This is so stupid.
You can’t “earn” a billion dollars doing the thing that the vast majority of people do for money, which is selling your labor.
No one can argue with this.
We all understand that if people who own a lot of capital give a lot of it to you, you can grow that capital into more than a billion dollars.
Most people do not have access to the kind of capital required to do this. Most people never will. The avenues open to the vast majority of people on Earth cannot lead to becoming a billionaire.
Paul Graham knows this, and he is being deliberately obtuse.
“All you have to do is have a good enough idea and someone will fund it!”
This is a myth. To access capital, in Silicon Valley and anywhere else, you have to engage in elaborate court protocol and social climbing. You have to have the right kind of idea, in a niche that is interesting among the capital-owning class.
Look at what’s getting funded in Silicon Valley right now. Nobody wants any of this AI shit. There is no issue in America that is more unifying across all of our usual dividing lines than opposition to AI.
It’s getting funded because AI is interesting in the social universe of people with billions of dollars to invest.