How to earn a billion dollars • Hacker News Board

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#481

Post by mystraline » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 6:06 PM UTC

missedthecue wrote: post #376

mystraline wrote: post #86

You do not EARN 1B$. You mass exploit labor at scale to exfiltrate 1B$. You commit wage theft to obtain 1B$ (the largest theft category). You union bust and fire workers who try to fight for better working conditions and wages. You engage in monopoly practices to obtain 1B$. You engage in corruption via 'campaign donations' to lay down laws that benefit you and harm others. Doctors earn. Engineers earn. Scientists ea…

In tears laughing that people still believe the labor theory of value. How is this possible. What's next, bringing back miasma theory and spontaneous generation?

Well, for starters, Elon Musk actively adheres to the Labor Theory of Value. He named it differently, with the "Idiot Index". Except, its an inverse LTV.

Both theories use the SAME formula.

Final Price = Raw Materials + Labor + Overhead + Profit

The difference is that Marx pushed that labor is what makes a thing have value. Wheres Musk pushes that humans have 0 value, and should be removed whereever possible.

Same thing, different conclusion.

And know what happens when we get "perfect idiot index" of 1.0? There are no workers, no money, and wealth is accmulated purely in the hands of the elite. Hell, even Ford saw this in tge early 1900's - who'd buy cars if nobody can afford them?

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#482

Post by thelastgallon » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 6:14 PM UTC

The people who create real value rarely make any money.

Linus Torvalds created Linux which allowed companies to use commodity hardware. Before Linux, every company had to pay massive taxes to Sun (Solaris) or IBM (AIX) to run a server. With Linux, commoditty hardware ecosystem blossomed, and the first companies like Google built massive datacenter. This wouldn't have been possible if they had to buy Solaris servers to run their datacenters.

The value created by Linus is probably tens of trillions of dollars. I don't think he is a billionaire. There is a guy who is a trillionaire today. It is hard to make an argument that Musk created more value than Linus. Tesla is a trillion dollar company with negative YoY growth.

Linus Torvalds is not a visionary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-YL0BeWZyU

The people who become billionaires are experts at becoming billionaires, creating value probably has nothing to do with it. They have either inherited wealth or in the right networks. The example PG gives of starting with 2 million USD is someone who is already incredibly wealthy and in the top 1% (1% globally, not just US). As always, there may be some rare exceptions where the founders actually created value and became billionaires.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#483

Post by ElijahLynn » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 6:14 PM UTC

Weird to see Graham take AOC's quote out of context:

Graham: So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars. I felt like a skating coach hearing someone say that it's impossible to do a triple axel. Of course it's possible. It's hard, but it's possible.

Per his link in the article:

AOC: there is a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned. You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#484

Post by ElijahLynn » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 6:15 PM UTC

changoplatanero wrote: post #263

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 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.

All sport stars making millions are making it because they are effectively advertising shills. How many of them are effectively getting paid for advertising shit food, like sugary drinks that humans are addicted to.

They aren't paid millions based on tickets to see them play, it's the advertising.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#485

Post by SoftTalker » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 6:17 PM UTC

stouset wrote: post #470

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…

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.

> These numbers are ludicrous.

They are also speculative, not real. They are based on the notion that the company would be worth that much based on projected cash flows, expenses, etc. If you actually tried to cash it all out at any point in time you could not get anything close to that because the very act of selling will lower the value by destroying confidence in the speculative valuations.

None of these SV billionares have billions in cash or cash equivalents. Maybe a few of the largest companies do.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#486

Post by SoftTalker » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 6:19 PM UTC

UncleMeat wrote: post #461

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…

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 "ea…

Are you doing something to create that value? If yes, then I think you are earning it. If you are simply an investor, then no, but we need investors to make the whole system work.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#487

Post by slibhb » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 6:20 PM UTC

thelastgallon wrote: post #482

The people who create real value rarely make any money. Linus Torvalds created Linux which allowed companies to use commodity hardware. Before Linux, every company had to pay massive taxes to Sun (Solaris) or IBM (AIX) to run a server. With Linux, commoditty hardware ecosystem blossomed, and the first companies like Google built massive datacenter. This wouldn't have been possible if they had to buy Solaris servers t…

> The people who become billionaires are experts at becoming billionaires, creating value probably has nothing to do with it

Give me a break. Elon has created a huge amount of value. Every third car I see on the road is a Telsa and the US was relying on Russia to reach the ISS before SpaceX.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#488

Post by popalchemist » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 6:20 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.

Growth does not ONLY come from innovation. It can come from bad actor or even simply non-innovaive strategies such as acquistition (which can lead to monopoly, as capital tends to amass in large centers / the hands of the few, per Marx). Other bad faith / anti-competitive / non-innovative strategies include regulatory capture, lobbying, doing illegal things (and hoping to not get caught / paying a slap-on-the-wrist fine that would be impossible for smaller companies), etc.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#489

Post by ModernMech » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 6:22 PM UTC

tome wrote: post #180

What AOC is trying to do here is shift the debate from extracting retribution on people who have violated specific laws (a fair and an honest way to enforce justice in a civil society) to extracting retribution on people who she insinuates "must have done something immoral" based on their net worth (a selfish, dishonest, envious and greedy way to run a society). It's a clever play, and unfortunately for the people of…

>There is enough of the population filled with envy and greed that they'll lap up whatever a politician tells them bogie man of the day is. Historically it's been the aristocracy, Jews, immigrants, but those don't work any more, so now it's generally "the rich".

I love how the billionaires hoarding resources to entrench their own power are not the greedy ones in your telling.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#490

Post by mullingitover » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 6:24 PM UTC

The thing about billionaires is that it's almost entirely paper wealth.

The real thing they have is a collective agreement that allows them to have the power to direct a bunch of capital toward production. If they ever just decided to cash in their chips and buy a dragon hoard of gold instead, the paper wealth would vaporize really quickly.

The problem that really exists here is that this small group of individuals has too much power. The feudal system existed for a long time, there's arguably a tendency to return to it, and this is the thing that truly makes people uneasy about the concentration of power outside democratic processes. How do we get rid of the despots? At least with democratic process there's a way to vote them out, their terms expire, etc. With hoarded wealth, and especially (as we see with cases like the Waltons and now the Ellisons) generational mega-wealth, we have zombie feudalism clawing its way out of the grave.

I don't think there's a problem with someone earning the trust of a bunch of investors and being granted a lot of power to direct resources in their lifetime, but the intergenerational transfer of unearned power is a place where a crackdown is certainly warranted.