> Surely for these companies, if the founders get to several million or tens of million in revenue without hiring any more people, those people have successfully become millionaires and we can credit them as such, right? Or do you simply think this is impossible?
It seems disingenuous to imply that this is what I meant.
If you can scale a startup to a billion dollar valuation on your own, that's a unique example - and I'd be surprised if anyone is against that. I actually am not sure there are any real examples of this happening, though.
The point is that there's a ceiling to how much wealth a person can create on their own. Corporate ownership structures are the only thing that allow for a person to reach hundreds of billions of dollars.
I know one of the common follow up questions is "well what is the exact number that someone should be allowed to make?" And plainly: there isn't one. That's not what these discussions are ever about. The discussion is really about attribution of credit - and that the ownership class disproportionately benefits for things that they could not have built on their own.
Suppose you own a thing. And it becomes extremely profitable to own. And so you're able to pay people extremely generously to help maintain the thing. So everybody you pay feels like they're getting a good deal by working for you.
And the thing you own becomes so valuable it's worth a billion dollars.
You are now a billionaire. But through your telling, you don't deserve it, and that might be right. We didn't discuss how this amazing thing came into existence, and if it just magicked into being then sure, you don't deserve it.
But suppose that without you, this thing never existed. How should credit be distributed?
Now there are lots of problems here and there are lots of ways to criticize startups and many of them are legitimate. Oftentimes companies do exploit their employees, or use exploitative contracts, or are exploiting some resource that we don't like them exploiting. But almost every conversation like this implies that this is the only way, that it's theoretically impossible for a company to do things legitimately. And honestly, that's often fair because corporations often become extremely extractive / exploitative (see the new book by Eric Ries if you need examples and counterexamples)
But I would like it if everybody could correctly realize: the problem isn't making a billion dollars. It's how we do it, and it's the incentives that we place on companies for continued growth. If you're a politician you should work to fix _that_, not the existence of billionaires.
One thing I'd like to pick at:
> And so you're able to pay people extremely generously to help maintain the thing.
This is optional, and requires the owner to be generous. It is more common for people to not be paid generously. And that matters because these businesses literally cannot achieve their valuations without the employees. Going back to the 1-person, 1-billion startup valuation - there are 0 examples that I can find. What does that tell you? That the maximum amount of wealth an individual can create, in today's dollars, is somewhere less than 1-billion.
I'll try to rephrase my stance: It's not that being a billionaire is bad - it's that all of the billionaires we have believe that they did it themselves. PG basically confirms this in his post. The ownership class thinks they are deserving because no matter how many employees they have, they view all the wealth as something they created by themselves. That disconnect is in my opinion, extremely bad for society.
It's also typical to see delusions of grandeur that lead a lot of these ultra wealthy people into thinking they are working 1000x as hard as everyone else. Elon Musk regularly claims to work 16 hour days, 7 days a week. But somehow he also has enough time to play diablo and path of exile 20-40 hours a week, spend multiple hours a week with each of his ~20 kids, tweet constantly, etc. These aren't people that view the world for what it really is, because the level of wealth they've obtained leads them to believe they have super powers. As a society we can't have rational conversations with people that think this way.