It is more impactful to me to instead think of it like this: Elon Musk's net worth is roughly 1 million times the median American's. So Elon "earned" as much as the combined life savings of a city roughly the size of Houston or Phoenix.
How to earn a billion dollars
751–760 of 1001 posts
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#752The 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…
What if -- bear with me here -- the very thing that makes those founders able to make the $1B they would otherwise make would drive them to also ask why it is that someone else who had no hand in building or funding it gets lion's share of the $900M while they get only $100M?
You don't /know/ that people need to collectively get over "this" -- you have a feeling that it seems more fair to do that than the alternative. But you can look at what happens elsewhere in the world with regimes that implement exactly what you are describing. And what happens is the people who are most equipped to be the golden gooses that you are proposing are just as equipped to simply most somewhere they can do so unencumbered.
That's why what you're proposing will just never really work.
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#753PG makes little effort to identify what it means to earn something. Some people consider effort the measure of whether something is earned. Some believe luck should be subtracted from result to get what is earned. Some say you cannot earn the benefits you receive from your genetics. No idea of what it means to earn something is given except for making users happy while "not cheating" (who decides what counts as cheat…
The responses to PG were remarkably substantive and specific, in the direction you point out and others! The high-horse complaint about "negativity" was easily the laziest and least specific thing in this thread.
I don’t agree. You may agree with them but your agreement is not the same as substantive.
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#754PG makes little effort to identify what it means to earn something. Some people consider effort the measure of whether something is earned. Some believe luck should be subtracted from result to get what is earned. Some say you cannot earn the benefits you receive from your genetics. No idea of what it means to earn something is given except for making users happy while "not cheating" (who decides what counts as cheat…
I think we can clearly say that capital gains are not earned. Someone who lays bricks, "earns" their income; someone who's wealth increases as a bricklaying company's value increases, does not. In this sense, it is indeed impossible to "earn" a billion dollars...
No, we can’t clearly say that. If we could, they wouldn’t be taxable.
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#755I am a capitalist. But I feel most capitalists are shortsighted. The problem isn’t a person being wealthy. It’s a person capturing a market and making competition impossible.
The problem with most analysis about capitalism is that it fails to appreciate that, over time, capitalism will destroy itself as winners capture the market, stifle competition, and the very ecosystem that created their wealth in the first place.
If you love the benefits of capitalism: the price setting function, the innovation, the broad wealth creation, you have to prevent the accumulation of market power that leads to monopolies or you will watch as the market evaporates and monopolies turn into aristocracy and collapse
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#756Earlier quoted context omitted.
When AI melts away these rent seeking marketplaces like Uber, Doordash, Amazon, etc, they won’t go as quietly as the people they displaced.
These are actually the most durable businesses because they have network effects: restaurants alright signed up, sellers onboarded, etc. Easier for them to adopt AI than AI companies to rebuild the networks
I couldn't disagree more. These are intermediation businesses, that is they've inserted themselves as an intermediary between customers and providers. Everybody hates those businesses, ultimately.
Over time, profits tend to decrease. To a point you can counter that by expanding and entering new markets but ultaimtely you reach the point where your only options are raising prices and/or cutting costs. To maintain this you often need to engage in rent-seeking behavior (eg national ISPs lobbying to make municipal broadband illegal).
As an intermediary, Uber needs to increase their margin at the expense of the driver, the customer or both. Same with DoorDash and all these others.
You see this when people try and start intermediary businesses like MyClean, TaskRabbit, tutor services and so on. They all face the problem that the customer and provider are always better off leaving the platform and dealing directly because the value-add of the intermediary is a lot less than what they charge to justify their profits.
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#757Someone 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…
> Is it really impossible to grow 93% month over month for 5 consecutive years? I can imagine some startups that can. Sure, if they have a monopoly. Any market seeing that kind of growth will instantly have competitors and eventually the TAM runs out.
This is a joke, right?
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#758PG makes little effort to identify what it means to earn something. Some people consider effort the measure of whether something is earned. Some believe luck should be subtracted from result to get what is earned. Some say you cannot earn the benefits you receive from your genetics. No idea of what it means to earn something is given except for making users happy while "not cheating" (who decides what counts as cheat…
The reason her startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built. He's said the "make something people want" thing before, his argument for billionaires doesn't seem to go much beyond it. It seems rather clear it's not all you need nor is it all it took for these people to get there. You don't just make the thing. The founder didn't become a billionaire simply because users loved her product. Y…
Yeah this analysis (Not yours - PG's) is pretty poor tbh either he is intentionally glossing over the tactics and strategy necessary for one to acquire such wealth - or - he really lacks the fundamentals that is value (of equity) is a function of free cash flows to equity, growth and risk. And guess what, immense cash flow potential doesn't fall out the sky. It requires doing certain things. Such things can be considered dirty by many people.
Anywho, I was really unimpressed with the post.
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#759PG makes little effort to identify what it means to earn something. Some people consider effort the measure of whether something is earned. Some believe luck should be subtracted from result to get what is earned. Some say you cannot earn the benefits you receive from your genetics. No idea of what it means to earn something is given except for making users happy while "not cheating" (who decides what counts as cheat…
Without making any value judgement, there’s a very clear distinction between earning wages as compensation for labor (even very high wages) and increasing your net worth through ownership of a company. That’s a valid distinction no matter how hard the second person works.
I have no idea if this is what AOC meant, but it’s clearly not possible to earn $1B via wages in compensation for labor.
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#760The 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've got kids, I want people creating start ups they can work in, the alternative is too grim. I also have kids. I want them to live in a just society where billionaires, whom Mr. Graham proudly grooms, according to his telling of the matter, don’t actively undermine the ability of ordinary citizens to earn a living wage, to have a say in self-governance, and to enjoy universal healthcare.
I think you'll find its not billionaires stopping that, its elected officials.