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Comment by antimagic | Hacker News Reader

I prefer to think of this as the on-ramp. Learn your craft by selling eyeballs, or some other relatively trivial technology, make FU money, and then go and do something real. The archetype of this is of course Elon Musk.

I know that what drives me is the hope that one day I will have amassed enough money that I can stop going to work for somebody else, and instead choose to work on what interests me.

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But how much money is that? I mean the median income in the US is less than $30k. Live on what most people in the US live on, and with the outrageous hourly rates of most consultants you can do for-pay work about 10 hours a week and have the rest of the time to yourself to work on what you want?

Why does it take millions of dollars to be able to do good work?

is it hard to "stay in the game" unless you're giving it 110% of your energy?

It takes millions of dollars to make space ships.

Elon Musk fully funded SpaceX with his own money?

He's put hundreds of millions of dollars of his own capital into his ventures, yes.

Good work != space ships.

Because most people don't get to charge the "outrageous hourly rates of most consultants"?

The original intention of Paypal, once it pivoted from Blackberry payments to online banking, was hardly trivial. Their goal was to be something akin to Bitcoin before Bitcoin.

As they scaled, regulatory realities set in... but to trivialize Elon like that is foolish imo.

I did say "relatively trivial" and yes, I stand by that: PayPal is relatively trivial compared to the sheer scale of the ambition of companies like SpaceX and Tesla

>I prefer to think of this as the on-ramp. Learn your craft by selling eyeballs, or some other relatively trivial technology, make FU money, and then go and do something real. The archetype of this is of course Elon Musk.

The archetype?

For one, he worked on real stuff from the beginning -- not ads or social crap: online publishing and payments.

Second, even if he fit the profile, he would hardly be an archetype, because I don't see many (if anyone) following on his footsteps.

People making FU money and leisuring or working on pet hobbies I do see. But people making FU money and "going and doing something real", well, can't think of anyone. There could be 2 or 3. I doubt there are ten.

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