How to earn a billion dollars

The hacker crowd has always had a heavy socialist or even communist component - sharing and coöperative work is a big part of the FLOSS community, after all!

I'd say HN is slowly catching up with traditional SV startup culture dying, and seeing more non-VC-funded people flowing in as sites like Reddit enshittify. Those people identify more as tech workers than as early startup employees who aren't a billionaire yet.

Combine that with recent economic and political developments, and it isn't exactly surprising that a growing part of HN isn't a big fan of the über-wealthy tech elite trying to make their life worse.

>His core premise is that one's not required to cheat

His core premise is terrible if not outright facetious given the case he made. That the girl who is going to become a billionaire in his example has a startup that makes a product that everyone loves does nothing to disprove the point. Billions of people love VLC media player but Jean-Baptiste Kempf didn't become a billionaire.

The difference isn't the product, it's that what makes the startup founder a billionaire is that they're willing to pawn off their invention to people who do all the unethical things, while they laugh on their way to the bank, that's the point of the big check.

In some sense I prefer the robber Barron over the startup founder because at least the former doesn't pretend they're a saint between they've put one level of indirection between themselves and the exploitation.

The new rich have warped concepts about how they "earned" their wealth.

Very, very rarely does someone actually build or provide something so significant that it results in them profiting enough to become that wealthy.

Instead, they (possibly unknowingly) play a complex game that essentially defines complex rules that result in outsized rewards while obscuring the real process of gaining those rewards.

Most of this revolves around magic numbers. The best example is "valuation". Valuation in theory is reasonable. But after just a couple of iterations of mixing leverage with hype and gambling (with other people's money, of course), there is now enough artificial wealth to invest in new ventures to get some % ownership. And based on the amount paid and the percent received, the venture now has this official value. There's no legitimacy behind this calculation other than the fact that everyone agrees to play this game.

Now that your startup has a nice big valuation, you go through several successive rounds of funding - where each round serves two purposes: 1. give you more cash to burn so you can move faster than regulatory bodies can keep up (Uber) or enough spare cash that you can slow the regulatory processes by throwing lawyers at it, and 2: pay the previous investors a nice reward.

Repeat this process several times, eventually resulting in an IPO where you dump all this false value on the general public (or nowadays, all the pension funds and government-forced personal investment accounts). In other words, the last buyers pay for all of the false value. Then they wait for a reward that often doesn't come.

Ironically, part of why this system spawned and has worked so well is that once large, publicly traded companies became fixated on quarterly EPS numbers (so the execs can hit their bonus targets), those companies became slow and useless for innovation. But they had magic money with which they could buy up startups who are actually trying new things.

This entire system is astounding in its perversion compared to how business worked 40+ years ago.

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Of all the billionaires in the world, what percent of them did something like this, vs the percent who reached that number from investments (and by investments I mean assets they possessed which ballooned in value)?

I'm betting it is a tiny fraction. Most modern "wealth" is all based on investment games.