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How to Steal a Billion

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Re: How to Steal a Billion

#91

Post by Consultant32452 »

oblio wrote: post #90
Consultant32452 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The skewed distribution of wealth creates a situation where people don't have time and energy left over from their hustle to take care of themselves and to take care of each other in basic ways. Can you help me understand this better? Because I see this sentiment often. I'm just gonna do some quick math... Bezos + Gates + Musk + Zuckerberg = let's round up to $300 Billion. Divide that evenly among the 327 million US…

I find it a bit naive that the whole system would work like some sort of highway robbery :-) I'm pretty sure that's not what's meant when people talk of "wealth redistribution". Your argument looks like a strawman to me.

I'm not trying to make an argument, I'm trying to understand what the GP means in practice. I know people sometimes use questions passive aggressively, but that wasn't my intent. A more even distribution of all the wealth looks like people having a few thousand dollars of wealth. Much less if we're equalizing the whole world and not just the US. What are we imagining happens?

Re: How to Steal a Billion

#92

Post by ph0rque »

travisoneill1 wrote: post #25

I object to the word "steal" being used to describe Adam Neumann's actions. He did not take anything by force or deception (as far as I know). If I take a piece of dog shit, spray paint it gold and sell it as a bar of gold, you could argue that is "stealing" (or at least fraud). If I say "this is a piece of dog shit that I spray painted gold but I am selling it for the price of gold" and an adult of otherwise sound m…

Ah, but nowhere in the description of the product being sold did you discuss unlocking superpowers and elevating global consciousness. That's the deception alluded to in the OP, as far as I can tell.

Re: How to Steal a Billion

#93

Post by Spooky23 »

ksdale wrote: post #38
CptFribble wrote: post #13

That's the funny thing about Billions-with-a-b: normal thinking about money and value just doesn't work IMO. The Vision Fund is going to lose ~$19 billion. But Masa Son still controls over $80 billion. That's more wealth and power than almost any human being will ever have in history, ever. At that point the numbers don't even matter. Maybe Neumann took Masa Son for $50 billion. Who cares? A person can live in the US…

It's especially interesting, because although a billion dollars is a staggering amount of money for one person to possess, if you distributed the wealth of the world out to every single person evenly, it would only be something like $50,000 per person (based on some quick Googling), which is a life changing amount of money, to be sure, but it's a one time deal. It's not $50,000 per year of income, it's $50,000, perio…

That’s the wrong way to look at it. Velocity of money creates value.

If you have everyone money, they would buy and sell goods and services instead of hoarding it.

Re: How to Steal a Billion

#95

Post by samatman »

ksdale wrote: post #78
ZhuanXia wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>distributed the wealth of the world In the limit of a single individual wealth works in a naive fashion where such distribution is possible. But on the scale of the economy, such a thing is not possible without inventing a better distribution mechanism than capital itself. If you redistribute each peace of your car's engine to each passenger, you will be forced to walk. Even as a thought experiment, evenly distribut…

Yeah I agree it's not remotely practical and that there would be all sorts of crazy consequences, I just think the thought experiment is useful as an intuition check for how much wealth there is. As an aside, I don't agree that wealth is produced by the incentives inherent in inequality. Wealth is created when people make things and do stuff, which often happens because people want more than what they have, and that…

Those incentives can't exist if any improvement in the quality of life must be distributed evenly among 7 billion people before it may be claimed.

It's true that most people are more interested in absolute quality of life than they are in the relative status granted by inequality, but the one implies the other.

You can make a case for less inequality, of course; but now we're quibbling about the price, as it were.

Re: How to Steal a Billion

#96

Post by Ididntdothis »

andreygrehov wrote: post #68
hashberry wrote: post #14

WeWork/Uber/Airbnb... it's interesting how WeWork is classified as tech IPO next to these (e.g. Softbank used its "technology fund" to invest in WeWork). How did this happen? Isn't it an obvious real estate company? Is it because WeWork appealed to tech startups and remote workers?

I hate when people say that WeWork is not a tech company. WeWork is a real estate tech company. They make a ton of internal tools that help them to automate the business, which is exactly what technology is for - affect real life experiences. In a sense, they are a pure tech business.

By that definition you won’t find many non tech companies. What company that’s not super small doesn’t build internal tools and doesn’t try to automate things ? By your definition all car companies are tech companies, so are insurances, banks and pretty much everybody else.

Re: How to Steal a Billion

#97

Post by ksdale »

samatman wrote: post #95
ksdale wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I agree it's not remotely practical and that there would be all sorts of crazy consequences, I just think the thought experiment is useful as an intuition check for how much wealth there is. As an aside, I don't agree that wealth is produced by the incentives inherent in inequality. Wealth is created when people make things and do stuff, which often happens because people want more than what they have, and that…

Those incentives can't exist if any improvement in the quality of life must be distributed evenly among 7 billion people before it may be claimed. It's true that most people are more interested in absolute quality of life than they are in the relative status granted by inequality, but the one implies the other. You can make a case for less inequality, of course; but now we're quibbling about the price, as it were.

I mean, the thought experiment isn't about the logistics of redistribution, it's about the sheer amount of wealth. These counterpoints amount to saying that actually redistributing wealth like that would have terrible unintended consequences, which I agree with, and I think just serves to underscore that there is much less total wealth than most people think there is.

Re: How to Steal a Billion

#98

Post by oblio »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #91
oblio wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it a bit naive that the whole system would work like some sort of highway robbery :-) I'm pretty sure that's not what's meant when people talk of "wealth redistribution". Your argument looks like a strawman to me.

I'm not trying to make an argument, I'm trying to understand what the GP means in practice. I know people sometimes use questions passive aggressively, but that wasn't my intent. A more even distribution of all the wealth looks like people having a few thousand dollars of wealth. Much less if we're equalizing the whole world and not just the US. What are we imagining happens?

I'm from a former Communist state (one of those states that became Communist at Soviet-tank-barrel-point :-) ). So Communism doesn't have much appeal to me.

My personal perspective is that equalizing things fully doesn't work. You want incentives to motivate people. However, it's quite amazing what motivates people - after all, for the average billionaire going from $62bn to $63bn isn't really some sort of milestone, unless they somehow surpass some other billionaire. Sometimes the things that motivate people are a lot more fine grained that it seems. So pure financial motivation is rarely the main incentive.

On the other hand, such huge imbalances do eat away at democratic principles.

My personal opinion is that at some point, companies should be treated as utilities/companies of vital national interest. After all, that's how rich people make most of their money, through shares, not through salaries.

So, basically, once a company is taller than X, the country this company is based on gets a certain share of the company, 5%, 10%, 20%, it doesn't matter. I'd also make these shares non-voting. Even better, I'd force these companies to give out a certain percentage of these shares to employees (after all, they're "the people").

We'd have fewer billionaires, we'd have more stable middle class people, we'd have higher state revenues, we'd have less of a disconnect between totally private companies, regular people and governments.

As the owner of a company, you have a choice: create a huge company and have to share the spoils or stay small and nimble and have greater control.

Re: How to Steal a Billion

#99

Post by buboard »

AlexandrB wrote: post #53
buboard wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand the hate. He didn't steal it from an old lady behind her back. If that was the case, i can understand the feelings of empathy that it would evoke to people. But capitalizing on some uber-rich person's mistakes? Cry me a river, do you think Mr Softbank cares? Yeah he might drink one cocktail more, but who cares. What if Adam now becomes a great angel investor? Life is like that , all twists a…

> He didn't steal it from an old lady behind her back. He tried to. Had the IPO gone through it would have fleeced billions from "institutional investors" (i.e. pensions and 401ks).

that's not the same, you have to consider the intermediaries who have a ton of responsibility for investing that money. They're not absolved from responsibility , and technically Neumann didn't lie, at all.

Re: How to Steal a Billion

#100

Post by beerdoggie »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #69
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an interesting point. If drivers are employees, I'd call them a transportation company. If they aren't, I'd call them a tech company. Analogous logic for Airbnb. But it seems like too subtle a distinction to be reasonable. More likely, "tech company" just isn't a super useful label anymore, with the grey area growing and growing.

I tend to view tech companies as companies that consider custom tech a competitive advantage and attempt to maintain in-house competency. If you're a grocery chain and you contract out most of your technical needs then you aren't a tech company. But if you're a grocery chain and you hire and maintain a large technical team to provide you with various custom pieces of technology, you're both a grocery chain and a tech…

This is a great way to think about it.
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