How to Earn a Billion Dollars

Re:How to Earn a Billion Dollars by tsimionescu on Sunday June 14, 2026 @10:45AM (#48527716)

The bit about Lucas is obviously not true. The universe he envisioned does not sell itself, it was marketed, developed, painted and modeled, added to, kept fresh etc for many many years by a huge army of people. If the only Star Wars media that existed were the original film, or even the original trilogy, it would sell relatively little by now.

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Re:How to Earn a Billion Dollars by groundzeros2015 on Sunday June 14, 2026 @10:48AM (#48527742)

So if you were to assign value to the work to make a new Star Wars toy would you it’s (total value of Stat wars) * (number of people who have ever worked on Star Wars) / (number of people who worked on the toy)?

That’s absurd. Obviously they are creating incremental wealth and their particular toy didn’t make or break billions.

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Re:How to Earn a Billion Dollars by tsimionescu on Sunday June 14, 2026 @11:02AM (#48527883)

No, I'm saying that you can't attribute any significant percent of the value of a Star Wars toy sold today to George Lucas. If Star Wars had not continued after the 1980 films, these toys would not keep selling so much today.

The post I replied to allocated all of the monetary value of the Star Wars branding of a toy to George Lucas personally, which I think is obviously wrong.

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Re:How to Earn a Billion Dollars by groundzeros2015 on Sunday June 14, 2026 @11:09AM (#48527966)

Hmm, what about JK Rowling and LeBron James where the vast majority of their value is explicitly going to their publisher and they keep only a small percentage. Their tiny portion is a billion after everyone else takes most of it!

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Re:How to Earn a Billion Dollars by well_ackshually on Sunday June 14, 2026 @11:44AM (#48528469)

JK Rowling, the proofreaders, the reviewers, the printers, the marketing, the librarians... Everyone in that list is in effect getting stolen from by the publishers, yes.

in the same way that Lebron didn't go where with his own feet, he benefited from coaches, support, doctors, nutrionists & cooks, all dedicated to putting everything into this one man. Do you think merely being a freak of nature nets you a billion ?

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Re:How to Earn a Billion Dollars by blanched on Sunday June 14, 2026 @12:50PM (#48529504)

Right, and even if we assume Lebron accomplished his entire basketball career by himself and that his salary is 100% “earned”, his salary didn’t net him a billion dollars.

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Re:How to Earn a Billion Dollars by groundzeros2015 on Sunday June 14, 2026 @04:00PM (#48531990)

you’re only strengthening the argument that people deserve asymmetric compensation. LeBron and the NBA have a symbiotic relationship where both of them make more money because they exist. And I would guess the NBA made a lot more money than LeBron.

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Re:How to Earn a Billion Dollars by blanched on Sunday June 14, 2026 @05:23PM (#48532899)

Are we not discussing this in the context of this parent message?

> The actual opposing argument is that it's impossible to create a billion dollar enterprise without a group effort, and for one person to end up with a billion dollars necessarily means that they made decisions within that enterprise that resulted in a lopsided allocation of resources at the end.

> And I would guess the NBA made a lot more money than LeBron.

And yes, in this case I believe the NBA is extracting asymmetrically, from Lebron and others.

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Re:How to Earn a Billion Dollars by CPLX on Sunday June 14, 2026 @01:46PM (#48530282)

Also the idea that playing on a basketball team is a good counter to the argument that everyone is on a team seems pretty odd for obvious reasons.

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Re:How to Earn a Billion Dollars by groundzeros2015 on Sunday June 14, 2026 @04:01PM (#48532002)

Are you sure the root of your concern isn’t that people differ in ability and value?

Can you quickly break down which players on the team are fairly compensated and which are oppressed by LeBron?

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Re:How to Earn a Billion Dollars by CPLX on Sunday June 14, 2026 @06:39PM (#48533689)

I'm the original poster in this sub-thread, and I didn't make any of the points you seem to have ascribed to me.

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Re:How to Earn a Billion Dollars by groundzeros2015 on Sunday June 14, 2026 @03:59PM (#48531974)

Once again, the publisher gave her something like 5-10% of sales and kept 90% to cover those costs and she is still a billionaire!!! So is your real beef with the publisher?

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Re:How to Earn a Billion Dollars by well_ackshually on Sunday June 14, 2026 @05:01PM (#48532659)

Indeed. And once the publishers have paid their fair share, JKR also will, and she won't be a billionaire anymore.

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Re:How to Earn a Billion Dollars by tsimionescu on Monday June 15, 2026 @02:26AM (#48537351)

Harry Potter became a billion dollar business after the movies and toys and so on were created - again, it takes waayyy more people than one to actually produce this amount of money. The initial idea that Rowling herself came up with is of course a significant part of that - but still only a small part of it, in the grand scheme of things.

It's also important to note that Harry Potter making billions of dollars also prevented any other similar books or ideas from making any large profits. The entertainment industry is very much a winner takes all industry. HP didn't hugely grow the children's entertainment market, it just outcompeted other works. This is extremely important to understand, because it directly implies that a huge part of the value is simply that media execs decided to bet big on HP instead of trying out many other possible properties. The money would have happened either way, more or less the same - they just would have been distributed to one or many other authors instead, if JK Rowling hadn't hit it out of the park. People would have bought a roughly similar amount of books for their children to read, a roughly similar amount of toys, would have taken them to a roughly similar amount of movies.

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