How to earn a billion dollars • Hacker News Board

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#921

Post by askl » Mon, Jun 15, 2026, 9:21 AM UTC

kashunstva wrote: post #723

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'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.

Or even better, a world where billionaires aren't able to exist.

There needs to be a wealth maximum, afterwards you just get taxed 100%.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#922

Post by intended » Mon, Jun 15, 2026, 9:27 AM UTC

old-gregg wrote: post #604

wat10000 wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The post is patronizing as hell, it’s no wonder people respond to it negatively. Patting people on the head and saying “you moron, it’s just two numbers” isn’t a good way to make an argument.

Sam Harris often makes an argument that I both hate and kind of agree with. He says that exchanging arguments and having a debate only works when the two arguing parties share a foundation. The debate’s purpose is to reconcile a measurable difference of opinion. In this case, I feel there’s no shared foundation. Half of the commenters here don’t seem to understand what money is or how it works. There's no soil in whi…

I understand finance well enough to discuss money.

I read the first half of PG’s essay and was left wondering if I should read the whole thing, just in case there was something in half 2 that redeemed half 1.

Most startups fail! Ignoring that reality, and only focusing on the slope of money growth is like saying that if you hit the right drafts you will survive falling out of a high rise window.

There is no such thing as a free lunch. The payoff for doing startups is the (incredibly small chance that you succeed) * (the absurd payout if you do).

Even VC funds fail.

If PG brought up survivorship bias at any point, it would have significantly armored his case.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#923

Post by bob1029 » Mon, Jun 15, 2026, 9:33 AM UTC

OrangeMusic wrote: post #907

srpablo wrote: post #851

Disco Stu meme Paul is my favorite example of "brain gout." I learned what gout was as "a disease kings used to get by eating foods that were too rich." Paul's writing when he was closer to reality, in the early 2000's, was a lot more insightful, because he was closer to reality. But if you've spent 21 years never having a material concern, and increasingly interacting with other rich people (or young people who idol…

> Buy your own groceries. Cook your own meals What's the point of being rich if you're living like a chump!

Cooking your own meals is the most assured way to eat like a king.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#924

Post by croes » Mon, Jun 15, 2026, 9:37 AM UTC

preommr wrote: post #858

croes wrote: post #855

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worlds is grim because billionaires have a large part of the cake and the rest has to fight over the crumbs. Billionaires are a sign of a failing systems because nobody earns a billion dollars. What do you think why many important jobs are badly paid while some CEO gets a billion dollars. Didn’t you see in the pandemic where the real important jobs are and did you realize how low their payment is? BTW it’s intere…

> The worlds is grim because billionaires have a large part of the cake and the rest has to fight over the crumbs. et tu hn? I am tired of seeing this nonsense on social media (it's particularly bad on reddit, where /r/antiwork and it's offshoots keep hitting the front page) - Wealth is not a zero-sum game - Yes, billionaires shouldn't exist because they're a symptom of a broken system - And they don't exist on a lon…

Just look at the wealth distribution.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Global_Distribution_...

> Modern day securities are broken because they're poorly regulated because the public doesn't vote for people that would do the regulation

And Billionaires and their media power has nothing to do with it

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#925

Post by 0zer0 » Mon, Jun 15, 2026, 9:40 AM UTC

jibal wrote: post #881

jltsiren wrote: post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fou…

> The essay kind of misses the point That's a very charitable way to put it. The reality is Graham blatantly lied about what AOC wrote, and then went on and on addressing the strawman of whether you can accumulate a billion dollars. > as the question was mostly about the meaning of word "earned". Exactly. Which makes this entire page absurdly misdirected.

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Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#926

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jun 15, 2026, 9:46 AM UTC

tudorconstantin wrote: post #809

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…

It’s actually easy and straight forward to become an avogadrillionaire, on paper that is, but still an avogadrillionaire: issue a token with a supply of 6.02*10^23, sell one token for $1, bam, avogadrillionaire

[deleted]

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#927

Post by DrScientist » Mon, Jun 15, 2026, 9:52 AM 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 think the problem here is the word 'earn' is doing a lot of heavily lifting.

Let's take Y combinator. He is in the money lending business - where he sells the idea of becoming a billionaire ( which is possible in software as it so easily scales relative to other types of businesses ) to young people so they work crazily hard. Most of them fail ( which he doesn't focus on ), but just like a bookie who profits from gambling - he always wins as he controls the rules ( odds/investment percentages - ie lending rates ) of the game.

So he has set up a system that extracts value from others.

Nothing wrong with startups - not only to the founders get to keep more of their value, they can also set company culture and values etc.

However you could argue, particular in software where capital isn't really needed, that taking money from a VC is very expensive - and also somewhat abrogates that founder control.

Sometimes you need investment, and good VC's can really add value ( both to the investor and investee ) - but his ideal investment is going to be to companies that don't really need it - where he can reap a huge reward for little effort.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#928

Post by MrBuddyCasino » Mon, Jun 15, 2026, 9:55 AM UTC

dotancohen wrote: post #870

_carbyau_ wrote: post #763

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak for his other essays but this article was not great. He basically does some maths to show exponential growth. The definition of "earn" is not on the chopping block. Nor is what it means to "cheat" - which he introduces pretty early on. And times change. With the announcement: "[Insert name] is a billionaire!" It used to be: "Congrats to them for making the world better in some way and reaping the reward…

> It used to be: "Congrats to them for making the world better in some way and reaping the rewards." > Now it is: "What did they leverage to force another subscription on us?" Are you seriously asking how Elon Musk made the world better in some way? How about catalysing the move away from fossil fuels? How about inexpensive spaceflight?

History's first trillionaire is a guy who catches rockets out of the sky with chopsticks and beams internet to every dead zone on the planet.

Same guy ships cars that drive themselves, humanoid robots for the factory floor, brain chips that let paralysed people move a cursor with pure thought, and an AI running on a supercomputer his team stood up in months instead of years.

Your are debating people who sincerely believe that money is the economy and is not just a transaction mechanism lying on top of the actual goods and services that make up an economy. That the physical vectors of goods/services/logistics are just formalities relative to hard currency distribution, which, when implemented, would “solve world hunger” with $50 billion or whatever bunk number they claim is enough.

Your are dealing with envious, deeply incurious people who, as history has demonstrated again and again, will kill millions in pursuit of their ideology. There is no convincing them, debating them, enlightening them. It is futile.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#929

Post by root-parent » Mon, Jun 15, 2026, 10:05 AM 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.

Out of 6,500 companies YC funded companies, less than 0.40% amounted to anything. Do you really want to apply to YC with these success rate? The issue is that these 30 billionaires PG decided to highlight, none of their 14 companies, from which less than half are even profitable right now...are relevant at all. No civilization level breakthroughs, they are mostly payment layers, delivery apps, marketplaces, crypto exchanges, and labor or regulatory arbitrage, and attention platforms.

If Airbnb, DoorDash, Instacart, Coinbase, Reddit, Brex, Deel, or Flexport disappeared tomorrow, humanity would not lose a vaccine, a new energy source, a scientific discovery, or a cure for disease. We would mostly switch apps.

Only depressing aspect is pretending jackpot level, private wealth, equals meaningful progress. There is a reason not once, he used the word entrepreneur in the essay...

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#930

Post by angrysaki » Mon, Jun 15, 2026, 10:22 AM UTC

gpt5 wrote: post #908

tsimionescu wrote: post #861

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think no one is contradicting him? The exponential growth model that pg presents is an obvious lie - you could use his exact explanation to claim that good founders will soon become trillionaires, all it takes is 9 months of 93% growth after your first few billions; quadrillionaires will soon follow. The obvious reality is that exponential growth is just a small phase in any company's history, and it is an…

Both you and PG are missing the mark here. PG made the error thinking that this is just people misunderstanding math and exponential growth, which created a convoluted math section that could have simply been explained as - if you start with a million dollar and double every month, you'll be a Billionaire in less than a year. He also didn't really touch well on why many people hate large companies / billionaires. You…

>but also created an immense amount of value in society

I would say value is subjective. For example, some people might consider a successful game as having created value. Others might view it as too addictive and see the negative value on society as a whole.

It could be very true that in the long arc of history, most of the "value" these companies have created is seen as a net negative. Take smartphones for example. They have created "value" but it's very possible that in 100 years when we better can evaluate what they have done to kids who grew up with them, we well conclude that they were a net negative until their usage was rained in. The only opposing force is government regulation and that's exactly what is wrong with these types of companies (and billionaires in general). They are the ones that stop reasonable legislation from happening because they have too much power because they are so large/rich.