How to earn a billion dollars • Hacker News Board

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#651

Post by pandoro » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 10:04 PM UTC

agrajag wrote: post #623

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.

You are right that I should have said "That means 0.000003% of humans own 20% of the value globally created" instead of capture.

However, getting relatively accurate and meaningful numbers for billionaires income is probably virtually impossible. Hence the comparison to their wealth which is known. I think it's still a valuable and common comparison. See https://stats.areppim.com/stats/stats_rich_26_trend_percentx... or this New York Time article: https://archive.is/KvbQH or this Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2026/may/15/wealth-br...

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#652

Post by c-hendricks » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 10:07 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.

Taxi medallions aren't a thing in lots of cities that have taxis. All Uber did was outpace regulations in many cities.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#653

Post by verzali » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 10:07 PM UTC

seanlinehan wrote: post #510

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…

> if the economy is growing at 2.5%, how do you sustain 15% over 5 years? US GDP is $31.82 trillion dollars per year. Taking the 2.5% growth rate, that's nearly $800 billion dollars per year in new GDP. The economy very obviously does not progress as a bunch of soldiers marching in a straight line. Some firms will shrink 100%, some will growth 10,000%. This much is obvious by just looking around. But even if no busin…

You should account for inflation.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#654

Post by yunwal » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 10:08 PM UTC

sillysaurusx wrote: post #576

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…

pg has an essay addressing exactly that: https://paulgraham.com/inequality.html The problem is that when you cap earnings to $100m, most investors lose motivation to invest in startups, because their investment isn’t likely to yield a reward. Unless you think all investments should be less than $100m, this kills large investment rounds. That would have killed OpenAI, for example, since their recent round was larger.…

I don't understand. Just because one person can't own 100 million doesn't mean an investment firm can't make a 100 million dollar investment and make returns on it. Those are 2 different things. The firm is managing the money of multiple people.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#655

Post by siliconc0w » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 10:09 PM UTC

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?

The market is supposed to do that. Once an opportunity is identified there is a rush to compete and margin disappears, so the people still get the new, better thing, but for much cheaper.

What can happen though is that companies figure out how to prevent meaningful competition to preserve high margins. They're worth millions for the innovation but they get to billions through anti-competitive and extractive practices.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#656

Post by TitaRusell » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 10:10 PM UTC

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.

I would want my kids to be happy. Who gives a shit about what job they have.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#657

Post by pclowes » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 10:11 PM UTC

TitaRusell wrote: post #656

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.

I would want my kids to be happy. Who gives a shit about what job they have.

People are generally happier when they are not starving to death and capitalism is really good at helping people not starve to death.

Every global economic statistic backs this up

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#658

Post by knorker » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 10:11 PM UTC

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 do you expect the reaction to be when he's, at best, taking a political cheap shot by misrepresenting what someone said and spinning it into absurdity?

It's an ugly ugly post, and that's what set the tone.

I hope your kids grow up to become better people than those who would write what PG wrote, and not spread lies about their interlocutors with straw man BS.

It's also an insulting post. Yeah we can add, thanks. That was never the problem. PG think math is what we were missing?

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#659

Post by justinmarsan » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 10:12 PM UTC

pclowes wrote: post #641

PowerElectronix wrote: post #637

It's clear to me that in order to get a billion, you have to swidle a lot of people out of their fair share of the billion. As soon as the person that has "The Idea" keeps their 60% stake of the company while the army of minions are working their assess off to get that idea to a billion dollar valuations are given crumbs or no stake at all, you know who is swindling who.

False, you just make something very valuable. To get people to help you make it you offer to pay them and they willingly exchange their time for that money (or equity if they also think it will be very valuable someday or you have a record of making valuable things in the past) Who is the person swindled here? Who agreed to something and was deceived? Who was stolen from? This process is net wealth creation. The weal…

I guess the point is that to reach the billion scale, you cannot be doing all of the important part on your own... So somehow, out of all the hardworking smart people you gathered yourself with, you decide that you're the genius that needs to benefit from the market value, while everyone else just gets compensated for their time...

The actual people doing the actual work, day to day, talking to prospects, building the things... But you had the idea, so it's just natural that you get the vast majority of the reward.

Maybe that makes sense to you... And like I disagree, but that's cool... But I cannot picture myself ever becoming a billionaire... I would have shared so much with the people that contributed to make me be a 100-millionaire way too much to reach the next step... And I'm sure I'd be happy to have 100 millions, and have people happy to get great compensation to do that with me...

Still, I agree it's not stealing. But the fairness of the situation is still up for debate.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#660

Post by didibus » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 10:12 PM UTC

Telemakhos wrote: post #227

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…

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…

> If the company makes an unexpectedly large profit, the employer is not obligated to redistribute that to her employees in addition to the already agreed-upon and paid compensation.

What if they were ? That's the whole point of the conversation lol. It's like you're side stepping the entire discourse. Maybe the company should be obligated to redistribute it to her employees, or to the public, etc.