481–490 of 1001 posts
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In startups you have to be right only once.
In startups you get to be wrong only once.
As opposed to a successful exit. No matter the above, it’s still a successful exit.
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If this company is growing at the rates PG says it is, then the existing investors should be happy to buy more of the stock.
But the existing investors are the ones whose wealth is being taken and being put up on the market. :) So who is going to buy the existing investor's wealth? Are they just going to buy each other's wealth?
Another example is McKenzie Scott selling billions in Amazon stock. There's no shortage of buyers for that.
Money Flow:
Public Investors, Mutual Funds
V
Investor Round X
V
Investor Round ...
V
Investor Round A
V
Founders/Seed Investors
Each level of this Ponzi pays for the previous level, plus a healthy spillover. So when the IPO happens, everyone prior in the chain wins big.
Before the IPO, each funding round pays the previous investors up the chain to the founders/seeders (unless you made a foolish arrangement with one of the VC rounds).
The magic here is that all of this can be done without the company ever making a profit. That's where things have really changed. In the past, you had no hope of an IPO unless your company had a track record of reasonable profitability. Uber is the best example of how the general investing public got fleeced in order to pay each level of investors which basically fleeced the next. It was all a money shuffle.
It's a great system to take money from questionable regimes and pour them into this shuffle (Softbank).
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I agree, I think some sort of universal income payment for each child would be the least controversial version of UBI.
Really? I think you would hear some strong arguments about how that would incentivise people to have tons of kids.
Instead this piece justs blames the fact that rich people also defend their interests. It's nothing new.
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I agree, I think some sort of universal income payment for each child would be the least controversial version of UBI.
Something like the UK's Child Benefit? https://www.gov.uk/child-benefit
The ways to break thru from 500gs to a million is immense and less competition. And most of these depend on the money from the lower classes.
What I meant to say is the system we all need to be in to get rich creates a feedback loop to keep the poor poor, it incentivize moat creation to stifle competition
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Yes that's very helpful. I cannot imagine any founder being deterred to start a company because of this wealth tax. With or without it you'd be very rich under PG's assumptions
It not a matter of a founder not starting a company, it doing it somewhere else than the US. Didn’t some study show a majority of founders are foreigners? They choose to come to the US. They can choose not to in the future.
You think a relatively well off individual from a less wealthy country facing many systemic problems for business will pass up the opportunity to migrate to the US because they may need to pay a couple percent if they strike gold?
If my neighbor has more then me, how is that an issue?
Now, I do understand that:
* Doing something illegal is wrong, but if someone aquired wealth legally, I don't see the inequality a problem.
* Poverty is a problem but poverty is a problem whether 100% of the population is poor, or is a minority of the population is poor, or the majority of the population is poor; because the problem is poverty, not the inequality
* I can also see how a different taxation philosophy would alleviate poverty, but then again that is a solution to poverty, not a solution to wealth inequality.
So, why is "wealth inequality" a problem?
There's a little company called MyTeksi. My is a for-profit social startup with a mission to revolutionise the taxi industry. They started GrabCar, which killed off the taxi industry with higher wages, higher quality services, lower prices. To win the war against Uber, they'd lie about how long it took for a car to arrive, and they'd deceive drivers as well. A driver might be promised a $100 bonus for driving into an…
This is similar in vein to what DeliveryHero is doing in South and SE Asia. They closed shop in Europe once the regulations made it difficult to keep rider wages artificially low, and now majority of their operations are in the Developing world. The lax nature of regulations in Asia make it easier to do "naughty" things and move up the ladder.