I don't know what the best solution to the problem of wealth inequality is, but I know that we need to collectively get over this "but if people think they will be limited to a mere hundred million dollars in wealth they will have no motivation whatsoever to work" nonsense. You know what the motivation is? It's still a hundred million dollars, that's what.

What does this mean? Without some insane wealth tax this is literally impossible. No founder chooses to become a billionaire. They just keep growing a business that is solving a billion dollar problem.

The only other was is if after 100M they start turning down customers or restricting services.

It might be that if personal wealth alone were (effectively, by taxation) capped to $100m, we would still have exactly as much collective wealth, innovation, and value creation as we do today. Possibly more, because of more wealth distributed onto shared infrastructure and into the fluid economy.

You can just cap total compensation for executives relative to the lowest paid worker and include equity in that calculation. If you want to pay yourself, 10 million a year in stock, great... You need to pay the lowest paid person 10k in stock or whatever.

Or, you can mandate that after a certain size a worker owned trust/union will own some percentage of the company.

There's dozens of ways you could address this problem. Each have pros/cons. It's not that hard to fix if we actually wanted to fix it though.

Executives do get equity as part of their compensation and it’s a huge reason for the massive disparity in wealth.

This is well studied stuff.

Since you aren't willing to engage in a discussion in good faith, implying whatever I have to say about your 5th-grader-level economic plan to just seize all the shares is bs, I recommend you ask chatgpt why it doesn't work.

Imagine you lived in a feudal kingdom. Would you just shrug at all the wealth of kings and lords made off your back? Most people did, but thank god times have changed for the better. Perhaps we can change them to be better still.

So 100 million is enough to do quite a bit with?

> that person that is capable of earning 100 million will simply exit your tax jurisdiction

There are plenty of lower tax jurisdictions than Silicon Valley. Is it possible there's more to a jurisdiction than the raw marginal tax percentage it applies to one's paycheck?

The people at the top should look at the bottom for what should not be.

> My own wealth now would be unimaginable to myself when I lived in the USSR.

Good! But apparently $100M isn't enough?

You might look at history for how the "let them eat cake" approach goes.

> It's part of something called freedom.

Freedom is more complicated than you make it out to be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_liberty

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_liberty

One of the early things toddlers have to learn, in fact, is that their personal freedoms may be in conflict from the very legitimate freedoms of others.

It went rather badly for the revolutionaries: the vast majority of the nobility escaped, most of those executed were commoners, Robespierre himself was guillotined (nice own goal there) as a result of political infighting, and the First Republic gave way in only 10 years to the reign of Napoleon as emperor.

Those who invoke the French Revolution of 1789 are self-identifying as future failures. For pity's sake, at least use a historical example that lasted longer.

Few invoking the French Revolution think it'd be good. I'd just like to avoid a repeat.

Even in SF that's about double reality. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanfranciscocit...

> They will have 25 peak earning years where they earn like 240k after taxes but only spend 100k so that extra 140k goes into IRA/401k, and other investments, plus discretionary spend.

Talking about an extra $140k a year for decades straight to put into savings as if it's the American norm illustrates just how deeply out of touch you are here.

https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-28...

"Median household income was $83,730 in 2024"

> This isn't France and you're not gonna do shit.

Yeah, Louis XVI thought the same.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...

"A household's income can be calculated in various ways but the US Census as of 2009 measured it in the following manner: the income of every resident of that house that is over the age of 15, including pre-tax wages and salaries, along with any pre-tax personal business, investment, or other recurring sources of income, as well as any kind of governmental entitlement such as unemployment insurance, social security, disability payments or child support payments received."

> That means someone who has 3 million in an IRA will only show "income" on money they take out of the tax deferred account which may only be 50k in a fiscal year.

We're talking about putting in, not taking out.

Define median for me?

He already moved to Texas because of taxes - I think this is as good as it gets for him. If US Federal Government taxes his wealth (not something remotely possible) he will still stay in Texas.

> Top marginal rates span from 2.5 percent in Arizona and North Dakota to 13.3 percent in California. (California also imposes a 1.1 percent payroll tax on wage income, bringing the all-in top rate to 14.4 percent as of 2024.)

Am I missing something?

Yes. Literally an entire lifetime of context.

The problem is that when you cap earnings to $100m, most investors lose motivation to invest in startups, because their investment isn’t likely to yield a reward. Unless you think all investments should be less than $100m, this kills large investment rounds. That would have killed OpenAI, for example, since their recent round was larger.

In other words, it’s fine to say “you can only earn a hundred million dollars.” The hard part is implementing it without killing the investment ecosystem. Every investor is chasing the big return that covers the 20 investments that didn’t pan out. If that big return is capped, there won’t be investment, and hence no startups.

The ultimate point of money is for someone to have it. And since corporations are owned by people, it’s not enough to say that corporations aren’t bound to the $100m cap. Otherwise people will just hoard money using corporations, and take loans against their value, a bit like how it already works today.

What counts as $100m? If you buy a million dollar house, then sell it a few years later for a million dollars, are you now limited to $99m since you already spent $1m? Does the money from selling the house go to taxes, or to you? If it goes to you, what’s to prevent someone from hoarding equity and only taking out $100m at a time, effectively living the life of a billionaire while keeping their balance under $100m?

If you own some stock, and it rises in value to $150m, you forfeit $50m to taxes, right? But then if the value of the stock goes down by half, would you have $75m or $50m?

And if the answer is “you have $150m, the cap only applies when selling stock,” then what stops people from putting the money under the custody of a business (which you said isn’t bound by the cap) and then taking loans against that extra $50m?

These aren’t contrived scenarios. Stock goes up and down all the time, and it’s important to be clear about how the proposed system will work.

I’m genuinely interested in answers. It’s easy to say “just cap someone’s wealth at $100m,” but people seem to shy away from proposing specifics.

Yes, divestment.

Sure you must pick a point in time. But no matter. This is what we all do on Tax day. This how home owners pay property tax.

There does not need to be an exception for stock.

This argument you make, as if "but who can say how much it really is worth?" Sure. Just like a house. Somebody builds a freeway right next to you, guess what, your house is not worth as much as it was yesterday.

Your argument, "but you can hide your money in a company." Actually, this is good point. Perhaps companies shouldn't be allowed to hoard wealth, then buy up their competitors in order to skew the market.

Maybe this is a problem. Maybe we wouldn't the google/apple phone duopoly, maybe we wouldn't have Meta owning Facebook, and Whatsapp and etc, and all this AI, if they weren't able to hoard cash.

Maybe there should be some law that says, the maximum a company can pay the top is 100 times what they pay the bottom, including the janitors.

There are lots of solutions. If you stop trying to defend some random human having the wealth of a god, it's easy to come up with many, many ideas.

Instead of say, "but this, but that", say, "what if we tried that."

The trouble with economics is that if you get the incentives slightly wrong, people will relentlessly exploit the difference. So when I ask "but this, but that," I’m asking "have you thought of this exploit or that exploit?" Because unfortunately you can’t just ignore that they exist. Each of them needs a concrete answer, or the system will reward those who exploit it. (You can argue that’s true for the current system too, but at least it’s hard to exploit. The loopholes I listed above are all straightforward.)

Instead of, "but this, but that," you say, "what about this?"

You use your considerable brain power, to, instead of finding faults and leaving it there, you suggest something better, that you believe can accomplish the overall goal. The overall goal, I believe, is fixing wealth disparity before violence becomes the only answer.

In this manner, we come to some solution that benefits society, rather than keeping the status quo which is obviously, without doubt, broken.

Things he doesn’t want = mob rule

So you know, agree to disagree, I'm not going to argue anything other than that I don't particularly care for the framing of it as dictatorial or mob rule because the same can be done for other taxes. Which I have done and it doesn't appear you wish to dispute anyway.

Professional athletes and lottery winners prove otherwise.

People who work a job they don't like because they need money to live, view money as the objective in life, because the equivocate it to escaping and freedom. So wearing that lens, and looking at billionaires, these motherfuckers are greed driven psychopaths who blew past the "escape with freedom" bank account ages ago, and are now just taking money off the table from others trying to get ahead.

But that is not how it is at all. Virtually every billionaire is crazy focused on their work, and the money is a side effect that they don't really care that much about, besides it being a tool to enable more work they can do.

It's very hard to get this across when speaking to people who view work as an obstacle, money as god, don't have personal business experience, and whose passions are things that aren't very productive.

This is an illusion. A share has value because it represents the hypothetical future productivity of an abstract entity that may or may not even exist in the future.

At the margin, you can take an Amazon share and buy bananas with it. However you absolutely can't take the entirety of Amazon and exchange it for a trillion bananas. Those bananas don't exist.

More importantly, you can't take the entirety of Amazon and transform it into housing supply. I think people are often too careful about "missing the forest for the trees" and then conceive of problems as overly abstract. The affordability crisis is, first and foremost, a housing shortage.

Young people can't afford homes. Millennials are hitting 40 and realizing they may never afford one. Being secure in housing is pretty damn low on the Maslow hierarchy of needs. Sure maybe we need a more progressive tax policy, but this myopic focus on billionaires distracts from the real problem which is a housing shortage.

2. A $1T market cap is not $1T of spendable cash. This is exactly the point I was making that people don't understand the difference.

2. You can borrow 1T dollars in cash, effectively maxing out what the physical world will allow you to spend it on.

There is a reason Bill Gates didn't just write the IRS a check for $175B and created the Gates foundation instead.

They're in it for the money as it allows them to exert control. That's still being in it for the money.

A better way to frame it that doesn't hinge on the colloquial vs literal meaning of "in it for the money".

I can assure you, with the utmost in direct observation, that they are extraordinarily obsessed with money. It is, in fact, the defining characteristic of their entire existence, literally by definition.

Any argument to the contrary is profoundly hilarious. Imagine if you came across someone that had over one billion model trains in his basement who was claiming that he wasn't super interested in model trains.

From a billionaire POV, money is what you use to build valuable things (what the lenses are to photographers). Unlike photography, it also happens to be the thing that the market rewards you with for doing a good job (although a successful photographer could convert their profit to new/better lenses).

I would eat my hat if you could find a single billionaire (outside trust fundees / inheritance) that is grinding it out doing something they hate, selling a product(s) they think is shit, all so they can hit whatever number, cash out, retire to a private island or whatever and never work again.

Let's phrase this a different way. Everyone has values that they live by.

Some people value family and community above all else. For example, even if their town has very little economic opportunity, they will stay there to support their grandparents, their parents, their cousins, and so on.

Some people might value artistic expression, and they will forsake money for the chance to be, let's say, a musician. They might become incredibly successful, or they might not, but they will always focus on playing music. That's the thing that they value whenever they have to make a choice. That one goes first.

Billionaires value money. I'm 100% certain of this. I've had a sort of interesting life and happen to have been quite close to and worked with at least twenty billionaires, some of whom I've known for decades and watched their progression. I'm telling you for certain that they value money incredibly highly.

This, of course, really should be obvious to even your average child or anyone who takes even a passing interest in the topic. A couple of million dollars here or there can be an oddball side effect of some luck or strange life choices. A billion dollars cannot, it is an absolutely staggering amount of money, and anyone who has achieved it has aggressively sought it out and has been given dozens, if not hundreds, of opportunities to focus on something else instead and settle for some large amount of money that is short of a billion dollars.

Again, this should not surprise anybody at all who has a functioning brain. Imagine Jane Goodall heads into the jungle to study a tribe of gorillas and discovers that most gorillas have a dozen or so bananas, but then discovers a gorilla with a pile of bananas several thousand feet tall.

How do you think she'd fare trying to make the argument that this gorilla was actually focused on other things besides bananas for most of their life and the pile just kind of happened as a side effect?

Then she didn't discover the billionaire gorilla, she discovered the lottery winner or the trust fund kid.

The billionaire gorilla has thousands of acres of banana trees, with enough bananas to reach the moon and back if all picked and stacked.

The billionaire gorilla is laser focused on generating bananas. A complex machine with fractal parts whose ultimate output is bananas.

Meanwhile the other gorillas are laser focused on the height of their banana stack (which is rotting and half aren't even aware). Telling themselves if they had a stack 1000ft high they would never work a day again.

I'm pretty sure you understand this, and part of me thinks we are saying the same thing.

Yeah exactly. And the billionaire is laser focused on generating dollars.

Not just more dollars in the world though. More dollars for themselves, specifically.

We can re-ground ourselves in your original comment that I am responding to though, which is this:

> I think the most chronic misunderstanding in the "billionaire" rhetoric is that billionaires are in it for money.

Nope. There's no misunderstanding. Billionaires are definitely in it for the money.

Making a billion dollars doesn’t require becoming a billionaire. Someone who makes a billion dollars in a balanced society generates wealth and taxes. (One who does in an unbalanced one has the choice to donate.)

Also, liquid versus illiquid. Founders shouldn’t be under obligation to cap their ambition or force liquidate if their companies do well.

You might think: I can argue with them.

No. You can't. They literally couldn't care less about you or anyone else. They do, however fear retribution.

There is legitimate debate around whether the French aristocracy came out of the Revolution richer than they were before.

> They do, however fear retribution

They don’t. They haven’t been targeted. Luigi potted a middle manager with a glorified title. The billionaire who owns the group is fine.

We need to raise taxes. We need new tax brackets. But pretending violence is a check on a globalized rich is just self-congratulatory fantasy. Worst case, they lose billions when they flee.

Post-Trump. The mask is off, and they are evil.

How many billionaires are there? I don't think we'd miss them if they were gone.

And it goes farther than this actually.

Should we have publicly executed the cigarette CEOs, and those CEOs of the drug companies who knowingly destroyed so many lives with opiates? What about the company CEOs who poison water.

Before Trump I would have said, "no." But now, "yes." They deserved it, and by not sufficiently punishing them for their crimes against humanity we sent a message to the likes of Facebook and OpenAI and the new batch of psychopaths, that there are no real consequences for their actions, no matter how base they are.

If Trump and his family does not sit in jail after he leaves office, if the democrats do not exact retribution for all he and his ilk have done, I think there will be rioting against both sides.

I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. I actually hope I'm wrong.

But I think I'm right. And even though this post will be down-voted for referencing violence as leverage, I think these ideas are mainstream now.

We wouldn’t. I’m not arguing that. I’m saying they don’t believe they are at risk. Because they aren’t. None of them have been even close to being harmed.

That's hilarious. I guess. Maybe not?

I’m saying it was symbolic but inconsequential to the richest and most powerful. If you’re a billionaire, Luigi didn’t show you’re at risk. He showed that the folks who work for the folks who work for you might be.

And for the record, I think what hd did is wrong. But that’s orthogonal to the question of effectiveness.

When are you gonna stop acting like you are an authority on all things?

ELon has said many times he fears being taken out in a public setting, therefore he does not present himself in public.

If the world's wealthiest man says this, he is far more indicative of the ultra-wealth class than you.

Elon has said lots of things. His behavior, in this regard, reflects limited concern.

The alternative to your wet dream is that both Bernie and Luigi are hapless and actually incapable of altering the systems they rail against besides symbolic token gestures meant to appease the hopes of someone, anyone to serve as a messianic figurehead.

Bernie Sanders has de facto been in the ruling party for multiple years in his career. (As in aligned with Democrats when they controlled all branches of government.) Taxes on the rich went down each time.

Meanwhile, Luigi potter a middle manager. No billionaires harmed in his schemes.

These are hapless symbols of class warfare. That’s problematic, because we need competent leaders to channel this rage. Not another eighty-something who refuses to retire.

What can happen though is that companies figure out how to prevent meaningful competition to preserve high margins. They're worth millions for the innovation but they get to billions through anti-competitive and extractive practices.

But we can start by not forgiving CG on death. That seems like a no brainer with no downsides.

No downsides I respect, at least. "We want to keep the business in the family" should be ignored.

When Bezos divorced, Mackenzie Bezos was awarded 25% of their Amazon shares valued at over 38 billion dollars.

Just by the above being possible, that means there's no reason why such a "divorce" couldn't happen once per year, and there's also no reason why it has to be 25% rather than "everything above 100M". It means that the tools for this exist. The government takes the place of Mackenzie Bezos. During the divorce, not a single mention of "oh it's just _impossible_ to take 25% of Jeff Bezos' Amazon shares, it will cause collapse". Just all of a sudden if you replace MacKenzie Bezos with "the government" or "the pension fund", suddenly there's all kinds of supposed reasons why it can't happen - even though there's zero reason why it couldn't.

No "but technically they will temporarily have over 100M in the intermediary period" please.

Because it doesn't work that way at that level of wealth, especially for tech CEOs. You can't just hide billions worth of shares in a company.

There's so many possible options.

It's hard. But if we make CG inescapable it should as a second order effect close the Buy Borrow Die loophole, and the super rich must fund their life some other way. Probably by selling assets to consume.

And putting a tamper on inheritance (which could be progressively taxed or capped) it has a second order effect of discouraging hoarding while alive.

So increasing inheritance tax (effectively) would mean a change of incentives for hoarding money. Which is the only thing that actually works.

Obviously, being a hard problem, there's no quick fix. But in the choice between slowing down the problem and not, we should do the former.

How do we "prevent" it? Well, we can throw the baby out with the bathwater. Is that your proposal?

As for your question: no intransigence please.

You force the founder to give up their private property just because it is valuable?

Remember these are not dollar bills in the founders bank account. It is just the company they created is now very valuable. It does not mean it is liquid.

Which party is the IRS partisan towards? What do you mean by partisan?

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-irs-investigations...

That's how taxes work.

On the business income, on the sale of shares, on their wealth, on loans, on estate and inheritance, etc.

Breaking up the company is another avenue, it could increase competitiveness and make the markets freer, open up more options for employees to shop around for employer, etc.

Raising minimum wage, stronger overtime rules, paid family leave, mandatory paid vacation and sick leave, non-compete restrictions, profit-sharing requirements, and other regulation that favors the employee is yet another avenue...

There are ways if the will is there.

Owe 1M$ in taxes and have ownership stakes in a company worth 1B$? Fine, transfer a 0.1% share of ownership in the company into the SWF.

You tax them. Wealth inequality of this magnitude is toxic to democracy. It's simply too much power. These men aren't gods, they are just flesh and blood and usually really terrible people. We are not staff at their resort. Let them live in luxury for the rest of their life, great. But they don't get to have more political power than half a million people put together.

On the point of democracy, none of the candidates who spend the most on major elections seem to be winning much lately, Bloomberg, Harris, Cuomo, Steyer, etc.

Thomas Massie was just ousted in the most expensive house primary in US history.

The difference between 1-2 mil that is normally spent and the $30+ million spent on that election alone.

The problem isn’t necessarily that some one can buy a seat for themselves (though some people out there could spend 1000x as much as half a billion and still have 500 billion to spend), it's that for less than half a billion, someone can buy 20 house or senate seats for more conventional candidates that are willing to vote the way the financier wants.

Not to mention that the Norwegian Pension Funds holds $2 trillion in assets. UAE and KSA have ones over $1 trillion each.

And that's ignoring that currently an even smaller group of people owns everything, who don't even represent the public on paper. Quite stupid to assume that this is a better idea.

Please don't do this.

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That net worth is, under our current system, tightly linked with his interest and control in his various enterprises.

He can borrow against it which gets around taxes and that should probably be addressed, but he like the hypothetical fresh billionaire startup founder don’t have that money. And the mega rich on paper can’t access more than a small percentage of that money without reducing their control of the company they built or are building.

Ideas like a wealth tax, or the new sovereign fund paid into by an equities tax or grant are all interesting, but they are all more complicated on the ground than “wouldn’t $100m be motivating enough?”

FWIW, I think that some sort of public endowment and/or sponsored healthcare, education and safety net and/or tax or management of hyper wealth is one of the problems of our age.

But part of that problem is that it’s not clear how to do that in a way that is workable in an increasingly multipolar world of tech and soon healthcare giants that are as powerful as small but growing nation states. Economically and in some cases militarily linked to great powers.

Seems like a solved problem to me.

Yes, this is a good take. I wish more people understood this. Things like sales taxes could address this. Land value tax, with single homestead exemptions are another.

Folks who lend money against stock insist on being repaid. (In fact, they typically have the right to sell the stock to be repaid.) The money to replay was taxed. (It comes from salaries and/or stock sales. Borrowing more to repay previous loans just kicks the can down the road.)

And it’s not like he took the money from somebody else.

He spent a ton of time to create something that he owned the majority of and to make that thing more valuable. He paid other people to help him and they were happy with that exchange. The government also helped them and they were happy with that exchange.

Suddenly, people have assigned a concrete value to the thing via the IPO and it is very valuable.

It’s not like he suddenly has $1 trillion in his account. It’s just the thing that he made and has ownership of is suddenly worth that much.

Is your theory that he dug it out of the ground with a shovel or something?

You can be assured I understand the concept of wealth creation.

But the fact that there are, in fact, other people involved here is hilariously hand-woven away here:

> He paid other people to help him and they were happy with that exchange. The government also helped them and they were happy with that exchange.

OK I will bite. Who determines what "the government" thinks in a democracy? The general public, right? Does the general public seem happy?

Regardless:

1. Starlink is amazing (literally never want to fly on an airplane without it ever again, wish I could search for flights based on having it)

2. Starship is amazing. (ensures American space dominance for generations)

3. Being able to manufacture hard things at scale and employ hundreds of thousands of people and making thousands of millionaires is amazing for our economy!!

Unless they are fools, the general public should be stoked AF.

With that said, it might also be instructive to realize that most people in the country are coming to fucking hate this bullshit. They're exhausted at the fact that our economy is now dominated by financial extraction and that nearly all of the resources of the country are accruing to a tiny group of people.

They're increasingly unable to afford housing in the places that they grew up. They're unable to raise their families. They're unable to have any sense of security or continuity in their life whatsoever.

And the best part is that they have to listen to people like you calling them fools for wanting to live healthy and productive lives, for valuing human connection over technology, for value and tradition over innovation. They get to be told that they're lazy for not having built some sort of financial engineering machine to extract money like you guys did.

The problem for you guys is there's a lot more of them than there are of you. At a certain point, they will kill you and eat you for your protein content.

It's happened quite a few times in history before. So good luck with all that.

If you want a tip, you might want to think about how we can harness the power of all this incredible innovation and still get exciting new toys and quality of life improvements while also having a society that's more balanced, fair, and healthy for all the participants, including the ones who aren't as smart or weren't born into money.

I like it because it’s useful.

Life is objectively much better today for the average person than it has been for 99% of humans in 99% of history.

(“They will kill us and eat us for our protein” makes you sound totally insane and in this ludicrous scenario I think the rich peoples army of drones/optimus robots would simply say “no”.)

Life is objectively much worse for many communities in this country.

Get on a plane to Detroit if you don't understand what I'm talking about.

We allowed one of the most powerful and sophisticated industrial economies in history to be taken over by bankers who shipped the jobs to a different country, bought off our politicians, and spend most of their time coming up with new ways to use monopolies to overcharge us for shit.

You can talk about 99% of history all day long, but if you're standing in a town and the stores are boarded up and the jobs are all gone, or alternately, if you have to move further and further away from the community that you were born in because you can't afford to live in the same neighborhood that your parents raised you in, then you're not interested in statistics or people telling you it's the best we've ever had it.

Real median household income is the highest its ever been and risen steadily for 50 years: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

Unemployment rate is 4.3%

Also, I go to Detroit about once a year. Every year it is more vibrant than the lows of 2010. Real estate prices support this argument. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ATNHPIUS19804Q

Not saying some people somewhere don’t have it rough but overall we are doing better than we ever have.

Yep, this is it. This is the fundamental disconnect in our culture. Who do you mean by "we"? And why do you think that Detroit being increasingly unaffordable is a sign that things are going well for working people? Huh?

For a large group of working people you are definitely wrong about this, and the signs of the crisis are literally everywhere in our politics right now, but if you can't see it, I can't make you see it.

Perhaps file this conversation in the back of your head as you go about your business in the coming weeks and months, and see if you can see any examples of what I'm talking about after all.

Instead of taking me at my word, just consider it as a hypothesis that you'll objectively try to verify or disprove.

My hypothesis is this: for regular working people who don't have access to excess capital by virtue of birth, connections, or high levels of education, life has increasingly become a living hellscape of being ripped off and exploited in every aspect of their economic life. They are more precarious and less able to control their own destiny than at any time in the modern post-war era, and they are increasingly mad about it.

Show me a plane ticket stub or gtfo

https://endhomelessness.org/state-of-homelessness/

So we are possibly having more record highs in wealth, and more record lows.

But I do agree and have noticed that the tone here is radically different than it would have been five or ten years ago. I've been around for a while here as well.

I think that's a sign of the cultural shift underneath our feet. Silicon Valley and the tech sector in general has almost no goodwill left. They've harmed too many people for that at this point.

- He took money from others that gave it to him with expectation that he would return it many many times over. Those are called investors.

- He took money from the government because the government thought his work was worth subsidizing. It was, he employs thousands and thousands of people.

- All of the money taken is a fraction of the company now

- The money taken is not what makes the company valuable

Just waiting for my company’s top 10 shareholders to be anonymous entities owned by other companies based in the Cayman Islands.

Every American economic miracle has been precipitated by the government building basic infrastructure and doing basic research.

You don't /know/ that people need to collectively get over "this" -- you have a feeling that it seems more fair to do that than the alternative. But you can look at what happens elsewhere in the world with regimes that implement exactly what you are describing. And what happens is the people who are most equipped to be the golden gooses that you are proposing are just as equipped to simply most somewhere they can do so unencumbered.

That's why what you're proposing will just never really work.

How so?

Well, suppose we say, nobody should be a trillionaire - is this an arbitrary number, or is it aimed at the richest person? Clearly, the latter. Now if we carried this out, now there are billionaires remaining. Well, nobody should be a billionaire, one might say. Most will agree. So the wealth of billionaires is taken away, and redistributed evenly.

This will continue, with the majority of people below the average wealth level, demanding a more equal playing field. You can see how it ends

The fact people say 1 billion is too much money, or 1 trillion is too much is something to dig into - the number is relative! 1 billion is only a lot because not many people have a billion dollars. If inflation keeps up, one day everybody will be a billionaire.

Why is that a bad thing? Or will it exemplify some other non-financial inferior trait of the person which might be existentially 'scary?'

In this case, I feel there’s no shared foundation. Half of the commenters here don’t seem to understand what money is or how it works. There's no soil in which to plant an argument, because there's no understanding of what a billion dollars represents. There’s no genuine desire to understand the counterparty either.

Very disturbing.

So even if the debate reveals that no, there wasn’t a viable reconciliation, the debate was still worthwhile.

I read the first half of PG’s essay and was left wondering if I should read the whole thing, just in case there was something in half 2 that redeemed half 1.

Most startups fail! Ignoring that reality, and only focusing on the slope of money growth is like saying that if you hit the right drafts you will survive falling out of a high rise window.

There is no such thing as a free lunch. The payoff for doing startups is the (incredibly small chance that you succeed) * (the absurd payout if you do).

Even VC funds fail.

If PG brought up survivorship bias at any point, it would have significantly armored his case.

I've observed this in a lot of internet arguments, but have not been able to put it into words until you said this. It feels like everyone is more concerned about 'winning' the argument more than anything else.

Every global economic statistic backs this up

It consumes childhood and adulthood. Only when workers have power can the engines of innovation benefit the many.

Of course history is littered with failed autocracies aspiring to be capitalist/socialist/insert-econ-system utopia. I'd argue the current US administration is in an autocratic mode right now. And doesn't seem to be going well for any except the richest asset owners.

It's an ugly ugly post, and that's what set the tone.

I hope your kids grow up to become better people than those who would write what PG wrote, and not spread lies about their interlocutors with straw man BS.

It's also an insulting post. Yeah we can add, thanks. That was never the problem. PG think math is what we were missing?

"Earned income", for tax purposes, matches pretty closely the kinds of income many people consider genuinely earned in the moral sense. From this perspective, if a startup grows organically and the founders become rich, they have earned it. But if the growth requires capital (an investment, a loan, or the wealth the founders already have), the situation becomes less clear. How much of the success can be attributed to the contributions of the founders and how much is based on arbitrary choices made by wealthy people?

If you now assume that existing wealth is mostly unearned, any success made possible by arbitrary allocations of that wealth is similarly unearned.

The wealth controlled by a startup investor becomes earned income, in your words, when the founder receives pay for their work, in the form of cash or exercised options or whatever else.

To get that earned income, which is derived from wealth but is not the wealth, they have to earn it in the same way the wagies in your first paragraph earned it. The investor (on the board, presumably) has to vote him in as CEO and approve his pay package.

And just as retail customers don’t give their money away for no good reason, neither do investors.

The intuitive difference is mostly between the many and the few. Between the ordinary people and the elite. If your money comes from many small streams, it looks likely that many people have independently determined that what you are doing is valuable. If there are a few large streams, the situation is less clear. Maybe your contributions are genuinely valuable, or maybe someone is picking favorites or choosing winners in advance. From that perspective, capital is a poison that permanently puts the reasons of your success in question.

If anything, I remember when the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee was picking favourites - and that favourite was ULA. Elon gave them hell.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=upnx_DD9zSQ

No. Earned income is salary, and taxed as such. Unearned income is capital gains, exercised options, etc, not taxed as income. It's pretty easy.

If we just use this tax office definition, it's effectively impossible to earn a billion dollars because you'd need to pay yourself ~$1.6 billion dollars in salary (depending on where you live), and very, very, few people can afford to do that

That's a very charitable way to put it. The reality is Graham blatantly lied about what AOC wrote, and then went on and on addressing the strawman of whether you can accumulate a billion dollars.

> as the question was mostly about the meaning of word "earned".

Exactly. Which makes this entire page absurdly misdirected.

I don't get it. If I need to raise money to fund my startup, how are my profits more "earned" if I crowd fund $10m by finding 10,000 wage earners who will lend me $1000 each than if I borrow $10m from a billionaire?

What did the founder have to do to keep growing at 93%? Good solid business fundamentals and identifying a new solution can get you some growth. But eventually you've done all that and the only way to continue growing is extraction -- buy out your competition and raise margins, outsource your workers, enshittify your user experience. THAT is why no one "earns" a billion. The last $900M pretty much always requires using your resources in clever but unethical ways to extract money from customers and financial markets.

I don't see why he should have engaged with them any more than he did, because AOC's claims are BS. He gave them more attention than they deserve.

What he should have engaged with is, what happens when a startup stops being a startup? All three of his poster children for startups, Apple, Google, and Facebook, are now notorious for treating their users badly and making money in ways that at least a substantial number of people don't think are "earning" money, such as monetizing users' data. And at the last of those three, the founder is still in charge, so even if PG can argue that Zuckerberg earned what he got from Facebook in its startup phase, that doesn't mean he's earning the money he makes now from Facebook in the same way. (And the other poster child he mentions, AirBnB, can't be said to have clean hands either at this point.)

To me that's the biggest gap in PG's worldview more generally, that I never see him address in his essays: once the startup phase is over, the company drops off his radar and he pays no attention to the collateral damage it causes when it's a tech giant. (And of course AOC's claims have nothing to do with this genuine issue either.)

> making money in ways that at least a substantial number of people don't think are "earning" money, such as monetizing users' data.

Is this not a contradiction? Or are you splitting hairs between a "true startup" and an enshittified bigCo?

No, because AOC claimed that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars. Not that there are ways to make money other than earning it, which of course there are, but that there are no ways to make that much money by earning it, which is BS.

It used to be if you criticized anything in his blogs you’d get downvoted to oblivion. Now criticism is the norm.

As far as I can tell it’s less a change in pg’s viewpoints (though the topics have evolved, and he has gotten more transparent perhaps), but a change in the public reaction to them.

I’m not sure if it’s the same people though, might just be the new generation.

Freudian slip?

They do if you cherry-pick your economies, starting points, definitions of "capital" and "growth", and cutoff points, yes.

Plotting it vs time makes this clear because you can clearly see what caused what.

To be less glib, that amount of time is more than ample to see a generational change in a sector as fast-moving as technology. Perhaps some robust push-back on his ideas better represents the a zeitgeist of people being less happy with a maximalist winner-takes-all attitude to business or personal success.

It is quite possible for someone to have thought about their views before they formed them and maintain stable opinions over 15 years because they are aligned with objective reality. That is good. Then there is the opposite where they've got ridiculous views that don't make sense and they stick with them despite all evidence out of stubbornness. That's bad. But again, the exact view and the nature of the evidence is what matters.

The world is about as stable as it always has been. World War II isn't even 100 years ago. If someone's view 15 years ago was 'the world is stable' then yes they are going to be facing a lot of contrary evidence. But that is because it is a wildly optimistic view with no foundation in evidence or argument.

I think their point was more - attitudes to pg's posts have changed over the last 15 years - pg's views are pretty consistent about good/bad over the last 15 years - a lot of the public's (and hn's) attitudes to tech have changed for the worse, people trust tech less - pg doesn't seem to have noticed/internalised these changes

Some of these things are nuanced, complicated things to think about and explain. Nobody thinks that pg doesn't know smartphones have been invented.

Ironically:

1. The term you're searching for with "anger/condescension/whateverthisis" is "curiosity". Typically when I feel curious I ask write a response asking a question.

2. If you're tempted to write "Maybe try to approach other people's comments that you're not sure about with a bit more curiosity" and then "less anger/condescension/whateverthisis" you should pause and consider the utility of asking someone to clarify their intention before making assumptions. I know you don't understand, you know you don't understand. Great time for a "hey, do you mean ...?" style post. I have to admit that sentence got a smile out of me.

This is the exact problem. Anyone who thinks they’ve found objective reality isn’t looking hard enough.

I blame the pandemic and social media.

* There were far fewer tech billionaries.

* The tech billionaries were not publicly associating with far-right figures or cryptofascist belives, or at least were doing so quietly while promoting ideas of technology as social progress

* A lot of the tech startups were seen as fighting entrenched interests grounded in regulatory capture and people had the illusion that the next generation of companies supplanting these wouldn't succumb to the same factors.

* Donald Trump as a phenomenon of current politics did not quite exist yet, so we didn't have to witness these people sucking up to him

That's just for starters.

This should not come as a surprise when they are forced to live with roommates because they can't afford a house or even an apartment to themselves because every cent is being analyzed for optimal extraction from them.

Just so you know, the new generation is investing earlier than the previous generation.

Gen Z is also outpacing millenials on home ownership https://www.npr.org/2026/05/15/nx-s1-5791499/gen-z-homeowner...

The idea that the latest generation is not benefiting from the current situation is in your head, not reality.

A has 97% of the wealth.

B has 1% of the wealth.

C has 2% of the wealth.

Your argument is that because C > B, C is benefitting from the status quo.

In the US, the median age for first time homeownership increased from 29 to 40 since the 1980s when the stat began being tracked. That is reality, not an exceptional anecdote that is so out of the statistical ordinary it warrants being paraded as a puff piece in a newspaper.

So that's going to impact any professional class community, whether it's tech or not.

I'd say HN is slowly catching up with traditional SV startup culture dying, and seeing more non-VC-funded people flowing in as sites like Reddit enshittify. Those people identify more as tech workers than as early startup employees who aren't a billionaire yet.

Combine that with recent economic and political developments, and it isn't exactly surprising that a growing part of HN isn't a big fan of the über-wealthy tech elite trying to make their life worse.

These days, most people's experience at a big tech company is a political dystopia where everyone is optimizing for their promo packet.

That's going to get you 2 different audiences.

Yes, big corps suck. Always have, always existed, 20 and 40 years ago. Startups of 20 years ago have become big corps of today; now, new ones are in this "youthuful vigor" stage.

The current boom in AI and the cloud/social media boom in the recent decade have required ungodly amounts of capital for their resident companies to get off the ground. It's no longer a creative endeavour that basement hackers can participate in. In many ways it is toxic to the original nerd/hacker ethos by shutting out newcomers to the field and increasing wealth inequality, hence the hostility you now see on HN.

The good vibes and optimism have left the industry.

From the mid '00s through early '10s, pg was a much more grounded, down-to-earth person. Sure, he'd sold Viaweb and was doing quite well financially, but he was still working hard and was very close to the startups he was advising and was funding. I attended Startup School back in 2006 and thoroughly enjoyed it and thought it was a genuinely useful experience, even though I never went on to start a startup.

Fast forward to today: pg's net worth has gone up a ton, and he's moved on to bigger and different things than his old roles at YC. He's not the same person he was 20 years ago (who is!), and his writing reflects that over time.

Much of his old work still resonates with me (I go back and re-read my favorites from time to time), even though I'm a bit more cynical (or perhaps just more realistic) about startups these days, but most of the new stuff he writes feels out of touch. Plus he sometimes tries to write about things well outside his wheelhouse, and gets much of it trivially wrong, which tends to turn me off.

The thing that really made me shake my head at this particular essay was that he used Facebook and Airbnb as examples in an article about how it's possible to make heaps of money without cheating. Just... wow.

I think it's mostly demographics. Most people my age (I'm 38) have to come to terms with the fact that their most energetic age and most of their opportunities are already behind them. When faced with uncomfortable reality, many start looking for something or somebody else to blame for this. Not only billionaires, but tens of thousands of millionaires have played their cards better than I and others like me. They had the same opportunities, sometimes even less, but they have shown better judgement, strength of character and pure talent. Admitting this is not pleasant.

Things are measurably darker. Hell, we went from “do no evil” being a motto for Google to being removed entirely. Early Tech had a genuine claim on trying to be better than firms that had come before.

Why would it be an unpleasant realization that you are less successful than 0.00012% of the world’s population? There is arguably something sick about a system that can make a significant number of people feel this way.

I'm always curious as to why something that happens to 100% of humans remains 'uncomfortable.' Like there's nothing in genetic code making aging (or death, I suppose) less uncomfortable. It's kind of fascinating.

I still really like some PG essays, but PG used to be a much better writer.

See the post above, where I criticize him and am being downvoted into oblivion...

There is no way anyone responding to him has a lazier argument than he does.

Someone who lays bricks, "earns" their income; someone who's wealth increases as a bricklaying company's value increases, does not.

In this sense, it is indeed impossible to "earn" a billion dollars...

We should all go back to being hunter-gatherers? Or how do you propose this is going to work?

I don't think I fully agree with it, but OPs point wasn't about any of that and instead said capital gains (and clarified further - fungible, uninvolved capital without any other contribution). That's really different. If you want to attack that maybe use an example of passive index investors or pension funds allocating capital to a vc.

Starting a company that becomes worth $1M by creating $1M in value is a literally a capital gain of $1M for whoever owns that business.

Maybe the person who started that business wants to sell. 10 people buy $100k each in shares. Now they own the business. They hire a manager to grow the business and expand and create more value. Now the business is worth $2M. Those new investors created another $1M in value by hiring the right manager and making good decisions. This is another capital gain.

None of this is accidental or magical. Businesses that do well produce capital gains, and most businesses fail, and produce no capital gians.

Capitalism isn't perfect but it's the best system we have. We need to educate people better about how it works and we need to regulate it so it's not abused. But capital gains, or interest, are "earned". They are also taxed, and when those taxes are used for the right goals by the government, result in improving things for everyone.

According to the IRS, "unearned income" is money received from sources other than employment, such as interest, dividends, rental income, and pensions.

We tax it at a vastly lower rate than ordinary income, and we tax it not at all for the purposes of exponential compounding, which is the application in which it is most problematic. What fraction of Elon's capital gains do you think have ever been realized?

We tax capital gains less because we want people to invest their money in companies. As I said, we can debate the tax rates, some might argue we should lower the tax on capital gains (double taxation?) some might argue we should raise it. We should absolutely have an evidence based rational discussion on these topics.

There's a good podcast about the evolution of US income tax: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/624-tax/

EDIT: So supposedly in 2021 Musk paid $12B in taxes (which was an anomaly) and in most years he pays around 455 million federal taxes. There was one year where he took no income and paid no taxes. So the average American probably pays ~10K I would imagine.

I agree with your intuition, but this is often contested based on the idea that one of the state's services is protecting property, which scales up in cost in some way with the amount of property.

For example, if you have a 10-story building, the cost of protecting it against fire is greater than the cost of protecting a small shack against fire (the kinds of fires it can be involved in and the means of accessing it to fight them are greater).

Or, if you have valuable jewels, the cost of protecting them against theft is greater than the cost of protecting a few items of clothing (more sophisticated attackers like organized crime and otherwise professional criminals may try to steal them using more sophisticated means and resources).

Or, if you own corporations, the cost of protecting your ownership interest against fraudulent transfers may be greater than the cost of protecting someone's ownership interest in a house against such fraud, again because of more sophisticated attackers and also because the rules permitting transfers of the corporate ownership interest may be more complex to formulate and apply.

However, it's likely that the cost of protecting most kinds of property scales sublinearly with the economic value of the property rather than superlinearly, so if people were merely being charged for the increased cost of actually providing them state services that they use or directly benefit from, this would still not justify tax rates increasing with wealth or with income.

I wish I could pay taxes at a rate of 0.25%! What tax rate did you pay last year?

It's really not. I don't think you understand the role capital plays in our economy, like at all.

How does this follow? Is the management effort in organising a brick laying company not count as work? Does the RND effort of a bricklaying company not count as work?

I would have used housing speculation as my example tbh.

The parent post is not saying that some forms of shareholding do not earn, but they are excluding any form of owning a bricklaying firm is definitively not owning. So any arrangement that involves owning a bricklaying firm is within scope. Sole Trader or Partnership for instance.

The house is the capital. Bricks are an intermediate good.

The point is, the bricks do not materialize out of thin air. The act of laying the bricks is not the only labor or capital involved in laying bricks.

No, we can't say that at all, because most businesses are small businesses, owned by the people who run them, and capital gains are the owners' income from running the business.

The money startup founders make, from building something as PG describes, is also capital gains. So again, no, we can't say at all that capital gains are unearned.

In fact, in some countries not paying yourself a fair-market-value salary is illegal!

Maybe not zero, but PG's "ramen profitable" basically means the only "salary" the founders take is enough to cover their living expenses, which are kept minimal. So the vast majority of the money they make (remember we're talking about a billion dollars here) is capital gains, not salary.

Of course CEOs of large established companies (not startups) take large salaries--and then usually get stock options and own a considerable amount of company stock, so they get compensated three different ways. Which arguably gets into "unearned" territory--but at that point the company is way past being a startup.

> especially not with small companies which aren't publicly traded

Privately owned companies can still be sold, and the profits from the sale are capital gains. But I agree that in this case that's not the primary way the owners of, say, a mom and pop restaurant get compensation. I should have been more specific that I was talking about startups.

Yes, we can say this. The IRS classifies capital gains as unearned income.

A lot of comments seem to not assume that ownership is equivalent to 'earning'. Why does capital need to pretend their wealth growth is equivalent to the effort of labour.

People are more productive when they have tractors and seed and fertilizer and all the other requisite capital inputs for growing apples. In fact, one can hardly think of anything productive one can do with zero capital inputs.

You do not live on an island. There is trillions of dollars worth of both capital and labor at work underneath your every waking moment that supports your life. Your level of effort means nothing to anybody.

I really wish people weren't so easily seduced by the labor theory of value.

Your labor alone without materials, without tools, or a farm, or a factory, is just you flailing your arms in the air and producing nothing. Capital is as valuable an input to production as labor. You cannot have one without the other.

It's so funny to see people on HN who have clearly overdosed on Marx but have never read Das Kapital, where even the man himself acknowledges the critical role capital plays in production.

  The reason her startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built. 

You don't just make the thing. The founder didn't become a billionaire simply because users loved her product. You market it and you distribute it and you do all the things normally associated with business. Your ability to do those things "well" has lots of room to cheat. Hasn't Uber and Lyft skirted a bunch of laws? Aren't there still a ton of drivers who feel cheated? Aren't there a bunch of share bikes and scooters lying around cities and landfills? Isn't it fairly standard to throw tons of investor money at your CAC to buy "love" and sabotage competitors? He mentioned Facebook, isn't its origin story connoted with theft? I can see angles where these don't count as cheating for some. I can see slivers where there's only so many degrees of separation you hold the billionaire responsible for what happens downstream. Even if not done intentionally, the accumulated wealth still resulted from some cheating though, no?

And there's the stock market. If he means the stock price when he's talking about things people want, then I might agree. You need to manage the thing people love, and by "the thing people love" I mean your product, and by your "product" I mean your stock price. Most of the billionaires became so because of their equity. We're well down normalizing that your product doesn't need to be profitable (where people love it enough to pay more than it costs to make) for the stock price to soar.

It doesn't count as engaging with the argument if he doesn't engage with it. I'm almost surprised he bothered to respond.

Edit: Interesting downvote situation going on throughout the comments.

Anywho, I was really unimpressed with the post.

I think you're reframing his argument as something softer. Not whether they cheat or exploit, but whether they're primarily doing it. Is the cheating low enough or outweighed by the tremendous love for the product? I'm not sure he would agree that's what he's trying to say, but I would count that as cheating. At best, there is cheating, but it's worth it (for them and, I don't know, maybe/hopefully even for society).

You're also nudging it towards whether some billionaires are sometimes able to do it without cheating. It's hard to make a strong assertion whether the senator or PG's claims are meant strictly all or nothing. Both have language of this type. I couldn't say which one means it, though I think it's fair to judge hyperbole. I alluded to this in the prior comment, but I think it's fairly easy for CEOs to benefit from cheating happening downstream. Did Dropbox spam users' contact lists to grow? Did their PM or PMMs abuse push notifications for marketing? Again, I can see versions where this doesn't count as cheating for some. Or it does, just low enough level or normalized such that people redefine cheating. I think there's a lot of (often low level) cheating just built into business and it's mostly a matter of whether anyone will take you to task for it.

I'm going to firmly push back on this. A reasonable, straightforward interpretation of AOC's quote is that "you can't earn a billion dollars" without cheating or abusing others. I'm can believe she may have meant that as hyperbole, but even if she did, PG believes "What she meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way." He's not doing mental gymnastics to get there; it's a straightforward reading of "you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that."

That makes PG very much not strawmanning. He's arguing directly against her stated position. He doesn't steelman her argument (create a stronger or more generous version of her argument and argue against that), which could have made his argument stronger.

That also means I'm not strawmanning. PG's position is exactly what I said: that it's not impossible to become a billionaire without doing something bad. He is quite clear on that. Nowhere does PG use language implying all billionaires don't cheat. Only AOC does that, if you take her words literally.

I think you're basically doing what you accused me of doing here: greatly softening AOC's position. Did Dropbox spam users' contact lists to grow? (They didn't, AFAIK, though they did have a referral program to invite friends.) This is a huge downgrade in accusation of wrongdoing compared to breaking rules and abusing labor laws.

If you soften your definition of cheating to this level, it's no longer a billionaire thing. It's an everyone thing. Does my gardener report all his cash income? Has a friend ever streamed a TV show less than legitimately? AOC isn't trying to nitpick the smallest infractions. She's trying to paint becoming a billionaire as substantially corrupt.

This is not unlike a sibling commenter who hypothesizes earning a $50k margin building a home and all you need to do is do it 20k times. There’s a lot in between doing it once and 20k times. The path has many places where cheating will make things easier and possibly required. If the leader avoids the temptation, their employees may not, society may not. If their competitors cheat and they don't, we should applaud them, but they might not be a billionaire then and we can't count them. I'd guess this is a common way potential billionaires do not become billionaires. It probably catches lots of people getting to a million and then more at ten million and then more.

There's a certain amount of "in theory you could make a billion", that's different than whether we have billionaires that didn't cheat. I think it’s worth noting that you are engaging with the issue in a way that he didn’t. This was the primary argument I was making.

---

  If you soften your definition of cheating to this level, it's no longer a billionaire thing. It's an everyone thing.

I have no idea if this is what AOC meant, but it’s clearly not possible to earn $1B via wages in compensation for labor.

Often very high compensation packages happen to include shares, but that’s just the form of compensation not an inherent requirement. Of course all paths to a billion dollars are so unlikely it’s really not a reasonable target unless you have already passed most significant hurdles.

Non-founders CEOs have done this, like Tim Cook. Also, Taylor Swift.

I do. I take the $500k from you and then pay $450k to a bunch of employees who put in 40 hours a week. I take home $50k. I earn $50k.

Now, you like the home so much you tell all your friends about it.

I hire more employees and I take $50k profit per house but I build 20k houses and make $1B. I earn $1B.

Market forces decide how much you "earn". There are plenty of blue collar workers who work 3 jobs and live paycheck to paycheck. There are SWEs who work 20 hours a week and make the bank.

This is the "rock star" fantasy. You do something that becomes wildly popular and can then walk away while still making epic amounts of cash. You didn't earn that $1B through continuous effort. It was all made by your initial idea. It just takes time for the cash to be delivered in full.

Do you deserve to profit off a good idea? Yes, and few would contest that. Do you deserve to profit so much that you never have to work another day in your life? Should the system let people retire after having one good idea? That's going to seem like a sub-optimal system to many. However, its important to note that ideas take capital to implement, and it's much more typical for rock star rewards to go to those with the capital than those with the ideas. That's a system that many more will find to be flawed.

Why does it have to be earned through continuous effort? It seems like you’re defending a sweeping assertion (that you can’t “earn” $1 billion), but retreating to a narrower position based on a very specific definition of “earn.”

Yes, you can’t become a billionaire performing fungible labor compensated on a periodic (hourly or annual) basis. But I don’t see why that’s the dividing line between “earned” and “unearned.” A lawyer charging hourly will never become a billionaire. But there’s been a couple of lawyers (Joe Jamail, Mark Lanier) who became billionaires by securing enormous verdicts for their clients. Are you saying lawyers “earn” their money only if they charge hourly, but not if they get a share of the money they recover for their client?

That seems to be a weird definition of “earned” versus “unearned.” Maybe you can say that money is unearned when it’s inherited. Or that it’s unearned when it’s just accrued interest. Or that it’s unearned if it’s through socially questionable activities like high frequency trading. But most billionaires didn’t get their money in those ways.

If we don't have a system for that, then how would you incentivize people to take on bigger risks, bigger projects, etc?

Also, should the lottery not be a thing? What exactly are you advocating by this line of reasoning?

Imagine that making a ground-breaking discovery in physics came with a prize of a billion dollars. One good idea, and you can retire. Would that not harm science? Many scientists would keep working after their first prize because it's what they love to do. Some would accuse them with being greedy after they've made a few more discoveries. "Hey, leave some money for the rest of us!"

What I'm trying to get at is that the rewards for certain things are badly out of whack with what is necessary to keep people both rewarded and motivated. At least, in terms of what is healthy for society and progress. In general, the closer people are to the money the more unreasonable the rewards are. Perhaps people who are further from the money but who contribute just as much (or more) to society are right to be concerned.

P.S. Musk bought companies with people who had a lot of good ideas and convinced governments (mainly the U.S. government) to pay for it. He's always been a capital guy, not an idea guy. He desperately wants to be in idea guy, but his ideas are things like re-branding Twitter to X and the Cybertruck.

Personally speaking, I am sympathetic to the idea that billionaires (especially Musk) are often created more by government policy than market forces. Although for some reason the push to stop governments minting billionaires by fiat seems rather weak, which makes me think a lot of people are being disingenuous on the topic. Or maybe just haven't thought about it much. There is a bizarre zeitgeist where first the government has to give a man billions of dollars because something needs to happen ASAP, then they have to take the billions away because nobody thought the thing needed to happen all that urgently.

There is an overlap in the vibe between the people who are unhappy that the government rewarded Musk and the people who, at the time, were clamouring that the rewards for things Musk was doing were too low. 10, 20 years ago it was all "there isn't enough funding for electric vehicles", "world is literally ending from climate change" and "who is going to put money into batteries".

The people closest to the money are the people who have the most control over how and who its allotted to. We really ought to watch them more carefully.

It’s rewriting history to call Musk a “capital guy.” Tesla and SpaceX entered markets with huge, established competitors. Those companies had access to virtually unlimited capital. But EVs and commercial space travel were pipe dreams before Musk got involved. I graduated with a degree in aerospace engineering pre-SpaceX and the field was moribund. Your options were going to Boeing to make airliners 1% more efficient every decade or going to Lockheed or Rockwell to design better missiles for blowing up brown people. The idea that SpaceX was just about a “capital guy” coming in is 100% hindsight bullshit.

You’re also just completely factually wrong about “most of” anything “coming out of government coffers.” The government gave Tesla a $485 million loan that was fully repaid. SpaceX received about $500 million in grants. In both cases, that was a small fraction of the money invested into the companies. Tesla’s cumulative net loss was $6 billion before profitability. SpaceX’s cumulative net loss is $42 billion.

At most you have a fair argument that the government should take equity in companies instead of providing grants with no strings attached. But that would just mean that maybe the government should have a 10% share of SpaceX or whatever.

People got reasonably mad at Apple’s iron fisted control of the App Store and access to its platforms.

It got to the point that there was political will to force Apple to change. (Sort of, in some circumstances)

But during the golden age of the App Store, when Angry Birds came out—-it wasn’t something people were hemming and hawing about the fairness of distribution platforms it was more like: “wow! iPhone! Check out this game! Everyone is playing this thing, Jack White is playing it. You too can have this game for a few bucks, can you believe this?”

It is only after Apple had ridden the horse a good long while and reaped what came to be outsized profits and using the thing to control competition over an extended period that something really was done about it. (Sort of)

There are many other examples of this kind of thing.

Compensated creative expression has somewhat relied on it in the form of intellectual property, which has built in albeit relatively toothless expiration.

But even IP is under greater threat than ever with gen AI. Just look at what fans are doing with the Star Wars franchise on YouTube right now.

Anyhow, I agree with the system is flawed but I mean to point out that deciding a person or company has reaped enough for their thing is something we do on a case by case basis.

It is not easy to say when to say to someone or something has been compensated “enough.”

I'm betting it is a tiny fraction. Most modern "wealth" is all based on investment games.

This hypothetical isn't possible. There's no way you can directly manage the construction of 20k houses in a human lifetime.

So a person figuring out how to scale their homebuilding methodology by teaching others and providing the *capital* with which they can implement that methodology isn't worth anything to you? I can't imagine a society that could work without these features -- we'd all be re-learning best practices every generation because there'd be no incentive to scale up ideas that work.

Do you? Sound like the people you hired built the home. Do you know how to do what they did? Did you do it? What did you do to earn that $50k?

Because I don't think you can build a billion dollar home construction empire where you profit $50k per home in perpetuity. You will have to lower your margins, cut others in on your profits to stop them from competing with you, or manipulate markets to never make a loss on a project.

First of all, you don't know how to build a house, you have some vague idea of it, maybe even some innovative one, and hire people who actually know how to implement that idea to do it for you, but you pocket some of the money because they don't know the exact worth, and because they need to live and no one else is paying them.

Then, what happens next is that some competitor springs up, and they want to poach your people by offering to pay them $475k and only keeping $25k in profits for themselves. You can't have that, so you start paying off government officials to deny or delay their building approvals, paying off mafia thugs to sabotage their construction or threaten workers who try to leave, you sue them for breaching worker non-competes or IP rights on the construction methods, etc.

All of these are part of how the construction industry actually operates, it is well known as one of the most corrupt industries around. Let's also not forget that the value of real estate is location location location - house and business prices are hugely determined by where the plot of land is, much more so than any differences in construction prowess, if we disregard the very top of the most complex projects ever made (of which there are way fewer than 20k).

They know how to do one piece and finding and coordinating all those people (something else they don't know how to do) is work on its own that is valuable.

Sweet, how do you build a house?

> I take the $500k from you and then pay $450k to a bunch of employees

Oh. You don’t know how to build a house. You know people that know how to build a house.

Picking a thing that you literally don’t know how to do as your example of a thing that you know how to do is amazing. You could’ve picked a blanket fort or a spreadsheet that tracks other people’s work or a LinkedIn post but those aren’t really things people pay for

I know doctors but I don’t go around posting that I know how to treat eczema lmao

Which is probably why this immediately devolves into a bunch of silly math and equally silly proclamations that don't seem rooted in any actual defined course of action. This is less than worthless, it's actively harmful.

> I've got kids

And this requires _a billion_ dollars? Perhaps an intentionally narrowed scope would be good for some of the HN audience.

I also have kids. I want them to live in a just society where billionaires, whom Mr. Graham proudly grooms, according to his telling of the matter, don’t actively undermine the ability of ordinary citizens to earn a living wage, to have a say in self-governance, and to enjoy universal healthcare.

People like AOC just pander to uneducated populace who'd prefer to use force to take free stuff of other people who work instead of working themselves.

Very easy to keep electing such politicians — just continue giving out more free stuff, so that people think it's the norm, and working is not required, just always taking is fine. People will vote accordingly

There are a lot of fine shades between a free riding communism and cut-throat capitalism. Finding workable balances is a key aspects of politics.

Funny, to me this describes the investor class.

Price of rent increasing in desirable locations is not due to greed or collusion of bad actors (as long as government prevents monopolies), it's due to more people competing to live in a place that can house only a limited number. Of course everybody wants to live in big cities in the US. But rent is very cheap in dying small towns in the middle of nowhere.

Another reason why WFH should become more of the norm, it will help solve the issue of expensive housing an rent since it means people could live in these less expensive towns and still be able to work.

There needs to be a wealth maximum, afterwards you just get taxed 100%.

The problem is, reality doesn't care whether you think it's grim or not.

I think the environmentalism movement faces this - it's easier to believe that everything is fine and we're not harming the planet and all is good, because the alternative is grim. But if the alternative is real then the fear of facing it is only going to make the reality even more grim.

The definition of "earn" is not on the chopping block. Nor is what it means to "cheat" - which he introduces pretty early on.

And times change. With the announcement: "[Insert name] is a billionaire!"

It used to be: "Congrats to them for making the world better in some way and reaping the rewards."

Now it is: "What did they leverage to force another subscription on us?"

  > It used to be: "Congrats to them for making the world better in some way and reaping the rewards."

  > Now it is: "What did they leverage to force another subscription on us?"

Much as I appreciate the former, the latter is if questionable benefit to most people, as the cost of launching e.g. GPS constellations and weather satelites was not the limiting factor for them, and direct-to-satelite phones and broadband at whatever the subscription price is, while neat, are not life changing for 99% of the population.

(Space is cool, I like space, he's free to spend his own money how he likes, but the IPO happened because he ran out of his own and private investors' money).

Also Tesla has problems going with that benefit, between court cases over marketing of FSD & if he committed fraud by saying he had secured funding to take it private, and also the P/E ratio is unjustifiable as a mere car company so they're pushing an AI narrative that's also unjustifiable for reasons long enough I can't be bothered to type them in again.

That and him selling Tesla shares worth more than the lifetime revenue of the business, which is sus.

Same guy ships cars that drive themselves, humanoid robots for the factory floor, brain chips that let paralysed people move a cursor with pure thought, and an AI running on a supercomputer his team stood up in months instead of years.

Your are debating people who sincerely believe that money is the economy and is not just a transaction mechanism lying on top of the actual goods and services that make up an economy. That the physical vectors of goods/services/logistics are just formalities relative to hard currency distribution, which, when implemented, would “solve world hunger” with $50 billion or whatever bunk number they claim is enough.

Your are dealing with envious, deeply incurious people who, as history has demonstrated again and again, will kill millions in pursuit of their ideology. There is no convincing them, debating them, enlightening them. It is futile.

SpaceX has a really cool launch and satellite comms business saddled with multiple money-losing other businesses and is currently running at a loss despite the revolutionary aerospace part being profitable.

There's pre-2020 Elon who did cool technical stuff and then there's post-covid Elon who spent $50B on Twitter and then cut it's revenue by 66% so that he could post more cringe memes.

The sad part, relevant to TFA above, is that all of the financial chicanery turns out to have been vastly more profitable than inventing re-usable rockets or shipping the first viable electric car. That's not me being a jealous hater, that's me being mournful about what's rewarded.

It is _hard_ to start a successful car company, let alone one on an untested platform. He did it, and it taught China how to build the future of cars.

It is _impossible_ to build a successful rocket company from nothing. He did it, and SpaceX is now ~60% of _worldwide_ launches.

He's had plenty of failures, but Musk is what people are buying. He's gross and annoying, but I wouldn't count him out, and I'm rooting for his success.

If he were still mission focused, he would have used his time in the Trump administration on cool missions instead of "ctrl-f trans" and defund random projects with "transducer" or "transfusion" in them.

All glory to the guys who started the company (I love my Tesla Y), but I don't believe it would have gone anywhere without Musk.

(I was add something about Stacy Munro and the auto industry, but I'll just link to his first teardown of the Model 3[1].)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpCrkO1x-Qo

- Tesla ain't that successful

- SpaceX isn't even profitable

- Hes tweeting stuff I don't like

- I was rooting for him when "was keeping it real", but "now that financial chicanery is rewarded I can't in good conscience" etc

People love the underdog and love the looser, they hate successful people because of what it tells them about themselves.

I specifically called out a bunch of compliments and things I liked prior to 2020, and I think we'd both agree that "spending all day on twitter" is not great regardless of tweet content.

In my opinion, around that time he stopped being interested in tech and manufacturing of said tech as his top concerns (WHICH HE WAS GOOD AT), and started being more concerned with twitter culture war bullshit. This happened to a lot of people on both sides of the aisle around that time due to the lockdowns, but the lockdowns are well behind us and he's still not focused around "get to mars" or "redefine human energy usage" as his top goals IMO. He's buying twitter, doing what he did at DOGE and repackaging a failed AI company into an IPO on SpaceX's coattails. The stories out of the SpaceX launch business are all about how they effectively "manage up" to get him out of the way and on with their jobs.

I understand the sentiment, and getting as involved into politics as he did was probably a mistake, simply because he is not good at it.

If I may offer a different perspective as to the on-mission part: he realised some years ago that leftism was a grave danger to his plan to make mankind multi-planetary, so he decided he had to get involved, if he wanted to or not. You will probably not agree with this point of view, but perhaps it will help soften the image of him in your own mind.

Yeah, that's just saying "social media addiction" in more words. Also, Star Trek?

Are you seriously saying you think Elon Musk falls into the "now it is" category? That's making up something to get angry about.

He's been a billionaire for quite a while. IE he falls into the "used to be" category.

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/02/04/world/lancet-usaid-global...

Indeed this wouldn't even be front page material if PG's initials were not on it.

So the exact same thing PG is guilty of in the article?

He disagrees with the opposing statement, gives a lazy counterexample with 0 evidence that introduces at least two major assumptions that do the the entirety of the work for his "argument", and then takes another few paragraphs to effectively say "just grow exponentially, bro".

There's nothing to push back against except vague hand-wavey nonsense. PG is washed and the level of discourse in the thread matches the quality bar of his post, so I'd say it's pretty appropriate.

His core premise is terrible if not outright facetious given the case he made. That the girl who is going to become a billionaire in his example has a startup that makes a product that everyone loves does nothing to disprove the point. Billions of people love VLC media player but Jean-Baptiste Kempf didn't become a billionaire.

The difference isn't the product, it's that what makes the startup founder a billionaire is that they're willing to pawn off their invention to people who do all the unethical things, while they laugh on their way to the bank, that's the point of the big check.

In some sense I prefer the robber Barron over the startup founder because at least the former doesn't pretend they're a saint between they've put one level of indirection between themselves and the exploitation.

One can't be held responsible for unethical things done by his creation once it's sold.

In a free market everybody can choose to sell or not, who to sell to and under which terms. Therefore, he should be held morally responsible for giving away control of his creation to the wrong people, or for not ensuring his creation can't be turned into something bad.

Then again, they don't get rich by cheating, abusing or whatever, they build a legal thing and sell it. You wouldn't go after a knife maker if someone used his knife to stab someone.

If you make a successful crowdsourced reviews website by building trust over time with contributors and users, and by any mechanism it ends up getting owned by an advertisement company that makes a business out of making it pay-to-win, should you not be held responsible?

I'm not talking about legal responsibility here, just moral responsibility. Ideally the former should follow the latter but it's not always the case.

Even then, has say Databricks or Canva been guilty of unethical conduct?

OK, PG might have proved it's possible for someone to become a billionaire. But why is that a good thing?

The model is: rich old guys extract money from the populace with threats of violence (just try not paying taxes). The rich old guys get FOMO. They give this money to young people who work really hard. This means foregoing sleep in favor of vibe coding some BS that nobody ever asked for, and making it addictive.

Nobody in their right mind would give a penny to these very hard working young people. In fact they don't: their startups only make money through ads. Nothing they make is worth even a tiny subscription fee. And ads are paid for by resource strip-mining megacorps.

What we have is a two-tier population of a have-nothing underclass and a handful of nobility. If we continue down this path there will be a revolution. There always is. Now that is something you probably don't want your kids to live through.

Billionaires are a sign of a failing systems because nobody earns a billion dollars.

What do you think why many important jobs are badly paid while some CEO gets a billion dollars.

Didn’t you see in the pandemic where the real important jobs are and did you realize how low their payment is?

BTW it’s interesting you see you kids working in a startup but not creating one.

et tu hn?

I am tired of seeing this nonsense on social media (it's particularly bad on reddit, where /r/antiwork and it's offshoots keep hitting the front page)

- Wealth is not a zero-sum game

- Yes, billionaires shouldn't exist because they're a symptom of a broken system

- And they don't exist on a long enough timescale, there's a reason why oil barons and railroad tycoon families are a shadow of their former selves, and why the richest people are all in tech/oil

- Billionaires and increasing income inequality are a symptom of a bigger problem. Musk wouldn't have as much money if his publicly traded stock wasn't as popular... among the public.

- Modern day securities are broken because they're poorly regulated because the public doesn't vote for people that would do the regulation.

It literally is, though. For one's wealth to grow, the wealth of others must shrink. You could print more money, but that'd just result in inflation reducing everyone's wealth.

If you intend to say value is not a zero-sum game, I agree.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Global_Distribution_...

> Modern day securities are broken because they're poorly regulated because the public doesn't vote for people that would do the regulation

And Billionaires and their media power has nothing to do with it

got some bad news for ya pal

The exponential growth model that pg presents is an obvious lie - you could use his exact explanation to claim that good founders will soon become trillionaires, all it takes is 9 months of 93% growth after your first few billions; quadrillionaires will soon follow. The obvious reality is that exponential growth is just a small phase in any company's history, and it is anyway limited by the size of the market(s) it is operating in. A company can quickly capture a market, but not quickly grow forever.

Then, he completely hand waves away the externalities, lawlessness, self dealing and similar issues that are the supporting power of all such growth events. He claims this is all powered by "making your users happy", which makes them tell others about your business, as if every restaurant that people fawn over becomes a billion dollar business in 1-5 years. Even the examples he can think of of companies that did this are infamously bad companies that have become rightly hated and accused of spreading various forms of social ills - e.g. social media addiction induced by Meta, spy ads by Google, excessive tourism and house price increases by Airbnb, or the erosion of worker protections by Uber. There isn't a single billion dollar company that doesn't at least get accused of similar problems, which represent t the meat of the argument, and pg ignores this completely in favor of the "build something useful" model.

PG made the error thinking that this is just people misunderstanding math and exponential growth, which created a convoluted math section that could have simply been explained as - if you start with a million dollar and double every month, you'll be a Billionaire in less than a year. He also didn't really touch well on why many people hate large companies / billionaires.

You are making the mistake of using a moralization framework that equivocate being accused of something to being bad for society + not looking at the alternative (i.e. even if it's true that every Billion dollar company is "bad/exploitative/etc.", that doesn't mean that the (realistic) alternative is better for society or people.

The reality is that companies like Google, Amazon, NVidia, etc. have create an immense amount of wealth for their founders and investors, but also created an immense amount of value in society. There is a real problem of incentives when you prioritize growth endlessly, as it leads to perverse incentives such as that ones these companies are accused of - leading you to progressively take more and more less positive actions in order to achieve this growth. So I don't disagree with the general premise that growth leads to moral problems, but I do disagree with saying that building big companies is bad for society.

Like poet/warrior/advisor that convinces the King to give them one grain of rice on the first square of the chessboard, two grains of rice on the second square, four grains of on the third square, eight on the fourth - and so on, doubling the number of grains each square until the 64th square. The King can no more deliver 2^64 grains of rice that PG's founder keep her 93% growth rate consistent for 64 months (or even the calculated 9.5 months to make her a billionaire).

Yes, it's true that a very few tech startup founders create billion dollar wealth by "making what the people want" - but anybody trying to tell you the naive compound interest math makes it inevitable, is trying to sell you something (like perhaps their companies startup accelerator program or venture capital investment opportunities).

I would say value is subjective. For example, some people might consider a successful game as having created value. Others might view it as too addictive and see the negative value on society as a whole.

It could be very true that in the long arc of history, most of the "value" these companies have created is seen as a net negative. Take smartphones for example. They have created "value" but it's very possible that in 100 years when we better can evaluate what they have done to kids who grew up with them, we well conclude that they were a net negative until their usage was rained in. The only opposing force is government regulation and that's exactly what is wrong with these types of companies (and billionaires in general). They are the ones that stop reasonable legislation from happening because they have too much power because they are so large/rich.

What negative actions has Google Amazon and Nvidia done due to them prioritizing growth endlessly?

For Google, they didn't prioritize growth or they would have moved on AI a decade ago, but they were afraid of having tech journalists who hate them already write mean articles about how their AI is harmful.

Amazon just .. I don't know, keeps squeezing out operational efficiencies that get me next day delivery? Or developing AWS to enable other people to build apps?

Nvidia sells GPUs. Maybe you're a gamer and the push into AI means higher GPU prices?

I'm at a loss here. I don't think anyone is mad at these companies outside of a tiny vocal terminally online minority.

There's a human cost to this. Amazon warehouses are famous for their bad working conditions.

More specific criticisms:

Amazon

- They exploit factory workers that have to piss in bottles to keep up with productivity quotas and have high workplace injury rates. When they take time off to recover they are fired.

- They commit intellectual property theft, by copying top selling products and putting their hands on the scales to divert traffic to their clones.

NVidia

- Used software lock-in of CUDA to gain advantage in hardware sales.

Google

- Steals your information. Uses its browser to compete unfairly in other markets (mobile phone OS, etc).

Elon Musk / Tesla / SpaceX

- Bought Twitter and used it to influence elections and voters, promote racism / nazi sympathizers.

>- Used software lock-in of CUDA to gain advantage in hardware sales.

Now with a 6bil market cap is seems.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

(Apologies to BrandonM for reminding everybody...)

It's just grepping logs on steroids

> Sentry

Hooks on error handlers in JavaScript

> Snowflake

Anyone can just use parquet or DuckDB

>Okta

No digital sovereignty for those who can't manage users' passwords

> MongoDB

JSONB fields in Postgres, anyone?

/s

BrandonM doesn’t mind:

> I really don’t mind the commentary. I’m long past being frustrated about being misinterpreted, and I learned a lot from it, anyway.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27070138

But dang does:

> my heart sinks a little every time I see this brought up

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27067281

It’s thoughtful context that I think everyone mentioning BrandonM and Dropbox should be familiar with.

He still couldn't evaluate whether an idea will be successful in the market. That's why Paul Graham in the OP admits he thought Airbnb was dumb idea. Then says not to speculate on what people want but to build something for yourself.

If only we could trust such big hearted people who selflessly donate their time and expertise for thinking and researching - without asking those pesky little questions like "what do they stand to gain? what hidden agenda do they have? what ideology dictates their value system? what axes to grind and biases do they harbor?"

I'd rather trust the people directly involved, whose interests are mostly clear and known.

PS I'm not a fan of Meta.

That seems like a wild statement to me. Just so I understand what you're saying. Are you saying you would trust Meta's statements on if their algorithms are harmful to youth/society over independent researchers because those researchers might have some hidden bias?

I am old enough to remember when "researchers" and "experts" where warning us about the evils of violent FPS gaming, the whole panic over teens and kids playing Doom. The Columbine shooting. The end was nigh! Of course, it was all blown out of proportions...

There will not be next quadrillionaire soon because there are economic crashes that kick economy down each time so it has space to climb again.

That is how its been historically and how it will continue unless the math underpinning it will change.

She also pays full UK tax on her earnings, the 36th most of any individual.

https://moneynation.com/jk-rowling-net-worth/

For authors, the arguments are again quite simple - billionaire authors or directors don't become billionaires by selling books or movies, they become billionaires from much larger businesses that employ way more people who were collectively much more critical to the success of said businesses than the authors themselves. JK Rowling didn't become a billionaire until the movie franchise and the toy mega production began. If the movies hadn't happened, or the toys hadn't happened, she would have just been an extremely rich multimillionaire.

You and Paul are both claiming it's extremely hard.

A restaurant won't scale - most ideas won't scale - because they're not useful enough.

These companies are not criminal enterprise and they don't steal money or threaten them with violence: they just offer them products and ecosystem and most people are dumb enough to ruin their life with it. Don't get me wrong: I hate them and I ban social media for my kids, but it doesn't make them evil.

The bad actors are thugs with guns stealing your purse and the government stealing your tax money or threatening you with jail.

To give another, less controversial example, I don't think companies selling products with sugar and seed oils are bad, even though they likely have the highest combined reduction of life expectancy across all people - but I hate them too.

Counterexample, a restaurant worth $202 billion: https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/mcd/market-cap/

One of the arguments against billionaires really deserving that much money is that while they own the shares, the scaling up is done by a labour force that doesn't capture this growth, "only" (so goes the argument, I do know about share options) "their wages".

How many burger flippers get compensation in the form of shares in the parent company? I genuinely don't know, but I do expect it to mostly be in the form of pension funds rather than stuff they can see in their working lives. Pension funds are a lot of money, they need to be so those with them can retire, same logic as FIRE because being a pensioner is the first three initials of FIRE.

This is probably for the best, owing to something not explicitly mentioned in the article: startups are risky. This is as much a lottery question as it is an effort question, because "cool idea" absolutely does not mean "make it and they will come", no matter how hard working the founders (and first hires) are.

Also an argument for El Chapo and friends (if we didn't criminalize their products and add the violence around the trade, see Alcohol and Tobacco).

> - but I hate them too.

Why do you hate them if you don't think they are bad?

You seem to be saying, "it's not illegal; I will hate it, but it is not bad". What is "illegal" is an arbitrary classification that different countries choose. That's the point of what the unnamed politician (it's AoC I think?) is saying: those things should be illegal.

PG> I don't want anyone to accuse me of using unrealistic numbers, so let's take a more conservative growth rate. Let's see what happens at 15% a month. That's not rare at all.

You> it is anyway limited by the size of the market(s) it is operating in

PG> how long you can continue to grow at that rate depends on the size of the market.

Maybe read what you intend to critique.

You> Then, he completely hand waves away the externalities, lawlessness, self dealing and similar issues

Not addressing an issue is not hand waving.

One of the hallmarks of clear thinking, is you don't lash out at people for things they said, that you agree with, or things they didn't say, that you would have disagreed with.

Make your own points without the misleading tie ins.

Again, if all it takes to become a billionaire is 15% growth rate for 5 years, which is easy, then if you start with two billion dollars and grow at 15% per month, you'll be a trillionaire in 5 years. And 5 years after that, a quadrillionaire. If the billionaires are literally generating billions of new value, what explains why trillions can't be generated in the same way?

If the market is limited, then it means that you can't grow your way to a billion dollars, you have to displace others - either competitors in the same market, or other markets as well. So now there's a much clearer chance that you're using underhanded means to actually get your billions - you're not growing a new pristine market that people just love, you might just be edging out competitors or snuffing out other markets that had existed before - and perhaps were limited by things like regulations or externalities that you simply choose to ignore.

And the question of externalities and unfair competition and corruption is not tangential, it is the whole point that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders or others in this anti-billionaire movement are making. Not talking about it is simply ignoring their argument. The problem isn't "oh, I didn't realize that simply growing at 15% every month for 5 years will make a million dollar business into a billion dollar business". It's "the actions that you need to take in order to continue growing at 15% every month for 5 years are going to include things like un priced externalities, corruption, cartel behaviors, etc". Addressing how you can sustain this growth, and how the markets can have so much money in them, are exactly the most important things - not the trivial math of exponential growth that he discusses, condescendingly, at length.

Except: you don't have to be a scourge to make a billion dollars. Even though some do, or go down that road later.

And your points would be just as valid and relevant, without re-framing a straightforward tautologically correct post as the foil.

Let's take Y combinator. He is in the money lending business - where he sells the idea of becoming a billionaire ( which is possible in software as it so easily scales relative to other types of businesses ) to young people so they work crazily hard. Most of them fail ( which he doesn't focus on ), but just like a bookie who profits from gambling - he always wins as he controls the rules ( odds/investment percentages - ie lending rates ) of the game.

So he has set up a system that extracts value from others.

Nothing wrong with startups - not only to the founders get to keep more of their value, they can also set company culture and values etc.

However you could argue, particular in software where capital isn't really needed, that taking money from a VC is very expensive - and also somewhat abrogates that founder control.

Sometimes you need investment, and good VC's can really add value ( both to the investor and investee ) - but his ideal investment is going to be to companies that don't really need it - where he can reap a huge reward for little effort.

That's a very negative way to describe buying a share in a company.

As I said, I'm not a person that thinks that correct allocation of capital isn't a useful role. Really good VCs and investors are really really important.

However like art - it can be both simultaneously true that art has intrinsic value and that the art market is seriously corrupt.

Sure Paul adds value - but I'd humbly suggest not as much as he has extracted.

If Airbnb, DoorDash, Instacart, Coinbase, Reddit, Brex, Deel, or Flexport disappeared tomorrow, humanity would not lose a vaccine, a new energy source, a scientific discovery, or a cure for disease. We would mostly switch apps.

Only depressing aspect is pretending jackpot level, private wealth, equals meaningful progress. There is a reason not once, he used the word entrepreneur in the essay...