At least you know who is putting their skin in the game rather than some generic name.

Also Tesla is not named Musk, or Amazon, Bezos.

If:

(a) you have FU money

(b) you'll get to keep having FU money (perhaps drastically less, but still FU money) whatever you try

Then you don't have "skin in the game" anymore like a normal person does.

If Bezos fortune goes from 100 billion to 5 billion due to bad bets, he still hasn't suffered anything more significant than some damage to his ego (meanwhile Amazon employees could see their lives and finances ruined).

I’m sure he would feel like he’d just gone from $1000 to $50 though.

It’s a fairly significant difference.

$1000 in the bank is enough to feel like you can cover rent, bills, and meals. $50 is not. Do you think he would feel like he wouldn't know whether he'd have a roof over his head next month, or whether he should start skipping meals entirely?

Would he, though? Really?

Functionally what is the difference in quality of life and power between the two?

The only thing I can think of is he'd no longer be astronomically one of the richest ten humans alive.

I'll bet it's really nice to have major cities beg you to move there.

That's a function of him being the CEO of Amazon, though, yeah?

I'm sure state income taxes on dividends off $100B don't hurt either. (If AMZN paid dividends, or Bezos diversified his stock portfolio.)

Yeah but he would have no skin in the game. Or much less than ordinary person. You need to be in a position where if your bet goes awry you’ll end up in some sort of worse state (not having few less zeros in the bank account but your actual lifestyle and quality of life affected in a meaningful way).

Ego difference. No lifestyle difference. And no life and death difference.

No, he wouldn't. Either way he has more money than he can realistically spend. Money has drastically less value the more of it you have.

My comment was not about WeWork's CEO, but rather in reference to the Galt's Gulch (Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand)comment. They made a comment that the heroes in Atlas Shrugged used their own names as the monikers of their companies. I was simply stating that the comparison didn't carry over to Tesla = Musk. That was all. It seems to have triggered some to respond to their own interpretation. Skin in the game was putting your name on your company, not a more ambiguous one to hide behind. I would argue that unless you can change your name, you are putting skin into the game by naming your company after yourself.

I also refrain from the concept of FU money, all that it connotates, and that someone else can determine how much I can have.

Why are they putting their skin in the game? What sort of decisions could WeWork, Tesla, or Amazon make that would ruin the personal finances of Neumann, Musk, or Bezos? There is still a corporate abstraction, so while profits turn into bonuses, losses don't turn into personal misfortune for the founders. (Although they may turn into personal misfortune for laid-off employees.)

(And yes, the real world is not a fictional caricature.)

Musk has said and shown repeatedly that he'd put his last dollar into SpaceX (and probably Tesla), so he's not a great example here.

Not sure about that. He maintains very luxurious lifestyle. His continuous investment in Tesla could be seen more as an effort to maintain full / majority shareholder control of the company. I don’t think he would sell his house and invest the money in Tesla. He would still be rich even if Tesla goes bankrupt. Plus he has billionaire family members as a fallback.

Who are Musk's billionaire family members?

His brother is a billionaire also I believe (not as rich as Elon but still that’s a nice safety net to have).

It puts their reputation on the line. If you destroy the brand $Lastname you can't use it again.

"I stake my personal reputation on the reputation of the company I run"

What do you need a reputation and a personal brand for if you have two billion dollars?

What if you need $10B to reach your goal? You'll need to raise money somehow, and reputation is the deciding factor for many investors.

Also, once you become fabulously wealthy, you want something more than financial security, you want to be remembered. Look at the flip Bill Gates did with becoming a leading philanthropist. He doesn't want to be remembered as the evil, anti-competitive CEO of Microsoft during the 90s, he wants to be remembered for his work in the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. Trump didn't want to be remembered as the shrewd personality on The Apprentice, he wanted to become President of the United States. Some just want to be extraordinarily rich to make "richest people in the world" lists (that's where I place Larry Ellison).

$2B is far from enough for most people to "be remembered".

So either way, it's all ego. Why should I care at all if I'm "remembered" after I die? I'll be dead. Conan O'Brien's NYTimes interview the other day captured this sentiment exactly. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/14/arts/television/conan-obr...

"I had a great conversation with Albert Brooks once. When I met him for the first time, I was kind of stammering. I said, you make movies, they live on forever. I just do these late-night shows, they get lost, they’re never seen again and who cares? And he looked at me and he said, [Albert Brooks voice] “What are you talking about? None of it matters.” None of it matters? “No, that’s the secret. In 1940, people said Clark Gable is the face of the 20th Century. Who [expletive] thinks about Clark Gable? It doesn’t matter. You’ll be forgotten. I’ll be forgotten. We’ll all be forgotten.” It’s so funny because you’d think that would depress me. I was walking on air after that."

With some people, it really does take a long, long time for them to be forgotten. How many people don't know the name of Nero, after all? It's been roughly 2,000 years and people still know about him.

Sure, because the Walton family is such a bastion of good policies and personal responsibility