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How to earn a billion dollars

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#621

Post by JumpCrisscross »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #525
pipes wrote: post #509

The amount of negativity to this is depressing. No one seems to be contradicting anything he's saying here, instead it's just vacuous ideology "extraction" etc etc. Purposely narrow reading. I've got kids, I want people creating start ups they can work in, the alternative is too grim.

What if -- bear with me here -- it's possible for bright, motivated founders to create startups that your kids can work in, but those founders could be content with merely making a hundred million dollars? Because, and I don't know if you know this so you may have to take it on faith, that is still so much money that said founder and their family and very likely their descendants can live in extreme luxury for the re…

> it's possible for bright, motivated founders to create startups that your kids can work in, but those founders could be content with merely making a hundred million dollars?

Making a billion dollars doesn’t require becoming a billionaire. Someone who makes a billion dollars in a balanced society generates wealth and taxes. (One who does in an unbalanced one has the choice to donate.)

Also, liquid versus illiquid. Founders shouldn’t be under obligation to cap their ambition or force liquidate if their companies do well.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#622

Post by WalterBright »

TrackerFF wrote: post #116

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…

> salaried workers can't use leverage to increase their earnings

Of course they can. They can invest, say, 20% of their income into stocks. They can borrow money to invest into stocks, too.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#623

Post by agrajag »

pandoro wrote: post #592

> What she meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way. > But startups are the most common way to become really rich, and if you want to start a successful startup, the key is not exploitation but empathy. There is no doubt that Graham is right in saying there is a formula to becoming a billionaire and that formula involves creating products that help you…

GDP is a measure of the amount of commerce per year, while global wealth is a net accumulation of all the work that has happened in human history.

Billionaires obviously get a disproportionate amount of income per year, but it’s far from 20% of all the world’s GDP. To make your math work that would assume they got all the wealth in a single year.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#624

Post by Muromec »

zarathustreal wrote: post #370
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…

Not giving everyone equal % is exploitation? Interesting, by that logic every participant in the economy should also be required to bail out any startup that fails otherwise we’re exploiting the founders! They’re taking all the risk and we’re getting all the benefit of the services and goods they create!

It may not be exploitation, but one can question how fair is the exchange rate of risk to reward and whether answering "free market" makes the question go away.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#625

Post by nfw2 »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #525
pipes wrote: post #509

The amount of negativity to this is depressing. No one seems to be contradicting anything he's saying here, instead it's just vacuous ideology "extraction" etc etc. Purposely narrow reading. I've got kids, I want people creating start ups they can work in, the alternative is too grim.

What if -- bear with me here -- it's possible for bright, motivated founders to create startups that your kids can work in, but those founders could be content with merely making a hundred million dollars? Because, and I don't know if you know this so you may have to take it on faith, that is still so much money that said founder and their family and very likely their descendants can live in extreme luxury for the re…

How exactly do you propose keeping a founder from becoming wealthier once their company scales past the point where they are worth a hundred million?

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#626

Post by awesomeMilou »

mercutio2 wrote: post #444

As a committed market-socialist, the extent that the HN commentariat has turned into a reflexively nihilistic anti-free-enterprise is a fairly astonishing turn. It’s like my belief system turned into the maximally idiotic version of itself. “Externality” is thrown about as a term almost completely disconnected from any economic grounding of the term. If you make externality mean “anything I find aesthetically displea…

> Demonizing people creating things is petty and unbecoming for a political movement.

i think a more rational argument would claim that this isn't about demonizing people who create, it's about societal inequality. i don't think mark zuckerberg, elon musk or larry page and sergey brin got demonized for creating their products in the first 10-15 years after launch, it's what happened after, the accumulation of wealth, the extension of power, that get's any rational person believing in a free market socialist economy nervous.

> Pretending that the people leveraging that capital are somehow guilty of an original sin just by leveraging capital markets, which is really what these screeds against anyone holding controlling interests in companies they were instrumental in creating, seem to be about, leads down a terrible path.

do you think that they should still be forced to leverage their capital within democratic boundaries? because from what i've heard most founders carry significant power due to their wealth and share increasingly anti-libertarian values, to secure their wealth.

if those democratic boundaries prove to be innovation stiffling, fair, that is definitely an issue, but wouldn't it make sense to argue to then try to adjust those boundaries from within the democratic framework?

one could also make the claim that one popular strategy for securing the gains of a succesful innovation is regulatory capture - a strategy that is increasingly employed by large companies to close of markets and secure market monopolies or duopolies.

in a sense, they are stifling innovation themselves by closing a market to competitors, via instrumentalizing what they usually critize: regulation, no?

it's like you said, these can coexist, but from my perception it's as if these billionaires don't want them to coexist.

and im not thinking about regulatory drama involving diesel generators for AI datacenters or anything specific, just the mere power accumulation and general radical tendencies you find with these ultra wealthy interest groups.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#627

Post by anbende »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #525
pipes wrote: post #509

The amount of negativity to this is depressing. No one seems to be contradicting anything he's saying here, instead it's just vacuous ideology "extraction" etc etc. Purposely narrow reading. I've got kids, I want people creating start ups they can work in, the alternative is too grim.

What if -- bear with me here -- it's possible for bright, motivated founders to create startups that your kids can work in, but those founders could be content with merely making a hundred million dollars? Because, and I don't know if you know this so you may have to take it on faith, that is still so much money that said founder and their family and very likely their descendants can live in extreme luxury for the re…

The primary issue with this is the way shares and equity work. Elon Musk is a trillionaire on paper. He pays himself famously little.

That net worth is, under our current system, tightly linked with his interest and control in his various enterprises.

He can borrow against it which gets around taxes and that should probably be addressed, but he like the hypothetical fresh billionaire startup founder don’t have that money. And the mega rich on paper can’t access more than a small percentage of that money without reducing their control of the company they built or are building.

Ideas like a wealth tax, or the new sovereign fund paid into by an equities tax or grant are all interesting, but they are all more complicated on the ground than “wouldn’t $100m be motivating enough?”

FWIW, I think that some sort of public endowment and/or sponsored healthcare, education and safety net and/or tax or management of hyper wealth is one of the problems of our age.

But part of that problem is that it’s not clear how to do that in a way that is workable in an increasingly multipolar world of tech and soon healthcare giants that are as powerful as small but growing nation states. Economically and in some cases militarily linked to great powers.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#628

Post by galenptacek »

free_bip wrote: post #611
galenptacek wrote: post #602

Someone told me it was impossible to become an avogadrillionaire (to have a net worth of one mole, or approximately 6.02 x 10^23 dollars.) Now there's this founder I know whose startup grew 93% last month. Let's be conservative and say she has 2 million dollars. Let's calculate how many months of 93% growth it takes for something to grow 301,100,000,000,000,000x. The log base 1.93 of 301,100,000,000,000,000 is 61.209…

Yes, yes it is impossible. And I'm sure ChatGPT could easily tell you why.

I've been proven wrong. I will now delete my initial comment.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#630

Post by didibus »

nfw2 wrote: post #625
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if -- bear with me here -- it's possible for bright, motivated founders to create startups that your kids can work in, but those founders could be content with merely making a hundred million dollars? Because, and I don't know if you know this so you may have to take it on faith, that is still so much money that said founder and their family and very likely their descendants can live in extreme luxury for the re…

How exactly do you propose keeping a founder from becoming wealthier once their company scales past the point where they are worth a hundred million?

tax?
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