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How to earn a billion dollars

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#461

Post by UncleMeat »

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…

Compound growth is also the exact thing that is being criticized here. Your wealth grows simply by virtue of ownership. No labor needs to be performed. When somebody says that you can't earn a billion dollars they are the same thing that PG is saying, he just doesn't think it is bad: the way to become a billionaire is to own things whose value rises over time. The issue is whether this can be meaningfully called "earning" it.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#463

Post by ozgung »

owaiswiz wrote: post #163

> She was getting richer at a stupendously rapid rate. And yet she hadn't been doing anything bad. The reason her startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built. So she could feel from her own experience how wrong that politician was. She wasn't exploiting anyone. I presume it's a company that just has co-founders then? Or everyone is getting an equal % of the share? In which case SHE's not…

Yeah math is wrong. She has to wait one more month to be a billionaire since she has a co-founder. So 10 months.

The good news is she can be a trillionaire in another 10 months.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#464

Post by UncleMeat »

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.

Bill Gates' wealth grew much more after he left Microsoft than while he was CEO. Was that wealth earned through innovation? No. He simply owned something that became more valuable as other people labored to innovate.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#466

Post by clear-octopus »

geysersam wrote: post #292
TheTaytay wrote: post #129

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.

The word "extracted" does not betray a belief that value cannot be created. You can "extract" value that is created just as you can extract value that was there already. The question is not whether or not value was created, the question is who deserves to control the value that was created. The fact is the billionaire managed to extract value from the market. The ethical question is: who deserves to get the value tha…

[dead]

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#467

Post by giardini »

Grombobulous wrote: post #420
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…

There are extremely good arguments for why the act of becoming and remaining a billionaire is immoral and bad alone, without any need for you to have directly wronged someone else. PG just completely misunderstands and hand-waves over this basic concept and makes the excuse that "hey we worked really hard and made an amazing product that people loved, we aren't harming anyone." For one thing, founders and employees d…

Grombobulous says "Paul Graham is out here giving speeches to rich kids at Oxford Union, but he could be spending his morning in the local soup kitchen or building homes with Habitat for Humanity. He could be mentoring people who are struggling to escape housing insecurity, or he could be working with advocacy groups to expand healthcare access and end childhood hunger."

Which of those would provide the most benefit to the world?

Grombobulous says "But he is one of the people who has dedicated his life to capitalism, even after successfully taking care of his family for many lifetimes, and that says a lot about him."

You're simply anti-capitalist. Please post about that instead of mounting personal attacks on people who make more money than you. And please cease telling other people what to do and not do! Try to put yourself into their shoes and think harder about their situation.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#468

Post by DonsDiscountGas »

grim_io wrote: post #304

To me, earning something means deserving something. 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.

Yes I'm sure that's what AOC meant too but it's not much of an explanation. Who are you to decide what people deserve or earn? And if you're going to decide that perhaps you'd like to provide a better justification, one that doesn't just boil down to "a billion is really really a lot of money".

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#469

Post by filup »

cm2012 wrote: post #365
filup wrote: post #10

I exclusively build stuff that I think is cool for me and my friends but I have little drive to market these things and plus they are designed to be completely free forever so I don't think I'll ever be a billionaire.

That is wonderful. What makes billionaires valuable to society is that the act of trying to make a business worth a billion dollars that people want is really, really hard. It essentially punches you in the face constantly. You have to power through a bunch of really tough situations. There has to be a really strong reward at the end to make it worth it. Otherwise everyone would just toy around with free projects.

Hopefully the billionaires are happy with the reward at the end of the tunnel.

I suspect they may envy the laymens position in life eventually. You loose alot becoming wealthy in the monitary sense. There are many ways to define richness and wealth beyond what society defines it as.

As they say, more money more problems.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#470

Post by stouset »

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…

Even 15% for five years only doubles your original investment.

To get a billion from a million you need to do 15% for fifty years, and that ignores inflation. Or 25% for thirty-one years.

These numbers are ludicrous.

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