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There is nothing more evil in this world than the pursuit of power and wealth.
— 1 Timothy 6:10 KJV (The King James Bible) https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_(King_James)/1_Timothy#...>
> The rational fear of those who dislike economic inequality is that the rich will convert their economic power into political power: that they’ll tilt elections, or pay bribes for pardons, or buy up the news media to promote their views.
> I used to be able to claim that tech billionaires didn't actually do this — that they just wanted to refine their gadgets. But unfortunately in the current administration we've seen all three.
Now he's claiming he's trained all these billionaires and they are a blessing to the world, not avaricious sociopaths.
This article reads like a rather flippant dismissal of the original concern that "earning" a billion dollars cannot be done without some moral compromise. Sure, if you start off with $2 million and double it 9 times, you end up with $1 billion. Exponential growth is a powerful thing, so it comes as no surprise that maintaining a large growth rate over time very quickly grows a starting sum into a much larger pool of…
Reminds me of this post I’ve seen making the rounds recently about a welder at SpaceX who was making $28/hr becoming a millionaire.
They keep emphasizing he’s a welder, the system works, and at the verrrry end mention he was issued 10k in stock a decade ago at SpaceX and held until it IPO’d the other day. The only “lesson” here is “if you own stock and stock go up you get lots of dollar bucks.”
They keep emphasizing “he’s a hardworking welder.” My response is “great! Let businesses take a lesson here: give all your employees a chunk of the company. Let’s all share in the success!”
But that’s obviously not their point.
> She wasn't saying, of course, that it's impossible to become a billionaire.... What she meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way.
> But now you at least understand, from having done the math yourselves, that you don't have to cheat to become a billionaire. You've seen for yourselves that there are only two numbers in the calculation, the growth rate and how long it continues. If it's impossible to make a billion dollars without cheating, which of those two numbers is impossible?
AoC quote:
> There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned. You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that.
Come now @pg.
$2 million * 9.45 months * 93% growth rate = earning a billion dollars, ok. Does that really address what AoC was saying? She wasn't saying that the math doesn't math.
I enjoyed this, but the thesis is misleading. Paul’s own examples here were Facebook, apple etc. I imagine that the politicians point was that beyond a certain point, you do have to be unethical to continue that growth rate. Facebook is notorious for doing plenty of this. Apple too is known for exploiting developers. If we extrapolate to trillionaires, we know for a fact that you need to be an all-around dousche that…
Yup. Billionaire - doable without too much ethical compromise (e.g early Google). The thing is that a billion isn't much per "first world" citizen if that is roughly your market. Many-many-billionaire - would need some good example, I can only think of bad ones. The SAP guys maybe? But they aren't exactly the richest. The only bad things I've heard about SAP are "making clunky software" and "charging too much money".
You mass exploit labor at scale to exfiltrate 1B$.
You commit wage theft to obtain 1B$ (the largest theft category).
You union bust and fire workers who try to fight for better working conditions and wages.
You engage in monopoly practices to obtain 1B$.
You engage in corruption via 'campaign donations' to lay down laws that benefit you and harm others.
Doctors earn. Engineers earn. Scientists earn. LABOR EARNS.
But billionaires never *earn* 1B$. They exfiltrate, steal, and corrupt.
That's not the problem.
The problem is even simpler mathematics. Proportions. How much do we give to first employees? How realistic is that John Smith, first salesman of the company is getting 2% and should consider himself lucky, while I, Peter Boss retain most of the company?
We always talk about the dilation of the founders' shares and its relation to the VC portion.
What is the usual proportion of the shares held by the founders and the first 10 or 100 employees?
Is that proportion usually realistic with regards to the effort put in and the risk assumed?
Is that risk usually really that heroic or most of us in the "can found a startup" caste can usually go back to jobs that already pay well over average?
I am the founder of a company. I want it to succeed. I don't want to become a billionaire, but I want the people that help me build it to have similar successes to mine.
If we succeed, I don't want my car or house to be 10x more expensive than of those people who joined me first.
There's something seriously rotten about telling university students about billions. The issue isn't whether anyone can earn a billion dollars. Nobody actually needs a billion dollars.
The question they should be pondering is given the excess of talent and opportunity they have, how can they help the people around them and give something back to society.
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. 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?
a) thinking that others don't understand exponential. Any reasonably college educated grad understands it well.
b) thinking that growing 93 percent every month means the founder has put in 93% more effort than the prior month.
Their argument relies upon the ideology that just because you thought and executed an idea profitably means you should continue to "earn" from it.
In the LLM age, more and more people are questioning this, and rather want to goto: effort == earnings.