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How to earn a billion dollars

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#371

Post by yawpitch »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #67
yawpitch wrote: post #33

Absent circumstances of four digit inflation rates, one cannot earn a billion dollars… one can only accumulate a billion dollars. If one ever does so, one has definitely done something morally indefensible.

What, exactly , is the morally indefensible thing that they have definitely done? If it's definitely there, you should be able to point out what it is.

As a first pass, you’ve accumulated all that money, thus you’ve actively or passively, knowingly or unknowingly, taken advantage of a perverse systemic bug that allows that sort of money to accumulate in any one person’s hands to begin with.

But point me at any given billionaire and I can provide more context-specific examples, sure.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#372

Post by satvikpendem »

csallen wrote: post #275
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'…

Did you read his post at all? He knew what she was saying and addressed it clearly: > 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] was. She wasn't exploiting anyone. Exactly the opposite…

Off topic but how's IH going? I haven't seen any new podcast episodes, have you guys stopped doing them for now?

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#373

Post by checkthisgot »

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…

Yes, I agree. You need to create a brand or to be a brand.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#374

Post by BowBun »

I've always respect PG's articles (obviously), but him pointing to a sole founder at a high growth rate (which founder btw, what is the product) as 'proof' that no bad has been done to reach that level of growth is so incredibly naive!

His founder is not at the level we are talking about. They obviously would not represent the 'bad' that AOC was trying to make a point about. Why don't you pick your actual billionaires?

Airbnb - Ignored and exploited local housing regulations, over time the blowback has been HUGELY negative. Here the 'bad' is the commoditization of housing in peoples' homes, causing housing problems.

Coinbase - For years, they built their business on bitcoin being used on dark nets for illegal purposes. There's the bad. If they were truly good they would have done KYC from day 1. Why would they? Billionaires gotta break rules.

DoorDash/Instacart - Exploitation of cheap labor, they _consistently_ underpay workers, hire undocumented laborers for that purpose, and pit laborers and consumers against each other rather than improving the system.

These, Paul, are the actual billionaires AOC was talking about. Not your young founder making the 200th to-do app.

Really unimpressed and disappointed by the shallowness of his thinking here.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#375

Post by Alpha3031 »

skybrian wrote: post #361
mlsu wrote: post #346

You can tell that he doesn’t really think too deeply about any of this, because the way he wants to illustrate the point is by typing the numbers into a calculator. It’s as if the money comes right up out of thin air, isn’t it? He inadvertently gets close when he talks about Facebook being about people doing stalking. PG, is stalking a good thing or a bad thing, hmmm?

There’s no conservation rule for an asset’s value. Market cap comes mostly out of thin air because people believe a company is valuable. If they change their minds, it disappears. (Market cap is estimated based on transactions that are a small percentage of market cap.)

Traditionally, the value of a security is a prediction of its future cashflow to perpetuity discounted by a capitalisation rate. While it is true that some securities these days are sold as something not dependent on future cash flows, and insiders are paid off by selling something misleading to retail investors, that is known as a Ponzi scheme and is traditionally prohibited by securities regulations.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#376

Post by missedthecue »

mystraline wrote: post #86

You do not EARN 1B$. You mass exploit labor at scale to exfiltrate 1B$. You commit wage theft to obtain 1B$ (the largest theft category). You union bust and fire workers who try to fight for better working conditions and wages. You engage in monopoly practices to obtain 1B$. You engage in corruption via 'campaign donations' to lay down laws that benefit you and harm others. Doctors earn. Engineers earn. Scientists ea…

In tears laughing that people still believe the labor theory of value. How is this possible. What's next, bringing back miasma theory and spontaneous generation?

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#377

Post by astura »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #199
d_burfoot wrote: post #192

There's a kind of Efficient Market Hypothesis of career advice that I wish PG took better notice of. If a career path (e.g. startup founder) outperforms at time T1, then this fact will diffuse quickly throughout society, causing the path to become overcrowded, which pushes down the average performance. So at time T2 the path will no longer outperform. This is analogous to a stock becoming overpriced due to hype. I co…

True, but only when you consider value as a combination of risk, reward, status, etc which is weighted by an individual’s preferences. One reason why doctor is more popular is the process for becoming one is high effort but low risk. So if you have any risk tolerance you’re probably better off using that effort elsewhere.

>One reason why doctor is more popular is the process for becoming one is high effort but low risk.

Disagree completely that becoming a doctor is low risk. The amount of residency spots is capped and is smaller than the number of people graduating from medical school. Every year thousands of MDs are prevented from going to residency and thus prevented from practicing medicine, even though they graduated from medical school.

https://dailyorange.com/2026/03/opinion-amid-u-s-doctor-shor...

>In 2025, 9,541 applicants went unmatched, including 2,409 soon-to-be graduates of United States schools awarding Doctor of Medicine and Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine degrees.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#378

Post by fmap »

CPLX wrote: post #165
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…

His entire essay is just based on a purposeful misreading of the opposing point. It's a straw man. And if you look at his history it's obviously intentional and part of his usual style of argument. The actual opposing argument is that it's impossible to create a billion dollar enterprise without a group effort, and for one person to end up with a billion dollars necessarily means that they made decisions within that…

> The actual opposing argument is that it's impossible to create a billion dollar enterprise without a group effort

The other thing that we're often ignoring is that it's impossible to create a billion dollar enterprise without luck. You have to be at the right place at the right time.

For the most part only capital gets to roll the dice, but even before that it's a sign of the times that we take it seriously at all when people talk about "earning" a billion dollars. We could all do with a bit more humility.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#379

Post by sershe »

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…

Why does it usually imply extraction and externalities? What are those for Taylor Swift and Michael Jordan? The actual "usual" things in common between these and e.g. Amazon are massive value creation for consumers, economies of scale.

Focusing on completely optional and often imagined "externalities" just reveals a certain mindset (one could find some for cases like Amazon, but bezos became a billionaire in 1998 so whatever Amazon does after that doesn't directly apply, unless the goalposts are moved).

An example I love is hollowing out of this or that. The fact that people wanted to shop at Amazon (especially in 1998) and not a local bookstore, like the fact that people want to go to a Taylor Swift concert and not your indie band's is not an externality, it's a skill issue.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#380

Post by zacksiri »

Thank you for publishing this. I've been following Paul Graham and his works for a long time. It's refreshing to see everything written down in a document like this. This is the bible for startups. Honestly, it's beautifully simple but not easy.
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