That's because for 99.999% of people, being paid money has utility. So the payment provides some benefit for them. But for someone with $2B, my argument is precisely this: whatever it is that drove them to make $2B (inveting the best product, or whatever) is NOT what drives them to make the NEXT $1B.
> you can't just take all their future wealth and expect them to continue > they will stop the instant they stop making money, just like any other person.
You cabsolutely can, and they absoluteluy will not.
That's the whole point again: assuming a high enough "cap", we are talking about people who will never not be extremely wealthy. Whether the cap is $100M; $1B or $10B can be argued, but the central point is that the utility of more wealth is diminishing. That's why me giving you $1B would make a massive difference, but then me giving you another $1B would make almost no difference to your lifestyle/happniess/whatever measure you choose.
No they don't.
Satya has a much lower cap earning money at Microsoft then Bill or Balmer did.
Does that make him a worse CEO? Does it mean he is less dedicated?
Very few people who are competitive are competitive because of money.
They want to be known as the best, have the most power, the most influence, run the largest company, their name the most number of history books.
Money is a rough proxy for power, but, to give an example, pharmaceutical companies have an outsized influence in American politics versus how much their CEOs are worth.
Heck for the vast majority of companies their leadership has 0% chance of becoming billionaires. Most industries are too low margin. That doesn't mean the leaders of those companies still don't want to win in their chosen market.
I’d rather do art or open source or go fishing.
(That’s not quite what you asked but I don’t know how many actual billionaires will read your comment so figured I’d chime in — to me it doesn’t seem unreasonable that calling wealth would change what people work on and how much they produce.)
Which are the examples driven by extreme wealth (note: not just regular 1%er wealth and not people who became extremely wealthy - I mean people who expressed that the reason they created something was because they knew it would make them extremely top-0.01% wealthy)?