How to earn a billion dollars • Hacker News Board

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#401

Post by kristianbrigman » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 4:42 PM UTC

atq2119 wrote: post #218

inigyou wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pg is or was the owner of a very influential venture capital fund, that created projects such as Uber and AirBNB. He knows all about setting up structures to extract value, and he also knows which framing makes people more sympathetic instead of angry.

The sad part about it, and one that has become a bit of a theme with his postings, is that pg stopped being intellectually honest in his online writings at some point over the last two decades. His post here in particular violates the fundamental principles of HN in that he does not engage with the argument at all. The argument isn't that it's impossible to become a billionaire legally , the argument is that it's imp…

pg’s argument is essentially 1. Build something people want to buy 2. If you do, you can get exponential growth of people buying it 3. This isn’t inherently immoral.

There are many assumptions around this you could argue about, but he’s directly addressing the original statement (which was also simple, and did not explicitly include the assumptions either).

I agree they are talking past each other - a lot of this is more related to marginal cost differences than anything else imho (basically how leveraged the value of my labor could practically be).

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#402

Post by theptip » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 4:43 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #386

theptip wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

This is the level of detail I am asking for. “Subpopulation height increases because of the physical and understood processes of maturation and growth”. You could easily go into the biology involved, model the genetic, environmental, and random variance.

You will note that PG does not provide such a mechanism for how a $100m company grows into a $10b company (thus producing $b wealth for founders).

Just to be clear. I am not saying at the object level that such growth is impossible. I am saying that at the meta/causal level, PG did not adequately characterize it it.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#403

Post by tmsh » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 4:44 PM UTC

AOC’s point is simply that when growing exponentially from 250M to 500M to 1B usually whether using exploitive rails one is conscious of or not - someone is bearing an unfair burden. That in 60 out of 60 examples of YC billionaires and all billionaires with maybe a few exceptions - people do not go out of their way to ensure nobody is getting hurt and everyone participates fairly. People are too excited about the exponential growth and their goals. I don’t even think it’s AOC’s main point that these people are at fault. Just that the system is at fault for not ensuring exploitation is minimized further for the rest of the 99%.

(Great essay on how to be a billionaire though. Could billionaires give back more? Yes. But creating market value like that is both worth celebrating and evolving.)

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#404

Post by elsonrodriguez » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 4:46 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…

> pg's reading of it is so blunt and misrepresentative that I'm nervous about what kind of content he's consuming.

Guy wrote an essay criticizing “woke” on the eve of Trump’s inauguration and is now running interference for billionaires causing an affordability crisis.

If someone is out of tune enough they are probably just playing a different song.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#405

Post by stephbook » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 4:48 PM UTC

Elon Musk easily earned the billions for SpaceX. It's providing space internet to Ukraine, an innocent democracy that's under attack. The technological feats of rocket reuse and the vision of Mars don't even matter, insofar as they're just tools to attract the capital. Any other method that supports Ukraine just as well would have also been worth a billion.

Patriot interceptors cost many millions, so 100-200 are already worth a billion! Is SpaceX internet worth 200 Patriot missiles? Easily.

I think politicians restrict "earning" to "wage income", which is kind of an arbitrary line in the sand, and would also be untrue. SpaceX/Tesla would also have paid Musk billions in cash if stock wasn't allowed.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#406

Post by zeroonetwothree » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 4:49 PM UTC

theptip wrote: post #360

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…

Perhaps you realize this, but the way the economy grows 2.5% is through lots of entities growing faster than that.

Growth comes from innovation, and innovators get rewarded with faster growth as non-innovators decline.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#407

Post by erelong » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 4:49 PM UTC

lots of moving parts on this discussion but I'll boil it down to:

the ratio of the average individual's wealth to 'illionaire's wealth feels "wrongly asymmetric" for a lot of people (CEOs making ~300x that of average worker)

the question is basically about how that startup scaling at 94% translates to scaling up the individual's life (who faces alleged "stagnant wages")

or in other words, how can entrepreneurs create an approach for society that facilitates individuals scaling up their wealth?

There is for example a perception that a person working all waking hours on a low amount of pay - like minimum wage, and without investments - could never become a 'illionaire through their "honest hard work"; ergo becoming a 'illionaire requires something beyond this "honest hard work" (implying illegal and or unethical means)

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#408

Post by simianwords » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 4:50 PM UTC

I feel like a primer on Labour Theory of Value is important in this thread. This a debunked theory that is still being used by populists to justify their anger on the System TM and in particular, the billionaires.

Folk LTV interpretation is that people's wages are supposed to be proportional to their hours worked. Obviously this is false -- everyone knows this but people still repeat it because it has populist memetic value.

That LTV is debunked and proved to be useless is very easy to demonstrate -- the single person (who was a Marxist) who took this theory seriously abandoned it. He's not the only one though.

I asked ChatGPT this: "who is the single one contemporary person who took labour theory of value seriously in an academic sense?"

ChatGPT: G.E Cohen.

(G.E Cohen is an Analytical Marxist BTW)

Here's what G.E Cohen has to say specifically on LTV:

1. "labour theory is, moreover, false" [1]

2. "The labour theory of value is not a suitable basis for the charge of exploitation laid against capitalism by Marxists, and the real foundation of that charge is something much simpler which, for reasons to be stated, is widely confused with the labour theory of value." [2]

[1] https://andrewmbailey.com/money/readings/cohen

[2] https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/3128-the-labour-theory...

So here you have the one guy who took this flawed concept seriously, * from the side of Marxism * and then has to conclude that it is false.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#409

Post by inigyou » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 4:51 PM UTC

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #406

theptip wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Perhaps you realize this, but the way the economy grows 2.5% is through lots of entities growing faster than that. Growth comes from innovation, and innovators get rewarded with faster growth as non-innovators decline.

If so many entities are declining, why shouldn't I expect that my entities will also decline? Why should I expect them to be the ones that go up?

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#410

Post by stephbook » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 4:52 PM UTC

JimmyBuckets wrote: post #261

Telemakhos wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say she has ten employees. They all voluntarily agree to work for her: slavery is illegal, so people work for others on a consensual basis. Both the employer and employee negotiated and consented to a salary or wage schedule for that employee. The employer pays the agreed-upon compensation, and the employee receives it. If the company makes an unexpectedly large profit, the employer is not obligated to redistri…

This completely negates the fact that due to how the labor market is structured, most people who sell their labour to survive are in a disadvantageous position for the negotiation you are talking about. What you are talking about works well in a basic economics text book but does not translate to the real world.

The cleaning lady at SpaceX doesn't do a better job than that at Walmart. So why should she be paid more?

You think she's doing the heavy lifting there? Creating the billions? While the underperformer at VideoBuster / Radio Shack is responsible for tanking the business? That's just not true.