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Billionaires Build

paulgraham.com

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Re: Billionaires Build

#391

Post by Aunche »

curun1r wrote: post #330
throwaway09223 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a straw man, it is an extremely common belief and it deserves to be addressed and debunked. My social media is stuffed to the brim with people posting exactly this sentiment. It is true that there are other, more reasonable beliefs.

I think Paul is fundamentally not understanding the argument behind “billionaires exploit workers.” It isn’t that billionaires are fundamentally bad people or that they’ve accumulated their wealth through misdeeds. But what it is is that it’s basically impossible to accumulate that amount of wealth through work. Instead, you have to be able to capture the difference between the value of someone else’s work and what y…

Bezo's wealth comes from his shares, which he had since the beginning. 20 years ago, anyone who worked at Amazon could have used a small fraction of their wages to buy Amazon shares. If they had, they'd be millionaires. However, that's a risk that only already rich people are willing to take.

Re: Billionaires Build

#392

Post by cgriswald »

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #338
canofbars wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone knew about this decades ago. It was even taught in schools as just basic facts and science before it became political.

Could I get your source for this? I've never heard that climate change was taught in public school decades ago.

We were taught about climate change in the first grade in the early 80's with some fairly graphic imagery (think gas masks and deserts). More of the focus was on ozone depletion and acid rain. I don't remember any of it being political or controversial until I was in high school in the 90's.

Re: Billionaires Build

#393

Post by buzzerbetrayed »

chillwaves wrote: post #257
austinpena wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is your stance that wealth in the hands of billionaires tends to do less good to raise the “common good” than if it were to be distributed in some way? If so, what kind of distribution do you think makes sense?

You guys acting like democratic government has not yet been invented. It's not like alternatives to billionaires owning the planet doesn't exist. Just America seems to be fairly resistant to the idea of public good. And the other consideration is how the money of billionaires is actively used to make everyone else's lives worse, either through manipulating markets and commodities, raising our rent, or literally pollu…

> No one yet has responded to me why it's such a great idea for billionaires to exist. I wonder if an argument could even be made that didn't even a personal fantasy/wish fulfillment scenario.

K, here's one, whether or not you accept it. I don't think the world would have SpaceX or Tesla were it not for the existence of billionaires.

Elon Musk already had a billion before founding/buying these companies. If he had "maxed out" and couldn't make any more money, I think there is a good chance he wouldn't have taken risks on these companies. I think we are better off with the existence of companies like these.

Even if you don't like Tesla or SpaceX, these are just examples. There are a lot of other companies that would not exist as well, especially if you consider the potential scarcity of funding in this scenario. And without their existence we would all be worse off.

There are downsides to having billionaires too, but it's pretty disingenuous to pretend there aren't upsides as well.

Re: Billionaires Build

#394

Post by landon32 »

kevas wrote: post #312

About to write some possibly controversial stuff... My early life, I grew up and had middle to upper middle class all around me. In my late teens and early twenties, there were times I had to scrounge my cushions and rummage through my car to find enough change to eat a meal. We live in a society where everyone has access to a computer—personal or local library. We have all the information we need to bring (the major…

One thing to keep in mind is people struggling to make ends meet don't have time to learn and will struggle to find motivation to dedicate themselves to something. For me it was quite easy to be ambitious and learn a lot, because my basic needs were taken care of growing up. Others join the workforce at 16 and their income is important for their family.

Re: Billionaires Build

#395

Post by cactus2093 »

curun1r wrote: post #330
throwaway09223 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a straw man, it is an extremely common belief and it deserves to be addressed and debunked. My social media is stuffed to the brim with people posting exactly this sentiment. It is true that there are other, more reasonable beliefs.

I think Paul is fundamentally not understanding the argument behind “billionaires exploit workers.” It isn’t that billionaires are fundamentally bad people or that they’ve accumulated their wealth through misdeeds. But what it is is that it’s basically impossible to accumulate that amount of wealth through work. Instead, you have to be able to capture the difference between the value of someone else’s work and what y…

You left out a key part in this simplified formula - you pay $X and make $Y from the work, and you do this for N people. If you leave X and Y the same and scale N down to like 50 or 100 employees, you have a good old hard working American business that's creating solid working class jobs. When you scale N up to an almost inconceivably large number (Amazon has over a million employees) you get an owner with an inconceivably large fortune.

The problem with just taxing it all away to prevent him from being a billionaire is the money is tied to control of the company, so it's equivalent to saying nobody can build a business bigger than some arbitrary limit. Which is equivalent to saying nobody can build a business with more than a certain arbitrary number of employees. Where would any of us work if that were the case? It's not at all a given that you would get millions of new small and medium businesses that would completely make up for that gap you'd have from lopping off every big company at a couple billion dollar market cap. The world is just not zero-sum like that as much as progressives might (either deceptively, or obliviously) pretend that it is.

> Paul would never fund a founder who wanted to divide all profits among employees

While YC might not recommend a founder take literally 0% equity, they are hugely supportive of founders giving more equity to employees and keeping less for themselves and have done a lot to move the industry in that direction https://blog.samaltman.com/employee-equity

Re: Billionaires Build

#396

Post by Context_free »

tmcw wrote: post #191

56% of billionaires build. 44% of billionaires inherit.

Also if we look at the so-called "self-made" billionaires, Bill Gates went to a fancy prep school where grammar school students had access to a computer in the late 1960s. His great grandfather was a bank president, and he was born with a million dollar trust fund. His mother was on an executive committee with the CEO of IBM.

Zuckerberg went to a high school, current tuition cost of which is over $57000 a year.

Warren Buffett's father was a congressman, his grandparents owned a retail business. Buffet was sent to an Ivy League school.

Beyond this, Kleiner Perkins did not give Jeff Bezos millions in VC back in 1996 because they liked him. He was around then, but they were too. As well as the employees shipping out books then. As well as the employees shipping books out now. Kleiner Perkins gave money then, anticipating the exploitation of Amazon factory (and non-factory) workers now. The company was not built with Bezos as some Atlas figure. It was built by millions from Kleiner Perkins in 1996, and by the exploited people doing the work there every day.

Bezos was given billions for successfully doing this. It does not waive away the expropriation of surplus labor time of those who work there.

Re: Billionaires Build

#397

Post by UK-Al05 »

smhost wrote: post #390
UK-Al05 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is basically the labour theory of value and ignores the value of capital and organisation. Some guy delivering stuff in a garage is not going to be nowhere near as productive as an Amazon worker. The crucial bit that people miss is that it is capital, goodwill and organisation allows employees to generate so much money in the first place. Basically the sum is greater than its parts. If you want to know where pro…

> ignores the value of capital and organisation it doesn't. that capital was built by labor.

And indeed those workers who get paid, can save and invest that money to enhance the productivity of other workers and get a return. Generally the higher risk of losing the money, the more return you can potentially get. Some of those workers will hit the jackpot and get a great return.

Is it morally wrong?

Re: Billionaires Build

#398

Post by IanCal »

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #351
newen wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems perfectly fine to me. Gifts are taxed in the US. If it causes resulting problems, deal with it then. Don't let perfection be the enemy of good.

How is this considered "good" in this scenario? Income is taxed anyway. So how to rerouting money away from "taxed income" to "taxed gifts" help anything?

It would mean that income is taxed twice or equivalent to it being taxed higher. Under a core assumption here that the tax revenue is used to help, this is better than it not happening.

More importantly though, it's not a precise tax plan it's intended to show the absurdity of the outcome we currently have rather than show a particular way out. That the answers are often "but there would be loopholes" rather than "having people amass much more wealth is inherently good for us all" is telling.

Re: Billionaires Build

#399

Post by ablekh »

breck wrote: post #384
ablekh wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be careful with labels / generalizations like "stupid legal system" and "inequitable laws". What you, some people and some companies might see as such, a whole bunch of other people and other companies might see as exactly the opposite. The world is not black and white. And it's all about perspectives ...

> The world is not black and white. But it is N and N^N

How is this relevant to the subject? Is this your counterargument to the core of what I wrote above?

Re: Billionaires Build

#400

Post by chillwaves »

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #393
chillwaves wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You guys acting like democratic government has not yet been invented. It's not like alternatives to billionaires owning the planet doesn't exist. Just America seems to be fairly resistant to the idea of public good. And the other consideration is how the money of billionaires is actively used to make everyone else's lives worse, either through manipulating markets and commodities, raising our rent, or literally pollu…

> No one yet has responded to me why it's such a great idea for billionaires to exist. I wonder if an argument could even be made that didn't even a personal fantasy/wish fulfillment scenario. K, here's one, whether or not you accept it. I don't think the world would have SpaceX or Tesla were it not for the existence of billionaires. Elon Musk already had a billion before founding/buying these companies. If he had "m…

It's a mistake to conflate the work of entire companies with one man, and I strongly disagree about the state of progress in America if billionaires did not exist.

Someone else would have taken Musk's place. There is no inherent quality to billionaires that make them valuable outside of their wealth.

> especially if you consider the potential scarcity of funding in this scenario.

how is this an argument? I assume banks still exist in this world without billionaires?

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