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How to earn a billion dollars

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#91

Post by smallmancontrov »

atmavatar wrote: post #74

This article reads like a rather flippant dismissal of the original concern that "earning" a billion dollars cannot be done without some moral compromise. Sure, if you start off with $2 million and double it 9 times, you end up with $1 billion. Exponential growth is a powerful thing, so it comes as no surprise that maintaining a large growth rate over time very quickly grows a starting sum into a much larger pool of…

Regarding "moral compromise," many in this thread are missing the forest for the trees. The trees are taxi drivers and airbnb noise complaints, the forest is a policy environment that is absurdly tilted towards capital:

- Ordinary income has sky-high taxes compared to capital gains, and you don't even have to pay the taxes on capital gains if you don't realize them!

- Inelastic labor supply mismanaged into increasingly soggy demand, mathematically tanking wages

- Attributing credit for job creation to capital without attributing blame for job destruction to capital

there are more, but these are all Political Economy decisions that didn't have to be this way. They are this way because people with money and power wanted them to be this way and were willing to morally compromise to get them this way.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#92

Post by layer8 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #59
thomassmith65 wrote: post #51

So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars [...] that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way. What counts as 'doing something bad' and 'cheating' clearly is subjective. I suspect Graham's opinion on the behavior of a Zuckerberg or a Musk would be a little more flattering than…

Conversely, I suspect the politician is defining that "all things that earn a billion dollars" are in the "bad" category. LeBron James has, between playing basketball and endorsing things, earned a billion dollars. What bad thing did he do, other than losing the finals a few times?

He probably signed advertising contracts.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#93

Post by jrm4 »

Please don't bury the lede here of how the author completely and epically misses the point of the statement.

It's not about the math of the thing, it's about the arguably necessary exploitation that must occur to hit those kinds of numbers.

And in fact, IMHO, you don't even need to get to "exploitation" to criticize this mentality.

Any normal human would (and if not would, SHOULD) want to stop "earning" well before they hit those ridiculous numbers. Let's say -- at about 50 million, a normal person should realize, yes, that's enough. Time to pivot to something that doesn't cause so much accumulation. This does happen, we just don't hear about it enough.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#94

Post by hilariously »

RickJWagner wrote: post #64

It’s like fertilizer, for jealousy.

Yeah man its just all the people who are jealous that are mad and no other reason.

The billionares hands are clean, the climate is fine, the elections are great, there's nothing wrong, close your eyes, stuff your ears with wax, and keep on trucking :)

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#95

Post by ceejayoz »

> So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars. I felt like a skating coach hearing someone say that it's impossible to do a triple axel. Of course it's possible. It's hard, but it's possible.

"Earning a billion", to the skating coach, is like pulling off a dodeca-axel.

It's not gonna happen through mere pluck, and it's probably gonna involve a lot of other folks' work if it ever happens, who probably aren't gonna get that much of the glory.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#96

Post by hilariously »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #77

I think maybe the fundamental issue is something that he said really late in the essay: > There are other ways to get rich than by starting startups. Some of those do require you to exploit people. But startups are the most common way to become really rich, and if you want to start a successful startup, the key is not exploitation but empathy. > How people become rich in your society is one of the most important thin…

You're right, higher taxes on the billionares would create all sorts of second order effects, like the ability to pay for the social safety net for the common folk, maybe educating the populace properly, all sorts of truly scary stuff!

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#98

Post by dangoodmanUT »

theturtletalks wrote: post #35
smallmancontrov wrote: post #3

In creative destruction, you can do an accounting sleight of hand by attributing credit for creation while ignoring blame for destruction even though the two are linked. This is a technology + investing forum and all of us agree that in general creative destruction processes are enormously net positive, but they frequently do kick off a toxic byproduct in the form of said destruction (e.g. Uber and displaced taxi dri…

When AI melts away these rent seeking marketplaces like Uber, Doordash, Amazon, etc, they won’t go as quietly as the people they displaced.

These are actually the most durable businesses because they have network effects: restaurants alright signed up, sellers onboarded, etc.

Easier for them to adopt AI than AI companies to rebuild the networks

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#100

Post by wg0 »

pcrh wrote: post #53
wg0 wrote: post #7

Does that work always without fail with anyone anywhere anytime?

For those that pg has sponsored it has happened a few times out of ~5,000. Better odds than the lottery, for sure.

I would not compare to lottery because a lottery ticket is bought at pure chance whereas these startup are taken onboard after very thorough audit.
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