The amount of negativity to this is depressing. No one seems to be contradicting anything he's saying here, instead it's just vacuous ideology "extraction" etc etc. Purposely narrow reading. I've got kids, I want people creating start ups they can work in, the alternative is too grim.
Why do you think no one is contradicting him?
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.
I agree with you, but what would be the argument against Athletes and someone like J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter author)?
The chart on the site below shows JK Rowling's net worth growth was pretty much linear. $100M per two years until about 2006, then $100M a year after that.
She also pays full UK tax on her earnings, the 36th most of any individual.
https://moneynation.com/jk-rowling-net-worth/
But that's not a response to my question.
It is in the context of this thread, because the article is about exponential growth.
Founders are often synonymous with their businesses. In the case of celebrities the relevant exploitation is carried out by others in the value chain, they are just the lure/source.
There's no such thing as a billionaire athlete. There are a handful of athletes who went on to become billionaires through their business dealings, like Michael Jordan, or Ion Țiriac or LeBron James. The arguments are exactly the same for them as for any other billionaire - that their businesses are either not really worth as much as the numbers suggest, or that their business engaged in various problematic practices.
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> you could use his exact explanation to claim that good founders will soon become trillionaires,
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.
You> Then, he completely hand waves away the externalities, lawlessness, self dealing and similar issues
Not addressing an issue, that doesn't undermine the points he does make, is not hand waving.
Hallmarks of clear instead of reactionary thinking: 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 (good) points. No need for framing around disagreement or other misleading tie ins.
I feel just as disgusted and frustrated by some rich people. But lots of people quietly become billionaires now, from normal companies that produce sensible services or goods people want. Substitute "rich" for "billionaire" to account for inflation, and increased globalization, and this has been true for a long time.
He does put caveats around his initial, condescendingly worded points. The problem is that those caveats are either too small, or they completely contradict his initial point.
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.
I agree with almost everything.
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.
millionaire is not a billionaire :)
Some example >1B companies off the top of my head: DataDog, Sentry, Snowflake, Okta, MongoDB
Isn't Dropbox the canonical HN example of a "stupid and obvious idea" that anybody could build for themselves and would never pay for?
Now with a 6bil market cap is seems.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
(Apologies to BrandonM for reminding everybody...)
> (Apologies to BrandonM for reminding everybody...)
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.
> DataDog,
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
Even his examples (Meta, Google, Airbnb, Uber) are "hated and accused" mostly by pundits and activists. Their users and investors are overall rather happy with their services (all have healthy competition) and their employees can quit and work for somebody else at any moment.
It's almost like the people who spend their time thinking and researching the positives and negatives of a particular company/service come to different conclusions than the people who make money off the company or are directly marketed it.
> people who spend their time thinking and researching the positives and negatives
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.
>I'd rather trust the people directly involved, whose interests are mostly clear and known.
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?
No, I am not saying I trust Meta's statements at all. I am just saying that I have ZERO trust in those "independent researchers".
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...
If you ask any of those questions to people directly involved, the answer is the same for all 4: money
At least for meta, its employees, and its customers (advertisers), and its users, you can infer easily why they are involved. Researchers have other motivations like currying favor via an opinion or paper with a particular benefactor, or the tenure game, or 1000 other hidden things you cannot reason about without disclosure on their part.
PS I'm not a fan of Meta.
it is simple fact economy is based on maths that require a percentage growth or death from everyone. denying that is denying maths.
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.
Both you and PG are missing the mark here.
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.
It's not even like unbounded exponential growth is a new or "startup" thing either. PGs story is just the grains of rice on the chessboard legend. (or depending on the culture telling the story, perhaps wheat on a chessboard, according to google)
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).
"Corn" is the general word for the most common cereal crop of a region, and the word for an individual grain of such a plant, in case you wish to use the corn-on-a-chessboard story without the qualification.
That seems to be true only in British English. In other dialects (USA, Canada, Australia), corn refers only to maize. (I'd never heard corn used as a general term, though Miriam-Webster does affirm this British usage.)
> 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.
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.
All of the companies you mention are at minimum engaged in monopolization and anti-competitive mergers as well as exploiting tax loopholes.
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.
One of those is not like the others
>- Used software lock-in of CUDA to gain advantage in hardware sales.
>Amazon just .. I don't know, keeps squeezing out operational efficiencies
There's a human cost to this. Amazon warehouses are famous for their bad working conditions.
>but also created an immense amount of value in society
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.
You didn't prove him wrong.
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.
> A restaurant won't scale - most ideas won't scale - because they're not useful enough
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.
> they just offer them products and ecosystem and most people are dumb enough to ruin their life with it.
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.
I think the problem here is the word 'earn' is doing a lot of heavily lifting.
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.
> So he has set up a system that extracts value from others.
That's a very negative way to describe buying a share in a company.
I'm pointing out the reality.
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.
> I've got kids, I want people creating start ups they can work in, the alternative is too grim.
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.
Or even better, a world where billionaires aren't able to exist.
There needs to be a wealth maximum, afterwards you just get taxed 100%.
I think you'll find its not billionaires stopping that, its elected officials.
Yes their are. Majority of elected officials are just their instrument. The amount of money billionaires spend shaping media, lobbying and campaigns to get power and push propaganda to determine who is elected makes the fight to get people like AOC who are working in the interest of society so much harder.
> people like AOC who are working in the interest of society
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
What did she give away for free and how can I get more of it?
Other people's money.
> use force to take free stuff of other people who work instead of working themselves.
Funny, to me this describes the investor class.
I'd really love to understand why you see it that way. In what way do investors force anybody to do anything?
Buy up all the property in an area and raise the rents in order to force other people to give them their hard earned cash so that they can spend it on a yacht in Monaco.
They don't force anybody though. People who think that the renting is too expensive and is not worth paying, are free to either 1) move to a place that has cheaper rent, or 2) build a new house from scratch since it's cheaper than renting.
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.
That’s also true of companies that AOC wants to raise taxes on. She’s not forcing anyone to pay those taxes. Companies that don’t want to pay those taxes are free to relocate away from America, abandon selling to the US market, and cut themselves off from the American labor supply. Of course every company wants to be successful in big cities in America. But taxes are very low in dying small countries in the middle of nowhere.
>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.
That's a grim view on a politician who - looking from the outside - is just thinking and talking like a normal human.
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.
To understand why the two are one and the same, is first to understand that the US is a plutocracy.
You are soooo close!
This sort of comment does not belong on hacker news.
I can't speak for his other essays but this article was not great. He basically does some maths to show exponential growth.
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?"
> I can't speak for his other essays but this article was not great.
Indeed this wouldn't even be front page material if PG's initials were not on it.
> How about catalysing the move away from fossil fuels? How about inexpensive spaceflight?
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.
History's first trillionaire is a guy who catches rockets out of the sky with chopsticks and beams internet to every dead zone on the planet.
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.
Tesla's sales are down year over year and yet it's somehow trading at a 360x multiple to earnings.
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.
I don't own shares in any Musk company, and agree that Tesla as a car company is grossly overvalued. But as the parent states, dude gets shit done.
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.
The rocket company is probably more technically impressive anyway but I am disinclined to accept the attempts to rewrite Tesla's history. Maybe it was necessary to force the actual people who started the company out for it to survive and a Series A is certainly important, but Musk is still an investor in the car company and not the person who started it.
I guess I'm rooting for his success too, my point was that the actual product successes as I see them all happened pre-2020. Covid era broke some people and Musk seems to be one of them.
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.
Take a close look at what you are complaining about:
- 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.
That's some fantastic armchair psychiatry but I don't think you got where I'm coming from.
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.
What exactly happened in 2020 that changed your mind. Perhaps I'm missing something?
Thanks for the good faith question.
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.
So if I may rephrase, the issue is that he kind of lost his way as a pure-hearted engineer working for the progress of technology and the good of mankind and started to stray of path with his half-baked political exploits. He is no longer focused on the mission.
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.
> that leftism was a grave danger to his plan to make mankind multi-planetary
Yeah, that's just saying "social media addiction" in more words. Also, Star Trek?
I think their statement is useful to contextualise what people consider leftism though. Looking at Musk's actual political actions, it seems like leftism (or at least the part that directly affects him and his companies) is when regulators are allowed to ask Musk to stop doing securities fraud with his social media addiction, and it's not entirely unreasonable for him to consider such enforcement a threat (though maybe not "a grave danger") in case it escalates beyond strongly worded letters. I am, by that metric, a leftist. Possibly a radical far-left communist, even.
The guy who is on track for causing 9 million deaths? That guy is your example of someone who made the world a better place? The guy who supports far right groups, white supremacists, throws nazi salutes, pushes an AI that makes child porn and turned Twitter into a right wing nazi loving cess pool? Yeah, the world is just swell now he's here.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/02/04/world/lancet-usaid-global...
The article is about how to become a billionaire.
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.
The essay kind of misses the point, as the question was mostly about the meaning of word "earned".
"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.
Halfway through your second paragraph you started conflating income with wealth/capital.
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.
You are focusing too much on legal definitions.
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.
Or maybe your industry just has very few, but very large, clients. Like spaceflight (SpaceX).
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
On the other hand, SpaceX has a handful of very large clients, and around 12 million small clients, which probably provide a less clumpy income.
> when the founder receives pay for their work, in the form of cash or exercised options or whatever else.
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
Being paid in stock is a form of income, which is taxed when given and which is separate from the additional capital gains tax levied when the stock is sold. Regardless, even if different forms of compensation are taxed different, the point is that they’re still earned.
> The essay kind of misses the point
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.
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> 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?
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?
I think there are different views you can have here. I think PG is in the group that thinks if you get a billion dollars, you earned a billion dollars. His distinction is between getting the billion dollars honestly or dishonestly. The alternate view is that you can get 100 billion dollars, presumably honestly, but that doesn't mean you earned a billion dollars. The first group will say this is splitting hairs. The second group will say that is the whole point. It the company gets a billion dollars, did it earn a billion dollars? Even more to the point, if the company earns a billion dollars, does the founder/CEO, or whoever is refernced in this post, earn a billion dollars? I think the two groups will just see this differently.
I would have liked the essay more if PG had actually engaged with AOC's claims. He just does some math and shows that exponential growth is fast.
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 would have liked the essay more if PG had actually engaged with AOC's claims.
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.)
On the one hand, you say AOC's claims are BS. And then you say that Facebook is:
> 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?
> Is this not a contradiction?
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.
Did people become billionaires at those companies before or after they started being enshittified?
The exact threshold doesn't matter. What matters is that the companies shift away from "make something people want", which is what PG says justifies the money that's made.
The timing doesn't matter because monopoly -> enshittification was always the plan. Hence FAANG were valued with the expectation that they could turn the profit knob at the right time.
Having been on HN for 15+ years I have found it fascinating to witness the fawning and adulation over pg blog posts completely reverse and everyone has turned on him now.
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.
I still like to read pg but he keeps writing about things outside of his domain. Here for example I trust him to talk about growth rates and how startups work. But I don’t trust him to talk about wealth inequality and how political leaders respond to it.
Growth rates are central to wealth inequality: the r>g observation (due to Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century) is that both historically and recently the returns to capital exceed the growth rate of the economy. Trusting someone whose fortune was built on "r" and is staked on "r" to do anything other than cheer-lead his own balance sheet would be nuts. Hear him out, but please hear what Piketty (& fiends) have to say as well.
> the r>g observation (due to Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century) is that both historically and recently the returns to capital exceed the growth rate of the economy.
They do if you cherry-pick your economies, starting points, definitions of "capital" and "growth", and cutoff points, yes.
You have to cherry-pick a lot harder to make r>g go away.
Plotting it vs time makes this clear because you can clearly see what caused what.
Yes, I agree. The combination of minimal inflation and extremely low interest rates is not something pg created, but something he did benefit from, and he doesn't seem to realize that.
> (& fiends)
Freudian slip?
Ha! Red suits them.
I also read what he writes. But some other things he writes/ tweets about actually interest me more- like art, writing-as-thinking, some interactions with his kids- than his startup related stuff. Some content seems repetitive or maybe I have moved on- for better or for worse- from such content: people in twenties, money-vs-wealth, airbnb, stripe (Collisons), Jessica, users, unrealistic sounding growth can be real, etc.
He's not talking about politics, he's talking about statups and growth rates, both of which are square in his domain, in fact one would argue that's the basis for his entire career. This article is a response to a politician making an incorrect statement to a topic he's an expert on
The politician wasn't making a statement about startups or growth rates. She was making a statement about what it means to "earn" money.
One thing I noticed is on HN where PG no longer hangs out the comments have gone negative whereas on twitter/x where he posts people are positive (https://x.com/paulg/status/2066124279448559907 on earn $1bn). I guess people who like him follow there.
"Reply guy" culture is notorious for breeding sycophancy.
If you met anyone, anyone at all, who’s views on the world hadn’t changed in the last 15 years - and I don’t mean this last 15 years, I mean any 15 year period - what would you think of them?
That isn't a very interesting question. If someone thought that murdering innocents was a bad idea 15 years ago and still thinks it today, gold star. If they think murdering is OK as long as you get away with it, then the length of time they've held that view really doesn't influence how dangerous they are. The nature of the view matters, not how long it is held.
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.
You're misrepresenting the question. The question is about "views on the world". The world has not stayed stable.
What would it mean for someone not to notice that the world is changing? Are we talking people who don't understand that smartphones have been invented? People who can't comprehend that the world is changing are exceptionally rare and almost by definition would need to have mental problems around their ability to form memories.
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.
Maybe try to approach other people's comments that you're not sure about with a bit more curiosity and less anger/condescension/whateverthisis.
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.
> Maybe try to approach other people's comments that you're not sure about with a bit more curiosity and less anger/condescension/whateverthisis.
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.
> because they are aligned with objective reality.
This is the exact problem. Anyone who thinks they’ve found objective reality isn’t looking hard enough.
This is getting tangental, but isn't objective reality infinity?; the board which your subjective reality plays on?
It may be infinity, it may be nothing, but it's fundamentally inaccessible to us. All we have is our subjective reality, so the assertion that someone has found objective reality is always false and usually used as a means to deny other people's realities.
That's a fair point and your comment is good.
And the lynch pin of course, your personal moral framing
I've been on HN for a similar amount of time, and I've seen the same shift in opinion on pg, but my conclusion about why is different.
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.
The new generation is struggling with self-determinism and individualism.
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.
> 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.
Let's take a hypothetical scenario.
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.
The people on HN have changed. It used to be founders and people doing things. Founders of some now huge companies were on HN. Interesting and well known hackers too. Now it's SWEs who work in big tech, hate their jobs and are afraid of being laid off who just parrot politically expedient current talking points. x.com is more interesting these days, even for tech.
Tech has changed, back in the early 2000s it really felt very creative, the growing big companies were inventing new things and defining the web. They were also much smaller, more idealistic and in their "youthful vigor" stage.
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.
Back in 2000s tech was about websites to share "I can has cheezeburger" photos and now we're literally in the middle of technological revolution that seemed like scifi less than 10 years ago. Not only AI, but biotech, space, fusion, robitics, even gussian splats. Solo software engineer can't create on of these now. But there's so much more invention of genuinely new, exciting new things going on that we can be involved with.
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.
But you just hit the nail on the head: "Solo software engineer can't create on of these now".
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 low hanging fruit is definitely gone but there's got to be some interesting problems...
There's been a massive shift in the industry. It's gone from "me and a couple dudes are working on this thing that'll help people live a better life", to "let's lie about what our product can do to reach unicorn status then cash out before anyone notices" and "let's make something that makes people feel dissatisfied with life and keeps them addicted and sells surveillance data to private militaries and governments to threaten our critics."
The good vibes and optimism have left the industry.
It would just be nice if people created good vibes. X is a chaotic mess but there's at least pockets of good vibes. PG still posts over there, as do DHH, Sama, and a bunch of other notable people and people builder things. Here it's been AI, React and political slop for years.
Most founder nowadays are not engineers or people who really can create anything, but well connected business idiots.
But it's just not a high quality essay. This writing would have few if any upvotes coming from a random Substack blog.
I still really like some PG essays, but PG used to be a much better writer.
Compared to 2011, HN turned from optimistic techno-enthusiasts who couldn't wait to see new stuff around the corner into an aging millenial club, just like reddit. I used to come here every day and talk to people, and how I hardly do it once a month.
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.
You can continue to show strength of character, that isn’t something that stops.
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.
> When faced with uncomfortable reality, many start looking for something or somebody else to blame for this.
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.
> tens of thousands of millionaires have played their cards better than I
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.
15 years ago things were quite different:
* 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.
Bound to happen in a society that’s been increasingly warped and purchased by people like PG in the last 15 years
It's almost as though people and culture change over time.
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.
The HN readership has changed massively in that timeframe, from the earlier Hackers and Painters / libertarian ideology to a much more socialist outlook. I could speculate about the reasons for this, but my theories would probably attract even more downvotes than just pointing out the obvious change in tone will.
I'm interested in hearing your reasons, tbqh.
One trend that's bigger than tech is that educated professional class has massively consolidated into the liberal column in the wake of Trump, it used to be more like 66/33 lean liberal.
So that's going to impact any professional class community, whether it's tech or not.
I'm not sure this is true. I consider this website very much to the right of most web fora.
I was talking about the broader professional population, there's polling on this and they've (we've) really consolidated left as the right wing has become more and more about culture war.
The hacker crowd has always had a heavy socialist or even communist component - sharing and coöperative work is a big part of the FLOSS community, after all!
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.
There is a real shift I think plus maybe a new generation.
I blame the pandemic and social media.
Criticism may be more common, but the downvoting has not changed.
See the post above, where I criticize him and am being downvoted into oblivion...
There is a bubble here. Running ones own business is, on the overall, better than being employed especially given the current world. However, that doesn't automatically equal to startups. There are people who are running their own brick and mortar businesses. They're not billionaires or even millionaires but they've crossed the point where lack of a reliable source of wealth is a source of misery for them. Surely, that's a great thing.
Healthcare is one place that gives me pause when considering going back into business for myself and my family while living in the US.
I guess it depends greatly on where one lives etc. This is a concern I've heard from all my friends in the States.
This is definitely a concern that needs to be addressed if we want to see more small businesses again. It's a big risk not having health insurance.
Well, you can't always get what you want.
The prospect of AI replacing white collar jobs has supercharged HN’s socialist bent.
Out of 6,500 companies YC funded companies, less than 0.40% amounted to anything. Do you really want to apply to YC with these success rate? The issue is that these 30 billionaires PG decided to highlight, none of their 14 companies, from which less than half are even profitable right now...are relevant at all. No civilization level breakthroughs, they are mostly payment layers, delivery apps, marketplaces, crypto exchanges, and labor or regulatory arbitrage, and attention platforms.
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...
What do you expect the reaction to be when he's, at best, taking a political cheap shot by misrepresenting what someone said and spinning it into absurdity?
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?
The post is patronizing as hell, it’s no wonder people respond to it negatively. Patting people on the head and saying “you moron, it’s just two numbers” isn’t a good way to make an argument.
Sam Harris often makes an argument that I both hate and kind of agree with. He says that exchanging arguments and having a debate only works when the two arguing parties share a foundation. The debate’s purpose is to reconcile a measurable difference of opinion.
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.
Well, with the extreme levels of income stratification that we have in the US and greater world, money literally means a different thing to the few folks who've escaped the poverty trap ... just like hunting means a different thing for the hunters as it does for the prey.
I understand finance well enough to discuss money.
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.
A debates purpose is surely to reveal if there’s a measurable difference to be reconciled in the first instance. Any actual reconciliation is a nice bonus on top.
So even if the debate reveals that no, there wasn’t a viable reconciliation, the debate was still worthwhile.
>He says that exchanging arguments and having a debate only works when the two arguing parties share a foundation. The debate’s purpose is to reconcile a measurable difference of opinion.
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.
Perhaps, but I see zero desire from pg to understand the counterparty either. When engaging at such a superficial level, don’t be surprised when that’s what comes back.
>No one seems to be contradicting anything he's saying here
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 that one's not required to cheat, use immoral loopholes or abuse anyone to become filthy rich, as a prominent US politician has claimed. That stands unchallenged.
>His core premise is that one's not required to cheat
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.
The distinction is if Mr. Kempf tried to charge all these people 1 dollar a year he would have gotten maybe a few million, and probably wouldn't have gotten much of the annual ~100 people to contribute to his product so the product wouldn't have been so awesome in the first place. There's just no money in being somewhat better than your OS's built-in player.
One can't be held responsible for unethical things done by his creation once it's sold.
>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.
The founders typically don't get to choose, they have the obligation to respect minority investors' interests and sell to the highest bidder. Also the gold standard is going public, which would make figuring out who's "bad" pretty hard.
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 they don't get to choose, they already gave up control in an earlier stage. Just as with going public, they're relinquishing partial or total control of their company and this is a moral decision.
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.
You're making a case for stricter laws on dubious moral issues, not for startups as such.
Even then, has say Databricks or Canva been guilty of unethical conduct?
people here focus too much on the numbers, the exact values, the details, and end up missing completely the point.
What if -- bear with me here -- it's possible for bright, motivated founders to create startups that your kids can work in, but those founders could be content with merely making a hundred million dollars? Because, and I don't know if you know this so you may have to take it on faith, that is still so much money that said founder and their family and very likely their descendants can live in extreme luxury for the rest of their lives even if they stop working right then.
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.
How exactly do you propose keeping a founder from becoming wealthier once their company scales past the point where they are worth a hundred million?
The market is supposed to do that. Once an opportunity is identified there is a rush to compete and margin disappears, so the people still get the new, better thing, but for much cheaper.
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.
Most things don't behave like pure commodities regardless of anything that can be considered monopolistic.
I agree with you on it being hard.
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.
100%. I don't understand how anyone defends the "death loophole" for capital gains. If you get rid of it you could actually get rid of estate taxes, which are a kludge to capture some of the capital gains that are given away by resetting the basis at death. It's a nutty system we have right now.
This one does seem to be a no brainer
Are you expecting someone to drag your contribution to the discourse out of you?
My question was how do you prevent anyone from having over 100M? No motte and baileys please.
Reverse lottery.
Like I said...
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.
By taking the excess yearly, and that's very doable.
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.
The amazon shares weren't liquidated in the divorce. Are you saying the government will receive shares instead of cash?
Yes.
So then the government becomes a stakeholder with vested interest in certain companies and not others?
You can simply mandate by law that these sells must be sold to the market at, say, 2% per month, and that the government will not make use of voting rights during that period.
There's so many possible options.
I’msure they will just ensure they will never reach 100m and stash their cash somewhere hidden. So won’t work that well. But might work for a one off cut. Which is good.
Why didn't Bezos just stash his assets somewhere hidden so that he wouldn't have to give $38 billion of it to his ex?
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.
Guillotines are the classic method, and they are likely coming if we don't change course.
Revolutionaries often overestimate the appetite in the general populace for revolution. Also I'm not sure guillotines will be able to do much against the killer drones that palmer luckey is making
It's mind boggling that you view the solution to this as so counter to the interests of the capital class that you can't even speak it aloud
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.
So you're saying the obvious solution is to force founders to liquidate all shares necessary every year to keep their wealth under 100M? How to keep short sellers from feasting on this? Who will the buyers be if everyone is selling around tax season? If the stock crashes because there is government-mandated short interest and no long interest are they off the hook?
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.
> On the point of democracy, none of the candidates who spend the most on major elections seem to be winning much lately,
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.
Tom steyer spent half a billion to not even make it onto the final ca ballot
I think you'd find more examples of people spending much much less money to influence elections, or buy certain positions than you will people spending money to make the public vote for them. The money influences policies, regulations, wars, etc.
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.
Buying senate seats is for chumps. For $300 million, Musk got his own executive branch agency, a pseudo cabinet level position, and carte blanche to take a machete to all the programs he personally disliked including investigations into himself and his companies.
Maybe if you suck them off hard enough they will give you a few crumbs after you are done.
Beats sucking off a communist in order to not starve when there is a food shortage
Speaking of hunger, capitalist utopia is worse than a global pandemic: https://www.npr.org/2026/05/27/nx-s1-5836441/food-insecurity...
ok now compare it to food insecurity in north korea or venezuela
No one is advocating America to be more like North Korea or Venezuela. Democratic Socialism is what young people are asking for today. These cold war era dichotomies will die with the boomer generation.
How about the doesn't need to be paid in cash? The government claims a percentage of the company over time...as always only above some level of valuation
No, the shares can be directly transferred to a government-held portfolio. Come on, think for 2 seconds, my god. If you're going to rage like this at least don't come up with strawman issues that can be trivially resolved in 2 seconds of thinking.
Of course the government should own everything! How stupid of us for assuming that's a bad idea.
How stupid of you for assuming they'd have to keep it, rather than slowly selling it off, indeed exactly like Mackenzie Bezos might do. You could easily mandate this.
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.
It's so weird that taxing my property is straightforward but taxing the property of the capital class is so incredibly Byzantine and unexplainably impossible
Elon musk was unceremoniously kicked out of the white house. To say he has some great power is ridiculous. Whatever power he has aside from his companies is in his mind
Think for a second… If money doesn’t give people power… then what’s all the fuss about??
> It's mind boggling that you
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
tax?
On what? You force the company to break up and liquidate so they can pay taxes?
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.
Owners being able to lock the value generated by workers solely within their family for generations has been tried. It ends in feudalism.
Are you proposing changing inheritance laws or are you proposing forcing companies to sell their stock in a firesale to be in accordance with the IRS? Be clear in your propositions please.
Progressive taxation, taxes on CG, inheritance taxes, and a well funded and non-partisan IRS.
None of these will prevent someone from gaining more than 100M. That is what is under discussion. I am not against more progressive taxes.
Which party is the IRS partisan towards? What do you mean by partisan?
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/experts-warn-trump-imm...
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-irs-investigations...
I agree these are partisan and bad developments. It is also unrelated to the question at hand about how to prevent people from gaining over 100m which people have been able to do under the heretofore non-partisan irs
What do you mean by “is”? What do you mean by “you”? By clear.
It doesn’t end in feudalism. It ends in guillotines.
> On what?
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.
> You force the founder to give up their private property just because it is valuable?
That's how taxes work.
The straightforward solution to this is to allow the tax to be paid in kind, to be paid into a sovereign wealth fund.
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.
Taxes. If they want to externalize the costs then society should socialize excessive surpluses.
anti-trust
What if -- bear with me here -- the very thing that makes those founders able to make the $1B they would otherwise make would drive them to also ask why it is that someone else who had no hand in building or funding it gets lion's share of the $900M while they get only $100M?
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.
The entity you're implicitly proposing should take the money doesn't have a good track record of spending it wisely. I'd much rather let the startup founders keep their money and build rockets with it, than spend another few trillion on building 100 meters of high-speed rail.
The whole problem with CalHSR is precisely that they can’t spend any real money… There were governmental barriers like CEQA and local NIMBYs but the primary cost culprit is that the legislature has continuously kicked fully funding the project down the tracks for the past two decades. Funding it fully with a 10-20 year construction timeline in the early 2010s would’ve far cheaper at this point.
Every American economic miracle has been precipitated by the government building basic infrastructure and doing basic research.
So it's pretty clear it's not the billionaires but random thousandaire loudmouths that are the problem then.
Does this contradict the comment you're replying to, somehow, or are you trying to prove their point?
It is not like the money is in his bank account.
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.
Of course he took the money from someone else.
Is your theory that he dug it out of the ground with a shovel or something?
That must be why there is exactly as much wealth now as there was in the year 600. We've all just been stealing it back and forth.
Thank you, I never thought debating economics on hacker news of all places would be the equivalent of discussing orbital mechanics with flat earthers.
I have a degree in economics and wrote my economics thesis on the application of complex adaptive systems to economic theory. I'm still quite attached to economic analysis, it's even the story behind my user name.
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?
Is the general public happy? Who cares, it is not the job of the government to ensure happiness but rights.
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.
Yes, if you're the kind of person who just kind of thinks that Elon's stuff is really really cool, then that's fine. I have no reason to think your point of view is insincere. I have quite a few good friends who share it with you. And I strongly believe in your right to express it and to vote based on it.
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 don’t like it because it’s Elon (I literally have been an active litigation with him for years lol)
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 better today for the average person than it has been for 99% of humans in 99% of history.
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.
What?!
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.
> 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.
Only as a reminder and a data point, homelessness rises every year, too. It's at record highs. (Caveat: homelessness data is difficult to calculate.)
https://endhomelessness.org/state-of-homelessness/
So we are possibly having more record highs in wealth, and more record lows.
> Also, I go to Detroit about once a year.
Show me a plane ticket stub or gtfo
It's curious to me that the message board run by arguably the most significant capitalist group in tech seems to hate capitalism and tech
First of all, it doesn't. The Silicon Valley market fundamentalist, future worshipping contingency is still very much alive and well here.
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.
His money is tied to his equity. The equity itself is created by typing a number into a computer - it's not taken from anybody. The equity represents the value that the company has created
Nah. We are talking about people who started businesses that are then valued at $1bn.
How about we set a maximum wage instead of a minimum wage? But it's not a set number. It is a maximum multiple of the lowest paid employee at a company? 10x should do it. If the CEO wants a million each year then the lowest paid employee still gets 100k. I'm trying to think of why this wouldn't work.
Probably won't work because the ultra-wealthy don't get ultra-wealthy by earning wages.
The only reason it doesn't is the greed of folks who become billionaires.
> But those founders be content with merely making a hundred million?
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.
This is conflating businesses that solve billion dollar problems with people who individually contribute so much to a business that they solved the billion dollar problem all on their own. The latter is probably possible, but it's not necessarily the case that all billionaires and up today were such individuals.
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.
They can continue growing the business while giving other employees a larger share of the asset. One person doesn’t create a billion dollar company, dozens or thousands do. After founding, other people who don’t become billionaires work similarly hard and are similarly smart as the founder. This is why people dispute “earning” a billion dollars.
You don't have a solution unless you can propose a way this gets legislated and executed. No hand waving. How specifically does this work? Suppose it is day one of my shares being worth more than 100m. What happens?
I didn’t say I did have a solution :). There’s value on agreeing or disagreeing that a problem exists without needing a solution. Dismissing a problem based on the viability of a solution is a strange fallacy.
You've asked this about 10 times in this thread, I've provided a very straightforward manner elsewhere as a reply to you and am eagerly looking forward on what you come up with to claim that it's impossible.
> I am eagerly looking forward on what you come up with to claim that it's impossible.
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.
My latest reply to you was "Yes.". Might want to feed the thread to chatgpt and ask it if that's "not willing to engage in a discussion in good faith".
It's pretty easy.
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.
The founders already have the equity, they aren't receiving more on an ongoing basis.
We’re not talking about founders. We’re talking about executives.
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.
Why are we not talking about founders? They are the most likely to have obscene wealth.
This...100%
My old startup got bought out and while I can't know if the CEO became a billionaire, why do I care if he did? I made out with a shit ton of money so what? Why are people so jealous of other people? Of all industries, tech is probably the most likely to share... I mean look at spacex where even janitors and cafe workers were given equity, whereas most companies would contract that out
I’m not jealous or losing any sleep over this. But it’s worth evaluating in our quest for a more perfect world. Something “feels unjust” about the current wealth inequality. Maybe it’s the best possible situation, but maybe not.
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.
Feels fine to me. I agree we need to create a world in which everyone's basic material needs are met but given America's history I think we have probably the ones with the system that'll get us closest to that ideal.
Nobody is jealous. They are pissed that excessively wealthy people can pay their way to success and influence the US government, for their continued personal gain. It’s about fairness and democracy, not luxury.
Taxes. So insane.
> it's possible for bright, motivated founders to create startups that your kids can work in, but those founders could be content with merely making a hundred million dollars?
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.
This is why the guillotine will either be taxes or blades. It's either Bernie or Luigi. There is a sizable segment of the population that just doesn't have any empathy for society at large. "There should never be a cap to my selfishness."
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.
> This is why the guillotine will either be taxes or blades
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.
"They don’t."
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 many times he fears being taken out in a public setting
Elon has said lots of things. His behavior, in this regard, reflects limited concern.
There is, in theory, a type of fear that makes someone comply and obey and do what you want. There's another type of fear that just makes someone hate
I don't know about this. Pre-Trump I would have agreed with you.
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.
> don't think we'd miss them if they were gone
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.
LOL. I realize this isn't 4chan from 2000s- but I can't tell if you are arguing that Luigi messed up by committing murder, or he messed up by offing the wrong guy.
That's hilarious. I guess. Maybe not?
> if you are arguing that Luigi messed up by committing murder, or he messed up by offing the wrong guy
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.
What makes you think there will actually be a guillotine? This isn't the French Revolution era.
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 and Luigi are hapless
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.
Surely this would just create an industry of ways to dodge the “$100m tax”.
Just waiting for my company’s top 10 shareholders to be anonymous entities owned by other companies based in the Cayman Islands.
The rich being willing to cheat doesn't mean we should just give up and let them consume all surplus value in the system, until people are literally working 3 jobs for rent and food.
UK companies are forced to list beneficial owners, in order to cut through these kinds of shenanigans. It did take decades to get this change implemented because capital was deeply opposed to it. For some reason, I'm sure it's not because they want to avoid paying taxes like the little people.
Let's give it a try and see. Maybe better things ARE possible
There is an alternative: 1) limit how much descendants can inherit. Allow them only a maximum amount of let's say: 10 million and make sure that either the founder finds a way to redistribute his/her wealth to the rest of the world, or make the government find ways of redistributing this money. 2) make it mandatory for corporations to share their wealth (income) with the employees -- as an example make it mandatory to redistribute 50% of the income generated to the employees working for the company rather than paying CEOs insane amounts of money to return 'shareholder value'. The whole motto of maximising shareholder value has poisoned capitalism: the goal of a company should not be to become a cancerous growth -- but to serve as a net good for humanity. 3) seal the tax loopholes that make it easy for the rich to avoid paying taxes. There is no reason why the poor and middle class pay a disproportionate amount in taxes compared to the rich.
The primary issue with this is the way shares and equity work. Elon Musk is a trillionaire on paper. He pays himself famously little.
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.
Just don't step-up cost basis at death and you solve the problem. Elon's fine, we can wait until he dies and his heirs sell their shares.
1. End step-up cost basis at death 2. Tax or end lending against portfolios
Seems like a solved problem to me.
So what I'm gathering is the only way they're rich is because they can borrow against these monopoly-level valuations. Actual liquidity makes them essentially another joe schmoe. So people in the finance sector successfully just "made up more money?"
> He can borrow against it which gets around taxes and that should probably be addressed
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.)
Who is it that implements the rights around ownership? Who is it that will (possibly literally) go to war to defend this right? Maybe he should pay a bit of tax on this right since he expects others to defend it.
>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.
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.
I understand it perfectly fine and I'm still supportive of taxing and regulating billionaires. I just don't see why it would be an issue. Private credit loans now commonly feature payment-in-kind provisions, I see no reason why the tax office can't do the same thing for situations where it knows the payee would likely have insufficient liquidity.
> that is still so much money that said founder and their family and very likely their descendants can live in extreme luxury for the rest of their lives even if they stop working right then.
Professional athletes and lottery winners prove otherwise.
I don't understand why people argue for a limit on wealth - the line of reasoning, when reasoned out, concludes with a majority of people having the exact same amount of wealth.
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
Is this not an exemplar of the slippery slope fallacy?
no, it's not. It's math. If you make a rule that you lower the person at the top of the pile, over time, there will be nobody left to lower - everybody will be at the top of the pile.
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.
> everybody will be at the top of the pile.
Why is that a bad thing? Or will it exemplify some other non-financial inferior trait of the person which might be existentially 'scary?'
I think the most chronic misunderstanding in the "billionaire" rhetoric is that billionaires are in it for money.
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.
I've known and spent time with quite a few billionaires personally.
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.
This is missing the forest for the trees on the level of "I have spent time around photographers, and let me tell you, they are obsessed with lenses to the point that it defines their existence".
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.
I'm not sure if this is a straw man or what.
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 discovers a gorilla with a pile of bananas several thousand feet tall.
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.
> The billionaire gorilla is laser focused on generating bananas
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.
Perhaps it was my mistake to rely on the colloquial meaning of "in it for the money".
What could possibly be the non-colloquial meaning of the phrase? It's a colloquial expression.
If they’re not in it for the money, they’ll be happy to pay more tax
Taxes are money that they lose control of.
There is a reason Bill Gates didn't just write the IRS a check for $175B and created the Gates foundation instead.
That's kind of the opposite of your original claim then.
They're in it for the money as it allows them to exert control. That's still being in it for the money.
They are in it for manually appreciating their own assets, which has the intrinsic effect of generating wealth.
A better way to frame it that doesn't hinge on the colloquial vs literal meaning of "in it for the money".
Okay, so they are in it to grow their assets, so they can leverage them in their life in this world. And those assets probably get evaluated or assessed at some point, and get assigned some numerical value. And the unit of measurement used for that evaluation may be referencing something like a currency, that other people can understand for its use as a medium of exchange. I see that is very different than money.
I think the deeper issue is a chronic misunderstanding of what wealth is. Most people engage with wealth in the form of usable goods and services. A banana is wealth. A house is wealth. A dollar in my bank account or a share I own is, at the margin, entirely fungible into things I can consume, so they aren't meaningfully different.
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.
1T dollars allows you to corner the best contractors, maybe most of them, for your own projects while houses remain unbuilt.
1. You think Amazon has the market of contractors that build houses locked down?
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.
1. The contractors move to where the money is. They will migrate to specialized work that will not benefit those who can’t afford “competitive” prices.
2. You can borrow 1T dollars in cash, effectively maxing out what the physical world will allow you to spend it on.
You can borrow 1T in cash? From whom?
One of the problems is that rather than billionaires being it for money, they’re in it for money. They don’t lack for money to live, sure, but they do want more money for the power it provides.
One thing I'm gathering from reading this thread is that the 'spending money' is different than the 'power money.' The 'power money' may not actually exist as it's tied up in valuations. If your company is the 'power money' generator, then of course you'll need to work more, since you're in it to be more powerful
bear in mind, elon musk now has the wealth of 10k "100 millionaires" - we truly lack comprehension of how wealthy the wealthy have gotten.
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what are you talking about????????? 100 million is a fortune, and only people in the SF bubble could even consider that a drop that is pissed into the wind. I would say that you need to take a serious step back and actually contemplate life around you. 100 million is a fortune, and no one actually NEED that much money, if they do, then they have lost touch with reality.
In California that's only 100 homes. That's what's normal for us. Increased market efficiency should actually be lowering taxes, not increasing them just to make you feel good about yourself.
It's normal for someone to want 100 homes?
Elon spent less than that to fund SpaceX and Tesla which are now bringing in money from abroad and therefore paying a lot more in taxes than whatever you would have collected from that 100 million. Now you can be a commie and seize more or of it to fund your healthcare or whatever but that person that is capable of earning 100 million will simply exit your tax jurisdiction and then you'll be poor. See Europe for the example.
> Elon spent less than that to fund SpaceX and Tesla...
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?
It's not enough to build a data center these days. Or even run the government for a day these days it seems. Or are you saying salaries need to come down?
The amount it costs to build a datacenter or run the government for a day is an unimaginable level of personal wealth to virtually every person on the planet.
My own wealth now would be unimaginable to myself when I lived in the USSR. Maybe don't look at the bottom for what should be. There's never any imagination there. I know better than most.
> Maybe don't look at the bottom for what should be.
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?
Enough is not for you to define. Or anyone. Please internalize that. It's part of something called freedom.
> Enough is not for you to define. Or anyone.
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.
> "You might look at history for how the "let them eat cake" approach goes."
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.
It went badly for everyone, including the people hoarding all the cake.
Few invoking the French Revolution think it'd be good. I'd just like to avoid a repeat.
A 21st century repeat would accomplish even less. Global air travel is effortless and moving wealth across borders is done electronically.
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This would sting more if the poster posting it thought the Census hadn’t heard of retirement accounts.
The average person in my area makes like 250-350k between two professionals being a couple. 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. They have 1 million in those accounts within 10 years and 3 million by the time they are in their 50s. That 40k per year you keep citing at that point is less than 2%. None of these people will vote for higher taxes and they keep winning elections. This isn't France and you're not gonna do shit.
> The average person in my area makes like 250-350k between two professionals being a couple.
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.
You don't understand how incomes and the census data even works. When you set aside 401k and IRA money it doesn't show up as income. It actually lowers your taxable income for that year so instead of seeing 180k earned you might instead have 150k earned. It's what the IRS calls "tax deferred" which means the money is sitting in an account you own and contributes to your net worth but it's pre-income-tax money. 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. Income basically tells you nothing and it's a dumb statistic to cite.
Someone doesn't understand it, but it's not me.
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.
No one is revolting over even 80k. It's actually funny you would even suggest it. Good luck. I am not rooting for you.
> No one is revolting over even 80k.
Define median for me?
Yeah, sure, Elon will leave US if he is taxed. Where will he go? EU - even higher taxes. Russia? China? Elon cannot even cross the street in those countries without Putin’s/Xi Ping’s approval.
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.
You misunderstand. He never would have done it here in the first place. And we would all be poorer for it. Whether he would have been successful elsewhere or not is entirely irrelevant. He could have retired like any one of us normies would have.
Why did he pick one of the highest tax jurisdictions in the country to do it "in the first place", then?
Taxes in California are quite low. That's why I moved here and purchased property.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-income-tax-ra...
> 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?
> Am I missing something?
Yes. Literally an entire lifetime of context.
I'm not sure any amount of context is going to make your assertions that average Americans can put $140k in savings annually, that the Census doesn't account for pre-tax income, that Musk moved to CA for its low taxes etc. make any sense.
Don’t feed the trolls.
Market efficiency as most people in the US mean requires the presence of things like roads in decent condition and regulation of RF spectrum use. Both of those are funded via taxes. Reasonable tax rates and uses of tax revenue are required for most non-trivial-sized markets to function efficiently.
Who is going to cap how much a company is allowed to be worth? Or how much of the company you start you are allowed to own? Why should anyone have the power to do that? That is a far more evil power than any billionaire has.
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We are. All of us. If enough of us agree, we can make any rule we want.
So "enough of us" can take anything by forcing the asset to be valued at an artificially high value, force them to sell it for taxes, and then reduce the price down again to keep it ourselves?
Yep. That’s how democracy and law work.
Mob rule is not something to celebrate.
How do you, personally, distinguish between democracy and mob rule?
In the extreme there is no distinction. This is why the US and almost every other democracy are not direct democracies.
Things he wants = democracy
Things he doesn’t want = mob rule
No, it's called rule OF law. Not rule BY law. We create a law, like property rights, and we work within that framework. We don't suddenly decide that property rights don't matter any more because someone happens to have stuff we particularly want to take. That's how dictatorships work.
It would seem quite an essential liberty for a democratic polity to be able to impose this thing called "taxes". I suppose it's up to you to decide whether that is compatible with the rule of law and property rights.
We already have taxes, the vast majority of which are paid by the wealthy. Taxes are not a cap on allowable net worth. That is a different thing altogether. That is economic suicide.
Most of the rah rah billionaires shouldn't be allowed people are just proposing a wealth tax from what I've been told. If I'm wrong I'm open to hearing about it.
Wealth taxes are also economic suicide but most of the "rah rah billionaires shouldn't be allowed" people seem to have absolutely no idea how anything works and think billionaires have billions of dollars sitting in their checking accounts and they could easily write an "end homelessness" check but just don't because they're mean.
pg has an essay addressing exactly that: https://paulgraham.com/inequality.html
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.
I don't understand. Just because one person can't own 100 million doesn't mean an investment firm can't make a 100 million dollar investment and make returns on it. Those are 2 different things. The firm is managing the money of multiple people.
And when one of those people breaks $100m, does the excess money go to the firm, or to taxes? Or are you saying that a company can have unlimited money, as long as the shareholders don’t extract more than $100m over the course of their lifetime?
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.
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
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."
I appreciate the response.
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.)
You miss the point.
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.
Just because people disagree with you does not mean "narrow reading".
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.
Huh? Why do you require billionaires for your kids? There are so many alternatives
lol the next generation won’t be working in startups or anywhere else, all we have now is to hope and pray that we get a nice corner of the human zoo
Never thought I'd see "think of the children" as an excuse to requiring billionaires but HN will always find a way to surprise you.
I would want my kids to be happy. Who gives a shit about what job they have.
People are generally happier when they are not starving to death and capitalism is really good at helping people not starve to death.
Every global economic statistic backs this up
Capitalism without regulation is a great way to grind large portions of the population to dust, and enrich a small number of capital owners.
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.
Ok
The worlds is grim because billionaires have a large part of the cake and the rest has to fight over the crumbs.
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.
> The worlds is grim because billionaires have a large part of the cake and the rest has to fight over the crumbs.
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.
Most people are only able to vote for candidates that are chosen and campaigned by the monied interests. We can blame the people for not seeing how the system works sooner… but really that’s not who is acting out of line…
Just look at the wealth distribution.
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
>- Wealth is not a zero-sum game
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.
I think your explanation of inflation is a little simplistic. It appears that governments can print some amount of money, relative to total supply and gdp, without causing inflation. On the first level, thats because some money is destroyed every year (or buried under mattresses). On a second level, its because they actually target some small amount of inflation, to avoid forementioned mattress-hoarding). However, even beyond that, the amount they need to print to achieve the same level of inflation can be vastly different depending on circumstance and country. That is usually relating to demand for money, which isn't fixed (but also to some degree by trust in government by the financial system). Inflation can also heavily based on vibes - events like ukraine war and covid can become self-fulfilling prophecies, with business leaders expecting inflation, so they raise their prices to get ahead of it. Everyone independently does this, and pat themselves on the back for their powers of prediction as they observe prices rise.
> I've got kids, I want people creating start ups they can work in, the alternative is too grim.
got some bad news for ya pal
Both political parties and all 'sides' in America fundamentally agree on degrowth. The only distinction is the Idiocracy version or the ivory tower one
> the alternative is too grim
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.
Just because you managed to get a billion dollars of value attributed to your name does not mean that you know how to earn a billion dollars or that you have the first worthwhile clue to share to anyone else how they should do it. It's the blind trap of the successful. They lose situational awareness and can no longer accurately map their actions onto the world they actually live in.
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.