301–310 of 1001 posts
This article did not sit well with me. I have found myself rereading Beyond Smart, How to Write Usefully, The Need to Read, Life is Short. But this one is harmful; nobody needs a billion dollars.
Why would you even WANT to become a billionaire? Wealthy, sure, but becoming a billionaire effectively destroys your place in any of your social circles. It obliterates any dynamics of trust and interdependence you may have and replaces them with a gnawing unease about if they’re still hanging out with you, or if they’re hanging out with the money. Not to mention, Graham entirely fails to differentiate between EARNIN…
There’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the mechanics & incentive structure here: Take Mr. World’s First Trillionaire, Elon Musk. He doesn’t have a dragon’s horde, his money is almost entirely invested in SpaceX and Tesla, building things he wants to build. SpaceX didn’t IPO so he could have bragging rights with his Forbes list peers, it IPO’d because it was the most efficient way to get more capital to grow and ac…
> 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'…
But, in the real world, as the 'exponential earnings' stack up, the incentives to do unsavory things to keep the rate of growth scales right along with the earnings; and the odds of anyone actually 'earning' a billion dollars while sharing the proceeds and absorbing the risks and societal costs of that growth fairly, ethically, legally and honestly has a growing potential to become vanishingly small.
AOC was speaking to this reality, the author was speaking about the math functions of how some steady rate of growth crosses from a small number to a very big number due to the law of compounding growth, and speaking to the actions and motives of a cohort who had not yet done what it took to realize that rate and duration of growth.
They actually are both right.
AOC was not addressing the math at all, nor did she claim that it was mathematically difficult to become a billionaire; just that it was unrealistic to expect that the process of doing so did not select for people with an intrinsic ability to externalize risk and maximize profit in a manner which many other people find distasteful, bordering on criminal if known to the full extent.
And the original post posits that his representative cohort was free from these types of behaviors and thus would remain so.
I find one of those arguments more realistic and actionable than the other even though they both may be true. I'll leave which for another day.
I don't think that the current system rewards those deserving the largest cuts of the pie.
If you want to argue how to get a billion dollars, sure. But to me that is different than earning it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
- So I would like you all to do me a favor please. I would like you to take out your phones and calculate a number. I know this may seem contrived, but I promise it will be useful for you. I’m thinking of vibe coding a calculator app How Many Babies Died For This where you input your startup idea, life(style) goals and AI token usage and the machine spits out the Net Babies Dead for you to achieve your dreams
The pursuit of everlasting growth that pg describes inevitably results in cheating. At a certain point the market reaches a saturation point and if you're capitalising on every possible opportunity to retain your high growth rate, that will include hoarding resources and circumventing consumer protections.
Why would you even WANT to become a billionaire? Wealthy, sure, but becoming a billionaire effectively destroys your place in any of your social circles. It obliterates any dynamics of trust and interdependence you may have and replaces them with a gnawing unease about if they’re still hanging out with you, or if they’re hanging out with the money. Not to mention, Graham entirely fails to differentiate between EARNIN…
You don't have to advertise that you're a billionaire. You can live quite normally while quietly changing the world as a "side job".
I think the distinction the politician tried to make, was that you don't "earn" a billion dollars the same way the vast majority of people make their money. You become a billionaire by company ownership, not getting cold hard cash. The hierarchy of wage looks something like: 1. hourly pay (how many hours you can work sets the maximum possible salary) 2. base pay + cash bonus (the cash bonus starts to increase your ea…