Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to earn a billion dollars

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

661–670 of 1001 posts

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#661

Post by sumeno »

fn-mote wrote: post #645
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…

Surely this would just create an industry of ways to dodge the “$100m tax”. Just waiting for my company’s top 10 shareholders to be anonymous entities owned by other companies based in the Cayman Islands.

Let's give it a try and see. Maybe better things ARE possible

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#662

Post by soerxpso »

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 entity you're implicitly proposing should take the money doesn't have a good track record of spending it wisely. I'd much rather let the startup founders keep their money and build rockets with it, than spend another few trillion on building 100 meters of high-speed rail.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#663

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#664

Post by pclowes »

justinmarsan wrote: post #659
pclowes wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Do you feel like the cafeteria workers at SpaceX who were paid standard cafeteria wages when they started plus some equity that everybody considered worthless at the time and now makes them multimillionaires feel like they were treated unfairly?

I am struggling to understand where the unfair part is coming from. Nobody is making anybody do anything. Everything is transparent and above board. Everybody in this scenario is willingly working market wages (except for founders and early hires who work below market and take equity for a couple years because they believe in the idea)

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#665

Post by keeda »

Here's a fun query to try with Google AI overview:

"How many of the top 20 billionaires in the world have companies that have NOT been in legal trouble for anti-worker, anti-consumer or anti-competitive practices."

The answer begins with "Exactly zero" and goes from there. It's the same answer up to the top 50 billionaires, but up to 20 it might even give you a summary of infractions for each billionaire.

Not only were the extrapolation calculations in TFA very https://xkcd.com/605/, what was funnier was when PG tried to counter AOC's point ("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 that.") by talking about how he personally knows like 30 founders who have become billionaires. And I was like, no way is he thinking about Chesky and AirBnB, who literally started off with multiple regulation-skirting shenanigans and whose effects on neighborhoods have been heavily criticized...

And then he mentions not only AirBnB, but also Facebook!!

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#666

Post by laser »

mjamesaustin wrote: post #643
laser wrote: post #594

At scale the only utility of wealth is the power it gives to allocate the means of production. The vast majority of ultra high net worth individuals spend a tiny fraction of their wealth on personal consumptive activities, the only true "cost" born by society. But in exchange for this small cost aside from the benefits accrued to society existing in a natural state of free trade and commerce, society also gets to hav…

Yes, and they've optimized our economy in a wonderful place where the average worker today makes less than 50 years ago. But don't worry – it's not important that poverty, hunger, sickness, and many other social ills still exist even though we have far more wealth than required to solve those problems. Obviously the answer is that ending poverty is just an inefficient solution the Great Minds have concluded, and our…

No, you're simply misinformed likely due to widespread propaganda online. In the US the average worker makes about 10% more than 50 years ago. [1] And this is despite a massive outsourcing headwind of globalization that has made non-Americans vastly richer on average and pulled billions out of poverty globally. [2]

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/wld/wor...

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#667

Post by bjustin »

WarmWash wrote: post #619
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…

I think the most chronic misunderstanding in the "billionaire" rhetoric is that billionaires are in it for money. People who work a job they don't like because they need money to live, view money as the objective in life, because the equivocate it to escaping and freedom. So wearing that lens, and looking at billionaires, these motherfuckers are greed driven psychopaths who blew past the "escape with freedom" bank ac…

One of the problems is that rather than billionaires being it for money, they’re in it for money. They don’t lack for money to live, sure, but they do want more money for the power it provides.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#668

Post by knorker »

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?

I agree with you on it being hard.

But we can start by not forgiving CG on death. That seems like a no brainer with no downsides.

No downsides I respect, at least. "We want to keep the business in the family" should be ignored.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#669

Post by paulryanrogers »

pclowes wrote: post #657
TitaRusell wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Capitalism without regulation is a great way to grind large portions of the population to dust, and enrich a small number of capital owners.

It consumes childhood and adulthood. Only when workers have power can the engines of innovation benefit the many.

Of course history is littered with failed autocracies aspiring to be capitalist/socialist/insert-econ-system utopia. I'd argue the current US administration is in an autocratic mode right now. And doesn't seem to be going well for any except the richest asset owners.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#670

Post by jltsiren »

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.

The essay kind of misses the point, as the question was mostly about the meaning of word "earned".

"Earned income", for tax purposes, matches pretty closely the kinds of income many people consider genuinely earned in the moral sense. From this perspective, if a startup grows organically and the founders become rich, they have earned it. But if the growth requires capital (an investment, a loan, or the wealth the founders already have), the situation becomes less clear. How much of the success can be attributed to the contributions of the founders and how much is based on arbitrary choices made by wealthy people?

If you now assume that existing wealth is mostly unearned, any success made possible by arbitrary allocations of that wealth is similarly unearned.

Post reply on HN