Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to earn a billion dollars

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 1001 posts

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#141

Post by cyanydeez »

TheTaytay wrote: post #129
AdamN wrote: post #124

She meant impossible in that one doesn't earn a billion dollars through work alone. The only way to get there is to set up a structure that extracts a billion dollars from a market (usually by building a structure that's more efficient but also generates externalities that are not borne by the person getting the billion dollars). pg's reading of it is so blunt and misrepresentative that I'm nervous about what kind of…

Your phrase “extract” betrays a fundamental disagreement with what Paul is saying. (Externalities does so again) It assumes a zero-sum game where the job is to shift money from one person to another. Value, and thus money/wealth can be created. Literally. You are saying, in different words, that no one can do it “honestly”. He is saying one can.

no one is doing it honestly in the disparity

musk isnt a trillionaire because his assets would equate to physical product. his valuation is an inflated target of market manipulation.

when you add up all the physical goods in the world that directly benefit people, that comes nowhere near these valuations.

and externalities are one way wealth is taken from the environment. then theyre parlayed.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#142

Post by ProllyInfamous »

AdamN wrote: post #132
OtherShrezzing wrote: post #117

I don't think this article properly engaged with the criticism from the politician. That's fine, I wasn't expecting it to, but this isn't valuable commentary on the politician's point. I suppose it does serve to demonstrate that Graham and people in Graham's orbit are unable to see a distinction between "have a billion dollars" and "earn a billion dollars". It's a very sf-bubble type article.

It's depressing really - lost alot of respect for pg over time. Based on his writings it honestly appears that he isn't engaged with any critical writing in any of the social or political (or economic) domains.

The problem with any Sycophancy is that eventually [even the most-egalitarian] leaders lose both perspective as well as control (of their entire organization... world).

Even if the leader wants to hear honest criticism – to receive capital `t` Truth, IMHO: rare – his echelons will sequester any challenge(s) to their status quo, often by excluding dissent(er)s.

----

Thou art mortal, Caesar.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#143

Post by AIorNot »

This horrible mentality is what ails tech bro culture today and ruined the tech world for me - chasing billions

Greed mixed with analytical thinking on industrial scale - graham, thiel, musk, hoffman, bezos, zuck all symptoms of “smart” people who screwed this country ultimately - all for what?

Has the changed world that resulted been for the better?

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#144

Post by AdamN »

djoldman wrote: post #84

> So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars. > 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'…

I doubt he listened to what she said - just a soundbite on Fox News or worse Facebook.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#145

Post by torben-friis »

AdamN wrote: post #124

She meant impossible in that one doesn't earn a billion dollars through work alone. The only way to get there is to set up a structure that extracts a billion dollars from a market (usually by building a structure that's more efficient but also generates externalities that are not borne by the person getting the billion dollars). pg's reading of it is so blunt and misrepresentative that I'm nervous about what kind of…

I understood the phrase as emphasizing the "deserving" implication of the word earn. As in, it is not possible for a human to take actions such that the fair reward is a billion. Or in other words, if you got a billion you got more than it's fair. To emphasize: this does not necessarily mean that the way one became a billionaire is nefarious or evil. It just implies unfairness.

I'm not defending that interpretation, mind you, just saying it's a possible read of the phrase.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#146

Post by inigyou »

TheTaytay wrote: post #129
AdamN wrote: post #124

She meant impossible in that one doesn't earn a billion dollars through work alone. The only way to get there is to set up a structure that extracts a billion dollars from a market (usually by building a structure that's more efficient but also generates externalities that are not borne by the person getting the billion dollars). pg's reading of it is so blunt and misrepresentative that I'm nervous about what kind of…

Your phrase “extract” betrays a fundamental disagreement with what Paul is saying. (Externalities does so again) It assumes a zero-sum game where the job is to shift money from one person to another. Value, and thus money/wealth can be created. Literally. You are saying, in different words, that no one can do it “honestly”. He is saying one can.

Yes, and the art of this game is to extract value which you did not create. It may or may not come alongside creating value. Uber creates value in the form of an app marketplace for taxis, but it also pushes taxi wages down below the sustainability line without pushing prices down that far, and pockets the difference for itself. Apple made a cool phone that it sells for a high but fair price, but it also takes 30% of everything you buy with that phone, just because it can.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#149

Post by dasil003 »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #58

I 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…

> Who cares if it might be illegal or the spirit of the law frowns on what we do?

Surely these things are on a moral and ethical continuum and we need to look at them individually? Pretty much every person has broken some law at least once in their lives. I don’t disagree that moral ambivalence is often necessary to make billions, but I also don’t consider all laws sacrosanct, or that breaking the law is the primary measure of a company’s moral standing.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#150

Post by inigyou »

dangoodmanUT wrote: post #98
theturtletalks wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When AI melts away these rent seeking marketplaces like Uber, Doordash, Amazon, etc, they won’t go as quietly as the people they displaced.

These are actually the most durable businesses because they have network effects: restaurants alright signed up, sellers onboarded, etc. Easier for them to adopt AI than AI companies to rebuild the networks

One way to take over a network is to start with an alternative front end. We'll see if this works out for AI companies. First you have the AI consult booking.com whenever someone asks it to book a hotel, then you get more and more hotels to directly communicate with the AI company, then you drop booking.com once you have enough.
Post reply on HN