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How to earn a billion dollars
511–520 of 1001 posts
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#512You cannot EARN a billion dollars.
(Unless there is hyper inflation)
You can only get a billion dollars.
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#513PG missed her point to an astounding degree. I’m sort of dumbfounded at this level of misinterpretation.
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#514She 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…
Paul Graham was at his best when he gave clear, experience-driven, action-oriented advice. But even then, his advice was flawed... advising people to do things like to discriminate against women and parents.
As he got a little older, he cut back on that pro-discrimination advice... that typical thing where he was able to recognize the problems with his bigotry only after he would have been on the other side of it.
As he has become ludicrously wealthy he has, unfortunately, lost all track of reality. He no longer engages with the practical or the real... instead he deliberately misreads a quote so that he can wrote a pathetic and defensive response to it that engages in bad faith. And because he is ludicrously wealthy, he is surrounded by a mix of yes-men, and other hyper-wealthy sociopaths. So none of them give him critical feedback.
Paul Graham has become useless to society. He is, fundamentally, just a mindless pile of cash.
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#515Impressed at the commentary here, which correctly points out Paul dodges the entire issue at hand. Three things can be true: 1. Growing at a rapid rate over long periods of time is hard , doable and rewarding 2. Incentivizing the discovery of these things is good for society. 3. Nonethless there is and should be a limit to wealth acquisition, given moral hazard. To make a similarly glib counterargument to Paul G: If…
It's kinda a shame; I've noted Paul is leaning into the right wing rhetoric more and more on X, and then more in this speech.
It's a shame. Both AOC and PG are often right in their own way, and then deeply entrenched in others.
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#516More sanctimonious billionaire apologism. Nope, all wrong. You can't earn a billion dollars, and nothing in this essay shows you can. You can get a billion dollars, and maybe you can even wind up with a billion dollars without being mostly evil (although I'm skeptical), but you can't earn it. Graham is confusing "I did some stuff and my net worth increased to a billion" with "I earned a billion".
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#517I read this and see two possibilities. 1) PG honestly believes that his audience is unfamiliar with compound growth - i.e., an insult to the audience's intelligence. Or 2) PG honestly believes that the founder of a successful startup is directly and wholly responsible for the level of magnificent growth a company achieves. The 2nd one is some Ayn-Rand-like school of thought. That there are great people who have 1000x…
Important context is; he is speaking to a generally small-c conservative.
So 3) he is well aware of his audience and is talking to them directly.
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#518Earlier 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…
Low-key one of the most fucked up comments I've read
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#519Impressed at the commentary here, which correctly points out Paul dodges the entire issue at hand. Three things can be true: 1. Growing at a rapid rate over long periods of time is hard , doable and rewarding 2. Incentivizing the discovery of these things is good for society. 3. Nonethless there is and should be a limit to wealth acquisition, given moral hazard. To make a similarly glib counterargument to Paul G: If…
> 3. Nonethless there is and should be a limit to wealth acquisition, given moral hazard. How do we determine that limit ? Most Americans ( middle class and above ) are richer than most people in the world. Way richer than most people in Africa or poorer parts of Asia can ever aspire to be. Consider that when competing for resources these poor people are competing with wealthy middle class Americans. Add to that the…
> How do we determine that limit ?
How about a cap relative to GDP?
Elon Musk's net worth is 3% of USA's annual GDP and 1% of global GDP.
I'm not a fan of limiting wealth among the upper class. But I am a fan of stopping a small number of individuals from controlling a significant percent of the world's GDP because if that trend continues, we'll end up with individual people more powerful than the governments that are supposed to keep them in check.
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#520To 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?
I think there's a bit of nuance here. AOC is directionally correct, but of course there's exceptions.
I do think Taylor Swift and JK Rowling "earned" a billion dollars.
I don't think Elon Musk or Donald Trump "earned" their wealth.
Elon, for example, did earn a lot of it. People gave him money for Teslas.
But he disproportionally makes profit off regulatory credits, selling his own companies to each other, and burdening his companies with debt. He's forced people to work through pandemics, undermined the SEC, stolen data from the government, bought elections, and (if you want to believe recent stories) may have even helped cheat in the most recent presidential election. He directly caused hundreds of thousands of deaths due to DOGE budget cuts, all while getting billions of dollars worth of contracts via SpaceX and xAI.
Or Bezos. Amazon uses our roads and infrastructure. A majority of Amazon warehouse workers rely on public assistance. I believe Bezos is a phenomenal founder, but his returns have subsidized by us.
There's a reason Taylor Swift doesn't get brought up when people talk about the rich. You _can_ earn a billion dollars, but more often than not you have to screw over a lot of people to get there.