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How to earn a billion dollars

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#321

Post by thaumasiotes »

AdamN wrote: post #124

She meant impossible in that one doesn't earn a billion dollars through work alone. The only way to get there is to set up a structure that extracts a billion dollars from a market (usually by building a structure that's more efficient but also generates externalities that are not borne by the person getting the billion dollars). pg's reading of it is so blunt and misrepresentative that I'm nervous about what kind of…

> She meant impossible in that one doesn't earn a billion dollars through work alone. The only way to get there is to set up a structure that extracts a billion dollars from a market

Is "building structures" not work?

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#322

Post by ghosty141 »

sumitkumar wrote: post #289
AdamN wrote: post #124

She meant impossible in that one doesn't earn a billion dollars through work alone. The only way to get there is to set up a structure that extracts a billion dollars from a market (usually by building a structure that's more efficient but also generates externalities that are not borne by the person getting the billion dollars). pg's reading of it is so blunt and misrepresentative that I'm nervous about what kind of…

Everything is extractive. Farmer plants seeds, partially sets the environment. The work is done by the seed/sun/soil/water. And so is every profession: labour or not. Most of the business are structured in such a way that someone can exploit them to make even more money. The whole vendors and b2b system is mutual extraction. Looking through wages and trying to find a ceiling(by time/effort) on the value creation by a…

There is a difference between the work most do: working for an hourly wage, and effectively getting rich through capital gains.

This is what aoc is referring to essentially. It's practically impossible to become a billionaire through "regular" work alone that pays you a salary.

I'd argue that for all super wealthy people, their salary isn't the major factor in how they gained their net worth. Lets take Googles CEO, he makes 2 mict llion per year (the exanumber isn't that relevant here). With this salary it'd take him 500 years to earn his net worth. Again, completely different proportions to "normal" people earning their net worth through their job. And I'd argue you can do this for everybody with more than 100 mil. dollars.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#323

Post by fjni »

The lack of genuine desire to understand each other is what is astonishing.

I don’t know where “the politician” went with that comment, but for me the more pressing conversation is whether we want a society where many are struggling and some make a billion dollars.

You benefited from society, clearly, which is not to say you didn’t work hard. But it seems entirely reasonable to me to ask you at that point to give back. We can knock plenty of people back to mere “hundred millionaire” status, they’ll be fine, and we can do a whole lot with that money.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#324

Post by evilturnip »

Yes, growing at average 15% a month will make you a billionaire in so many months. But somewhere along that trajectory you've tipped the balance from "eveyone is benefitting" to "in order to grow larger we need to exploit and extract."

Clearly nothing is universally the case, but this pattern repeats in enough freqeuncy that it's effectively the case.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#325

Post by greedo »

djoldman wrote: post #84

> So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars. > She wasn't saying, of course, that it's impossible to become a billionaire.... What she meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way. > But now you at least understand, from having done the math yourselves, that you don'…

Of course he's not addressing what AoC said. That wasn't the purpose of his propaganda. Just as so many billionaires are panicking about potential wealth taxes etc, so too is PG.

This is no different than any of the Thiel/Musk/Bezos propaganda that's been swirling around as they realize that the natives are getting a bit restless and mentions of guillotines become more common on social media. And they look at the UHC CEO's murder and wonder just how safe they really are.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#326

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

MinimalAction wrote: post #301

First question: why? Why should I (or anyone) earn a billion dollars? PG made it seem like that's the ultimate goal somehow. Also, why only a billion dollars, PG? You see your infinite cancerous growth machine doesn't stop? This article did not sit well with me. I have found myself rereading Beyond Smart, How to Write Usefully, The Need to Read, Life is Short. But this one is harmful; nobody needs a billion dollars.

Certainly, $1B is a lot of money...

But you probably need >$10M to not HAVE to work and live a low-risk comfortable life in even modestly expensive parts of the US.

The funny thing about money is, it's really hard to save $1M and $10M, but once you get there, it's pretty easy to grow that substantially.

The fundamental problem in the West, IMO, is that we make it so hard to save even small amounts of money, and so easy to compound huge amounts of money (and no the EU is not much better on this front than the US).

It should be the opposite.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#327

Post by csallen »

Kuyawa wrote: post #290

We can't romanticize making money, it's a ruthless field where mostly politicians, the military complex, and drug traffickers thrive, and a few startups that cater to the global economy, which are very very rare, so rare than only 30 out of more than 6000 have succeded in Paul's own words. Amazon was first, then Uber went world wide, so did Airbnb, and now OpenClaw, so yes, the AI gold rush opened the gates for new o…

> only 30 out of more than 6000 have succeded

At becoming billionaires. Many more than that succeeded at making a good chunk of money that was life-changing for them, their families, their early employees, etc.

So I think your reading of the chance of "hope" are overly cynical. Of course it's not easy to make millions, but it's not so bleak and the market isn't so ruthless that it can't be done for those who try intelligently and persistently.

And of course, even below that level of wealth, there are tens of millions of people who work regular jobs and are able to afford pretty high standards of comfort and living by any yard stick that's ever been used to measure.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#328

Post by jackmott42 »

A reminder that in a recent Paul Graham blog post, he vowed to help the 2nd Trump Admin crush woke youth, and asserted that racism isn't bad as the left thinks.

In the following weeks we saw Elon do two Nazi salutes in front of the presidential seal, and we saw the Trump admin hire tons of thugs to rip minority children out of their beds, and those same thugs have murdered a number of citizens, with Stephen Miller loudly shouting that they have absolute immunity.

I'm surprised Paul Graham and the signers of the blog post are not to embarrassed to continue posting their thoughts. At worst Paul should stop talking, better, he should apologize and admit he is a fool.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#329

Post by pohl »

csallen wrote: post #318
sofard wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are many arguments against AOC's comments, but I agree that PG here is misrepresenting her point. I don't think anyone reading PG's blog is clueless about the power of compounding or the difference between salary and wealth through asset growth. Her point is essentially whether the entire capital system is "fair." And to be fair to PG I don't think AOC articulated a particularly strong point either.

He very explicitly engaged with her claim that the system is unfair/unethical, and whether you agree with him or not, he argued against it: > What [AOC] meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way... The reason [my founder's] startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built. So she could feel from her own experience how wrong [AOC]…

I wonder why he didn't argue against the point by using an actual billionaire to illustrate. Instead he chose someone who is not a billionaire, and imagined them becoming one with nine and a half months of constant 93% growth. Couldn't his counterargument become stronger without the underpants gnome logic?

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#330

Post by whatever1 »

Even if we agree that Billionaires are better capital allocators and power yielders than elected govs, let's see what happens after they die.

Their money goes to heirs who did not earn billions and do not know how to allocate it, or to questionable non-profits. So it ends up being a huge drag for the society.

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