More absolute garbage from latter-day Paul Graham which further confirms how profoundly out of touch he is with the current political discourse around wealth and inequality. He demonstrates a baffling level of ignorance concerning the actual criticisms at play.
> The ones who become really rich are the ones who keep working. And what makes them keep working is not just money. What keeps them working is the same thing that keeps anyone else working when they could stop if they wanted to: that there's nothing else they'd rather do.
Here he completely misses the point, which is that exploitation has very little to do with an individual's intention and everything to do with systemic dynamics and incentives in the way these companies operate. It was probably not Travis Kalanick's intention to exploit drivers, but Uber's business model incentivizes the company to pay drivers as little as possible, which they do. A similar dynamic plays out with nearly all capitalist enterprise, which makes the intentions of founders mostly irrelevant.
"Their exploitation usually begins with their own cofounders, which is disastrous, since the cofounders' relationship is the foundation of the company. Then it moves on to the user..."
At no point in this entire post does PG address what "exploitation" really means in the Marxist sense — Marxist economics being at the heart of most of discussions about wealth accumulation — which focuses on the exploitation of labor and the ways in which technology can enable or accelerate capital accumulation to the detriment of regular workers.
What's so startling about PG's posts on these subjects is how unseriously he takes the opposing view. He clearly hasn't done any work to understand people's concerns about income and wealth inequality (which is not just coming from "politicians" as he characterizes it). There are probably better arguments in favor of billionaires, but Graham doesn't know enough about the ideas he's arguing against to imagine them.
If this is the level of intellectual rigor governing Silicon Valley today, it's no wonder we keep seeing boondoggles like WeWork and Theranos propped up by silly investments. Disgraceful.