So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars [...] that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way.
How to earn a billion dollars
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Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#52Holy smokes, one could call this condescending but assuming both politicians and an average reader don’t understand how exponents work feels a step above. And that’s before you get to the part where it’s all about a great idea and hard work and definitely zero exploitation while mentioning examples like Apple, Facebook or Airbnb.
The most offensive part to me is that it tries to excuse obscene wealth as simply (shrug) a pesky, I mean "magic", byproduct of math.
Regardless, can we talk about the danger to society of having these resulting billionaires and how we ought to address that? I think that is in fact what "the politician" mentioned in the article was trying to address.
(The new American Dream appears to be: be one of the 30 people every 21 years that finds themselves the head of a startup that succeeds.)
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#53Does that work always without fail with anyone anywhere anytime?
For those that pg has sponsored it has happened a few times out of ~5,000. Better odds than the lottery, for sure.
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#54The real problem is his example, "you start off with 2 million dollars and 95% growth rate". Fine, show me the average person who can come up with 2 million dollars. I sure as hell can not. I even went to banks and founders with my ideas, cash flow sheets and customer list looking for a loan. No, I am convinced, the rich already have 2 million dollars, and make themselves a billionaire. The system is rigged against "…
Well the average person, when you exclude real estate, is neither worth nor has a million dollars, that is true.
But this kind of person isn't rare either, even in Italy or Poland where I live I know many multi millionaires.
Some are farmers, some have restaurants/hotels, some work remotely for US tech companies, some were early engineers in startups.
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#55Holy smokes, one could call this condescending but assuming both politicians and an average reader don’t understand how exponents work feels a step above. And that’s before you get to the part where it’s all about a great idea and hard work and definitely zero exploitation while mentioning examples like Apple, Facebook or Airbnb.
>PaulGraham: And how could you possibly cheat to increase the market size?
I can literally think of a million ways.
1) lie to your customers about what your product actually does; this seems inevitable, once (if not before) private equity gets involved.
Using AirBnB as example: all the excess fees which have slowly crept into the final purchase price, while still requiring guests to clean &c
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#56Playing devils advocate here: Maybe the politicians position is that the whole system is based on cheating and everyone who partakes is acting immorally? Is it fair that the founder got education and some money to start his company while other people are living on the street or have to care for relatives? If they come from a relatively privileged position and manage to build a company that ends up being successful, d…
If the only viable alternative is that nobody gets to start their business rather than some idealized best case of everyone getting a chance of it, then yes, it's probably fair.
I don’t think the only options are the current way or that nobody is allowed to start companies.
Im not from the US so I’m probably not doing a good job at the devils advocate thing but I could imagine that you just tax the people that start the business so they still get some healthy personal wealth by redistributing the truly extreme wealth back to the workers/society.
There’s probably some motivation problem to grow the company further at some point but maybe you could limit the percentage any individual can earn by holding the company or something like that?
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#57>an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars… What she meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way.
This assumption is depressing. That the only alternative to "earn" is "cheat".
A system of diminishing work (i.e. where money makes money), especially combined with inheritance, means every dollar is arguably less earned than the last. That system is fine and actually very useful, but that diminishment becomes a big problem at large enough scales. We've been operating at that scale for many decades.
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#58I think Paul left out the fact that in order to grow that fast, you often need to commit crime.
Airbnb/Bed Boat, Neighbor, Swimply, Uber/Lyft, Bird/Lime, BlackJet, Waymo/Cruise, Splacer/Peerspace, Zenefits, Tilt, Loomis/Stablecoins, Coinbase, Worldcoin, Stripe, AngelList/Sydecar, Polymarket, Uniswap Labs, Doordash/Instacart/Postmates, CloudKitchens, Shef, Done Health, Forward Health, Cerebral, Pacaso, Sonder, 23andMe, Ro/Hims/Hers, Viome, Juul Labs, Oura Ring, Particle Health/Moxe Health, Roblox, YouTube, Popcorn Time, Kickstarter/Indiegogo, Republic/Wefunder, Deel/Remote, Lambda School, Make School, Mission Bit, WeWork, Oyster/Papaya Global, HiQ Labs, FlexPort, Katerra, Zipline, Starship Technologies/Serve Robotics, 3D Robotics, Anduril Industries, DraftKings/FanDuel, Cydia, Eaze, MindMed, Odin, Swarm Technologies, Starlink, Convoy/Uber Freight, Carvana, Tesla, VoltShare.... oh yeah, and OpenAI.
What do all of these companies have in common? They all manipulated markets, bent and broke laws in order to get that "exponential growth". They didn't want to wait around and find out if their businesses would be legally allowed to grow. So they just broke or worked around the law, with the intention of becoming billionaires. But that's okay, because growth rate! We're not doing anything bad, people want these things! Who cares if it might be illegal or the spirit of the law frowns on what we do? Money!!!
This is just one of the reasons why becoming a billionaire requires you to cheat. There's also the tax loopholes, the inducement to harm (both of the customer and by the customer), anti-competition, etc. In order to get these gains, you need to cheat, because if it were easy to do legally, ethically, and quickly, somebody already would have. It's corporate doping.
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#59So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars [...] that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way. What counts as 'doing something bad' and 'cheating' clearly is subjective. I suspect Graham's opinion on the behavior of a Zuckerberg or a Musk would be a little more flattering than…
Conversely, I suspect the politician is defining that "all things that earn a billion dollars" are in the "bad" category.
LeBron James has, between playing basketball and endorsing things, earned a billion dollars. What bad thing did he do, other than losing the finals a few times?
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I will say before Uber was a thing, if I tried to call and schedule a taxi pickup in the city I lived in at the time, if they showed up at all they were at east a half hour late. Missed a flight because of it once. I don’t even like uber, but it is objectively a better service most of the time.
Yes, Uber did something enormously creative. But it also did something destructive and we're guilty of an accounting sleight of hand if we focus on one while pretending the other doesn't exist. We still want to encourage creative destruction to move forward, but paying taxes to clean up the destruction is the very least that the victorious parties can do because the entanglement exists in moral accounting even if it…
Destroying inefficient monopoly rents? By all means, let us not pretend that doesn't exist.