditions, dirt wages, and child labor. They can be and should be addressed. But they're not genocide and throwing out a "Arbeit macht frei!" is gross here.
And as noted elsewhere in the conversation, American companies are benefiting from actual concentration camp labor (https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2025/aug/30/revealed-major...) that some deem genocide (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-55973215).
https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/academic/poverty-and-pers...
> Jewish institutions sought to grapple with the consequences of a process of structural pauperization as driven by deliberate policy
The question is how much value do they add? If it's more than the money they're making, the people paying them are stealing. You don't like this because it makes it impossible to make money as a capitalist, but that's the entire argument. Making money as a capitalist is always unethical, because it necessarily involves stealing the value of someone else's labor.
Just because you can pay someone $1 to do something that makes you $10 doesn't mean it's ethical. It isn't, ever.
It's funny though, I hadn't read a word of Marx but the first time I understood that I was being paid $15/hr to make websites for a guy who was charging his clients $100 for that same hour of my work, I immediately understood everything about it and its innate truth. I got into the business myself and figured out exactly what value the CEO and the salespeople were bringing, and let me tell you, brother, it wasn't $85. It wasn't even $15. You can call it whatever you want, but you will never convince me that guy wasn't stealing money from me.
> I got into the business myself
Exactly, as capitalism intends. If you don't want to make employee wages then you take on the risk and capital and do it yourself, and are thus rewarded for it. Ironic, if you were actually a socialist you would've tried to help your fellow workers but you instead are the capitalist now.
I'm now in a situation where I could go back to Italy, but the above is one of the reasons that makes me doubt wheter it would be a good outcome or not.
This is to answer your point about purchasing power. With an Italian salary (considering the same tech job), my purchasing power there would still be lower than my purchasing power here with a local salary.
The point is that the “gains” are overwhelmingly absorbed by the top.
There’s no reason they couldn’t pay them a much bigger share of the profits and raise up that entire part of the world.
But yet, they don’t. Because that would cost them some of their own wealth.
I’m not even saying it should be equally distributed. The disparity is insane right now though.
Why should they pay more than market worth? When you go shop at a store, do you pay double the price tag just because you can? No, you don't, because that would cost you more of your wealth.
Does the average person in a first-world country donate half their wealth to the average person in a second-world countries? Does the average person in a second world country donate half their wealth to the average person in a third world country? No, and no. It's not really a common thing in human nature to give up a lot of what we have in order to support those who are less fortunate. You might say that's sad, but imo it's still a fact.
What is curious about human nature is how, despite this lack of behavior on our own part, we expect those who have more than us to give us what they have.
Market wages and prices are fairly set, largely due to supply and demand.
> The disparity is insane right now though
The disparity is better than ever imo. I'd rather live in this time period than any other, thanks to technology, which is a great equalizer. It provides amazing quality of life improvements across so many areas, from education and healthcare to entertainment and food; then capitalistic competition absolutely demolishes the costs of this tech, to the point where prohibitively expensive tech becomes affordable to billions.
Today, a middle class person can eat a cheeseburger that's just as good as what Bill Gates is eating, drive a car that's 99% as good as his, travel to the same places he travels to, wear clothes that are just as good as his, read the same books, watch movies, listen to the same music, go to the same plays, etc. The rich sit in slightly bigger chairs, enjoy slightly shorter waits, and many other improvements that historically would've been considered negligible compared to the gaps between kings and peasants, nobility and servants, owners and slaves, rich and poor.
In fact, the richest are having to resort to paying insane prices for useless luxury goods and brand names just to differentiate themselves. Or paying outrageous sums for luxury toys like yachts and planes that most wouldn't even want.
I worked my balls off to make millions for CEO founders and other asshole investors and only got a pittance of the wealth that they made off my work.
Have you ever actually worked in a start up?
That's not how it works. You can negotiate whatever you want. The deal can still change out form under you as new investors come on.
Not to mention, you're negotiating from a point of information asymmetry. They know way more about their plans for the company than you do and will often tell you what you want to hear rather than the truth. You can make some attempts at discerning if they're being honest or not, but ultimately you're left to just make a guess.
They also enter the negotiation from a strong position economically. They aren't going to miss a rent payment without a Job. The company itself may be fucked if they can't hire, but not the investors/founders.
So the negotiation is inherently unfair from the start.
> Sounds like many in this thread just have a sort of spilled milk viewpoint. No one forced you to work for these startups.
This is not relevant to whether their actions were moral, ethical or fair.
Ultimately it's possible to get screwed, but you can also choose not to work at startups and get a traditional job with less risk.
And the existence of some bad actors and screwy deals in the startup community is not really valid commentary on the greater picture of "the way wealth is shared." That was one way that wealth was shared, at one company, in one industry, with one or several bad actors.
Except it's not. It's the norm not the exception. It's pervasive through the industry, and YC and pg have done it themselves to multiple companies.
Hence why it was literally turned into a meme plot on a TV show.
You also ignored the bit about the negotiation being inherently unfair from the get go. And again, the deal can (and almost assuredly will) change out from under you because of the structure of the company which isn't really up for negotiation.
Just to be clear, we're talking about the same LLMs that were recently silently tuned to kneecap competitors? https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-responds-to-backlash-o...
Yes, many in fact. We negotiated the terms up front and if I didn't like them then I went with another offering company. I never had deals change from under me, maybe you're some Eduardo Saverin but I'm not. That you got screwed for not doing your due diligence doesn't mean everyone does. I'm not sure what is immoral, unethical, or unfair about that when again no one is forcing you to work at any particular company or even startups, or even in the tech industry. There are lots of jobs you can do.
I sincerely doubt this. If your start up went through a funding round, the deal changed.
> That you got screwed for not doing your due diligence doesn't mean everyone does.
“Due diligence” is impossible because the negotiation is asymmetrical. You can’t know what their actual exit plan is. You can’t know what their financials look like. You can ask. They can lie.
> I'm not sure what is immoral, unethical, or unfair about that when again no one is forcing you to work at any particular company
No one forced people to invest in Enron. I guess it was ethical. No one was forced to invest were Bernie Madoff. I guess it was ethical.
Just because you aren’t forced to invest your time/money somewhere doesn’t mean they can’t take advantage of you
> No one forced people to invest in Enron. I guess it was ethical. No one was forced to invest were Bernie Madoff. I guess it was ethical.
Yes, there was nothing unethical about being an investor in these, sometimes you cannot predict what a company will do but that doesn't make you an unethical investor unlike investing in say weapons manufacturers.
What if HN hasn't taken a political turn? What if politics took a giant turn, and HN is roughly the same as it was?
Some even have specific agendas as evidenced by their submission history and comments which all seem to follow specific biases too.
That's the whole moral and ethical difference. Paying them their market worth is the minimum. The entire argument is that when something is wildly successful, that success should be shared with everyone. Not necessarily equally, but not as insanely disparate as it is today.
> When you go shop at a store, do you pay double the price tag just because you can? No, you don't, because that would cost you more of your wealth.
I'm not sure if you're aware, but your delivery driver is not an eggplant. There's a fundamental difference between a good you purchase and labor. One of those is an actual human being. For two, I and many others do choose where we shop based on how their employees are treated and how they get their goods. Ironically, it was literally the business model of Whole Foods before Amazon bought it and ruined it. For three, I'm not a billionaire. So what I do isn't remotely relevant to any part of this discussion.
> The disparity is better than ever imo. I'd rather live in this time period than any other, thanks to technology
The disparity is literally, mathematically, the worst it's ever been in human history. That doesn't mean I wouldn't rather live today than another tiem period. That's not even really an important question. The question is how do we make tomorrow even better. How do we allow more people to enjoy the riches that technology has granted us? Those are the real questions.
> What is curious about human nature is how, despite this lack of behavior on our own part, we expect those who have more than us to give us what they have.
Except that isn't true in the slightest. For one, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of the ask. The ask isn't that CEO should give everyone a bunch of money. The ask is that everyone who works at amazon should have more of an equity stake in the company and that likely means giving the CEO less equity. In amazon's case that would mean jeff gives less equity to himself in the early days and more to other workers (or you know.. a union that owns shares.......). I don't really agree that it's the same thing.
but even if we want to say that it is the same thing. I don't want anyone to give me shit. I'm relatively well off. I don't need more. I want the wealth to be shared with more people because there are a lot of people who aren't as well off as me. Also, my actions do reflect my values. It's just, I'm not a trillion dollar company so it's not that much impact.
> Today, a middle class person can eat a cheeseburger that's just as good as what Bill Gates is eating, drive a car that's 99% as good as his, travel to the same places he travels to, wear clothes that are just as good as his, read the same books, watch movies, listen to the same music, go to the same plays, etc.
Outside of music and movies, this isn't even remotely true. Even as someone that is on the very upper side of middle class, I can't eat at the same restaurants as Bill Gates. I'm literally not allowed. I can't buy the same clothes. They literally won't open the store for me. I can't see the same plays, tickets are near unobtainable without connections (not to mention the cost of traveling to venues). Not to mention, a big part of the problem, because of some of these ultra rich nerds, the middle class is smaller and smaller.
This system doesn't work because what people consider to be fair is completely subjective and arbitrary, and of course under a system like that, people with less money are going to just tell people with more money to give it to them. The only actual fair way to decide prices and wages is to let the market decide.
If you truly think that, based on your arbitrary, subjective, personal opinions, that founders should be sharing more wealth with employees, and that the market's pricing is unethically low, then what number would you choose? How do you choose that number exactly? What makes your choice for that number any better than anyone else's choice for that number?
And why don't you apply that thinking to other analogous walks of life, like charity, or taxes? How much of your income do you give to those less fortunate than you in this great project we call our country, or to people in other areas of the world? If you think our taxes are too low, how much extra tax do you pay voluntarily? What number is appropriate? At what point is it unethical?
There are plenty of billions of people who don't live in the first world who consider even a lower-class American to be living a luxurious, privileged life. America is a country built off the back of exploiting other countries. Are lower-class Americans not therefore unethical unless they donate much more to their even less fortunate counterparts in second- and third-world countries?
I don't think we're ever going to agree here, because a central part of your subjective opinion about what counts as ethical behavior is related to how much money/wealth/stuff some other other person has. Whereas that doesn't factor into my ethical belief system at all. At no point in my life have I ever cared how successful anyone else is, let alone wanted to tear them down or blame my problems on their success, nor expected them to give their money away to others according to my personal belief system.
It continues to boggle my mind that people care so much about others' success. It's almost the exact opposite of the teachings of pretty much every religion or book of wisdom ever created.
> The disparity is literally, mathematically, the worst it's ever been in human history.
This is an unprovable claim, an extreme claim, and almost certainly a false claim. It's also extremely subjective and depends entirely upon what metrics you choose to follow, most of which haven't been tracked for very long.
Worse, in my opinion, is that it's a popular a meme of an idea spread by politicians engaging in demagoguery, which has succeeded in getting people riled up in anger against their fellow citizens, as all demagoguery does. People are obsessed with the spending habits of their rich neighbors, but completely ignore the spending of the government -- the party actually responsible for the welfare of the people, which controls and wastes unimaginable sums of money.
I can't tell you how many people I met in San Francisco who believed wholeheartedly that the city should be taking more money from more people, but couldn't recount a single fact about how the city stewards and spends its budget.
> That doesn't mean I wouldn't rather live today than another time period. That's not even really an important question. The question is how do we make tomorrow even better. How do we allow more people to enjoy the riches that technology has granted us? Those are the real questions.
I agree with you about the real questions, but I disagree that the other question is important. I agree with you about the latter questions, but I disagree that the former question is unimportant. In the US, we have an entire generation of people on both the left and the right side of the political aisle who are being brainwashed into believing that things were so much better in the past, for two very different reasons. And it's causing us to blame and distrust social and economic mechanisms that have benefitted millions to an unimaginable degree.
We live in an era of unprecedented wealth creation, technological progress, extreme poverty elimination, and quality of life improvements, and people are literally clamoring to tear it all down because they keep being told that it used to be better. It's important to understand that no, it didn't. Your actual quality of life, the thing that mattered, would not have been better in the past, for the vast majority.
But again, I do agree with you that we should try to make tomorrow even better. The focus should be more on allowing more people to enjoy the riches that technology has granted us.
I just don't see the focus being directed that way. I see far more people discussing how to tear down the rich than how to help the poor. Far, far, far, far, far more people. There's a strong and popular perception that somehow doing the former will lead to the latter.
> Outside of music and movies, this isn't even remotely true. Even as someone that is on the very upper side of middle class, I can't eat at the same restaurants as Bill Gates. I'm literally not allowed. I can't buy the same clothes. They literally won't open the store for me. I can't see the same plays, tickets are near unobtainable without connections (not to mention the cost of traveling to venues).
I don't know what to say to this. By historical standards throughout all of human history, almost every human who ever existed would pretty much agree with me that the differences you point out are trivialities. If you zoom in on incremental 1% improvements, artificial scarcity, exclusivity, designer brands, and things like that, sure, maybe Bill Gates has a lot you don't. I'm sure he's eaten some fancy cheeseburger that you haven't. Maybe he's been in some exclusive room that you haven't. But if this is the level of inequality that we're complaining about, minuscule and artificial differences that would require an education in luxury goods/experiences to even notice, then I don't know what to tell you. How is that not a HUGE victory?
> Not to mention, a big part of the problem, because of some of these ultra rich nerds, the middle class is smaller and smaller.
What a disingenuous statistic! The only reason the middle class in America has shrunk is because the upper class has grown! We are literally moving in an upward direction, creating more and more wealth to more and more people!
It's genuinely depressing to see so many people disillusioned with the state of the country, because they're being barraged by a non-stop deluge of pessimistic messaging by demagogues telling them that everything is terrible, even when things are relatively great and trending in a better direction overall.
It's very poetic though, in a tragic sort of way. Very human. I can't think of anything more human than to live in the best age of all time, one others could scarcely have dreamed of, and yet to complain about it incessantly because some have more than others.
The demagogues have been shockingly effective at telling people that the size of the pie is fixed, the game is rigged, and the only way to get a piece of that limited pie is to steal it. And the people that are most susceptible to this message are the ones that live in the countries that people are literally dying to get in to.
While I believe the spending habits of the ultra wealthy should be monitored, it is astounding how people don't seem to pay any attention to the spending of the government. There are unfortunately many people taking advantage of the system, lining their pockets using funds for programs meant to help the people.
>It's genuinely depressing to see so many people disillusioned with the state of the country, because they're being barraged by a non-stop deluge of pessimistic messaging by demagogues telling them that everything is terrible, even when things are relatively great and trending in a better direction overall.
This is one point I really wish was more emphasized, in fact it should be taught to everyone in school. We are constantly being bombarded by negativity on the internet, even here on HN. I've noticed myself stepping away from here more often due to it, since I find myself and my thinking falling into a negative spiral from its influence.
However, when you take time to step back from the constant bombardment of negativity, you actually begin to better appreciate the blessings you have in life, and the opportunities present. Of course, there are problems and issues to be solved when it comes to our current system, but by taking a step back from the constant negativity from the news, social media, etc, you can better glimpse the real issues at hand.
Okay, if you're going to make such a claim and trust in it, then can I presume you have answers to these two questions?
1. In a world without Apple, what would these people be doing that would make them happier?
2. What exactly is stopping them from doing that now?
I think the rise of China demonstrates they're certainly trying.
2. Economic coercion. The people are forced by the capitalist system - that was shaped by capitalist interests - to participate in a system they don't have any say in. They cannot even opt out.
2. You didn't answer this question either. What specifically is stopping them from opting out? Who is putting a gun to their head and saying they can't live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle or be a subsistence farmer?
The answer is nothing. People are largely making these choices themselves, because they're better options, for reasons that are obvious to anyone who's read a bit of history.
What do you think slavery is?
2. You can't live as a hunter-gatherers because the land has been enclosed and privatized.
There's no choice involved here. Your - and my - freedoms have been taken away a long time ago.
After the chokepoint capitalist: the store has closed so you go to a website and pay $30 to receive the crappiest version of the product in 6 to 10 business days. The website gets $20, the value chain that does 100% of the work (the website didn't add value, just stuck itself in the middle of your transaction) gets $7, the post office gets $3, you get the product. Mutual exchange of value.
This "mutual beneficial exchange" stuff is like that xkcd alt text on free speech: it's as if the best argument you can make to support a political position position is that it's not literally illegal to express support for it. "It's a mutually beneficial exchange" is saying the best thing about a transaction is that it's not literally a scam. Seems we should aim a bit higher than that if we want a society that works, yeah?
Chant “mutually beneficial exchange” all you want but the system and its players have done everything possible to ensure that everyone at the bottom has as little leverage and as few alternatives as humanly possible.
Not only that, but I have an incredible amount of competition. Thousands of alternative products, listings, websites, etc. I went to buy a standing desk last week, and there were literally thousands of choices all over the internet: solid wood standing desks, aluminum standing desks, tall ones, short ones, mid-century modern ones, futuristic ones, etc.
I have no idea what planet y'all are living on to say that people now have no leverage, few alternatives, no stores, slow delivery, and get no value.
You can argue that the app store and vetting process itself is worth up to or over 30% (i.e. they are giving value away, not extracting it), but they make a clear distinction.
Uber's profit margins are about 10% value created and 90% exploitation of power imbalance between the rich corporation and itinerant drivers and less well capitalized competitors.
Whether somebody acknowledges this reality or not tells you where their political allegiances lie.
That feels like a number you are just making up based on hating Uber.
They maintain an app and some servers and do some cursory checks on drivers. Those things are pretty easy to do.
In a properly competitive market for ridesharing apps those things would be commoditized to the point that they are pennies per ride.
The vast, vast majority of the value is getting you from A to B whether you are in denial about that or not.
Apple was already a multibillion dollar company almost 30 years before the iPhone was invented...
(though I'm sure you will have no trouble inventing some other reason that that wealth, too, was created through exploitation)
We have evidence he was still doing this decades later when he colluded to depress wages with Eric Schmidt at Google when he felt Apple employees were being offered too much in salary.
I'm happy to assume he was stealing money from people at every point in between because he was, quite famously, an asshole.
Ideally a new business creates more value than it simply takes out of an existing marketplace.
I think one can argue a lot of 2010s app-ification, Uber-of-X, or what I called "re-intermediation" was more than 50% rent seeking.
The business model of being willing to lose billions selling $1 of goods for 80cents (before even talking CapEx) until your competitors fold (and then raise prices) is the kind of thing we used to regulate against.
At some point our regulation shifted towards a more short term "if it makes consumer prices lower right now its OK".
It's impossible to fully prove a counterfactual, but few things "wouldn't exist at all" if "that one person" hadn't done it.
Netflix is a decent example. Many people saw the coming of video streaming. We would still be able to stream videos today even if Hastings had stayed at Rational.
There are also products that seemingly should exist but don't because no would-be inventor has found capital, eg. a decent bluetooth keyboard+trackpads with the same layout as a laptop. I know because I spent an hour trying to find one yesterday, and they basically just don't exist.
Any discussion not grounded in those facts is a dishonest discussion. It is a zero sum game until those externalities change because ultimately our species is built upon extraction resources to produce wealth. It IS a zero sum game until you or someone else invents a means of solving the first order problems.
You don’t need a trillion year scale for the average man to already be dealing in finite resources and ability to create wealth.
It takes 30 seconds of research to see the cost of an acre of land has far exceeded inflation over the last 50 years. That’s finite resources at work.
Anyone downvoting me because they think renewable energy overcomes the finite resources on planet earth are absolutely delusional.
We literally have evidence of the scarcity of resources when China started threatening to limit access to rare earths. CaN other countries build capacity at some point? Sure. What happens when you’re in a country that has none naturally and the countries that do have access don’t feel like selling you any?
What’s that? It’s a finite resource that results in a zero sum game?
The original claim, as I understand it, is basically this: you can’t be an honest actor in a dishonest system.
And it’s not even necessary to claim that billionaires did something uniquely wrong to become billionaires. It’s just that their share of the exploitation is so, so, so much bigger.
> There are three ways to make a living:
> 1) Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.
> 2) Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.
> 3) Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.
> What [AOC] meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way... The reason [my founder's] startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built. So she could feel from her own experience how wrong [AOC] was. She wasn't exploiting anyone. Exactly the opposite in fact. The reason her startup was growing so fast was that she and her cofounder had been working their asses off to make their users happy, and as a result the users had been telling their friends. And that gets you exponential growth.
To any honest reader, it's clear he's saying the system isn't necessarily dishonest, and that it's possible (if not common) to rapidly earn money in the system by simply creating things of value and selling them to willing customers.
That is the system.
The marxist nonsense about exploitation is getting really tired and needs to die already. Yes, we get it, marxists don't value anything that grows total output, don't think it should be compensated and are totally fine living in the stagnation that view creates. If they could all just skip a few steps and go to the end game of their philosophy that would be great because I'm tired of hearing from them.
Last election cycle, the world's richest man made the nation's largest political donation to the most expensive campaign in US history. In return he was given unprecedented (and arguably illegal) access to take a figurative chainsaw (his imagery) to our institutions.
We're all under the same laws, but we are not all operating under the same rules. To quote the President, "when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything."
First, this the same logic as "the law is equal because the rich and poor are both equally barred from sleeping under bridges." Moreover, no, you cannot hire the same lawyers and that's the point, because what Musk got wasn't through the law, but throwing $300 million dollars at an autocrat. This isn't about $50 vs $2000.
Can you do that and buy your own government agency and a pseudo-cabinet position that circumvents senate confirmation? No? Neither can I. We're not under the same rules they are.
Your point same sex marriage doesn't make sense to me you'll have to explain it better.
The second point was the ambiguity in outcome is what allows societal change and I don't want to lose that because there is still a lot of stupid enshrined in our legal code and institutions. We need enforcement to be lax enough to allow people to break stupid laws and the legal code to be ambiguous enough that, when enough people's opinions have changed by the law breakers breaking the law and nothing bad happening/ the law breakers being closer friends and family of enough people that you can get a big change to the law through, either via the courts deeming the law unconstitutional or the congress critters changing the law. It's a fine line on multiple fronts there between effective changing to suite current needs and too much corruption and I don't see a way to change the system that decreases corruption without also decreasing flexibility for change so I am very cautious on that front.
The problem is that wealth can buy a level of political access that ordinary citizens cannot realistically obtain at all. Once someone can spend hundreds of millions helping elect a president or pay people a million dollars to vote their way, and then get a quasi-governmental role with influence over federal agencies, then the system is no longer a system but instead a service.
Saying the system allows the ultra-rich to do this because of builtin ambiguities does not mean therefore no billionare is blameworthy for using it. If a loophole lets billionaires buy political influence, them exploiting that loophole is still part of the problem.
Your defense of him seems to reduce to: the system is corrupt, and if you were rich enough you could exploit it too. I agree that this describes how power works, but I just do not see how it defends it.
Right, but, taken to its logical conclusion, you cannot earn any amount of money honestly at all, because you'll always create negative externalities to some extent, or supporting people who do/companies who exploit their workers, even as a rank-and-file employee.
1. Extracting from the market or the economy. It seems like (correct me if I'm wrong) this is what you're reading it as? Here you're generally exploiting what private equity calls "pricing power" or what economists call "enclosures" (or "rent-seeking") so inelastic demand (eg housing) or market protection (eg making municipal broadband illegal); and
2. Extracting from labor. This is the basis of the labor theory of value [1].
The point of comments like AOC's is mostly the second one, which is to say that you only become a billionaire by extracting it from your workers. And yes, this is a fundamental disagreement with many people. Some will say that the startup founder who makes a billion dollars deserves it by taking the risk or being the leader or however you want to frame it.
The counterargument is that that value simply wouldn't exist if it wasn't for those workers and their work. Even Instagram, which famously had only 13 employees when acquired for $1 billion, still needed those workers. It would've been nothing without them.
Take Google as another example. The profit per employee has famously been (at times) over $1 million per year.
The term for this is "surplus labor value".
> Take Google as another example. The profit per employee has famously been (at times) over $1 million per year.
So, are you saying that the employees were exploited in some way? I could give you examples of how value is created without any work at all.
"Mainstream economics" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It didn't "replace" LTV. Marginal utility is simply an an ideological rejection of it with the confusion of price vs value that ignores class exploitation. The proponents of this were the gensis of the so-called "Austrian school" [1] and thus the fathers of neoliberalism [2].
> So, are you saying that the employees were exploited in some way?
Yes, objectively, as measured by profit. The counterargument is that many were well-paid compared to their non-tech colleagues. While true, they still created way more value than what they were paid.
> I could give you examples of how value is created without any work at all.
I'm all ears.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_school_of_economics
As is "mainstream medicine" or "mainstream climate science". If you don't trust mainstream science, you must be either extremely smart or just delusional.
> I'm all ears.
Ageing whisky.
> product is constantly evaporating and you're getting a lower yield on the same initial input
This so-called 'angel's share' accounts for ~2% per year, not 10%.
Capital costs are not real in LTV?
A carpenter takes wood, nails and hammer and creates value making tables.
Hammers are a capital cost and are made the same way - workers are a factory xreate value by assembling steel and other components making a hammer.
Steel workers un a steel mill create value by turning iron into steel.
Iron miners create wealth by mining iron.
And so on.
Capital costs are accounted for. Not turtles all the way down, but labor - newly created value comes from labor. The value in a hammer comes from the labor to make it a year ago when you bought it.
Google ads "extracted" value from traditional advertising in newspapers and magazines, so the "exploitation" (or efficiency gains, if you're charitable) came at the expense of employees at other organizations worldwide.
Reasonable people can disagree as to the nature/extent -- or even the existence of -- exploitation, but this guy absolutely has impermissibly strong blinders on, rendering most of this article a waste.
Like, does PG really not understand that nobody is arguing that a company can build a billion dollars worth of value? Has he not read Adam Smith? Is his definition or understanding of rent seeking so limited that he can't see the grey areas between "extraction" and "earning" money?
Anybody who earns significant income from investment, including VC money, should recognize that they are at some level extractive, not the hard won dollars that the folks at the ground level are generally putting in.
For guys like PG, Musk, Bezos, Zuck, Ellison, Thiel their very identity is tied to winning this as a game, and thus, any actions they take must defended at all costs, and the score must be seen as righteous and deserved and free from interference.
Not to mention that, especially in a fiat environment where currency is printed out of thin air, it is literally a zero-sum game by definition. When the printer winds up, the bankers win big at everyone elses expense; setting the tone for the entire market. Anecdotal success stories of hard working, honest billionaires is a nice distraction, but that's all it is.
The substantive reality of the status quo is one of unprecedented levels of extraction, and as we continue down this AI power consildation story, that will be harder and harder to deny as we go forward. If you happen to win big as an outlier, more power to you, but the article even admits to the rarity of this story implicity. 20 years. thousands of companies. 30 billionaires.
Even if every single one of those people are honest to goodness saints, that's only slightly better odds, perhaps, than winning the lottery.
The fact is the billionaire managed to extract value from the market. The ethical question is: who deserves to get the value that was created by the market? The answer could be "the founder" but it could also be the funder, the worker, the customer, the political structure that enables the market economy, the mother of the funder who raised them to be hard working, the nurse that treated the founders minor illness in an early stage and prevented it from causing a physical disability, etc.
That's why we're here debating, because one can create value, and one can extract value. Both statements are true and easy to argue for. The synthesis is that creating value also grants licence to extract since it's impossible (possibly even theoretically impossible) to define exactly where the line between the two is.
By comparison, many people out there are trying to get rich playing the lottery, gambling on stocks, etc., which often have far less likely odds. Is it not better for them to hear about what PG is preaching?
There are less than ~5K billionaries in the entire world. Not quite like winning the lottery sure, but still unrealistic for the majority of people.
How many is "many"? If you meant 100 million people, then that's still just 1.2%.
And in my opinion to claim that 100 million people have the opportunity to become a billionaire is laughable. Even if you're a super genius and you do everything right, there are just WAAAY too many happy accidents (opportunities) or just lack of unfortunate events stopping you.
Like you could be born to the best parents, who can afford the best school, growing up with the best opportunity business partners, and you work your ass off and are very smart… and then there's STILL a 20% chance you're in a car accident before the age of 30[1], potentially derailing your whole trajectory.
So car accidents ALONE could take away the chance for 20% of people. Not saying a car injury is terrible, but it could be sufficient to derail the billionaire plan.
That said, you work with what you got. And become a millionaire? Sure, doable. Billionaire? You need to win several lotteries AND have skill & contentiousness, I'm sorry let's not pretend otherwise.
[1] 2.44 million people injured in traffic in the US every year (2023 data, and US traffic injury and death is skyrocketing UPWARDS thanks to the car lobby's light truck loophole, while everywhere else in the world traffic deaths are going WAY down).
But PG is literally addressing the billionaire question. He's literally replying to a statement about billionaires specifically.
We're not reading too much into it.
Like I said, millionaire sure. (You could see it as another word for "successful"). Billionaire? Absolutely not, and it just sounds like you and PG are trying to change the subject, because the actual topic can't be refuted.
Or PG is so disconnected from reality that he's intentionally directly saying "I earned billions".
Yeah that's not better.
I'm not an AOC fan, but wow that makes PG an ugly political hack, not a clever writer.
There's no way to spin this that makes PG look good.
Uber was not a YCombinator company. For some unexplained reason, many mistakenly think it was a YC startup but it's not correct.
(The gp's comment is an example of how chatbots hallucinate because they train on the text of people unintentionally hallucinating.)
()
We're now applying LLM anthromorphism back on people...sigh
I'm of the opinion that this skill atrophies substantially for billionaires.
His post here in particular violates the fundamental principles of HN in that he does not engage with the argument at all.
The argument isn't that it's impossible to become a billionaire legally, the argument is that it's impossible to become a billionaire in a moral way, though that's more of a problem of the system than it is necessarily one at the individual level. A just and moral system would assign the value being created in such a way that becoming a billionaire would be essentially impossible.
Yet pg never even acknowledged the possibility that that might have been the argument.
There are many assumptions around this you could argue about, but he’s directly addressing the original statement (which was also simple, and did not explicitly include the assumptions either).
I agree they are talking past each other - a lot of this is more related to marginal cost differences than anything else imho (basically how leveraged the value of my labor could practically be).
2. If you don't have an unfair anticompetitive moat, you'll have competitors, driving your profit towards zero as usual.
2. This is one of the (many) side assumptions that are worth discussing.
"Company" is doing some very heavy lifting in how you are using it. The "company" in that sense does not include any worker who isn't a meaningful equity participant. In Amazon's case, or Telsa/SpaceX's case, the "company" is a single founder and his cronnies.
But as for `the work of the workers does not on its own create the value`... I just don't see how that isn't completely incorrect. It is literally the only part that is at the core of the value creation.
How much value would be created by Amazon tomorrow if every fulfillment worker and driver didn't show up? Basically none. But Jeff Bezos could die of a heart attack tomorrow and it wouldn't stop a single dollar of value creation.
We really don't appreciate the contributions of workers enough in this country. Whether it is the medical assistant at the doctor's office, the person who makes your burrito, delivers the Amazon diaper's order, or even check you out at the store. If people stop showing up to work, this all falls apart. It won't matter how much capital you have if you have no workers.
You can worry about whether the split of return is correct, but arguing that the pile of paperwork is valueless or somehow nonexistent is silly. Value flowing to investors is a consequence of how that pile of paperwork is set up and what is on the papers, nothing more or less.
China probably has the most successful communist government ever (in large part by selectively adopting capitalism) but it isn't like the conditions for their workers are better than in the U.S. or Europe.
All this talk of "late-stage capitalism" seems to miss the mark. It is the rise of many forms of authoritarianism that is the leading cause of disregard for the needs of every day working peoples.
Does this mean you haven't been following his twitter the past several years?
Which one is the better allegory of modern capitalism?
It's about how a utopian society could and/or should respond to changes in resource distribution, and how entirely consensual behavior and exchanges between people can still lead to situations that are problematic.
Making everyone have the same income means there is already a big infrastructure to manage how resources are allocated in this society - it already can't have been a free-trade system with currency that can be arbitrarily sent and received.
But yes, I think a lot of people would say there should be a cap on how much more wealth someone has compared to the median, for many reasons, such as the amount of political power it would yield him. The thought experiment uses a harmless activity for earning the wealth, but criticism of wealth inequality is often based on what happens _after_ the wealth is earned too. If in this example you will claim the world remains perfectly (socially) egalitarian and the kid will be benevolent, then maybe we can let him keep his wealth in the thought experiment. But that’s not the world we live in, and possibly never will be.
IIRC, that's precisely what Nozick is nominally interested in exploring (although he really doesn't).
There at least 2 distinctions going on:
1. whether wealth is acquired with or without exploitation; Nozick uses consent as a proxy for exploitation, which is dubious but predictable given that he's a libertarian
2. whether there are ill-effects to (excessive) wealth regardless of how it was acquired
They aren't paid millions based on tickets to see them play, it's the advertising.
So the reason you can’t think of any is because no economic activity exists with out them.
But externalities can both be positive or negative.
In my circles we actually never use this word because it is basically just a fancy way to say exploitation that makes capitalists feel good about them selves.
Exploitation is orthogonal. You can have internal or external value exchange that is exploitative. You can even have positive sum transactions that are exploitative.
It must be exhausting having conversations in your circles if you change the definition of all the words…
As opposed to something like heliocentric solar system theory, where you don’t need to play word games to prove the counter. You just need to observe and collect data and use the same words to come to the correct conclusion.
Looking through wages and trying to find a ceiling(by time/effort) on the value creation by a human is one dimensional at best.
> The work is done by the seed/sun/soil/water.
and the farmer collects. It's not that the farmer does nothing or deserves nothing. But it is precisely the same as the capitalist model: the capitalist sets the stage for labor to do the work, and then collects.
As others have noted, the central question is who gets to benefit from what is created and why.
It’s only the same if you consider natural resources and human labor to be equivalent. To me, that sounds quite reductive.
Obviously when viewed from other perspectives, they differ significantly.
This is what aoc is referring to essentially. It's practically impossible to become a billionaire through "regular" work alone that pays you a salary.
I'd argue that for all super wealthy people, their salary isn't the major factor in how they gained their net worth. Lets take Googles CEO, he makes 2 mict llion per year (the exanumber isn't that relevant here). With this salary it'd take him 500 years to earn his net worth. Again, completely different proportions to "normal" people earning their net worth through their job. And I'd argue you can do this for everybody with more than 100 mil. dollars.
You should read that as a self-preservation technique. The eager use of a strawman tells us PG heard AOC's words as an attack against him personally, his business, and his friends.
So the essay is not a reasoned retort but more an emotional self-defense to soothe a bruised ego. It's to assure himself that no -- in fact he did earn his wealth fair and square, and to imply otherwise shows a lack of understanding of how this all works. But I do love this essay because it does show just how emotional and irrational billionaires can be when their wealth and egos are threatened.
Sure, some folks are going to be fantastically wealthy, that's OK to a large extent.
But, we're on the precipice of trillionaire's existing in a country where literally half of the population is functionally illiterate (yes, that's the USA), where the middle class is dissolving, and where we are approaching a feudal level wealth inequality-- and all this stuff is accelerating.
I mean, I guess it's not that bad. We still have a democracy. It's not like we have billionaires re-arranging political power and public resources for their pleasure and benefit. Oh wait, we do!
I wasn't there at the time, so I could be wrong. But I feel like their robber baron counterparts 100 years ago knew that they were hated and had some idea of why. And that's why they spent so much money on parks and buildings and colleges and everything else. They could see option B was the masses coming across their lawn with sharp implements.
No. It was to persuade future politicians not to redistribute his and his friends wealth.
Say, for example, my job is allocating capital across the S&P 500. My work is picking the stocks, the fruits of my labour are excess returns.
Are those excess returns not work? What are they?
Wealth extracted from a market, which is what the parent commenter said in the first place
Please provide an example of how logging in to fidelity.com to see that today my net worth increased by a multiple of my annual salary constitutes "work". Define your terms so it's clear to readers.
Are you sure you tried to come up with a counter example?
If the only kind of “work” is “selling your labor” then sure, but I think a farmer tilling his own soil is “working”.
I described it as “sitting there” to contrast my viewpoint that in fact it’s not being “extracted” from anything as far as I can tell.
It’s totally incoherent and unreliable as an explanation for an economy, but it explains the comments in this thread.
You could say the same about musicians and authors. Are they immoral as well?
But note that I have been very careful not to call the fund managers individually immoral.
Making great art is wonderful, but it's certainly not "work" the same way that digging a ditch or answering tech support calls is.
I was talking specifically about the moral implications of books that can be read without any additional work from the author. This statement is about books, not authors.
> but it's certainly not "work" the same way that digging a ditch
I don't think so. Value comes from utility, not from toil.
I agree, writing great novels is a wonderful thing and a moral positive.
The moral problems begin when writing that book gives you extraordinary power beyond what is healthy for society (which is extremely rare for authors, of course; the discussion isn't really about authors, you just invoked them in an attempt to conjure a moral shield for the people who are the real problem).
And again, even that in itself is still not a moral failing of the individual. It's primarily a failure of the system in which the individual operates.
It does become a moral failing of the individual if the individual uses that power to perpetuate the system.
Say, for example, my job is allocating capital across the roulette wheel. My work is picking the numbers, the fruits of my labour are excess returns.
Are those returns not work? What are they?
Normally you'd get a low percentage fee instead of getting all of the returns unless you got that capital for free (inheritance?), so yes, you are a worker compared to the person controlling the capital.
Missing from both sides of this argument, IMHO, is BATNA.[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiat...
Whereas: If they hire a single employee to help with, idk, responding to support tickets that would get them into "well maybe you did not earn it"-territory?
Because if that is the depiction we are going with: I have my doubts.
Just like you're mentioning Obama's lambasted "you didn't build that" comments -- his point was completely valid, in that the individual profiteers didn't build the roads their products ship on, the energy infrastructure their cloud providers consume to host their digital footprint and logistics, etc. etc. But people pay for a large part of what they DO consume -- the cases where they don't are what we squirrelly and bookish economists call "externalities" (costs of production gotten too cheap/free). Trying to correct for every externality is a maddening and endogenous exercise in navel gazing -- but huge and easily seen externalities are not crazy to want to address (e.g., Erin Brokovich, pollution, etc.).
In your example of someone getting hired to field support tickets -- if that person weren't hired, the founders would spend all their time chasing down those tickets. So did the founder earn the cash, or did both people earn the cash despite one of the jobs being less favorable? If an egalitarian share is unwarranted, what is a reasonably fair trade? Why is an egalitarian share unwarranted? Etc.
The core question embedded in all these arguments are - what is a fair tax on the economy? If a government's policy encourages large economic growth for everyone, then perhaps it is good to fund it via tax with all the associated tradeoffs like crowding out, marginal decisions impacted, and so on. Getting it right looks like Scandinavia. Getting it wrong looks like Cuba / final days of the USSR. Ignoring it (on both sides of the aisle) looks like Venezuela and Argentina.
But there is no doubt that without the people who produce there would be no taxes, and a 100% tax would push everyone away from doing anything. This is why the way-too-simplistic Laffer curve argument seemed compelling in the 80s -- "unshackle the economy by lowering taxes."
I haven't kept up with pg (fairly or unfairly) since some of the techbrokings adopted Yarvinism as a goal, so I have no idea what he has said recently.
That's the fun part: they cannot make a billion dollars through their own work. It doesn't exist. Billions of dollars do not exist without either collaboration (extremely rare), or exploitation of others (see: every single YC company)
>Whereas: If they hire a single employee to help with, idk, responding to support tickets that would get them into "well maybe you did not earn it"-territory?
Would you have made that billion without the employee ? If not, you did not earn it. Would your company have gone under if you didn't have someone handling those support tickets, what percentage of the survival of the company is linked to it, and why didn't you pay them nearly that percentage ? Congratulations on exploiting your employee.
Her point was being made about actual reality and not some hypothetical fantasy
With recent advances in AI, it may be possible for someone to build a billion dollar single founder company.
Reality is reality. Her statement was based on reality.
Inventing some nonexistent fantasy where her statement is wrong isn’t a useful exercise.
Yes, it’s possible that in the future there may be some person that manages do be worth billions by themselves, but that doesn’t exist today so isn’t relevant to her statement
Working through a world where some condition proves true is useful to inform logical policy. It admittedly doesn't make for a sexy soundbite and is a lot harder to work through, but it has substantial use (1) to both justify the morality of a policy/action in the real world and (2) to anticipate a potential real world scenario where a single person makes a billion dollars in a SaaS.
Just because pg is `not even wrong` doesn't mean we have to be as well.
Thank you, you made me laugh in earnest. This is one of the funniest things I've read today.
The problem with AOC’s argument is she’s recycling a 2008 talking point into a context where it doesn’t make sense. Financial entities making trillions moving money around raises questions about whether value is really being created. When I get three Amazon packages delivered to my house every day, there’s no question about value creation.
Her point isn’t that Amazon is bad because it’s a trillion dollar company
Her point is that Bezos is bad because he and Amazon could have paid that driver 10x what they make and still had more money than they could spend in 100 lifetimes
The distribution of the gains is absurdly weighted towards the top
How is that relevant to anything? There are intelligent criticisms of Amazon. But this is just a non-sequitur.
The point is that his wealth is from exploiting labor out of greed.
He could take a smaller share and still be plenty rich and many more people would be much better off than they are today.
But he doesn’t. The disparity is so vast that it is arguably immoral or unethical. That’s AOCs point
The entire point is that the riches borne of the success of amazon could have been shared more equally while not actually making a different in Bezos' or his families life.
The only difference would have been that his score on the billionaire leader board would have been slightly lower.
That fact is not only relevant, it's a central pillar of the point.
Why does that matter? What is the universal principle that’s at play here? Does this principle apply to everyone? Does it apply to you? People in my dad’s village in Bangladesh survive on $5/day. Under your principle, why do you get to spend 1,000x that on a vacation?
Can you also explain your math? You said above that Amazon could pay its workers 10x as much as they do now. Bezos’s share of Amazon’s net profit last year was about $6.9 billion. Amazon has 1.1 million delivery drivers and warehouse workers. So if Bezos’s share was nothing, those workers could earn about $6,300 more. That’s like 10-15% more, not 10 times more as you incorrectly said.
We're not talking about Bezos's profit share for one year. We're talking about giving the workers a bigger share of the profit. Ideally, there would have been a workers union that owned a significant number of amazon shares or some other similar structure. Then all workers benefit from the compounding growth pg is talking about in the article. However that didn't happen, because Bezos didn't want it to happen.
Those are the same thing, because you can only take Bezos's 9% of Amazon once. If you took all of Bezos's Amazon stock and put it in a trust for the workers, the profits from that would have amounted to $6,300 per worker last year. That's a nice bonus, but it's not 10x like you said.
It very obviously goes to the people working at Amazon. Political party has nothing to do with anything
She meant it was unethical to do so. It wasn't about working alone or not.
I know we like AOC but the way people bend over backward for her is off-putting.
What you said she said: "The only way to get there is to set up a structure that extracts a billion dollars from a market"
Extracting does, in fact, imply "something bad". To extract is to take something for yourself without adding value. That is bad. Your language implies that the people who make that sort of money do not add, which is what pg is trying to refute.
And now comparing PG's writing today and what he wrote 10~15 years ago, I finally get what Joel means.
And a lot of these structures either involves a percentage cut or a security of some kind. And it's not new, it's copied.
Is "building structures" not work?
And an overly simplistic view of the math problem too. (Surely going from 1000 to 2000 customers is as easy as going from 10 to 20, right?)
Everyday, people grind their own flour.
Then I build a mill, and allow them to use it in exchange for a part of their flour.
Is my wealth not earned?
In the US that would make me a billionaire.
You couldn't do it by yourself. A team of people could, and if they shared the billion, none of them would have a billion, but if you were the company owner and got to keep 50%, but your team of a hundred made two billion, you'd be a billionaire but not because you earned it.
Focusing on completely optional and often imagined "externalities" just reveals a certain mindset (one could find some for cases like Amazon, but bezos became a billionaire in 1998 so whatever Amazon does after that doesn't directly apply, unless the goalposts are moved).
An example I love is hollowing out of this or that. The fact that people wanted to shop at Amazon (especially in 1998) and not a local bookstore, like the fact that people want to go to a Taylor Swift concert and not your indie band's is not an externality, it's a skill issue.
> She wasn't saying, of course, that it's impossible to become a billionaire. Obviously that's possible. Nor was she talking about the distinction between income and capital gains. She wasn't making a point about accounting. What she meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way.
IMO, that's a pretty fair interpretation, given Warren's rhetorical history.
> ...one doesn't earn a billion dollars through work alone > set up a structure that extracts a billion dollars from a market
If we accept that interpretation (which I don't), in what way is the latter not "work"?
As he got a little older, he cut back on that pro-discrimination advice... that typical thing where he was able to recognize the problems with his bigotry only after he would have been on the other side of it.
As he has become ludicrously wealthy he has, unfortunately, lost all track of reality. He no longer engages with the practical or the real... instead he deliberately misreads a quote so that he can wrote a pathetic and defensive response to it that engages in bad faith. And because he is ludicrously wealthy, he is surrounded by a mix of yes-men, and other hyper-wealthy sociopaths. So none of them give him critical feedback.
Paul Graham has become useless to society. He is, fundamentally, just a mindless pile of cash.
I'm not defending that interpretation, mind you, just saying it's a possible read of the phrase.
I didn't even exploit my workers and make a margin on their labor. Please can someone who believes billionaires are evil explain this to me.
Taking your interpretation at face value I would add that yes we call it “capitalism” not “laborism”.
like other "entrepreneurs" its most likely self-affirming bullshit, cranked up to religious levels (cue any modern ayn rand equivalent)
Guy wrote an essay criticizing “woke” on the eve of Trump’s inauguration and is now running interference for billionaires causing an affordability crisis.
If someone is out of tune enough they are probably just playing a different song.
When you hit a hundred billion in net worth, you get a nice solid gold plaque that says "I won capitalism", you get an attaboy from the UN, and we start taxing the shit out of wealth over that cap.
Adjust periodically for inflation. (Do that for minimum wage while we're at it.)
I find these special founder-class shares that completely insulate folks like Musk and Zuck from their actual investors to be deeply problematic.
It's because while for some people there may be jealousy involved, many more have realized or are now realizing how much power the ultra rich have, and how bad that is for our societies.
Once a company becomes large enough, it becomes so influential in society that control of it must be made more democratic.
I don't think anywhere has figured out quite the right way to go about it yet, but it's clearly the right goal. Some countries require employee representation on the boards of large companies.
Musk was AWOL running the US government for months without any apparent impact. Even after he got back to work, he's running enough companies he's clearly part-time on at least some of them.
Jobs died. Bezos and Gates stepped down. Things continued!
> Commies will literally never learn.
Yeah, they're goofy, for the same reasons the extreme libertarian anti-tax folks are goofy. Each pretends the complexity of humanity can just be waved away.