How to earn a billion dollars • Hacker News Board

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#351

Post by therepanic » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 3:45 PM UTC

> So how do you find startup ideas without looking for them? By working on projects with your friends. That's where the very best startups come from. Initially they're not even meant to be companies. They're just something people built because they thought it would be cool. That's how Apple and Google and Facebook all started. None of them were meant to be companies at first.

That’s cool and it’s a cool post, sure, but it sounds ridiculous when you look at how many dumb GPT wrappers there are in YC batches nowadays.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#352

Post by jmyeet » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 3:45 PM UTC

epsteingpt wrote: post #238

Impressed at the commentary here, which correctly points out Paul dodges the entire issue at hand. Three things can be true: 1. Growing at a rapid rate over long periods of time is hard , doable and rewarding 2. Incentivizing the discovery of these things is good for society. 3. Nonethless there is and should be a limit to wealth acquisition, given moral hazard. To make a similarly glib counterargument to Paul G: If…

> Impressed at the commentary here,

Me too, honestly. I'm also kind of shocked. I want to expand on your last point.

Uber became a billion dollar business by running an illegal taxi service. Now I like the ability to book a taxi from my phone with seamless payment. I also dealt with the yellow cabs in NYC in years gone by and it sucked. Shift changes, annoying looping ads you couldn't turn off, card skimming, the process of hailing a cab sucked and the cabs themselves tended to be bad. All that is true but it was still illegal.

AirBNB became a billion dollar company by allowing people to run illegal hotels in residential neighborhoods. This was value extraction from all the neighbors who had to live with the externalities created but gained nothing from it. That value was extracted by people who usually didn't live there. Agree with it or not, it was generally illegal, particularly in their large profit centers like NYC.

There is a lot of this that goes on and, honestly, is the entire basis for private equity. Private equity looks for companies that have what they call "pricing power", which is a form of "inelastic demand". Housing, for example, has inelastic demand. But it also includes creating regional monopolies like buying up all the vets or medical practices in an area and then jacking up the price of all of them. You're not going to drive 5 hours for most medical treatment.

This can sometimes go wrong. KKR bought Envision Healthcare, an amergency medicine contracting company, and unlocked "pricing power" by intentinoally using out-of-network services wherever possible to charge a lot more. Lots of medical practices do this actually. Anyway, their business was effectively killed when the No Surprises Act [1], which interestingly was signed into law by Donald Trump in his lame duck period after losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden.

[1]: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/understanding-the-no-surp...

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#353

Post by wasabi991011 » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 3:45 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #36

smallmancontrov wrote: post #3

In creative destruction, you can do an accounting sleight of hand by attributing credit for creation while ignoring blame for destruction even though the two are linked. This is a technology + investing forum and all of us agree that in general creative destruction processes are enormously net positive, but they frequently do kick off a toxic byproduct in the form of said destruction (e.g. Uber and displaced taxi dri…

There's no resource destruction involved in displacing taxi drivers. Taxi medallions are a rent-seeking scheme, there's no real scarcity involved. Most other instances of "creative destruction" are like that, the capital simply gets repurposed at negligible social cost and only excess profits disappear.

Please look up Uber's business practices: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Uber

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#354

Post by dartharva » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 3:46 PM UTC

Kuyawa wrote: post #290

We can't romanticize making money, it's a ruthless field where mostly politicians, the military complex, and drug traffickers thrive, and a few startups that cater to the global economy, which are very very rare, so rare than only 30 out of more than 6000 have succeded in Paul's own words. Amazon was first, then Uber went world wide, so did Airbnb, and now OpenClaw, so yes, the AI gold rush opened the gates for new o…

"Drug traffickers" is a great term to use here, because arguably many of the startup stalwarts that went on to make billions are those that did so by selling addictive convenience (Amazon, AI-anything, etc.) or brainrot (all social media), all of which function as harmful drugs that emasculate people.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#355

Post by dakiol » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 3:46 PM UTC

csallen wrote: post #338

dakiol wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PG's net worth is between 2.5 and 10 billion... so, I wouldn't take him seriously. Normal people (like the majority ones around here) won't ever have the opportunities/skills/luck all combined at a given point in time to generate billions. So any advice from his side regarding money is simply misleading.

This is pessimistic and cynical. Many millions of people are capable of succeeding if they strive for it, and in doing so making better lives for themselves and others. Hearing words of encouragement, useful advice, and inspirational examples from those who've done it can be tremendously motivating, and is often the difference between trying and not trying. Between "I did it" and "I wish someone had told me it was po…

I'm not against inspirational examples. I'm against unrealistic inspirational examples (like PG).

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#356

Post by arjie » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 3:48 PM UTC

There is an argument to be made that societal structure enables much of that wealth to be made. J K Rowling can make a billion dollars not just because people want her stuff and give her money for it but because we have a system of intellectual property and a bunch of guys who enforce it. We all pay for that and Rowling benefits. It’s true that this happens, but our system of taxation takes care of this pretty well.

There are exploitable gaps in the logic where loaning against owned collateral is not considered a realizable taxable event and it’s reasonable to attempt to close these.

But like most things I find that things fall down when actual policy needs to be written. The only example is the SEIU proposition in California which is backdated and requires many people to give up half their ownership in a company.

I can’t be brought around to supporting those outcomes.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#357

Post by well_ackshually » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 3:49 PM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #59

thomassmith65 wrote: post #51

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?

It's true. After all, what's wrong with endorsing a company that uses slave labor to make shoes ?

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#358

Post by arjie » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 3:49 PM UTC

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…

You can’t realistically make any money through work alone. Being paid for that work and being able to hold the value of that medium of exchange fully depends on the rest of us keeping an orderly society around you.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#359

Post by kingstoned » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 3:51 PM UTC

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #313

changoplatanero wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what she would say about professional athletes. Some of the top stars have made near a billion dollars in lifetime wages, as unionized employees. Hard for me to see who the sports stars are exploiting to get their wealth.

Nozick has a very interesting thought experiment about this. It poses a completely egalitarian world in which everyone has the same wealth and earns the same income. But there's a kid who's really good at dunking basketballs, and starts charging 5c to watch him dunk. Nobody is required to pay the kid, everybody does so entirely of their own free will. Things progress, and the kid now has 100x the wealth of anybody el…

and you answer is...? There is an interesting article about inequality and intentions behind it: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/inequality-is-about-grabbin... ... what do you think about it?

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#360

Post by theptip » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 3:51 PM UTC

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…

Right, regardless of whether you agree or disagree with the point, PG doesn’t actually engage with it. He just says “compound growth + build something that people love”.

But the meat of the point is: if the economy is growing at 2.5%, how do you sustain 15% over 5 years?

Look, I’m a startup guy, I buy into the premise that it’s an intensely value-creating activity. But I think it’s self-defeating to pretend like the monopoly and regulatory arbitrage problems don’t exist.

I get that PG and his customers need to be able to cash out, but also, the monopoly rentiers make it more difficult for startups to compete by buying up competitors early and offering crazy salaries that make startups uncompetitive.

All that said, the subtext here is that PG is providing politicians with stories they can tell, nobody in this conversation is trying to describe reality in the most precise or honest way.