> I read pg's collection of essays (Hackers and Painters) in my 20s, and it single-handedly prevented me from being radicalized by leftist ideologies.
Strap in folks, this is going to be a doozy
> The one insight from the book that I will always remember from the book is this: if you want to be rich, make something people want.
and then there's “Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” https://biblehub.com/matthew/19-24.htm
> Money is fiat to the value you've generated in growing the economic pie.
This is gibberish, fyi (in case you didn't know) -- I can't even begin to de-garble it
> It is in fact possible gain wealth ethically.
I think this does get to the crux of the matter. I grant you that there is a sizable chunk of the population, most of them lefties, that do believe this. I personally, as a matter of principle, do not believe this. However (you just knew there was a however) I think it is let's say tricky to accumulate a vast amount of wealth obscene wealth ethically. We know from wage stagnation https://aflcio.org/2015/1/15/five-causes-wage-stagnation-uni... that the system is rigged. So fair play to anyone that opts out of playing the game and decides to join the rentier class https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/applied-and-soc... More power to them, but let's not pretend the system itself isn't lopsided, captured, rigged, and unfair.
> However, there are several addendum to this argument:
addenda is the plural of addendum
> It's actually a major PR failure that people think Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk when they think of billionaires; If we can ignore their character for a second, these guys are actually hyper-productive and they've created immense wealth for society and are compensated in a power law sort of way.
This Jeff Bezos? https://www.btimesonline.com/articles/177080/20260414/amazon...
Or this Jeff Bezos? https://metro.co.uk/2025/09/24/inside-never-ending-nightmare...
Or this Jeff Bezos? https://www.epi.org/publication/corporate-union-busting/
Oh, he's so hyper-productive
> 1. Most billionaires are hedge fund or private equity managers whose name no one has ever heard of. They provide liquidity or allocate capital or something.
fun fact: “Before founding Amazon in 1994, Jeff Bezos worked at D. E. Shaw & Co., a quantitative hedge fund in New York. He was there from 1990 to 1994, becoming a senior vice president by age 30.”
What I'm not saying. I'm not saying that Mr Bezos isn't a smart guy. I'm not saying that he isn't hard working. I'm not even saying Amazon isn't an amazing company.
> If we can ignore their character for a second
No, I am unwilling to, why should we?
Look, I'm not anti-capitalist. I look up to Elon Musk. I think what he has built and is building are astounding human achievements. Musk and Bezos didn't create this lop-sided system and I am not going to fault them for taking advantage of it. But as I said before -- let's not pretend there's some magic exponential money tree that some among us are just ever-so-gifted at growing for themselves and acknowledge the system is broken for the majority of people. It takes a special sort of myopia to ignore the obvious and plentiful social ills of the day. And do not take this as an attack on the system itself. As I said, unlike many other I am not an anti-capitalist. I do not believe that capitalism is inherently evil or wrong or bad or whatever.
> 2. Rich people make money with money - in the form of dividends, interest, rent, etc. Poor people trading labor for money. Salary only scales linearly; therefore, generating value for society is only half of the equation, you must also have ownership, or slowly invest your earned capital to eventually make money with money (i.e. retirement).
Yes, we know how the world works
> 3. There must be a growing economy, otherwise it's a zero-sum game; a fixed-sized pie. In a stagnant economy, the customers you gained are customers another company lost. The wealth just shuffle hands from laid off workers to your employees. I think this is why Jeff Bezos once remarked that a stagnant economy is incompatible with free democratic society.
??? what's the size of the pie and whether it's growing or not got to do with anything. The problem centers on the how unequal the relative sizes of the slices of the pie everyone is getting over time. Which leads us to wealth redistribution. You lot (you and pg and people like you) can call the rest of us "radical leftwing ideologues" all you like but the longer this inequitable dynamic goes on the likelihood of a violent revolution goes up. If you want to avoid pitchforks and guillotines and "eating the rich" (I'm not advocating any of this btw, I'm just saying that this is where ignoring structural inequalities leads) -- you know way back when they used to have debt jubilees because they our forefathers recognised that inequality (growing inequality between the haves and the have-nots to be precise) is a fundamental truth of the world, an iron law akin to the law of gravity.
> 4. There must be a new frontier, otherwise the chance of success is pretty much zero. Software is this generation's new frontier.
No, what must happen is that when you find yourself writing a string of non-sequitur gibberish … the sane rational self-preserving piece of your brain must stop feeding the gibber-crank oxygenated blood
> There are no bars to entry. You just need a laptop and the skill to arrange symbols on a screen in the right order.
As the kids say "wow, just wow"
> It's literally alchemy.
It's literally and metaphorically not.
> On the other hand, non-software startups can't just do things. In many cultures, maybe due to their lack of growth, "entrepreneur" is actually very low status. It's synonymous with ne'er-do-well who can't find proper work. In the case of USSR before its collapse, it's synonymous with literal thieves and black market thugs.
I would say it's almost a guarantee that going by the rest of what you've written here this short snatch is undoubtedly horseshit
PG's essays function as ideological inoculation for a specific demographic — young, technically skilled, meritocratically inclined. They don't prevent radicalization; they redirect it from class analysis to techno-libertarianism. You think you've avoided leftist ideology, but you've absorbed a different one: the "just-world" fallacy with startup characteristics.