Careless People

Talent and hard work at what is what's missing from these discussions, I think.

I literally don't even know what kind of work I should do if I wanted to make a billion dollars. I think it's mostly delegating, and convincing people to give me ownership of things that throw off money that I get, or to invest in things for which I have such ownership so my ownership becomes more valuable. But in concrete terms, I don't even know what to do to make that happen, like, step 1 of that process, I have no idea. Just being talented at programming and working hard at it (more talented than I am, and working harder than I do, even) doesn't seem to be a great way to get there. You have to focus on and have talent for activities that cause capital to end up owned by you, and I have zero idea where to even start with that kind of thing.

Meanwhile, I was socialized as a kid into a smear of multiple Fussellian "Prole" categories, plus his "Middle", so I have to hype myself up and still feel bad just to hire a plumber and not hover around them because I feel like I ought to be helping (and definitely feel like I've failed on some level any time I choose to do that instead of doing the work myself), and the notion of owning a business but not working at, or just being a kind of hype-man for it mostly for my personal benefit, weirds me the fuck out, it feels fragile and strange. Why would people let me do that and make so much money from it? It's so weird; I get that's how things work, but the idea of doing it feels scary and kinda gross, and I don't mean because of risk of failure.

I think I'd need a huge mindset shift and a totally different skillset to get actually-rich. I'd need to be a different person entirely. Meanwhile there's a long list of things I am or could become talented at, and could work hard at, and that produce real value, that might make me a living but will never get me past seven or maaaaybe with a ton of right-place-right-time luck ten digits of lifetime earnings, let alone net worth.

I broadly agree with your point, but you’re overlooking a critical dimension: once someone successfully identifies and exploits a niche (through a combination of skill and luck), the subsequent growth >canHumorous analogy: Imagine you’re playing a video game where, through a mix of skill and luck, you stumble upon an incredibly overpowered weapon. With even minimal competence, this weapon lets you easily acquire even more powerful gear, initiating a self-reinforcing loop that rapidly propels you to dominance. Soon enough, your advantage reshapes the entire game—limiting access to similar weapons for other players. The game stops being fun, or as some might put it, it becomes fundamentally unfair.

It's very odd that we consider corporations to have personhood in the U.S., if you were to actually describe most of these top, predatory companies like Nestlé, Meta, etc. and their action as something "a person" did we would all immediately say that person should be jailed, is evil and that allowing them to interact with the general population is too risky. That person once in jail would assuredly never pass a parole board.

Companies should either be treated as people or as companies, what we have is a ongoing classification error that makes all natural persons lives worse as our rights are subordinate to unnatural persons. It's insane how we build our own cages.

That being said, the environment is bad but not all individual companies are the same and saying so is not only false but creates an environment of acceptance and equivocation. "Pay ratio" is often a good indicator of where on the evil spectrum a company is... If only every company could have the moral standards of a HEB or Costco the world would be better than it is.

> otherwise people born wealthy would dominate the startup world. Instead its people born to upper-middle class families that dominates it.

Those are just two different points on the "wealthy" scale. If you zoom out on a global level, they are not very far apart.

The kind of upper-middle class family that produces startup founders tends to be from the rich countries.

It makes perfect sense that it's the pretty wealthy and not the super-wealthy. There's more of the UMC, and they only need a certain amount of social/economic capital to roll the dice.

We know Musk spends time on X. We also know he reads as well as writes, because he often replies to random things.

But even for a slightly wiser billionaire who does what you suggest - they wouldn't do that unless they knew they would get public hate, and were bothered by it. You don't have a thick bubble unless you understand that you need it.