You can aquire a billion dollars. Nobody has ever earned a billion dollars.
How to earn a billion dollars
431–440 of 1001 posts
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#432I've read (and re-read) all of PG's essays over the years. Often they're wonderful fonts of wisdom. Sometimes they're myopic and poorly supported, but never just plain wrong.
This is, sadly, a first for him.
AOC (the politician referenced) did not mean that earning a billion is "impossible". She, very clearly, stated within the context of that interview that Billionaires must be an extractive class at the cost of normal market efficiencies due to the rent-seeking behaviors of the monopolies that must exist to attain that level of wealth.
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#433[dead]
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#434> She was getting richer at a stupendously rapid rate. And yet she hadn't been doing anything bad. The reason her startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built. So she could feel from her own experience how wrong that politician was. She wasn't exploiting anyone. I presume it's a company that just has co-founders then? Or everyone is getting an equal % of the share? In which case SHE's not…
Not giving everyone equal % is exploitation? Interesting, by that logic every participant in the economy should also be required to bail out any startup that fails otherwise we’re exploiting the founders! They’re taking all the risk and we’re getting all the benefit of the services and goods they create!
Well yeah? We should have really wide safety nets actually, so people can try startups and feel comfortable that they might fail. What kind of losses are you envisioning - is it just salaries?
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder what she would say about professional athletes. Some of the top stars have made near a billion dollars in lifetime wages, as unionized employees. Hard for me to see who the sports stars are exploiting to get their wealth.
Nozick has a very interesting thought experiment about this. It poses a completely egalitarian world in which everyone has the same wealth and earns the same income. But there's a kid who's really good at dunking basketballs, and starts charging 5c to watch him dunk. Nobody is required to pay the kid, everybody does so entirely of their own free will. Things progress, and the kid now has 100x the wealth of anybody el…
Now switch the paying 5c to buying endorsed sweatshop Nikes and owning hundreds of minimum wage paying franchises. Because that seems to be what the successful sports folks do.
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#436Holy smokes, one could call this condescending but assuming both politicians and an average reader don’t understand how exponents work feels a step above. And that’s before you get to the part where it’s all about a great idea and hard work and definitely zero exploitation while mentioning examples like Apple, Facebook or Airbnb.
Have you ever listened to a congressional hearing? Or spoken to an "average reader"? Most absolutely glaze over at the idea of calculating the "log base" of anything. If they ever got that far in math class, they certainly have not used the concept since then and cannot remember what it means or how it works. They might remember exponents, but the compounding of them is absolutely lost on the overwhelming majority of…
I don't think this essay by PG is sufficient to teach them log bases or compounding, and is manipulative to assume now that someone knows 2 million doubling 9 times is a billion, they should be accepting of how one can earn a billion dollars fairly.
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#437She 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…
It's funny that you bring up seeds, for some crops farmers' seed spend is 25% because of IP laws and consolidation in the sector.
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#438To me, earning something means deserving something. I don't think that the current system rewards those deserving the largest cuts of the pie. If you want to argue how to get a billion dollars, sure. But to me that is different than earning it.
Why would you say that people don't deserve money that others willing gave to them in return for something they wanted and found to be worth it?
Good question. When the robber pointed his gun at my head, I thought: since I am willingly giving this man my wallet in return for my life, he must have earned it.
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#439She 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…
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Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#440Earlier quoted context omitted.
PG's net worth is between 2.5 and 10 billion... so, I wouldn't take him seriously. Normal people (like the majority ones around here) won't ever have the opportunities/skills/luck all combined at a given point in time to generate billions. So any advice from his side regarding money is simply misleading.
This is pessimistic and cynical. Many millions of people are capable of succeeding if they strive for it, and in doing so making better lives for themselves and others. Hearing words of encouragement, useful advice, and inspirational examples from those who've done it can be tremendously motivating, and is often the difference between trying and not trying. Between "I did it" and "I wish someone had told me it was po…
> This is pessimistic and cynical. Many millions of people are capable of succeeding if they strive for it,
How many is "many"? If you meant 100 million people, then that's still just 1.2%.
And in my opinion to claim that 100 million people have the opportunity to become a billionaire is laughable. Even if you're a super genius and you do everything right, there are just WAAAY too many happy accidents (opportunities) or just lack of unfortunate events stopping you.
Like you could be born to the best parents, who can afford the best school, growing up with the best opportunity business partners, and you work your ass off and are very smart… and then there's STILL a 20% chance you're in a car accident before the age of 30[1], potentially derailing your whole trajectory.
So car accidents ALONE could take away the chance for 20% of people. Not saying a car injury is terrible, but it could be sufficient to derail the billionaire plan.
That said, you work with what you got. And become a millionaire? Sure, doable. Billionaire? You need to win several lotteries AND have skill & contentiousness, I'm sorry let's not pretend otherwise.
[1] 2.44 million people injured in traffic in the US every year (2023 data, and US traffic injury and death is skyrocketing UPWARDS thanks to the car lobby's light truck loophole, while everywhere else in the world traffic deaths are going WAY down).