Hacker News Reader

Comment by user43928 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think this is what's going on in the first place.

Like, are eg. Musk and Zuckerberg doing this for bragging rights about a number on financial statements?

To be honest I have no idea about Zuckerberg's motivations. With the proposed billionaire tax in California, recent reporting indicates his main concern is retaining voting rights at Meta.

With Musk I believe he is investing into space flight and colonizing Mars.

I fundamentally don't agree with the idea that rich people are evil and motivated by nothing other than greed.

View on HN

> To be honest I have no idea about Zuckerberg's motivations. With the proposed billionaire tax in California, recent reporting indicates his main concern is retaining voting rights at Meta.

I wasn't addressing their motivations for attempting to grab all the wealth in the world. I am pointing out that that is what they do, so why would you expect them to stop at some point when they never stopped at any point in the past?

I guess I am asking, why are you expecting their behaviour to change?

Is that what they're doing, or are they merely retaining shares of the companies they created?

Do they need to donate their shares in order not to be considered hoarding wealth?

> Like, are eg. Musk and Zuckerberg doing this for bragging rights about a number on financial statements?

No, they're doing this for the power that the number can give them. After we create a system that rewards the people who maximize their wealth at any cost, we shouldn't be surprised that eventually we get a group of people concentrated at the top whose lives revolve around doing that one thing. We also shouldn't expect there to be some arbitrary amount of wealth and power that trips the failsafe in their brains and reverts them to the state of mind of an average human being. They will keep going, the goal is owning as much of the world as is feasible. Power is an intrinsic motivator. Most billionaires only sit on their hands and watch their number go up, so for those it's immediately apparent. For the exceptions, like Musk, it's a bit more complicated, but the desire to advance human spaceflight likely comes in far behind the desire to out-do everyone else, get your name in history and own a brand new unexplored frontier under your own name.

Whether someone like Musk is worth 500B or 3T on paper makes little difference when it comes to power, don't you think?

If that was the goal, surely one would need to run for president.

I don't think the brains of billionaires work so differently from us all. Who doesn't want his name in history for their achievements?

I know that I wouldn't want a dystopian future, and I think it is the same for most billionaires. I find arguments that they are all evil rather unconvincing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com