She meant impossible in that one doesn't earn a billion dollars through work alone. The only way to get there is to set up a structure that extracts a billion dollars from a market (usually by building a structure that's more efficient but also generates externalities that are not borne by the person getting the billion dollars).
pg's reading of it is so blunt and misrepresentative that I'm nervous about what kind of content he's consuming.
PG's net worth is between 2.5 and 10 billion... so, I wouldn't take him seriously. Normal people (like the majority ones around here) won't ever have the opportunities/skills/luck all combined at a given point in time to generate billions. So any advice from his side regarding money is simply misleading.
Your phrase “extract” betrays a fundamental disagreement with what Paul is saying. (Externalities does so again) It assumes a zero-sum game where the job is to shift money from one person to another. Value, and thus money/wealth can be created. Literally.
You are saying, in different words, that no one can do it “honestly”. He is saying one can.
Yes, and the art of this game is to extract value which you did not create. It may or may not come alongside creating value. Uber creates value in the form of an app marketplace for taxis, but it also pushes taxi wages down below the sustainability line without pushing prices down that far, and pockets the difference for itself. Apple made a cool phone that it sells for a high but fair price, but it also takes 30% of everything you buy with that phone, just because it can.
Accepting money from willing customers, who are paying you for access to some technology you created that they find valuable, is not theft. Quite the opposite, it's almost always two very happy parties engaging in an exchange that each of them finds advantageous.
You're overlooking that net new value was created in both of the scenarios. Don't you have any idea how many family horse businesses went under with the invention of the car? How many artisans wound up broke post-industrialization? We can both agree that we'd all be much much poorer in the world where those things didn't happen. NVidia makes a huge margin on the things they sell. Is that theft?
The world is not zero sum, AND in practice most business models are not entirely value creation or rent seeking, but a mix of both.
Ideally a new business creates more value than it simply takes out of an existing marketplace.
I think one can argue a lot of 2010s app-ification, Uber-of-X, or what I called "re-intermediation" was more than 50% rent seeking.
The business model of being willing to lose billions selling $1 of goods for 80cents (before even talking CapEx) until your competitors fold (and then raise prices) is the kind of thing we used to regulate against.
At some point our regulation shifted towards a more short term "if it makes consumer prices lower right now its OK".
Based on this article at least, he is not disagreeing with those claims, he is not even acknowledging they exist.
The original claim, as I understand it, is basically this: you can’t be an honest actor in a dishonest system.
And it’s not even necessary to claim that billionaires did something uniquely wrong to become billionaires. It’s just that their share of the exploitation is so, so, so much bigger.
But he seems wildly oblivious to the fact that there even is an argument to be had here, which there emphatically is.
Reasonable people can disagree as to the nature/extent -- or even the existence of -- exploitation, but this guy absolutely has impermissibly strong blinders on, rendering most of this article a waste.
No one is arguing that such a thing as wealth creation doesn't exist. The question is about who or what creates it.
Which is a topic of intense discussion in economics over the last few hundred years, BTW, and the discussion here so far has shockingly few references to those.
It's racism that fuels this comparison with value. I'm living in a yurt and would gladly trade it for a mud hut. Humans are currently threatening most life (including our own species) on the surface with extinction in multiple ways. That's not value and it is an inevitable conclusion to any form of binary thinking at scale. That includes the thinking that says "this way of life has more value than that way of life." We're living in the curse of the Greeks, whereby we've grown away from connection with our environments in the same ways they did by pedestaling their ways, including a form of logic that's too constrained to model reality.
You can have a system that generally isn't one of zero sum games that was that at the same time can become one when it becomes extremely unbalanced (e.g. when billionaires exist).
1. Extracting from the market or the economy. It seems like (correct me if I'm wrong) this is what you're reading it as? Here you're generally exploiting what private equity calls "pricing power" or what economists call "enclosures" (or "rent-seeking") so inelastic demand (eg housing) or market protection (eg making municipal broadband illegal); and
2. Extracting from labor. This is the basis of the labor theory of value [1].
The point of comments like AOC's is mostly the second one, which is to say that you only become a billionaire by extracting it from your workers. And yes, this is a fundamental disagreement with many people. Some will say that the startup founder who makes a billion dollars deserves it by taking the risk or being the leader or however you want to frame it.
The counterargument is that that value simply wouldn't exist if it wasn't for those workers and their work. Even Instagram, which famously had only 13 employees when acquired for $1 billion, still needed those workers. It would've been nothing without them.
Take Google as another example. The profit per employee has famously been (at times) over $1 million per year.
As the Wikipedia article states, the labour theory of value (LTV) was replaced by the theory of marginal utility in mainstream economics due to its major inconsistencies.
> Take Google as another example. The profit per employee has famously been (at times) over $1 million per year.
So, are you saying that the employees were exploited in some way?
I could give you examples of how value is created without any work at all.
Money is not a representation of value. It is a representation of desire. I agree that, in principle, an economy does not have to be set up as a zero sum game, and at smaller scales (many of us don't realize that 1 billion is relatively small for global scale economics), it really doesn't have to be.
I agree that value can be created. But value doesn't run this economy, desire does. And sometimes desire runs totally counter to what is _actually_ valuable.
Not to mention that, especially in a fiat environment where currency is printed out of thin air, it is literally a zero-sum game by definition. When the printer winds up, the bankers win big at everyone elses expense; setting the tone for the entire market. Anecdotal success stories of hard working, honest billionaires is a nice distraction, but that's all it is.
The substantive reality of the status quo is one of unprecedented levels of extraction, and as we continue down this AI power consildation story, that will be harder and harder to deny as we go forward. If you happen to win big as an outlier, more power to you, but the article even admits to the rarity of this story implicity. 20 years. thousands of companies. 30 billionaires.
Even if every single one of those people are honest to goodness saints, that's only slightly better odds, perhaps, than winning the lottery.
I don't think that was the point, you can add those to the physical goods list as well, as well as many other human services (education, cutting hair, open air games, etc).
The point was that the real money comes from finance games, like the stock market, forex trading, etc - things of much more dubious value when you actually look at them objectively.
There is a finite amount of land on earth, and a finite amount of most natural resources. We currently have no indication we will EVER develop faster than light technology.
Any discussion not grounded in those facts is a dishonest discussion. It is a zero sum game until those externalities change because ultimately our species is built upon extraction resources to produce wealth. It IS a zero sum game until you or someone else invents a means of solving the first order problems.
I think there are many arguments against AOC's comments, but I agree that PG here is misrepresenting her point.
I don't think anyone reading PG's blog is clueless about the power of compounding or the difference between salary and wealth through asset growth.
Her point is essentially whether the entire capital system is "fair." And to be fair to PG I don't think AOC articulated a particularly strong point either.
pg is or was the owner of a very influential venture capital fund, that created projects such as Uber and AirBNB. He knows all about setting up structures to extract value, and he also knows which framing makes people more sympathetic instead of angry.
The sad part about it, and one that has become a bit of a theme with his postings, is that pg stopped being intellectually honest in his online writings at some point over the last two decades.
His post here in particular violates the fundamental principles of HN in that he does not engage with the argument at all.
The argument isn't that it's impossible to become a billionaire legally, the argument is that it's impossible to become a billionaire in a moral way, though that's more of a problem of the system than it is necessarily one at the individual level. A just and moral system would assign the value being created in such a way that becoming a billionaire would be essentially impossible.
Yet pg never even acknowledged the possibility that that might have been the argument.
Why does building a successful business necessitate generating economic externalities? Many do, and that should be prevented, but many also don’t. And to say that those externalities are responsible for a majority of the business’s growth in all cases is just false.
I'm genuinely struggling to think of a sector of billion dollar business that doesn't rely heavily on externalized costs. I'm not trying to be difficult, but I can't come up with any.
I wonder what she would say about professional athletes. Some of the top stars have made near a billion dollars in lifetime wages, as unionized employees. Hard for me to see who the sports stars are exploiting to get their wealth.
Of course she wasn't talking about athletes (or artists, etc), she was implicitly talking about the business / tech world. I guess she should have been explicit about it so people don't come out with arguments like this.
I think this is super interesting (because the answer is not at all obvious to me): What do you mean by "through work alone"? Can it only be work if I can map a human hour cleanly onto someone paying an invoice for that hour?
Part of it is work, yes. But consider. How much is your take home as a fund manager with 100M AUM? How much is your take home with 10B AUM? The work is the same, yet if the take home is different, you've proven that your income is not in fact earned through work in a moral sense.
What do you mean “extracted”? The wealth is sitting there in his 401(k) being risked through (highly) fractional ownership of various publicly traded business ventures.
The common argument would be that, unless you set it up as a co-op/full profit share or never hire employees, you're extracting value (exploiting) from what your employees' labor earned the company.
Missing from both sides of this argument, IMHO, is BATNA.[0]
So if one finds a way to do it and not hire people they actually earned the money by that definition? We presume that people at large would be ready say "Oh yeah, in that case: You earned that billion dollars for sure, nothing wrong with any of that, go you"?
Whereas: If they hire a single employee to help with, idk, responding to support tickets that would get them into "well maybe you did not earn it"-territory?
Because if that is the depiction we are going with: I have my doubts.
Folks have been arguing about this forever. Both sides - community-focused and individual-focused -- have reasonable points on the ethics and morals of what they claim. Both sides want claim to a split of the pie produced by the efforts of individuals.
Just like you're mentioning Obama's lambasted "you didn't build that" comments -- his point was completely valid, in that the individual profiteers didn't build the roads their products ship on, the energy infrastructure their cloud providers consume to host their digital footprint and logistics, etc. etc. But people pay for a large part of what they DO consume -- the cases where they don't are what we squirrelly and bookish economists call "externalities" (costs of production gotten too cheap/free). Trying to correct for every externality is a maddening and endogenous exercise in navel gazing -- but huge and easily seen externalities are not crazy to want to address (e.g., Erin Brokovich, pollution, etc.).
In your example of someone getting hired to field support tickets -- if that person weren't hired, the founders would spend all their time chasing down those tickets. So did the founder earn the cash, or did both people earn the cash despite one of the jobs being less favorable? If an egalitarian share is unwarranted, what is a reasonably fair trade? Why is an egalitarian share unwarranted? Etc.
The core question embedded in all these arguments are - what is a fair tax on the economy? If a government's policy encourages large economic growth for everyone, then perhaps it is good to fund it via tax with all the associated tradeoffs like crowding out, marginal decisions impacted, and so on. Getting it right looks like Scandinavia. Getting it wrong looks like Cuba / final days of the USSR. Ignoring it (on both sides of the aisle) looks like Venezuela and Argentina.
But there is no doubt that without the people who produce there would be no taxes, and a 100% tax would push everyone away from doing anything. This is why the way-too-simplistic Laffer curve argument seemed compelling in the 80s -- "unshackle the economy by lowering taxes."
I haven't kept up with pg (fairly or unfairly) since some of the techbrokings adopted Yarvinism as a goal, so I have no idea what he has said recently.
I never understood why Joel Spolsky stopped blogging. His reason was basically (paraphrasing) that his business grew too big and mature for him to keep writing. It sounded nonsense to me by the time.
And now comparing PG's writing today and what he wrote 10~15 years ago, I finally get what Joel means.
Agreed, what a disappointment of an essay, encouraging a growth at all costs mindset and pretending that this growth doesn't involve/encourage bad side effects.
And a lot of these structures either involves a percentage cut or a security of some kind. And it's not new, it's copied.
His entire essay is just based on a purposeful misreading of the opposing point. It's a straw man. And if you look at his history it's obviously intentional and part of his usual style of argument.
The actual opposing argument is that it's impossible to create a billion dollar enterprise without a group effort, and for one person to end up with a billion dollars necessarily means that they made decisions within that enterprise that resulted in a lopsided allocation of resources at the end.
Period. That's it, and it's inarguable.
Every single aspect of the system is arbitrary and is a policy decision made by society. The basic building block, the limited liability joint stock company as a legal concept with some form of independent rights and entity status is arbitrary. Every lever, every part of the system, is created by people making decisions about how society is organized.
The people he is arguing with are basically saying "we want the system structured differently because this one is producing too much concentrated wealth." That's a political choice and an eminently reasonable one.
So if it's that simple, why would he feel a need to straw man instead of just addressing the actual argument? Well because he'd lose. The reality is is most people agree with this assessment of society and want it to change.
And by the way the question of how resources get split between labor and capital is the oldest and most central political problem in human history. To adopt a condescending tone while pretending to be ignorant of stuff you learn in the first couple weeks of any real study of politics or history, betrays the deception inherent in his essay.
> it's impossible to create a billion dollar enterprise without a group effort
George Lucas made a movie with a (small) group effort. But what made a billion dollars is his Star Wars universe which is almost entirely his creation.
It literally creates wealth for other people. If my toy sells $10,000 without Star Wars and $100,000 with it, did I participate in making George’s billion, or am I benefiting from it?
> means that they made decisions within that enterprise that resulted in a lopsided allocation of resources at the end.
What do you mean? Every good and service involves many people, but the degree to which they participate in its creation and risk vary. For example, a Farmer may create a more efficient way to grow food. Is the grocery store now entitled to a piece of the reward? They didn’t change anything, all of the improvement is the farmer side.
The bit about Lucas is obviously not true. The universe he envisioned does not sell itself, it was marketed, developed, painted and modeled, added to, kept fresh etc for many many years by a huge army of people. If the only Star Wars media that existed were the original film, or even the original trilogy, it would sell relatively little by now.
So if you were to assign value to the work to make a new Star Wars toy would you it’s (total value of Stat wars) * (number of people who have ever worked on Star Wars) / (number of people who worked on the toy)?
That’s absurd. Obviously they are creating incremental wealth and their particular toy didn’t make or break billions.
No, I'm saying that you can't attribute any significant percent of the value of a Star Wars toy sold today to George Lucas. If Star Wars had not continued after the 1980 films, these toys would not keep selling so much today.
The post I replied to allocated all of the monetary value of the Star Wars branding of a toy to George Lucas personally, which I think is obviously wrong.
> George Lucas made a movie with a (small) group effort. But what made a billion dollars is his Star Wars universe which is almost entirely his creation.
If that were actually true, how come we can't predict what the next Star Wars universe will be?
Same for pop songs etc. If it were actually about objective qualities of the creation, and not just luck, the next winners of the lottery would be apparent even before they hit the theaters.
There is null inherent quality in the Star Wars universe causing the billion dollar revenue. If George Lucas wouldn't have been there at the right spot at the right time, the dominant IP would simply have been something different.
If you have kids, you can directly observer what actually happens: The IP owners dump huge amounts of money into merch and product placements everywhere, resulting in them getting in contact with the franchise before they are out of their diapers. My kids came home from daycare roleplaying lightsaber fights without any previous contact with the franchise at our home. The trick is implanting the meme (in the original meaning of the word) into kids' brains before another meme can nest in there.
I addressed that. The movies themselves are not the source of the wealth and yes the original was created by a group so small that theoretically Star Wars wealth could have been divided evenly and they would be billionaires.
If you say the original crew did not do all the labor required to make the franchise grow in the future (obviously true), you are now arguing different people have had incremental impact on creating the wealth, which is kind of the point.
Of course it's arguable. You make it sound like founders perform some jedi mind-trick to take money from others. Here's what actually happens. Investors put in initial money because it's a win-win (they get an expected return, founders get starting capital). Employees join because it's a win-win (they get a salary, health, equity, other perks; founders get a workforce). Customers pay cash because it's a win-win (they get a product or service they want, the business gets money). At no point is someone being held down and forced to hand money to someone else.
Health is not a perk but an inelastic demand: a threat to withhold health is a threat of physical harm, and a negotiation in which one party's physical health is on the line is quantitatively but not qualitatively different from a negotiation held with a gun to that party's head.
One can agree that they would rather see wealth more equitably distributed while also admitting that the current system of private property and capitalism is the most effective at broadly generating wealth.
I understood the phrase as emphasizing the "deserving" implication of the word earn. As in, it is not possible for a human to take actions such that the fair reward is a billion. Or in other words, if you got a billion you got more than it's fair. To emphasize: this does not necessarily mean that the way one became a billionaire is nefarious or evil. It just implies unfairness.
I'm not defending that interpretation, mind you, just saying it's a possible read of the phrase.
You should read that as a self-preservation technique. The eager use of a strawman tells us PG heard AOC's words as an attack against him personally, his business, and his friends.
So the essay is not a reasoned retort but more an emotional self-defense to soothe a bruised ego. It's to assure himself that no -- in fact he did earn his wealth fair and square, and to imply otherwise shows a lack of understanding of how this all works. But I do love this essay because it does show just how emotional and irrational billionaires can be when their wealth and egos are threatened.
So what does you practical utopia look like in real terms. What's the master plan beyond I don't like people making money from what people want? What does that utopia look like in practice.
> So what does you practical utopia look like in real terms.
When you hit a hundred billion in net worth, you get a nice solid gold plaque that says "I won capitalism", you get an attaboy from the UN, and we start taxing the shit out of wealth over that cap.
Adjust periodically for inflation. (Do that for minimum wage while we're at it.)
But these ultra rich people don't have a hundred billion dollars in a bank account, they just own a percent of a company. So what you're really saying is a person isn't allowed to own a certain fraction of a company once it reaches a certain valuation.
It's because while for some people there may be jealousy involved, many more have realized or are now realizing how much power the ultra rich have, and how bad that is for our societies.
Once a company becomes large enough, it becomes so influential in society that control of it must be made more democratic.
I don't think anywhere has figured out quite the right way to go about it yet, but it's clearly the right goal. Some countries require employee representation on the boards of large companies.
But the accounting difference is real. It is virtually impossible to earn a billion dollars. What is possible but still difficult is to create something worth a billion dollars which you can then sell if you choose so.
And to the people criticizing, this is cheating. To them, a billion dollars enterprise is not possible without the exploitation of employees, customers, or at least the environment.
Also, the most important thing to understand about a society is how people gain status, not just money/wealth. If you focus on money, you won't have an explanation for political movements or artistic endeavors.
> A government agency spending $300 million in taxpayer dollars to produce sterilized flies sounds like a dream scenario for a DOGE team looking to cut waste, fraud, and abuse.
> Grocery shoppers could get hit with higher prices if the screwworm cases turn into a full-blown outbreak. That could cost $3 billion across the Southwest, according to a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
Good tax, or bad tax?
Returning to your question, though: Yes, I assert the cost of troubleshooting a "bad tax" may exceed the benefits of having addressed it.
"Look at the pros and cons of each one" is an enormous handwave; I've provided very clear evidence of our inability to do that successfully in a very topical and concrete case.
We have the current inefficient, corrupt, and incompetent government in the US because the anti-tax wealthy class threw an all-out tantrum over even the idea of paying a tiny bit more tax.
You can still collect taxes without taxing people who have already been taxed in the form of needing to exchange a large fraction of their life for the wage.
When capital gains tax is so much lower than income tax, this holds even more true for people who work at the companies being sold for lots of money and make income in wages than the people who own the companies, and that just reinforces the original point
Those taxes are the necessary condition in silly essays like this one from pg. Or why do you think those billionaires miraculously mostly end up in the US and not in countries like Sudan or Peru? I mean if those billionaires would actually be the wealth creators, not depending on society at large, they could become billionaires everywhere, right?
In creative destruction, you can do an accounting sleight of hand by attributing credit for creation while ignoring blame for destruction even though the two are linked.
This is a technology + investing forum and all of us agree that in general creative destruction processes are enormously net positive, but they frequently do kick off a toxic byproduct in the form of said destruction (e.g. Uber and displaced taxi drivers), so there is moral entanglement between creation and destruction. Morally speaking, figuring out how to mitigate this toxic byproduct is part of our remit just as it was part of the remit of earlier industrialists to figure out how not to discharge so much flammable goo into the river that it lit on fire. We neglect this at our peril, because society merely pinches its nose if the toxic byproducts are small, but they are increasingly not small.
One way to take over a network is to start with an alternative front end. We'll see if this works out for AI companies. First you have the AI consult booking.com whenever someone asks it to book a hotel, then you get more and more hotels to directly communicate with the AI company, then you drop booking.com once you have enough.
It’s exactly what I’m building. First I’m building open-source SaaS for every vertical and then leverage that to build a decentralized, interoperable marketplace.
There's no resource destruction involved in displacing taxi drivers. Taxi medallions are a rent-seeking scheme, there's no real scarcity involved. Most other instances of "creative destruction" are like that, the capital simply gets repurposed at negligible social cost and only excess profits disappear.
I will say before Uber was a thing, if I tried to call and schedule a taxi pickup in the city I lived in at the time, if they showed up at all they were at east a half hour late. Missed a flight because of it once. I don’t even like uber, but it is objectively a better service most of the time.
Yeah, anyone who uses taxi drivers as an example of destruction either don't know what they're talking about (because they never experienced it) or they're crying crocodile tears.
I had cab drivers nearly drive off with me hanging off the car in San Francisco, because they were far more concerned with screening my destination than, say, not killing me. If Uber destroyed that industry, it was only a net benefit to society. They created immense value, and the "destruction" was only to eliminate a layer of corrupt parasites who made money by preventing a free market (in this case, the medallion owners, but the entire industry was corrupt from top to bottom).
Not all places have corrupt taxi industries. I think they were always more expensive than Uber (but there's a reason for that, Uber's pricing is not sustainable) but in most places a taxi is just a taxi.
Don't entirely agree that a local Taxi service is necessarily costlier than Uber. In my indian city, Uber and Ola cannot compete (and have been nearly wiped out) because a local Taxi service (that now dominates the market) is very competitively priced and professionally run. They charge their drivers a fixed percentage (unlike Uber or Ola, and lower fees than them) and release their payments timely in a transparent manner. The price per km, and all extra charges (late night fees, overtime driver charges etc., permit fees in case of long distance travel, toll fees etc.) are transparently conveyed to the customer too. And there is no bullshit practice of price gauging through "surge pricing" or "convenience fees" or "platform fees" etc.
Yes, Uber did something enormously creative. But it also did something destructive and we're guilty of an accounting sleight of hand if we focus on one while pretending the other doesn't exist.
We still want to encourage creative destruction to move forward, but paying taxes to clean up the destruction is the very least that the victorious parties can do because the entanglement exists in moral accounting even if it doesn't exist in financial accounting.
Why are the taxi workers more important than, say, the taxi customers? If the companies are providing garbage service, why do I have to care about protecting their workers?
Technology has always displaced workers. And then the society adjusts. Plenty of people will lose their jobs to AI, but most workers will be redeployed elsewhere.
The agricultural revolution displaced farm workers with machines. There was unrest and migration to cities, and eventually that fed the Industrial Revolution and created a working class.
Yeah and it took about 150 years until industrial revolution started to actually benefit the common people and the workers started to have their working conditions improved.
What it took was social democracy and unions and other social movements.
Saying that "it's happened before, it'll be alright" is a bit naive and short-sighted.
Last time inequality cooked up it took a lifetime to go back down. It did so very painfully through capital incineration on a monumental scale: a great depression, where the incineration was metaphorical, and two world wars, where it was very literal. In both cases it was economical and in both cases it fixed the problem but at enormous cost. We should aim to do better.
I mean, maaaaaybe a Jevon's Paradox kicks into play with human labor and replacing people with robots somehow creates even more jobs, but whenever someone says this your immediate response should be: "ok, now put your money where your mouth is and bet on it by strengthening the social safety net."
This assumes sufficient jobs. We have been below replacement jobs for a long time but we made up the difference with Bullshit Jobs. Now we might even be running out of those.
I’ve only read the article, not the full book, but I’m not sure I buy the premise.
Maybe we can’t see what the new post-AI society looks like yet, but I tend to believe society progresses as it evolves.
It doesn’t mean it won’t be rocky for many people, and good social safety nets will make this easier, but I generally don’t think there will be some kind of dystopian future where society runs out of work to do for humans.
> She was getting richer at a stupendously rapid rate. And yet she hadn't been doing anything bad. The reason her startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built. So she could feel from her own experience how wrong that politician was. She wasn't exploiting anyone.
I presume it's a company that just has co-founders then?
Or everyone is getting an equal % of the share? In which case SHE's not getting 93% richer just cause her start up is.
Let's say she has ten employees. They all voluntarily agree to work for her: slavery is illegal, so people work for others on a consensual basis. Both the employer and employee negotiated and consented to a salary or wage schedule for that employee. The employer pays the agreed-upon compensation, and the employee receives it.
If the company makes an unexpectedly large profit, the employer is not obligated to redistribute that to her employees in addition to the already agreed-upon and paid compensation. If the employees think that what they agreed to work for is no longer sufficient, they are welcome to renegotiate their compensation or, if they feel they have been wronged and are being paid less than they are worth, to take their talent to a different employer. After all, everything so far has been consensual. The only thing that would be non-consensual would be obligating the employer to redistribute her profit over and above what had already been negotiated.
This completely negates the fact that due to how the labor market is structured, most people who sell their labour to survive are in a disadvantageous position for the negotiation you are talking about. What you are talking about works well in a basic economics text book but does not translate to the real world.
No it’s a magical startup where it’s just going to be her in a basement doing 100% of the work required for 10 months straight while demand doubles every month.
Lets walk through the math.
If her company is worth $100, and she owns 100% (her wealth starts at $100), and the company grows 93%, then the company has grown to be worth $193 and her share has grown by $93 which is indeed a 93% growth rate for her wealth.
Alternatively, if her company is worth $100, and she owns only 10% (making her wealth $10), and the company grows 93%, then the company has grown to be worth $193 and her share has grown by $9.30 which is still indeed a 93% growth rate for her wealth, which started at $10 and now rises to $19.30.
The pursuit of everlasting growth that pg describes inevitably results in cheating. At a certain point the market reaches a saturation point and if you're capitalising on every possible opportunity to retain your high growth rate, that will include hoarding resources and circumventing consumer protections.
The hoarding resources and circumventing consumer protections is just the start of it.
Eventually it becomes rational to start buying politicians, and subsequently laws. The next obvious avenue is to then control entire government agencies like the FAA or the FCC and just write favorable laws and regulations they don't even have to circumvent.
But even that isn't the end because they're growing too fast, they actually outgrow the law, so breaking it becomes a rational, profit-driven choice. Huge fines? Regulators breathing down your neck? No worries! Just spend more money then has ever been spent in an election to their favored presidential candidate, and then they get to just shut down investigations into themselves!
But even that isn't enough -- soon it becomes a rational business-forward goal to take over the entire government; or even better become the government. First a city, then a state, then a nation. Guess what folks EVEN THAT won't be enough. Not even everything on this entire planet Earth is enough for them; they also want the Moon and Mars and the entire solar system. They will have to become God at some point for this growth to keep up, and that will still be too little for their egos to bear. Something has to give.
Impressed at the commentary here, which correctly points out Paul dodges the entire issue at hand.
Three things can be true:
1. Growing at a rapid rate over long periods of time is hard, doable and rewarding
2. Incentivizing the discovery of these things is good for society.
3. Nonethless there is and should be a limit to wealth acquisition, given moral hazard.
To make a similarly glib counterargument to Paul G:
If it's the founders who earned the same monetary value of the companies they created ("because they're responsible for it"), they should bear the same moral and legal responsibility for the externalities.
So far, only SBF is in jail. Lots more of these companies have broken the law.
Let's throw the founders in jail too - they can keep their money!
Maybe the politicians position is that the whole system is based on cheating and everyone who partakes is acting immorally?
Is it fair that the founder got education and some money to start his company while other people are living on the street or have to care for relatives? If they come from a relatively privileged position and manage to build a company that ends up being successful, did they earn that money?
I don’t think the cheating people criticize is necessarily criminal fraud.
Edit: and the second thing people seem to criticize is that just keeping your company growing often seems to involve some unethical things. Basically every company that’s manufacturing hardware is doing that in Asia under inhumane conditions, so they probably can’t really claim they earned their money and it’s just maths.
If the only viable alternative is that nobody gets to start their business rather than some idealized best case of everyone getting a chance of it, then yes, it's probably fair.
I don’t think the only options are the current way or that nobody is allowed to start companies.
Im not from the US so I’m probably not doing a good job at the devils advocate thing but I could imagine that you just tax the people that start the business so they still get some healthy personal wealth by redistributing the truly extreme wealth back to the workers/society.
There’s probably some motivation problem to grow the company further at some point but maybe you could limit the percentage any individual can earn by holding the company or something like that?
There are models of business which don't assume a handful of people - some of whom don't even do the work - get to keep the profits, and the rest are disposable.
Technically if you look at AOC's statement he mentions
>AOC: “There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned. You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that”
there's some truth there in that PG is talking about capital gains as the owner of a company and AOC is talking about earnings as payment for labour which are different things both in reality and in tax policy and law.
The capital gains can be unfair in that most of them go to founders and VCs and not much to other employees and stakeholders who have contributed as well.
Putting the scale of dollars and the startup world aside, AOC’s comments read that way would suggest a farmer who gets a series of loans from the bank to help him expand his family farm from a $200K sole proprietorship to a $10M sole proprietorship didn’t “earn” it either.
I don’t think a definition of “earn” that excludes cases like that captures the generally understood meaning.
So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars [...] that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way.
What counts as 'doing something bad' and 'cheating' clearly is subjective. I suspect Graham's opinion on the behavior of a Zuckerberg or a Musk would be a little more flattering than mine.
Well there are plenty of massively successful companies that Paul famously said no to investing in, for stylistic and opinionated and not greedy reasons, like Palantir. I'm sure in Paul's opinion they are doing something bad. Maybe not in Gary Tan's opinion. That is to say, not only is this stuff subjective, but it's complicated. Palantir and Flock, their main customer is the government, which complicates the story even further.
Conversely, I suspect the politician is defining that "all things that earn a billion dollars" are in the "bad" category.
LeBron James has, between playing basketball and endorsing things, earned a billion dollars. What bad thing did he do, other than losing the finals a few times?
This then that makes the argument very hard to respond to.
"No I didn't mean this [virtuous example]. I meant the vast majority of [unnamed nefarious actors] which I don't need to elaborate about as their existence is obvious."
Once you say it's just hyperbole and you don't mean it literally, then the only way to prove it is a statistical argument.
"The overwhelmingly share of company founders and companies are bad and don't earn their money." is a big claim that requires more than vibes.
Would anyone take literally the claim that it is impossible to attain a billion dollars without 'doing something bad' or 'cheating'? Someone with $100 billion, who wanted to disprove it, could do so in five minutes, by cutting a $1 billion bonus check to his nanny.
A tremendous amount of advertising towards kids which very explicitly uses tactics to exploit their insecurities and get them to pressure their parents (many whom can’t really afford it) to buy them gratuitously overpriced shoes or other products which the kids don’t actually need at all.
It’s an industry of low-grade exploitation, generating products that people mostly don’t need. It’s bizarre. It fits squarely into the category AOC is trying to define here.
Aren't shoe companies notoriously scummy in regards to human rights? Nike has quite a lengthy controversies section on Wikipedia, and they're where a lot of his money came from.
Yeah, you can choose between two worlds: in the current one, Nike is producing shoes in you don't want to really know circumstances and is paying LeBron ~$40M a year.
In another world, LeBron is still a millionaire, getting a nice $1M a year. The rest, a mere $39M, which in Paul Graham terms is just a couple months from turning into a billion, goes to the hopeless kids actually churning out the god damn shoes.
LeBron did nothing wrong. The system is this corrupt.
I've been able to calculate logarithms for well over 20 years.
That's not the problem.
The problem is even simpler mathematics. Proportions. How much do we give to first employees? How realistic is that John Smith, first salesman of the company is getting 2% and should consider himself lucky, while I, Peter Boss retain most of the company?
We always talk about the dilation of the founders' shares and its relation to the VC portion.
What is the usual proportion of the shares held by the founders and the first 10 or 100 employees?
Is that proportion usually realistic with regards to the effort put in and the risk assumed?
Is that risk usually really that heroic or most of us in the "can found a startup" caste can usually go back to jobs that already pay well over average?
I am the founder of a company. I want it to succeed. I don't want to become a billionaire, but I want the people that help me build it to have similar successes to mine.
If we succeed, I don't want my car or house to be 10x more expensive than of those people who joined me first.
There's something seriously rotten about telling university students about billions. The issue isn't whether anyone can earn a billion dollars. Nobody actually needs a billion dollars.
The question they should be pondering is given the excess of talent and opportunity they have, how can they help the people around them and give something back to society.
Simply, neoliberal capitalism is sociopathy with quarterly returns.
The assumptions are:
1. A uniquely special class of people do all the work that matters. They're astoundingly gifted, talented, and insightful, and have a rare ability to make profits happen by having very special ideas, owning Important Things, and telling everyone else what to do. These prodigies deserve everything. They are not to be criticised or judged by their inferiors. Ridicule only proves their superiority.
2. The work everyone else does is far less important. Most of the people doing it are interchangeable and literally disposable. Sometimes they deserve nice things, in a limited sense, if it's hard to make things happen without them. But mostly no.
3. Negative externalities - pollution, ecosystem collapse, spiralling asset prices, financial and political instability - aren't real. If they are real they don't matter. If they do matter they're someone else's fault.
4. It's absolutely fine to treat other humans with aggressive indifference and outright contempt as long as Number Goes Up. In fact it's expected.
>an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars… What she meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way.
This assumption is depressing. That the only alternative to "earn" is "cheat".
A system of diminishing work (i.e. where money makes money), especially combined with inheritance, means every dollar is arguably less earned than the last. That system is fine and actually very useful, but that diminishment becomes a big problem at large enough scales. We've been operating at that scale for many decades.
Precisely, I like the term "diminishing work". I think a lot of disagreement comes from differing definitions of "earning", or "ethically earned", but working 12hr days hard labour to earn $1000 and putting $10k into a stock that goes up 10% intuitively seem different.
I think the distinction the politician tried to make, was that you don't "earn" a billion dollars the same way the vast majority of people make their money. You become a billionaire by company ownership, not getting cold hard cash.
The hierarchy of wage looks something like:
1. hourly pay (how many hours you can work sets the maximum possible salary)
2. base pay + cash bonus (the cash bonus starts to increase your earning potential. Sometimes the bonus can be huge, for traders, salespeople, etc.)
3. base pay + stock options (the stock options can outsize your base pay by big margins)
4. stock ownership (almost all your wealth is tied up to the stocks)
The vast, vast majority of people are stuck at (1), and will never move to (2). Nearly all billionaires are at (4).
The average worker will work around 100k hours in their lifetime. If you started working today, with a 2% inflation rate, you'd have to start getting paid close to $6000 / hour in order to reach a billion dollars (pre-tax) in total income by the time you retire 50 years from now.
Another factor to consider, is that salaried workers can't use leverage to increase their earnings. A startup founder can find investors and raise money, which works as rocket-fuel for their company. You can practically outspend your competition. That is simply not possible for regular workers, without breaking rules (as in outsourcing your job, taking on several jobs and outsourcing those, while collecting).
You say "stuck at (1)" as if most people actually desire this kind of wealth and are trying to become entrepreneurs.
The simple truth is that many people don't want to step into that kind of intensity and uncertainty, or lack the skills to succeed in a cutthroat industry.
The idea that founders are somehow "cheating" is hilarious to me. Anyone in the developed world can easily become a founder, why don't you try it?
I'm saying "stuck" in the sense that their earning potential is completely dependent on how many hours they put in, and how much their annual raise is.
While many don't necessarily value pay as #1, it is important to people. If a regular worker receives a 20% pay increase, that's huge compared to not getting anything, or something which barely covers inflation. Even though the dollar amount may not be much compared to others.
Also: Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes is well on his way to being a billionaire, assuming he’s not already there. He has natural talent, to be sure, but so do successful startup founders or successful bankers or successful lawyers. He didn’t “earn it”?
The idea that people don't want financial security or independence is absurd on its face. If you look at people who have founded billion dollar companies, you see that those people aren't a representative cross-section of society. You see factors such as:
1. Coming from a relatively affluent background (eg Bill Gates's father was a successful lawyer);
2. Social status. For example, Sundar Pichai came from a relatively modest socioeconomic background but he's also upper caste;
3. Even having access to a top-tier education (eg Stanford) generally shows a lot of privilege, Social connections, financial security, probably access to a quality education prior, tutors and so on;
4. Even just being white in the US means your family had access to create generational wealth that minorities didn't. The post-WW2 GI Bill famously discriminatory in providing cheap mortgages (as well as subsidized college eduation).
One cannot overstate the opportunities available to you if you are "free to fail". If your family can support you or even you can live at home then you have the option of starting a company and being unpaid for a long period.
As for founders "cheating", well that's a different story but also objectively true. Many companies extracted value by essentially breaking the law and getting large enough before enforcement caught up with them, which allowed them to buy those changes. AirBNB and Uber are good examples of this.
The myth of meritocracy has been so successfully propagandized it's no wonder that so many people see themselves as "temporarily embarrrassed millionaires".
There's a kind of Efficient Market Hypothesis of career advice that I wish PG took better notice of.
If a career path (e.g. startup founder) outperforms at time T1, then this fact will diffuse quickly throughout society, causing the path to become overcrowded, which pushes down the average performance. So at time T2 the path will no longer outperform. This is analogous to a stock becoming overpriced due to hype. I consider the founder path to be enormously overcrowded at this point.
The key to finding a good career is to play a kind of Money Ball - find paths that, for whatever reason, are mispriced and thus undercrowded.
True, but only when you consider value as a combination of risk, reward, status, etc which is weighted by an individual’s preferences.
One reason why doctor is more popular is the process for becoming one is high effort but low risk. So if you have any risk tolerance you’re probably better off using that effort elsewhere.
What occurred to me reading this was the wage. Initially, and famously, the hours put into building a startup result in sub-par wages. But the amount of work by an individual never increases as it is limited by human capacity. In a successful startup with continuous growth the wage is ever increasing, to the point of absurdity.
That’s weird. I grew up around farming and farmers. A group also very proud of the work they do, in a profession where the wage is also indirect — sometimes negative, sometimes a fortune, always based directly on the work they’ve done. Year after year, the work.
That’s different.
I’ve always identified two sets in the realm of entrepreneurs: those that want to “be rich”, and; those that want to “become rich”. The latter group is perhaps more admirable as they acknowledge the process and the value creation whereas the former seek only the status. But neither are often interested in the work of it.
Wealthy, sure, but becoming a billionaire effectively destroys your place in any of your social circles. It obliterates any dynamics of trust and interdependence you may have and replaces them with a gnawing unease about if they’re still hanging out with you, or if they’re hanging out with the money.
Not to mention, Graham entirely fails to differentiate between EARNING a billion dollars and HAVING a billion dollars. You can be part of a structure that earns a billions dollars without “cheating”, there are all kinds of companies that do that. But if you let that wealth accumulate in yourself? There’s something wrong there. You are almost guaranteed to be under-valuing the contributions of others, or the externalities of the systems in which you operate or SOMETHING.
And even if you’re not? That’s a dragon’s hoard of money. You’d have a very difficult time spending that much money on yourself and your lifestyle, and I find it hard to justify sitting on the rest, just to have it. It is literally a hoarding problem at that point. You do not need that money, it is actively making your life worse (look up the Billionaire’s Social Calendar: it’s the list of ultra-wealthy-only events that billionaires must attend if they want even a chance of interacting with people as peers instead of dependents), just let it go.
There’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the mechanics & incentive structure here:
Take Mr. World’s First Trillionaire, Elon Musk. He doesn’t have a dragon’s horde, his money is almost entirely invested in SpaceX and Tesla, building things he wants to build. SpaceX didn’t IPO so he could have bragging rights with his Forbes list peers, it IPO’d because it was the most efficient way to get more capital to grow and achieve its various strategic aims—largely set by Elon and its other preexisting owners.
You can take that away either proactively by making such ownership structures impossible or retroactively through taxation forcing current ownership to sell, but the end result is the same: No incentive for folks like Musk or Bezos to use their skills on big, ambitious, capital-intensive enterprises. Control is what matters, not $.
His essays are, themselves, "cheating" (in the sense of a life hack). Say what people want to hear today, even if it contradicts what you said yesterday.
"It's impossible to earn a billion" means it's impossible to work hard enough to deserve to have a billion dollars in a world where so many people died for lack of money, not that it's impossible to get it without cheating.
Another solid interpretation is that nobody gets a billion in wages. You have to own something that appreciates, and it appreciates because of the people who work for you, and you take disproportionately much of the benefit.
I enjoyed this, but the thesis is misleading. Paul’s own examples here were Facebook, apple etc. I imagine that the politicians point was that beyond a certain point, you do have to be unethical to continue that growth rate. Facebook is notorious for doing plenty of this. Apple too is known for exploiting developers.
If we extrapolate to trillionaires, we know for a fact that you need to be an all-around dousche that manipulates politics and literally cuts government funding to the poorest and most vulnerable groups to get there.
And since this post has a numbers focus, zuck is worth 195 billion. Would Facebook’s negative influence be noticeably less if they spent 194.9 billion on reducing the harms of Facebook, and zuck remained a millionaire? I believe so.
Yup. Billionaire - doable without too much ethical compromise (e.g early Google). The thing is that a billion isn't much per "first world" citizen if that is roughly your market. Many-many-billionaire - would need some good example, I can only think of bad ones. The SAP guys maybe? But they aren't exactly the richest. The only bad things I've heard about SAP are "making clunky software" and "charging too much money".
Early Google got that money because of the eventual market capture and implied evil they would definitely do because they are an american advertising company.
The first billionaire I followed was gates. He did pretty horrible rent extraction to businesses all over the world. See monopoly trials and other similar things that didn’t go to trial.
The real problem is his example, "you start off with 2 million dollars and 95% growth rate".
Fine, show me the average person who can come up with 2 million dollars. I sure as hell can not. I even went to banks and founders with my ideas, cash flow sheets and customer list looking for a loan.
No, I am convinced, the rich already have 2 million dollars, and make themselves a billionaire. The system is rigged against "normal" people.
He was talking about an equity stake in a start-up. Although on paper it is worth $2M, it is (probably) not liquid (i.e, the shares can't be traded easily, maybe at all.) The vast majority of founders don't literally spend $2M from their checking account to purchase their position in a start-up - they get some ownership as part of taking the start-up risk.
Is there some standard he/people use to come up with the initial company paper-stock worth? A 2m company I would imagine needs to have some tangible traction already.
One in 500 of them makes themselves a billionaire, the rest have thrown two million dollars down the toilet. It's just a fair bet, there's nothing "rigged" about it.
Just because only 1 in 500 makes it to a billion, does not mean the other 499 are failures. Plenty of startup founders turn a few million into much more.
If someone has an idea that 'only' makes them 20 million, I would call that a great success; even if it takes dozens of years to get there.
yes but again, who has $2M to bet, even at 1/500 odds? You have to be a billionaire to make 500 bets hoping one hits, then you’re back to just being a billionaire again.
This article reads like a rather flippant dismissal of the original concern that "earning" a billion dollars cannot be done without some moral compromise.
Sure, if you start off with $2 million and double it 9 times, you end up with $1 billion. Exponential growth is a powerful thing, so it comes as no surprise that maintaining a large growth rate over time very quickly grows a starting sum into a much larger pool of money.
However, his only response for how you should achieve exponential growth is this hand-wavy "make something you yourself want". His only acknowledgement of the concern that maintaining exponential growth may require cheating is a casual dismissal, and his only acknowledgement of the concern that the growth rate will drop off over time is "you'll still get there eventually".
So, while the original concern was that you cannot earn a billion dollars without some wrongdoing, PG's response can be boiled down to "nuh uh".
Regarding "moral compromise," many in this thread are missing the forest for the trees. The trees are taxi drivers and airbnb noise complaints, the forest is a policy environment that is absurdly tilted towards capital:
- Ordinary income has sky-high taxes compared to capital gains, and you don't even have to pay the taxes on capital gains if you don't realize them!
- Attributing credit for job creation to capital without attributing blame for job destruction to capital
there are more, but these are all Political Economy decisions that didn't have to be this way. They are this way because people with money and power wanted them to be this way and were willing to morally compromise to get them this way.
I think it's necessary that capital gains are only taxed when realized - anything else would be an accounting nightmare full of loopholes. However we could define more things as forms of realization - using it as collateral should count as realising it, and maybe casting certain shareholder votes that affect you financially
If I can pay property taxes on the unrealized value of my house, a notoriously illiquid asset with a notoriously subjective and noisy valuation, then billionaires can pay property taxes on their galactic piles of unrealized gains, which are more liquid than a firehose and easier to value than a $2 bill. This could crash the economy if done too aggressively, but the same can be said of every important economic decision ever made.
We've been pushing all the money into the capital economy and all the taxes into the labor economy and this can't go on forever.
> Sure, if you start off with $2 million and double it 9 times, you end up with $1 billion. Exponential growth is a powerful thing, so it comes as no surprise that maintaining a large growth rate over time very quickly grows a starting sum into a much larger pool of money.
Reminds me of this post I’ve seen making the rounds recently about a welder at SpaceX who was making $28/hr becoming a millionaire.
They keep emphasizing he’s a welder, the system works, and at the verrrry end mention he was issued 10k in stock a decade ago at SpaceX and held until it IPO’d the other day. The only “lesson” here is “if you own stock and stock go up you get lots of dollar bucks.”
They keep emphasizing “he’s a hardworking welder.” My response is “great! Let businesses take a lesson here: give all your employees a chunk of the company. Let’s all share in the success!”
I don't think they hid the point that he was issued stock? I thought it was pretty obvious? Which is why they're talking about it now, because the value of those stocks shot up because they went public
A cursory search says 74-90% (in the US), but also that’s just tech companies and usually you need to be early. It’s also often in the form of options that take years to exercise and companies have gotten very creative lately in how they screw people out of them.
The arguments for or against it being possible to earn a billion units of currency seem to hinge on differences in understanding of the term "earn".
The pg view seems to assume that if there is a causal relationship between your actions and a billion dollars appearing in your bank account, then it counts as having earned that money.
The countering viewpoint seems to consider the words "earn" and "build" as having a similar relationships to money and buildings respectively. If I tell you I built the shed in my garden, then you'll probably take my word for it. If I tell you I built a skyscraper, you'll either call me a liar or understand me to mean that a large number of individuals built it at my request.
I think the second version is more useful and more accurate.
>There are two numbers that determine how big a startup gets, and thus how rich its founders become: the growth rate and how long it continues. You get the first by making something users like so much they tell their friends. You get the second by being in a big market. If you grow exponentially into a big market, your startup will become valuable, and you, as a shareholder, will become rich. You not only don't have to cheat to make this happen, it will happen automatically if you just keep making customers happy.
> Since we started it in 2005 we've funded about 6500 companies.
> Starting a successful startup is the most common way to become a billionaire, so in effect I've spent the last 21 years training people to become billionaires. So far about 30 of them have, but there are many more in the pipeline.
Seems to me that right off the bat he completely undermines his own point - less than .5% of the founders being funded at basically the best connected best financed incubator become billionaires. Easy, right?
I won't even go into the embarrassing math that follows... pyramid scheme salesman levels...
I don't think this article properly engaged with the criticism from the politician. That's fine, I wasn't expecting it to, but this isn't valuable commentary on the politician's point. I suppose it does serve to demonstrate that Graham and people in Graham's orbit are unable to see a distinction between "have a billion dollars" and "earn a billion dollars".
It's depressing really - lost alot of respect for pg over time. Based on his writings it honestly appears that he isn't engaged with any critical writing in any of the social or political (or economic) domains.
The problem with any Sycophancy is that eventually [even the most-egalitarian] leaders lose both perspective as well as control (of their entire organization... world).
Even if the leader wants to hear honest criticism – to receive capital `t` Truth, IMHO: rare – his echelons will sequester any challenge(s) to their status quo, often by excluding dissent(er)s.
Holy smokes, one could call this condescending but assuming both politicians and an average reader don’t understand how exponents work feels a step above. And that’s before you get to the part where it’s all about a great idea and hard work and definitely zero exploitation while mentioning examples like Apple, Facebook or Airbnb.
Have you ever listened to a congressional hearing? Or spoken to an "average reader"?
Most absolutely glaze over at the idea of calculating the "log base" of anything. If they ever got that far in math class, they certainly have not used the concept since then and cannot remember what it means or how it works. They might remember exponents, but the compounding of them is absolutely lost on the overwhelming majority of people.
Unfortunately, there was plenty of not understanding exponentials on display during Covid, including from politicians, journalists and other public figures.
It tends to filter out trite topics and lower-quality submissions, though I have the feeling that it has become less effective for that in recent times.
The most offensive part to me is that it tries to excuse obscene wealth as simply (shrug) a pesky, I mean "magic", byproduct of math.
Regardless, can we talk about the danger to society of having these resulting billionaires and how we ought to address that? I think that is in fact what "the politician" mentioned in the article was trying to address.
(The new American Dream appears to be: be one of the 30 people every 21 years that finds themselves the head of a startup that succeeds.)
Let's put this math in a mirror and do the leftie version of the exponentials:
"The purpose of capitalism is to pay rich people for being rich in proportion to how rich they are, thereby establishing, reinforcing, and perpetuating a class hierarchy where the people on the bottom must constantly pay to exist while the people on top constantly get paid to exist."
Dear reader, if you bristled at how casually this statement ignored that compounding returns are a feature of the real world that we want our economy to model and encourage, now you understand how a normal person feels when a megacorp or megacorp cheerleader casually fails to account for everyone they displaced and stepped on in order to capture the value that they did. "Negligent accounting" is a strategy that points both ways.
> Let's put this math in a mirror and do the leftie version of the exponentials
The plot twist is that the 'rightie' and the 'leftie' are both entirely correct. Which is why most developed economies try to remove sources of wasteful, unearned rent and also include significant amounts of redistribution/social insurance rather than relying on pure market outcomes. This doesn't erase the compounding dynamics altogether, but it hopefully ensures that folks at the lowest end of the distribution can keep a tolerable standard of living that doesn't have them 'paying' too much.
Yes, although I tend to think this produces better incentives and is easier to administer if we formulate it as progressive corporate taxation. This structurally discourages mega conglomeration and encourages spin-offs to enhance competition. Also, taxing at the source of profits obviates the need to track down the destinations of profit, who are far more numerous and easy to hide.
The non-explosive way to do this is simply to set the heel above the megacorps today and let inflation push them into it. They will be able to avoid the heel by splitting at their leisure, slowly remediating the consolidation we have seen and restoring competition.
$2m is the standard seed round nowadays which is what he was as referencing. Anybody who has a good idea and can convince investors can raise this, hence how the new AI founders became billionaires without having $2m of their own.
Come on. Exponentials are deeply counterintuitive, but simultaneously pretty much where all the returns come from in startup investing. I think it’s extremely illustrative, especially to a group that’s probably heard a lot of degrowth propaganda.
> So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars. I felt like a skating coach hearing someone say that it's impossible to do a triple axel. Of course it's possible. It's hard, but it's possible.
"Earning a billion", to the skating coach, is like pulling off a dodeca-axel.
It's not gonna happen through mere pluck, and it's probably gonna involve a lot of other folks' work if it ever happens, who probably aren't gonna get that much of the glory.
Paul Graham is the skating coach himself, as from 6000 startups financed by y combinator quite a few were unicorns. it is olympian level, but it there is a system to it.
You can earn by deploying your own labor to facilitate transactions between other laborers, such as by running a job fair, that's completely legitimate, good, and creates value. You can't just take 90% of someone's wages, or rather, you can, and many people do, but it's theft.
This is slightly disappointing, but it's probably necessary cope. If you want to build startups which move fast and break things, you have to ignore many problems and many people of this state, country, and world.
You start by ignoring what a "billion dollars" means, and most people don't think it's stock. Then you have to ignore what "earn" means, which most people don't think is getting stock on the assumption that the company you own a portion in will turn a profit one day, possibly many years ahead.
Getting investment without having profitability, getting to keep a portion of this investment, even if the banks that are insured with taxpayer money lose that money, is not what the constituency of AOC think is earning money.
There is a huge amount of technological advancement and personal fortune that I enjoy from this system, but I'm not trying to bullshit anyone that the system is fair.
In conclusion, I do think this attitude is cope that allows a high performing individual to focus on this game and be successful, and Paul Graham seems to be successful, so it's natural.
What do all of these companies have in common? They all manipulated markets, bent and broke laws in order to get that "exponential growth". They didn't want to wait around and find out if their businesses would be legally allowed to grow. So they just broke or worked around the law, with the intention of becoming billionaires. But that's okay, because growth rate! We're not doing anything bad, people want these things! Who cares if it might be illegal or the spirit of the law frowns on what we do? Money!!!
This is just one of the reasons why becoming a billionaire requires you to cheat. There's also the tax loopholes, the inducement to harm (both of the customer and by the customer), anti-competition, etc. In order to get these gains, you need to cheat, because if it were easy to do legally, ethically, and quickly, somebody already would have. It's corporate doping.
> Who cares if it might be illegal or the spirit of the law frowns on what we do?
Surely these things are on a moral and ethical continuum and we need to look at them individually? Pretty much every person has broken some law at least once in their lives. I don’t disagree that moral ambivalence is often necessary to make billions, but I also don’t consider all laws sacrosanct, or that breaking the law is the primary measure of a company’s moral standing.
How many businesses are there that are worth at least $1 billion and employ no-one but the founders?
When people say that it's not possible to earn a billion dollars, they're talking about the discrepancy between the wealth gained by those employed by the company versus the shareholders of the company. For example, when WhatsApp was sold to Meta for $19 billion, how many of WhatsApp's 55 employees walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars?
The fundamental problem is that it's possible for an employee to generate a hundreds of millions of value for a business, and yet be compensated for a vanishingly small fraction of that. Even if the employees agreed to a particular salary, is it ethical to pay them so little in comparison to the worth they generate, or is it exploitative?
Most, if not all billionaires, reach that status by paying people far less than the value they generate. If you want to become a billionaire, you need to find people who are willing to be paid thousands or tens of thousands of times less than they're worth. You need employees who will generate you $100 million in exchange for being given $100 thousand.
Your post implies that every employee of a successful company is entitled to a share of whatever wealth that company generates.
As a career programmer, I worked for several companies. Each time I took a job, I negotiated what I thought was a fair salary for my wages. Some companies also gave me stock options and one gave me founder's stock. When a company had a good year, they often gave generous bonuses.
Only when I took great personal risk, did I expect to share the rewards that come with a successful company. I was always grateful when I got more than I agreed to work for, but I never felt entitled to it.
A janitor working for a 10x company should not feel entitled to 10x of the salary as another janitor working down the street for another company that is struggling.
That's not quite what I'm saying. You may very well have been paid fairly for each job you've taken, assuming that the value you generated for the business was not substantially higher than your salary.
But hiring people who are compensated fairly does not make someone a billionaire. If you generate $300,000 of value per year and I pay you $200,000, then I'm only making $100,000 profit off your work. I could hire more employees, but value does not scale linearly indefinitely. Doubling my number of employees does not guarantee I double my profits.
No, if I want to become a billionaire within my lifetime, I need an asset that generates far more money than it costs to buy and maintain it. In other words, I need employees who will generate millions for every thousand I pay them.
Now you might well argue that I'm taking a risk. How do I know if an asset or an employee or a team of employees is undervalued? Not every bet is going to pay dividends. However, while this is true, I don't think this makes it ethical. If I'm a venture capitalist looking to make it rich (or richer), the fact that I'm taking a risk doesn't change the fact that ultimately I'm looking for people who I can pay far less than they're worth.
This wouldn't happen if employees rejected cash-based compensation and decided to be founders themselves. Most employees trade risk for higher cash comp, and end up with less upside. This issue is mostly settled by the employment market
I don’t know if this take is just naive or dishonest…
building something people love can make you a billionaire, but most billionaires did not build something people love, and most people who’ve built something people love are not billionaires.
> There are two numbers that determine how big a startup gets, and thus how rich its founders become: the growth rate and how long it continues
> The reason her startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built.
> In the real world, growth rates tend to slow down a bit. A very successful startup will probably be growing faster than 15% a month in year 1 and slower than 15% a month in year 4.
It turns out that the people who will invest in your startup when 93% MoM gains are possible want you to do pretty much anything to keep growth as high as possible--also your career, net worth, and employment are tied to this so you're similarly motivated--including squeezing and manipulating those users who loved you so much. But hey, as long as you personally get rich it's fine I guess.
> So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars.
> She wasn't saying, of course, that it's impossible to become a billionaire.... What she meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way.
> But now you at least understand, from having done the math yourselves, that you don't have to cheat to become a billionaire. You've seen for yourselves that there are only two numbers in the calculation, the growth rate and how long it continues. If it's impossible to make a billion dollars without cheating, which of those two numbers is impossible?
AoC quote:
> There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned. You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that.
Come now @pg.
$2 million * 9.45 months * 93% growth rate = earning a billion dollars, ok. Does that really address what AoC was saying? She wasn't saying that the math doesn't math.
Did you read his post at all? He knew what she was saying and addressed it clearly:
> What [AOC] meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way... The reason [my founder's] startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built. So she could feel from her own experience how wrong [AOC] was. She wasn't exploiting anyone. Exactly the opposite in fact. The reason her startup was growing so fast was that she and her cofounder had been working their asses off to make their users happy, and as a result the users had been telling their friends. And that gets you exponential growth.
In other words, this founder being on a trajectory toward billionaire status, through doing little but working to provide something of value to those willing to pay for it, belies the claim that you must be doing something unethical and cannot earn one's way to a billion dollars.
I don't personally subscribe to this belief but the people saying it's impossible to earn a billion dollars without doing something bad would say that your founders are doing something bad by exploiting the employees by not returning to the value creators a fair share of the value generated and instead hoarding it for themselves. pg is arguing a strawman to the actual argument when there are far better arguments around rewarding risk though I feel like most people shouting that don't value risk either so maybe that's not a better argument?
Andrew Wilkinson has a whole part in his book about what it's like to be on the billionaire side of this speaking to former employees who feel that you took more of the value than you deserved it was an interesting read.
Who decides what's "fair"? Shouldn't the market decide? Otherwise, of course people will always be incentivized to argue that their subjective opinion is what's fair, and that's almost always going to be, "I should have been given more."
This post hand waves away the inflection point(s) of maintaining high growth rates as you grow. He hints at it saying year 4 growth is harder, but it is _vastly_ harder.
Companies focus of the Rule of 40 and struggle to keep above it. And this struggle is where many in management lose their way.
Enshitification begins. The margins get harder. More corners cut. Employees get treated less well, customers get treated less well.
Instead of telling us "it is just exponential growth bro," do case studies on billionaires and their dealings. In the US, you have billionaire business leaders who have full time employees who require government assistance every month.
The couple of billionaires and near-billionaires I have worked with (and helped build their companies) have not been bad people. But working at their companies pre and post IPO is way different. Less perks, more pressure. If the company culture isn't solid, it becomes bad fast.
What AOC is trying to do here is shift the debate from extracting retribution on people who have violated specific laws (a fair and an honest way to enforce justice in a civil society) to extracting retribution on people who she insinuates "must have done something immoral" based on their net worth (a selfish, dishonest, envious and greedy way to run a society). It's a clever play, and unfortunately for the people of the world who value freedom and a high standard of living, it's going to work. There is enough of the population filled with envy and greed that they'll lap up whatever a politician tells them bogie man of the day is. Historically it's been the aristocracy, Jews, immigrants, but those don't work any more, so now it's generally "the rich". Billionaires are the thin end of the wedge. After them it will be business owners of all kinds, people with second homes, people who send their children to private schools, and generally anyone who has anything else that someone might envy. It's clear that the way society is going people are going to keep lapping this stuff up.
HN used to be open minded about people creating wealth. The change is shocking to me, actually.
This essay is unfortunate because he isn't addressing the true misunderstanding of politicians like AOC, he's not explaining the consumer surplus (why the world gained 50x more from Google than the founders), and he's not explaining that wealth is craeted not taken.
Politicians spend their lives in one of the purest zero-sum systems in existence. Of course they don't have a gut level understanding of the creation of wealth.
But consumer surplus matters most of all. Imagine the net benefit to consumers of Robotaxi and Optimus (ok, ok, assuming they work, for the doubters in the room). Entrepreneurs capture
I don't disagree with the essay, but is there any benefit to being a billionaire? Almost anything I could possibly want could be satisfied by being a humble multi-millionaire.
Many of these billionaires they're referring to are paper stock billionaires. It gives you access to maintain control/takeover other companies. For example, Elon made an argument that his package payout (if fulfilled) was so large because it served him to be able to retain control of his company.
Another example would be taking over media companies like what Bezos did, the side effect would be being able to waylay/hide any dirty laundry.
Do you have a want to please millions of people whose lives are improved by exactly the product that your company sells? I could certainly do without that, but it does sound nice.
I'm not sure there is but if you create a company that successfully serves the world's 8 billion population it often ends up worth more than 12.5 cents per head. Or else it maybe isn't providing that significant a service.
With nearly all the billionaire PG mentions the money is the company valuation rather than cash in the bank.
I'm a capitalist through and through but I think its a bit disingenuous to interpret "there shouldn't be billionaires" as "I don't understand exponential". Sure exponential are hard to intuit but that's not what they're saying.
There are facets of the query that are actually interesting (to think about, not surrender to).
- Wealth is a curve like any other, it has a SD, shape, and other curve defining properties
- Motivation and discovery are two important pillars of capitalism.
A core belief of capitalism is that humans, as very fallible machines especially in collectives, do a poor job of managing that curve for others without hurting discovery and motivation. Intervention hurts the very evolutionary traits that make capitalism so successful.
While that's absolutely true, surely we can entertain the idea that there is a theoretical optimal wealth curve that doesn't effect the properties of capitalism we care about in such a way. Perhaps it is never achievable by systems we can design, but there surely is a "better" curve.
Its also evident if you look at psychology. Humans are more motivated by their relative differences (SD bands) vs their absolute values. There are wealth levels that are so abstract and absurd that they actual amount is meaningless to the holder; you'd have a hard time convincing me me $500B and $1.1T make a interesting difference to preservation of capitalist mechanics.
To reiterate: humans controlling the curve is no bueno, full stop. But surely we don't have the theoretically optimal curve.
Some disrespect to PG, but the entire thing reads like:
"Oh, if we just operate in a vacuum, do not closely examine the systemic interactions of our accumulation of such vast sums of wealth, assume there's no moral or ethical quandary that would prevent us from utilizing every game theory strategy available to us, and have consistently high, compounding growth over time, then anyone can make a billion dollars if they follow my teachings, which in turn were formulated over thousands of students and with a success rate still in the single percentage points, at best."
Here's the thing none of these people will ever admit: not everyone can actually succeed at a goal, otherwise it wouldn't be a goal, but a baseline. This is the fundamental grievance I have with these sorts of "wealth whisperers" braying on (and on, and on, and on) about how with a good idea and hard work (and YC's guidance), you too can be a Larry Ellison or Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg type.
Which, no, you cannot. If you could, PG's success rate for billionaires would be 100%. It is not, so clearly hard work and a good idea (and a mentor) alone isn't enough. Yet enough leaders and populace have bought into this fairy tale that we've reoriented society around it wholesale. The presumption is that anyone lacking in obscene wealth has done so by choice, rather than examine systemic incentives and policy failures that make such an outcome the default, rather than a personal choice (or worse, some sort of personal failure).
I'm just so weary of having the same argument with the same people who refuse to bother learning anything that might remotely conflict with their world view anymore. If the response to "maybe we should improve society somewhat" is some banal wealth-building sales pitch relying on cherry-picked statistics and devoid of any wider context, then I think it's safe to presume you're either willfully arguing in bad faith or so colossally ignorant that you're beyond help.
Generally a PG defender (at least nowadays), but he is deliberately misrepresenting what she meant, and/but I think a good % of the students/attendees know that.
- So I would like you all to do me a favor please. I would like you to take out your phones and calculate a number. I know this may seem contrived, but I promise it will be useful for you.
I’m thinking of vibe coding a calculator app How Many Babies Died For This where you input your startup idea, life(style) goals and AI token usage and the machine spits out the Net Babies Dead for you to achieve your dreams
Yeah I was more interested in why you haven't saved a baby's life for $4000. Maybe I'm being presumptuous, but even if you don't have $4000 in savings and liquid investments you could probably get a loan for $4000, or extend your mortgage. A baby is going to die if you don't.
I exclusively build stuff that I think is cool for me and my friends but I have little drive to market these things and plus they are designed to be completely free forever so I don't think I'll ever be a billionaire.
So nice of pg to mention AirBnB as one of his examples of what a successful startup who "doesn't cheat" means. They just were great people with a great idea who found a market for something people wanted that no one had thought about before, and poof, exponential math billionaires who earned it!
Of course, we'll ignore the huge issues that Airbnb created for cities, customers, and providers. We'll ignore the way they knowingly helped ignore any regulations on tourism as much as they could. We'll ignore the business model of simply being the biggest middlemen around. We'll ignore the fact that their business is slowly being outlawed in major cities, at least in Europe, because of all of the above.
And, surprisingly, if we ignore all of the things these founders do to ignore the law and cheat the market or their competition, we can say that they earned their billions without cheating!
We'll also ignore the fact that the brilliant magic math that us lay people and politicians just don't understand also predicts that the founder whose business is growing 93% per month will not only be a billionaire in 9 months, but a trillionaire 9 more months after that, and surely the world's first quadrillionaire within 5 years. You might think this is implausible, but that's just because you don't understand how exponential growth works!
No, that problem was not generated by Airbnb. There’s growing demand and, because of regulation, not enough is built every year. For example, according to INE, 250k new families are formed in Spain (more than 500k people) and only 100k new houses/flats are built and the yearly deficit has been accumulating for 12 years. That is the real issue and blaming corporations is just the politicians’ easy path to deflect blame, which unfortunately too many citizens eagerly buy into.
Even if it were true that the problem of housing affordability was not affected by Airbnb (it's not, at best it only exacerbated an existing problem), that would not mean it didn't create other problems for cities. Having tourists concentrated in places that are not designed for it, where a hotel license would never have been issued; the problem of too many tourist accommodations, causing an overflow of tourism; problems for neighbors with parties and similar nuissances; problems with untaxed income from the smaller owners; and probably others I'm forgetting.
Externalize all the problems, but its "not cheating!" - its just making us all pay for your growth while you take advantage of the current structure of society and generally making things worse.
"So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars..."
Paul, playing dumb doesn't suit you.
The first definition of "earn" on merriam-webster.com is "to receive as return for effort and especially for work done or services rendered".
Your chose a straw man, "doing something bad", to argue against because it's so easy to beat.
Much harder to justify that anyone's doing $1B of effort. Being a billionaire doesn't mean you're bad. In fact, it doesn't even matter if they are all bad -- there are always going to be bad people. It means a system that allows, encourages, and protects billionaires might be a problem that needs to be fixed.
Scary idea, I know. But we all only get to go around this world once. Might as well spend our time trying to make it better rather than rationalizing why it's OK to spend all your time trying to make it worse.
There's an older tradition of thought on the matter with better intellectual pedigree and epistemological hygiene: "Behind every great fortune lies a great crime."
The easiest way to earn a million dollars is to start a business that makes sense and work your ass off running it well. Maybe that's even the easiest way to reliably earn ten million dollars, a million isn't what it used to be.
But at some scale that's far short of a billion the game becomes about asymmetry.
This asymmetry takes many forms. For Steve Cohen it was trading on inside information, for Jim Simons it was (as far as anyone can tell) novel mathematics.
For most of the technology companies in the 21st century it was about privatizing the commons and/or externalizing costs that a well-refereed market would place on your company.
The United States used robust public/private partnerships and a vibrant, thriving university system to build the greatest pile of latent wealth in the sum history of humanity during the 20th century. Everything from the transistor to the integrated circuit to the laser to Velcro to tang to the internet to the web was a product of this holy Trinity of innovation: defense and related public money, well-refereed private companies (even a notable natural monopoly or two under muscular regulation), and a paved path between the Academy and the other two. The gains accrued enough to individuals to keep everyone motivated but largely in the form of status, which confers a desirable station in life but does not compound directly into political power. Feynman and von Neumann and Einstein all seem to have led very enviable lives and are easily as smart and accomplished as anyone in the front row at the last Inauguration (and if we're honest, a lot more), but none of them had a billion dollars or untoward access to the levers of government. All of them paid far more into the ocean of latent wealth deeded to the body politic than they took out of it.
And at some point (my money is on the kneecapping of Brooksley Born, whose architect is now resigning in disgrace from everything for Epstein affiliation and whose most recent post was on the board of pg's protege) the flow reversed. The access caste started to be d away from the competence caste and the singular fortune deeded to the public started to accumulate as a dozen private fortunes that were substantially just the 20th century stuff with a named owner.
You get a billion dollars by stealing it, this is qualitatively different, a distinction of kind not of degree, from how you get a million or even a few tens of millions.
To get a trillion dollars as we have now seen, well first you steal a billion.
PG actually addresses this in other essays. That adage does have more history. But the world literally changed;
1. In pre-industrial society there is less technological leverage, so that it’s very difficult for an incidental or group to help very many people.
Perhaps the closest analog before then was land discovery or conquest (taking other people’s stuff).
2. Post-enlightenment society is one of the first which doesn’t predefine your social role by birth. So you can claim new roles and status from your own wealth.
America has a much stronger sense of 2 which is why European attitudes towards wealth differ.
Why would you want to earn a billion dollars? You must have the maturity to handle the money. Hopefully you’ll mature sufficiently through the process of making that money but if the money’s fast, that might not happen. I’ve seen people get 9-figure rich overnight. Didn’t change them at all, they are still the wonderful folks they were. But I’ve also seen people drink themselves to death as it turns out a few mill in the bank does not answer the question “wtf do I do when I don’t have to do anything?”
"So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars… What she meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way."
Not exactly the way I interpreted it (emphasis on earn). Right or wrong, I think the vast majority of us think that "deserved money" is money earned from "work".
A simple example would be the billionaire Walton children: their fortunes inherited. Most people would argue that they did not really earn those billions of dollars.
On an admittedly slippery slope, for many, investing and other means where the money makes money is also not regarded as work (and therefore is not earned money).
To wave around the idea of "the American Dream", I suspect that many American's disapprove of any means of obtaining wealth that the average Joe or Jane are not privy to. This idea that you have to be born into money or have money to make money—we are (perhaps naturally) repugnant to.
This is a strawman argument. It is of course mathematically possible to obtain a billion dollars (although notably much harder to do in a way that is liquid, but let's gloss over that). My somewhat more charitable reading of that claim (shared by other readers here, I see) is that ‘earn’ refers to moral desert. I'm not really a desert-oriented person but let me try to steelman it a bit:
In aristocracies we traditionally assume or imply that a person can deserve a certain wealth or power simply by being born into it. Capitalism, however, sells us the dream of the meritocracy: your (financial) success in life should depend not at all on factors of chance like birth or genetics but simply how much of yourself you choose to sell to the market.
At any point in time you have control of some tangible or intangible capital, including wealth, physical health, social connections, equipment, information, trained skills, et cetera. Some of these assets are gained by luck, e.g. accident of birth; some of them are gained by trading your time; and some of them are gained by spending another asset (whose origin reduces, recursively, to some combination of luck or time). At any point you can, assuming the market is appropriately liquid, spend some of these assets to get cash.
Some of these assets have force-multiplier effects on your future output in certain domains, from which exponentials naturally arise; but the time spent on them remains linear, and so, if we want to ignore inherited factors (the opportunity to spend the time on things without immediate feedback, say, or handed-down insight about which of these investments will produce the most value in the future, or access to the required tutors) the increase in earnings these things _merit_ has to remain linear as well. There is no way to compound your time and therefore, under an assumption of meritocracy, there is also no morally acceptable way to compound earnings, which I would assume is the point the politician is attempting to make. Under this worldview, any exponential compounding that occurs must, mathematically, be a result of systematically undervaluing the time of an exponential number of other people, since each person can only spend a linear amount of time.
In practice, of course, the assumption of meritocracy is simply wrong, and arguably the concept as a whole is internally incoherent (or at least I don't believe we've yet managed to articulate it coherently: we would have to settle the nature vs nurture debate and completely sever the value of a person's spent time from the accidents of their birth, if such a thing is even meaningful). But I think that's where the claim falls down, not in failing to understand the mathematics of exponentials.
The issue with billionaires is that some of them got insanely rich while being net negative from a societal perspective.
The most famous ones ended-up in prison (Sam Bankman Fried, Elizabeth Holmes, Jeffrey Epstein, Bernie Madoff) but anyone with a basic grasp of statistics and criminal behavior know that many others will escape the justice system forever.
It does not mean that all billionaires are bad, the criminals are not the majority, but there are enough criminals to justify skepticism and scrutiny.
What people mean by "you can't earn a billion dollar" is that there's no work that's useful enough, alone, to be worth that much in reward. How can we live in a world where a moron can have a trillion to their name, while others work arduous physical labor all their lives and end up with nothing?
You might not believe you've done anything "bad" to become a billionaire, but the mere fact that you accumumated so much wealth necessarily means others, somewhere, had to work for it. The mere existence of billionaires is the mark of an unhealthy economy, that doesn't distribute wealth in an efficient or fair manner.
Um, did i just get mansplained compound interest by Paul f*ing Graham? I feel like this has been the subject of condescending advice since the beginning of time.
"But now you at least understand, from having done the math yourselves, that you don't have to cheat to become a billionaire. You've seen for yourselves that there are only two numbers in the calculation, the growth rate and how long it continues."
What could possibly be false in a two-parameter model of reality?
Regarding the scale of what a billion dollars even means, I've recently been thinking of an example which I think might work (but I haven’t tried it on many people yet).
There are 86,400 seconds in a day (24 hours * 60 minutes * 60 seconds = 86400). Now let’s say you spend an average of 1$ every second. That’s every second, including when you’re sleeping or on the toilet. That’s 86,400$ per day, which I hope we can all agree is a lot of money.
If you had one million dollars, to spend it all it’d take you over 11 days (1,000,000 dollars / 86,400 seconds = 11.57).
If you had one billion dollars, to spend it all it’d take you over 31 years (1,000,000,000 dollars / 86,400 seconds / 365 days = 31.71). That is an obscene amount of money.
Reading this, I realize that I don't have confidence in winning under capitalism, so I think it would be quicker to just try to break the game of capitalism altogether.
But communism, in my opinion, seems like a concept that is unlikely to arrive, so please wait just a little while until I come up with a new ideology.
He makes it sound simple, and in some ways, it is. You have to not only build the thing, but also find the thing that people want. It’s the latter that’s as hard if not harder than the former.
In addition, the converse is not true. Just because you’ve found something that grows fast and in large market, doesn’t mean you’ll become a billionaire. With all humility, I’ve been lucky to have done that twice, but in a large company. I’m not complaining, I’m just saying that doesn’t necessarily make you a billionaire.
As Upton Sinclair put it, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
That quote is just the tip of the iceberg of Sinclair's work, though. He wrote about how when a person's livelihood, reputation, or financial well-being relies on a specific status quo, they often find it impossible to see the logic or ethics in changing it. It can be very difficult for them to confront such issues objectively.
He also wrote about the question of cynics vs. true believers in this situation. For the true believers, he pointed out that the only way for them to resolve their cognitive dissonance (while maintaining their lifestyle) is to block out the truth entirely. They stop trying to understand because actually understanding would be too painful.
And yet, the vast majority of startups fail. This essay about exponential growth is clearly not the whole story.
How does your startup avoid failing? By skirting local laws? Exploiting employees? Destroying the environment? Replacing jobs in a way that makes the standard of living better for the few but worse for the many? Making weapons or systems that coordinate weapons? Submitting to and therefore tacitly supporting oppressive governments?
Sure, there are examples of startups that don’t do these things. But looking at billionaire-class startups (there’s not that many of those to analyze!), there are far more of them in the other category.
Yeah man its just all the people who are jealous that are mad and no other reason.
The billionares hands are clean, the climate is fine, the elections are great, there's nothing wrong, close your eyes, stuff your ears with wax, and keep on trucking :)
He's right. You don't have to cheat to become a billionaire. Stepping on everybody else's throats is a legit part of the capitalist playbook. No cheating involved.
This horrible mentality is what ails tech bro culture today and ruined the tech world for me - chasing billions
Greed mixed with analytical thinking on industrial scale - graham, thiel, musk, hoffman, bezos, zuck all symptoms of “smart” people who screwed this country ultimately - all for what?
Has the changed world that resulted been for the better?
Please don't bury the lede here of how the author completely and epically misses the point of the statement.
It's not about the math of the thing, it's about the arguably necessary exploitation that must occur to hit those kinds of numbers.
And in fact, IMHO, you don't even need to get to "exploitation" to criticize this mentality.
Any normal human would (and if not would, SHOULD) want to stop "earning" well before they hit those ridiculous numbers. Let's say -- at about 50 million, a normal person should realize, yes, that's enough. Time to pivot to something that doesn't cause so much accumulation. This does happen, we just don't hear about it enough.
This is a ridiculously oversimplified application of first year economic theory. No, we do not live in the textbook fantasy of "everyone is always free to make favorable trades and therefore no one is exploited."
If we assume that YC funded about 6,500 companies and produced about 30 billionaires...That is 0.46% using the most flattering denominator possible. And the best reason not to apply to YC.
If you count individual founders, the rate is even lower. So to insinuate this is some kind of training people to become billionaires, is like a lottery operator saying he teaches wealth creation because a few ticket buyers hit the jackpot.
PG is turning an extreme power law outcome into a moral argument. A tiny fraction of founders capture enormous upside, thousands do not, and PG presents the winners as proof that the system is fair. I could not think of more survivorship bias with a halo.
And thee political sneer is also absurd. Startups do not exist outside politics. They exist( or should exist) inside law, tax, infrastructure, courts, labor rules, housing rules, securities law, immigration policy, and government procurement. Uber S-1 warned that its business would be harmed if drivers were classified as employees rather than independent contractors...and described legal and regulatory obstacles as material business risks. In other words...regulatory arbitrage ( corruption? ) as a business model.
Airbnb is an even cleaner YC example. Its own filings describe short term rental law, host registration, tax collection, fines, city restrictions, and New York 2023 rules as materially affecting the business. Its a business that lives lives inside a fight over housing law and local regulation.
And if the claim is that politicians do not understand value creation, then SpaceX is a hilarious counterexample. SpaceX is a company completely entangled with the state and US tax payer.
SpaceX has about $22B in government contracts, mostly NASA, and Reuters separately reported a $5.9B Space Force launch award in 2025.
And the biggest logic failure being used here is the so called exponential growth part. The world is not exponential. Population growth is not exponential forever. Demand is not exponential forever. Restaurants, supermarkets, apartments, drivers, cities, and disposable income are finite. Real markets saturate. Growth curves become S curves. Pretending that 15% monthly growth can simply continue for years is nothing more than spreadsheet intoxication.
So instead of the claim you can earn a billion by making users happy, what is reality is, that in a legal and financial system that massively rewards scalable equity ownership, a tiny number of founders can become billionaires if capital, timing, network effects, labor structure, regulation, and distribution all break their way. I don’t think its legal, and the best PG could do with this is a defense of the casino by pointing at the jackpot winners.
Just reflect on this: Of the 30 billionaires Paul Graham talks about, in an essay where, notably, he never once uses the word “entrepreneur” they come from these 14 companies:
Less than half of them are profitable as of 2026. None created a vaccine or cured a disease, discovered a new algorithm or mathematical theorem, developed the economies of poorer countries, created a new engine, or invented a renewable energy source. If all of them...disappeared tomorrow...you would probably just use some other payment system, maybe with higher or lower commissions, and argue on some other message board not called Reddit.
The impact on human lives would be zero... or maybe even slightly positive.
I think maybe the fundamental issue is something that he said really late in the essay:
> There are other ways to get rich than by starting startups. Some of those do require you to exploit people. But startups are the most common way to become really rich, and if you want to start a successful startup, the key is not exploitation but empathy.
> How people become rich in your society is one of the most important things to understand about it. You can't let your beliefs about this be determined by ideology, or movies, or historical examples that are centuries old. You must look at the world around you and see how it's actually done.
The "it's impossible to do morally" people are looking at how it used to be done, and how it's sometimes still done. They are right to be opposed to that. But oppose the immoral aspects of it, not doing it at all.
And those who hard-core define a billion as immoral are I think signalling something else: They want the government to take that money, from every billionaire. (If we're talking immorality, we could discuss the morality of that.) But they don't understand that there will probably be second-order consequences of doing so...
You're right, higher taxes on the billionares would create all sorts of second order effects, like the ability to pay for the social safety net for the common folk, maybe educating the populace properly, all sorts of truly scary stuff!
He seems to be regressing, he said this in January:
> The rational fear of those who dislike economic inequality is that the rich will convert their economic power into political power: that they’ll tilt elections, or pay bribes for pardons, or buy up the news media to promote their views.
> I used to be able to claim that tech billionaires didn't actually do this — that they just wanted to refine their gadgets. But unfortunately in the current administration we've seen all three.
Now he's claiming he's trained all these billionaires and they are a blessing to the world, not avaricious sociopaths.
Hi, this is called “Labour Theory Of Value”. And this is imo a popular theory of value creation a lot of people believe in and it has populist memetic value.
But Labour Theory Of Value has been debunked and is mostly not used anymore.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"
- Upton Sinclair
And, well, you are right that there are 'debunkments' of Labor Theory of Value. Of course, they are put out by hard right-wing laissez faire capitalist enclaves, like Mises. I would never expect them to take a dispassionate view of capitalism, given their extremist position.
“For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows. ”
She meant impossible in that one doesn't earn a billion dollars through work alone. The only way to get there is to set up a structure that extracts a billion dollars from a market (usually by building a structure that's more efficient but also generates externalities that are not borne by the person getting the billion dollars).
pg's reading of it is so blunt and misrepresentative that I'm nervous about what kind of content he's consuming.
PG's net worth is between 2.5 and 10 billion... so, I wouldn't take him seriously. Normal people (like the majority ones around here) won't ever have the opportunities/skills/luck all combined at a given point in time to generate billions. So any advice from his side regarding money is simply misleading.
Your phrase “extract” betrays a fundamental disagreement with what Paul is saying. (Externalities does so again) It assumes a zero-sum game where the job is to shift money from one person to another. Value, and thus money/wealth can be created. Literally. You are saying, in different words, that no one can do it “honestly”. He is saying one can.
Yes, and the art of this game is to extract value which you did not create. It may or may not come alongside creating value. Uber creates value in the form of an app marketplace for taxis, but it also pushes taxi wages down below the sustainability line without pushing prices down that far, and pockets the difference for itself. Apple made a cool phone that it sells for a high but fair price, but it also takes 30% of everything you buy with that phone, just because it can.
> the art of this game is to extract value which you did not create
in common parlance, theft
Accepting money from willing customers, who are paying you for access to some technology you created that they find valuable, is not theft. Quite the opposite, it's almost always two very happy parties engaging in an exchange that each of them finds advantageous.
Everything is a rich man’s trick.
- Documentary
> Apple made a cool phone that it sells for a high but fair price, but it also takes 30% of everything you buy with that phone
Apple was already a multibillion dollar company almost 30 years before the iPhone was invented...
(though I'm sure you will have no trouble inventing some other reason that that wealth, too, was created through exploitation)
You're overlooking that net new value was created in both of the scenarios. Don't you have any idea how many family horse businesses went under with the invention of the car? How many artisans wound up broke post-industrialization? We can both agree that we'd all be much much poorer in the world where those things didn't happen. NVidia makes a huge margin on the things they sell. Is that theft?
The world is not zero sum, AND in practice most business models are not entirely value creation or rent seeking, but a mix of both.
Ideally a new business creates more value than it simply takes out of an existing marketplace.
I think one can argue a lot of 2010s app-ification, Uber-of-X, or what I called "re-intermediation" was more than 50% rent seeking.
The business model of being willing to lose billions selling $1 of goods for 80cents (before even talking CapEx) until your competitors fold (and then raise prices) is the kind of thing we used to regulate against.
At some point our regulation shifted towards a more short term "if it makes consumer prices lower right now its OK".
Based on this article at least, he is not disagreeing with those claims, he is not even acknowledging they exist.
The original claim, as I understand it, is basically this: you can’t be an honest actor in a dishonest system.
And it’s not even necessary to claim that billionaires did something uniquely wrong to become billionaires. It’s just that their share of the exploitation is so, so, so much bigger.
From an HN comment recently:
> There are three ways to make a living:
> 1) Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.
> 2) Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.
> 3) Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.
But he seems wildly oblivious to the fact that there even is an argument to be had here, which there emphatically is.
Reasonable people can disagree as to the nature/extent -- or even the existence of -- exploitation, but this guy absolutely has impermissibly strong blinders on, rendering most of this article a waste.
Can he provide evidence of one that has?
Look around you and see we are not living in mud and huts anymore
Housing prices certainly can get high, but they aren't anywhere close to a billion dollars, which is the actual number under discussion
The thing being discussed is that wealth can be created, not merely stolen.
The existence of housing is an example of something vlauable being created. The price of housing is not relevant to the example.
Also note that we're 8 billion people living on a much higher average material living standard than when we were 2 billion 100 years ago.
No one is arguing that such a thing as wealth creation doesn't exist. The question is about who or what creates it.
Which is a topic of intense discussion in economics over the last few hundred years, BTW, and the discussion here so far has shockingly few references to those.
It's racism that fuels this comparison with value. I'm living in a yurt and would gladly trade it for a mud hut. Humans are currently threatening most life (including our own species) on the surface with extinction in multiple ways. That's not value and it is an inevitable conclusion to any form of binary thinking at scale. That includes the thinking that says "this way of life has more value than that way of life." We're living in the curse of the Greeks, whereby we've grown away from connection with our environments in the same ways they did by pedestaling their ways, including a form of logic that's too constrained to model reality.
Here's a paper on uncertainty logic to expand from. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1506.03123
Thank you for saying it. The racism is so embedded into western society it’s intractable
You can have a system that generally isn't one of zero sum games that was that at the same time can become one when it becomes extremely unbalanced (e.g. when billionaires exist).
"Extract" here has two meanings:
1. Extracting from the market or the economy. It seems like (correct me if I'm wrong) this is what you're reading it as? Here you're generally exploiting what private equity calls "pricing power" or what economists call "enclosures" (or "rent-seeking") so inelastic demand (eg housing) or market protection (eg making municipal broadband illegal); and
2. Extracting from labor. This is the basis of the labor theory of value [1].
The point of comments like AOC's is mostly the second one, which is to say that you only become a billionaire by extracting it from your workers. And yes, this is a fundamental disagreement with many people. Some will say that the startup founder who makes a billion dollars deserves it by taking the risk or being the leader or however you want to frame it.
The counterargument is that that value simply wouldn't exist if it wasn't for those workers and their work. Even Instagram, which famously had only 13 employees when acquired for $1 billion, still needed those workers. It would've been nothing without them.
Take Google as another example. The profit per employee has famously been (at times) over $1 million per year.
The term for this is "surplus labor value".
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value
As the Wikipedia article states, the labour theory of value (LTV) was replaced by the theory of marginal utility in mainstream economics due to its major inconsistencies.
> Take Google as another example. The profit per employee has famously been (at times) over $1 million per year.
So, are you saying that the employees were exploited in some way? I could give you examples of how value is created without any work at all.
Money is not a representation of value. It is a representation of desire. I agree that, in principle, an economy does not have to be set up as a zero sum game, and at smaller scales (many of us don't realize that 1 billion is relatively small for global scale economics), it really doesn't have to be. I agree that value can be created. But value doesn't run this economy, desire does. And sometimes desire runs totally counter to what is _actually_ valuable.
Not to mention that, especially in a fiat environment where currency is printed out of thin air, it is literally a zero-sum game by definition. When the printer winds up, the bankers win big at everyone elses expense; setting the tone for the entire market. Anecdotal success stories of hard working, honest billionaires is a nice distraction, but that's all it is.
The substantive reality of the status quo is one of unprecedented levels of extraction, and as we continue down this AI power consildation story, that will be harder and harder to deny as we go forward. If you happen to win big as an outlier, more power to you, but the article even admits to the rarity of this story implicity. 20 years. thousands of companies. 30 billionaires.
Even if every single one of those people are honest to goodness saints, that's only slightly better odds, perhaps, than winning the lottery.
no one is doing it honestly in the disparity
musk isnt a trillionaire because his assets would equate to physical product. his valuation is an inflated target of market manipulation.
when you add up all the physical goods in the world that directly benefit people, that comes nowhere near these valuations.
and externalities are one way wealth is taken from the environment. then theyre parlayed.
Why should we only count physical goods as benefits?
That sounds like a pretty impoverished world to live in. No music, no art, no communication with our friends and family beyond speech…
I don't think that was the point, you can add those to the physical goods list as well, as well as many other human services (education, cutting hair, open air games, etc).
The point was that the real money comes from finance games, like the stock market, forex trading, etc - things of much more dubious value when you actually look at them objectively.
Percievable goods and services, then.
There is a finite amount of land on earth, and a finite amount of most natural resources. We currently have no indication we will EVER develop faster than light technology.
Any discussion not grounded in those facts is a dishonest discussion. It is a zero sum game until those externalities change because ultimately our species is built upon extraction resources to produce wealth. It IS a zero sum game until you or someone else invents a means of solving the first order problems.
On a trillion year time frame, sure.
I think there are many arguments against AOC's comments, but I agree that PG here is misrepresenting her point.
I don't think anyone reading PG's blog is clueless about the power of compounding or the difference between salary and wealth through asset growth.
Her point is essentially whether the entire capital system is "fair." And to be fair to PG I don't think AOC articulated a particularly strong point either.
pg is or was the owner of a very influential venture capital fund, that created projects such as Uber and AirBNB. He knows all about setting up structures to extract value, and he also knows which framing makes people more sympathetic instead of angry.
>pg is or was the owner of a very influential venture capital fund, that created projects such as Uber
Uber was not a YCombinator company. For some unexplained reason, many mistakenly think it was a YC startup but it's not correct.
(The gp's comment is an example of how chatbots hallucinate because they train on the text of people unintentionally hallucinating.)
An LLM trained only on true statements will still hallucinate.
Uber was founded in the special YC session that took place on the moon.
()
The sad part about it, and one that has become a bit of a theme with his postings, is that pg stopped being intellectually honest in his online writings at some point over the last two decades.
His post here in particular violates the fundamental principles of HN in that he does not engage with the argument at all.
The argument isn't that it's impossible to become a billionaire legally, the argument is that it's impossible to become a billionaire in a moral way, though that's more of a problem of the system than it is necessarily one at the individual level. A just and moral system would assign the value being created in such a way that becoming a billionaire would be essentially impossible.
Yet pg never even acknowledged the possibility that that might have been the argument.
> he also knows which framing makes people more sympathetic instead of angry
I'm of the opinion that this skill atrophies substantially for billionaires.
> pg's reading of it is so blunt and misrepresentative that I'm nervous about what kind of content he's consuming.
Does this mean you haven't been following his twitter the past several years?
No I got off that trainwreck a long time ago
Why does building a successful business necessitate generating economic externalities? Many do, and that should be prevented, but many also don’t. And to say that those externalities are responsible for a majority of the business’s growth in all cases is just false.
I'm genuinely struggling to think of a sector of billion dollar business that doesn't rely heavily on externalized costs. I'm not trying to be difficult, but I can't come up with any.
Externalities exist in every transaction, it just means the value created or lost outside of the transaction.
So the reason you can’t think of any is because no economic activity exists with out them.
But externalities can both be positive or negative.
I wonder what she would say about professional athletes. Some of the top stars have made near a billion dollars in lifetime wages, as unionized employees. Hard for me to see who the sports stars are exploiting to get their wealth.
Of course she wasn't talking about athletes (or artists, etc), she was implicitly talking about the business / tech world. I guess she should have been explicit about it so people don't come out with arguments like this.
I think this is super interesting (because the answer is not at all obvious to me): What do you mean by "through work alone"? Can it only be work if I can map a human hour cleanly onto someone paying an invoice for that hour?
Yes. Investment gains are not work, inheritance is not work,capital appreciation is not work, winning the PayPal stocks lottery is not work.
> Investment gains are not work
Say, for example, my job is allocating capital across the S&P 500. My work is picking the stocks, the fruits of my labour are excess returns.
Are those excess returns not work? What are they?
Part of it is work, yes. But consider. How much is your take home as a fund manager with 100M AUM? How much is your take home with 10B AUM? The work is the same, yet if the take home is different, you've proven that your income is not in fact earned through work in a moral sense.
> Are those excess returns not work? What are they?
Wealth extracted from a market, which is what the parent commenter said in the first place
What do you mean “extracted”? The wealth is sitting there in his 401(k) being risked through (highly) fractional ownership of various publicly traded business ventures.
I mean "not earned through work", as evidenced by your description of it "as as sitting there". Risk isn't the same as work.
What is being “extracted” from what?
I described it as “sitting there” to contrast my viewpoint that in fact it’s not being “extracted” from anything as far as I can tell.
Do you think “work” means literally “manual labor”?
Are you good at picking stocks, or just lucky? How do you know?
Say, for example, my job is allocating capital across the roulette wheel. My work is picking the numbers, the fruits of my labour are excess returns.
Are those returns not work? What are they?
What if I build and run a SaaS?
The common argument would be that, unless you set it up as a co-op/full profit share or never hire employees, you're extracting value (exploiting) from what your employees' labor earned the company.
Missing from both sides of this argument, IMHO, is BATNA.[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiat...
So if one finds a way to do it and not hire people they actually earned the money by that definition? We presume that people at large would be ready say "Oh yeah, in that case: You earned that billion dollars for sure, nothing wrong with any of that, go you"?
Whereas: If they hire a single employee to help with, idk, responding to support tickets that would get them into "well maybe you did not earn it"-territory?
Because if that is the depiction we are going with: I have my doubts.
Folks have been arguing about this forever. Both sides - community-focused and individual-focused -- have reasonable points on the ethics and morals of what they claim. Both sides want claim to a split of the pie produced by the efforts of individuals.
Just like you're mentioning Obama's lambasted "you didn't build that" comments -- his point was completely valid, in that the individual profiteers didn't build the roads their products ship on, the energy infrastructure their cloud providers consume to host their digital footprint and logistics, etc. etc. But people pay for a large part of what they DO consume -- the cases where they don't are what we squirrelly and bookish economists call "externalities" (costs of production gotten too cheap/free). Trying to correct for every externality is a maddening and endogenous exercise in navel gazing -- but huge and easily seen externalities are not crazy to want to address (e.g., Erin Brokovich, pollution, etc.).
In your example of someone getting hired to field support tickets -- if that person weren't hired, the founders would spend all their time chasing down those tickets. So did the founder earn the cash, or did both people earn the cash despite one of the jobs being less favorable? If an egalitarian share is unwarranted, what is a reasonably fair trade? Why is an egalitarian share unwarranted? Etc.
The core question embedded in all these arguments are - what is a fair tax on the economy? If a government's policy encourages large economic growth for everyone, then perhaps it is good to fund it via tax with all the associated tradeoffs like crowding out, marginal decisions impacted, and so on. Getting it right looks like Scandinavia. Getting it wrong looks like Cuba / final days of the USSR. Ignoring it (on both sides of the aisle) looks like Venezuela and Argentina.
But there is no doubt that without the people who produce there would be no taxes, and a 100% tax would push everyone away from doing anything. This is why the way-too-simplistic Laffer curve argument seemed compelling in the 80s -- "unshackle the economy by lowering taxes."
I haven't kept up with pg (fairly or unfairly) since some of the techbrokings adopted Yarvinism as a goal, so I have no idea what he has said recently.
Building the SaaS is work, responding to customer support tickets is work; collecting rents every month on a capital asset you own is not work.
I never understood why Joel Spolsky stopped blogging. His reason was basically (paraphrasing) that his business grew too big and mature for him to keep writing. It sounded nonsense to me by the time.
And now comparing PG's writing today and what he wrote 10~15 years ago, I finally get what Joel means.
He also glosses over the fact that the founder started with $2 million.
Agreed, what a disappointment of an essay, encouraging a growth at all costs mindset and pretending that this growth doesn't involve/encourage bad side effects.
And a lot of these structures either involves a percentage cut or a security of some kind. And it's not new, it's copied.
His entire essay is just based on a purposeful misreading of the opposing point. It's a straw man. And if you look at his history it's obviously intentional and part of his usual style of argument.
The actual opposing argument is that it's impossible to create a billion dollar enterprise without a group effort, and for one person to end up with a billion dollars necessarily means that they made decisions within that enterprise that resulted in a lopsided allocation of resources at the end.
Period. That's it, and it's inarguable.
Every single aspect of the system is arbitrary and is a policy decision made by society. The basic building block, the limited liability joint stock company as a legal concept with some form of independent rights and entity status is arbitrary. Every lever, every part of the system, is created by people making decisions about how society is organized.
The people he is arguing with are basically saying "we want the system structured differently because this one is producing too much concentrated wealth." That's a political choice and an eminently reasonable one.
So if it's that simple, why would he feel a need to straw man instead of just addressing the actual argument? Well because he'd lose. The reality is is most people agree with this assessment of society and want it to change.
And by the way the question of how resources get split between labor and capital is the oldest and most central political problem in human history. To adopt a condescending tone while pretending to be ignorant of stuff you learn in the first couple weeks of any real study of politics or history, betrays the deception inherent in his essay.
> it's impossible to create a billion dollar enterprise without a group effort
George Lucas made a movie with a (small) group effort. But what made a billion dollars is his Star Wars universe which is almost entirely his creation.
It literally creates wealth for other people. If my toy sells $10,000 without Star Wars and $100,000 with it, did I participate in making George’s billion, or am I benefiting from it?
> means that they made decisions within that enterprise that resulted in a lopsided allocation of resources at the end.
What do you mean? Every good and service involves many people, but the degree to which they participate in its creation and risk vary. For example, a Farmer may create a more efficient way to grow food. Is the grocery store now entitled to a piece of the reward? They didn’t change anything, all of the improvement is the farmer side.
The bit about Lucas is obviously not true. The universe he envisioned does not sell itself, it was marketed, developed, painted and modeled, added to, kept fresh etc for many many years by a huge army of people. If the only Star Wars media that existed were the original film, or even the original trilogy, it would sell relatively little by now.
So if you were to assign value to the work to make a new Star Wars toy would you it’s (total value of Stat wars) * (number of people who have ever worked on Star Wars) / (number of people who worked on the toy)?
That’s absurd. Obviously they are creating incremental wealth and their particular toy didn’t make or break billions.
No, I'm saying that you can't attribute any significant percent of the value of a Star Wars toy sold today to George Lucas. If Star Wars had not continued after the 1980 films, these toys would not keep selling so much today.
The post I replied to allocated all of the monetary value of the Star Wars branding of a toy to George Lucas personally, which I think is obviously wrong.
> George Lucas made a movie with a (small) group effort. But what made a billion dollars is his Star Wars universe which is almost entirely his creation.
If that were actually true, how come we can't predict what the next Star Wars universe will be?
Same for pop songs etc. If it were actually about objective qualities of the creation, and not just luck, the next winners of the lottery would be apparent even before they hit the theaters.
There is null inherent quality in the Star Wars universe causing the billion dollar revenue. If George Lucas wouldn't have been there at the right spot at the right time, the dominant IP would simply have been something different.
If you have kids, you can directly observer what actually happens: The IP owners dump huge amounts of money into merch and product placements everywhere, resulting in them getting in contact with the franchise before they are out of their diapers. My kids came home from daycare roleplaying lightsaber fights without any previous contact with the franchise at our home. The trick is implanting the meme (in the original meaning of the word) into kids' brains before another meme can nest in there.
Inability to predict the universe does not mean the underlying mechanism is actually random. It means you don’t understand it well enough.
Well that conveniently makes your assertion unfalsifiable, doesn't it?
> George Lucas
Once again, lopsided allocation - George benefited from and is directly responsible for keeping the cost of labor low: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/100...
Would he have been a billionaire without that? Who knows? But it definitely helped him get there.
I addressed that. The movies themselves are not the source of the wealth and yes the original was created by a group so small that theoretically Star Wars wealth could have been divided evenly and they would be billionaires.
If you say the original crew did not do all the labor required to make the franchise grow in the future (obviously true), you are now arguing different people have had incremental impact on creating the wealth, which is kind of the point.
I might be misunderstanding your point then.
Are you saying that he/the small group are solely responsible for Disney wanting to pay 4 billion for it?
Yes I’m arguing that the original crew created within the ball park of a billion in wealth per-head.
The Star Wars franchise earned a tremendous amount of money before the one-time Disney payout.
Of course it's arguable. You make it sound like founders perform some jedi mind-trick to take money from others. Here's what actually happens. Investors put in initial money because it's a win-win (they get an expected return, founders get starting capital). Employees join because it's a win-win (they get a salary, health, equity, other perks; founders get a workforce). Customers pay cash because it's a win-win (they get a product or service they want, the business gets money). At no point is someone being held down and forced to hand money to someone else.
Health is not a perk but an inelastic demand: a threat to withhold health is a threat of physical harm, and a negotiation in which one party's physical health is on the line is quantitatively but not qualitatively different from a negotiation held with a gun to that party's head.
I am making a meta-argument, and I do think that it’s inarguable.
My argument is this: the core disagreement here is about the allocation of resources between labor and capital.
I’m right. It is.
That doesn’t mean I have settled the argument about what those allocations should be which nobody has, it’s a core organizational element of politics.
But I think his argument is bullshit. It’s a purposeful misdirection because it refuses to recognize the terms of the discussion at all.
One can agree that they would rather see wealth more equitably distributed while also admitting that the current system of private property and capitalism is the most effective at broadly generating wealth.
amusing that the most rational take on HN is immediately down-voted.
You are saying that people should not have a right to keep their private property Most people would not agree with that
I understood the phrase as emphasizing the "deserving" implication of the word earn. As in, it is not possible for a human to take actions such that the fair reward is a billion. Or in other words, if you got a billion you got more than it's fair. To emphasize: this does not necessarily mean that the way one became a billionaire is nefarious or evil. It just implies unfairness.
I'm not defending that interpretation, mind you, just saying it's a possible read of the phrase.
> so blunt and misrepresentative
You should read that as a self-preservation technique. The eager use of a strawman tells us PG heard AOC's words as an attack against him personally, his business, and his friends.
So the essay is not a reasoned retort but more an emotional self-defense to soothe a bruised ego. It's to assure himself that no -- in fact he did earn his wealth fair and square, and to imply otherwise shows a lack of understanding of how this all works. But I do love this essay because it does show just how emotional and irrational billionaires can be when their wealth and egos are threatened.
So what does you practical utopia look like in real terms. What's the master plan beyond I don't like people making money from what people want? What does that utopia look like in practice.
> So what does you practical utopia look like in real terms.
When you hit a hundred billion in net worth, you get a nice solid gold plaque that says "I won capitalism", you get an attaboy from the UN, and we start taxing the shit out of wealth over that cap.
Adjust periodically for inflation. (Do that for minimum wage while we're at it.)
But these ultra rich people don't have a hundred billion dollars in a bank account, they just own a percent of a company. So what you're really saying is a person isn't allowed to own a certain fraction of a company once it reaches a certain valuation.
Sounds great to me.
I find these special founder-class shares that completely insulate folks like Musk and Zuck from their actual investors to be deeply problematic.
Yes, you got it!
It's because while for some people there may be jealousy involved, many more have realized or are now realizing how much power the ultra rich have, and how bad that is for our societies.
Once a company becomes large enough, it becomes so influential in society that control of it must be made more democratic.
I don't think anywhere has figured out quite the right way to go about it yet, but it's clearly the right goal. Some countries require employee representation on the boards of large companies.
But the accounting difference is real. It is virtually impossible to earn a billion dollars. What is possible but still difficult is to create something worth a billion dollars which you can then sell if you choose so.
And to the people criticizing, this is cheating. To them, a billion dollars enterprise is not possible without the exploitation of employees, customers, or at least the environment.
Also, the most important thing to understand about a society is how people gain status, not just money/wealth. If you focus on money, you won't have an explanation for political movements or artistic endeavors.
Having to pay a fat wedge of tax every year on what you "earn" sucks a lot of the life out of the compounding effect.
We pay those taxes because not having the services and societal stability those taxes pay for also sucks a lot of life out.
I think that’s their justification in the abstract, not the justification for most individual tax items.
I don't have to inspect every grain of rice with a magnifying glass to enjoy the overall dish.
Are you arguing that we should have bad taxes because some taxes are good?
Yes, absolutely.
There's a cost to perfection. In our computing world, every extra nine of reliability is more expensive than the last, often with diminishing returns.
See also: Florida drug testing welfare recipients cost more than it saved. https://www.aclu.org/news/smart-justice/just-we-suspected-fl...
You’re arguing that the cost to find bad taxes is not worth the savings. That’s not the same thing.
If I’ve already found with a poor justification or better yet, someone is proposing a new one. Shouldn’t we remove it?
I mean, I'd also argue that the definition of a "bad tax" is notoriously difficult to agree on.
For example:
https://x.com/NEWSMAX/status/1937470443168182386
> A government agency spending $300 million in taxpayer dollars to produce sterilized flies sounds like a dream scenario for a DOGE team looking to cut waste, fraud, and abuse.
A year later:
https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/09/business/what-consumers-shoul...
> Grocery shoppers could get hit with higher prices if the screwworm cases turn into a full-blown outbreak. That could cost $3 billion across the Southwest, according to a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
Good tax, or bad tax?
Returning to your question, though: Yes, I assert the cost of troubleshooting a "bad tax" may exceed the benefits of having addressed it.
You’re weasling.
We don’t have to treat taxes as a pool we can look at the pros and cons of each one. Taxes are not benevolent and good by nature.
You seem to be suggesting here it’s impossible or too costly to weigh pros or cons. So I would not consider you for an administrative position
You're avoiding the points.
"Look at the pros and cons of each one" is an enormous handwave; I've provided very clear evidence of our inability to do that successfully in a very topical and concrete case.
But the amount of tax we pay is because of inefficient, corrupt and incompetent government.
We have the current inefficient, corrupt, and incompetent government in the US because the anti-tax wealthy class threw an all-out tantrum over even the idea of paying a tiny bit more tax.
And that government was corrupted by…wealthy business owners via regulatory capture!
You can still collect taxes without taxing people who have already been taxed in the form of needing to exchange a large fraction of their life for the wage.
I'm entirely onboard with reducing tax on low/mid income folks in favor of increased taxes on the billionaire class, yes.
When capital gains tax is so much lower than income tax, this holds even more true for people who work at the companies being sold for lots of money and make income in wages than the people who own the companies, and that just reinforces the original point
Those taxes are the necessary condition in silly essays like this one from pg. Or why do you think those billionaires miraculously mostly end up in the US and not in countries like Sudan or Peru? I mean if those billionaires would actually be the wealth creators, not depending on society at large, they could become billionaires everywhere, right?
Only up to a certain threshold – after which you can afford "creative" accounting which reduces the tax burden and restores the compounding effect ;-)
People who earn money pay taxes
While at Amazon Jeff Bezos considers his worth to be 80k a year hence he was paid that much, and paid taxes in that salary.
If someone becomes a billionaire by being paid 50m a year for 40 years and paying taxes on that income then congrats.
In creative destruction, you can do an accounting sleight of hand by attributing credit for creation while ignoring blame for destruction even though the two are linked.
This is a technology + investing forum and all of us agree that in general creative destruction processes are enormously net positive, but they frequently do kick off a toxic byproduct in the form of said destruction (e.g. Uber and displaced taxi drivers), so there is moral entanglement between creation and destruction. Morally speaking, figuring out how to mitigate this toxic byproduct is part of our remit just as it was part of the remit of earlier industrialists to figure out how not to discharge so much flammable goo into the river that it lit on fire. We neglect this at our peril, because society merely pinches its nose if the toxic byproducts are small, but they are increasingly not small.
When AI melts away these rent seeking marketplaces like Uber, Doordash, Amazon, etc, they won’t go as quietly as the people they displaced.
These are actually the most durable businesses because they have network effects: restaurants alright signed up, sellers onboarded, etc.
Easier for them to adopt AI than AI companies to rebuild the networks
One way to take over a network is to start with an alternative front end. We'll see if this works out for AI companies. First you have the AI consult booking.com whenever someone asks it to book a hotel, then you get more and more hotels to directly communicate with the AI company, then you drop booking.com once you have enough.
It’s exactly what I’m building. First I’m building open-source SaaS for every vertical and then leverage that to build a decentralized, interoperable marketplace.
what makes you think AI won't be the ultimate rent-seeker
There's no resource destruction involved in displacing taxi drivers. Taxi medallions are a rent-seeking scheme, there's no real scarcity involved. Most other instances of "creative destruction" are like that, the capital simply gets repurposed at negligible social cost and only excess profits disappear.
I will say before Uber was a thing, if I tried to call and schedule a taxi pickup in the city I lived in at the time, if they showed up at all they were at east a half hour late. Missed a flight because of it once. I don’t even like uber, but it is objectively a better service most of the time.
Yeah, anyone who uses taxi drivers as an example of destruction either don't know what they're talking about (because they never experienced it) or they're crying crocodile tears.
I had cab drivers nearly drive off with me hanging off the car in San Francisco, because they were far more concerned with screening my destination than, say, not killing me. If Uber destroyed that industry, it was only a net benefit to society. They created immense value, and the "destruction" was only to eliminate a layer of corrupt parasites who made money by preventing a free market (in this case, the medallion owners, but the entire industry was corrupt from top to bottom).
Not all places have corrupt taxi industries. I think they were always more expensive than Uber (but there's a reason for that, Uber's pricing is not sustainable) but in most places a taxi is just a taxi.
Don't entirely agree that a local Taxi service is necessarily costlier than Uber. In my indian city, Uber and Ola cannot compete (and have been nearly wiped out) because a local Taxi service (that now dominates the market) is very competitively priced and professionally run. They charge their drivers a fixed percentage (unlike Uber or Ola, and lower fees than them) and release their payments timely in a transparent manner. The price per km, and all extra charges (late night fees, overtime driver charges etc., permit fees in case of long distance travel, toll fees etc.) are transparently conveyed to the customer too. And there is no bullshit practice of price gauging through "surge pricing" or "convenience fees" or "platform fees" etc.
Uber also forced taxi services to have apps and always accept CCs.
Yes, Uber did something enormously creative. But it also did something destructive and we're guilty of an accounting sleight of hand if we focus on one while pretending the other doesn't exist.
We still want to encourage creative destruction to move forward, but paying taxes to clean up the destruction is the very least that the victorious parties can do because the entanglement exists in moral accounting even if it doesn't exist in financial accounting.
Destroying inefficient monopoly rents? By all means, let us not pretend that doesn't exist.
You're forgetting the workers, who were the important part of this analysis.
Why are the taxi workers more important than, say, the taxi customers? If the companies are providing garbage service, why do I have to care about protecting their workers?
When you lose your job to AI, you will understand.
Technology has always displaced workers. And then the society adjusts. Plenty of people will lose their jobs to AI, but most workers will be redeployed elsewhere.
The agricultural revolution displaced farm workers with machines. There was unrest and migration to cities, and eventually that fed the Industrial Revolution and created a working class.
Change is tough, but we will all be fine.
Yeah and it took about 150 years until industrial revolution started to actually benefit the common people and the workers started to have their working conditions improved.
What it took was social democracy and unions and other social movements.
Saying that "it's happened before, it'll be alright" is a bit naive and short-sighted.
Last time inequality cooked up it took a lifetime to go back down. It did so very painfully through capital incineration on a monumental scale: a great depression, where the incineration was metaphorical, and two world wars, where it was very literal. In both cases it was economical and in both cases it fixed the problem but at enormous cost. We should aim to do better.
Easy to say it all worked out fine when you aren't one of the people who was displaced. They might feel differently.
It may have worked out fine for humanity as a whole, but it ignores the suffering of a lot of people.
What's the byproduct of human-level AI and robotics?
Displaced workers.
I mean, maaaaaybe a Jevon's Paradox kicks into play with human labor and replacing people with robots somehow creates even more jobs, but whenever someone says this your immediate response should be: "ok, now put your money where your mouth is and bet on it by strengthening the social safety net."
I generally do believe that workers get redeployed elsewhere after technological disruption.
(Eg agricultural revolution in the US)
I do believe in good safety nets as well and I think that shows in my voting record, so I’m not sure what else you would expect from me, if anything.
This assumes sufficient jobs. We have been below replacement jobs for a long time but we made up the difference with Bullshit Jobs. Now we might even be running out of those.
> Bullshit Jobs
I’ve only read the article, not the full book, but I’m not sure I buy the premise.
Maybe we can’t see what the new post-AI society looks like yet, but I tend to believe society progresses as it evolves.
It doesn’t mean it won’t be rocky for many people, and good social safety nets will make this easier, but I generally don’t think there will be some kind of dystopian future where society runs out of work to do for humans.
A lot of current bullshit jobs involve generating text that nobody reads or cares about. LLMs replace these.
We'll have a better idea if it arrives.
> She was getting richer at a stupendously rapid rate. And yet she hadn't been doing anything bad. The reason her startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built. So she could feel from her own experience how wrong that politician was. She wasn't exploiting anyone.
I presume it's a company that just has co-founders then? Or everyone is getting an equal % of the share? In which case SHE's not getting 93% richer just cause her start up is.
Let's say she has ten employees. They all voluntarily agree to work for her: slavery is illegal, so people work for others on a consensual basis. Both the employer and employee negotiated and consented to a salary or wage schedule for that employee. The employer pays the agreed-upon compensation, and the employee receives it.
If the company makes an unexpectedly large profit, the employer is not obligated to redistribute that to her employees in addition to the already agreed-upon and paid compensation. If the employees think that what they agreed to work for is no longer sufficient, they are welcome to renegotiate their compensation or, if they feel they have been wronged and are being paid less than they are worth, to take their talent to a different employer. After all, everything so far has been consensual. The only thing that would be non-consensual would be obligating the employer to redistribute her profit over and above what had already been negotiated.
This completely negates the fact that due to how the labor market is structured, most people who sell their labour to survive are in a disadvantageous position for the negotiation you are talking about. What you are talking about works well in a basic economics text book but does not translate to the real world.
> slavery is illegal, so people work for others on a consensual basis
Well there you have it folks case closed.
Slavery is illegal therefore there is no slavery. Geniuses at work indeed
No it’s a magical startup where it’s just going to be her in a basement doing 100% of the work required for 10 months straight while demand doubles every month.
:facepalm:
Lets walk through the math. If her company is worth $100, and she owns 100% (her wealth starts at $100), and the company grows 93%, then the company has grown to be worth $193 and her share has grown by $93 which is indeed a 93% growth rate for her wealth.
Alternatively, if her company is worth $100, and she owns only 10% (making her wealth $10), and the company grows 93%, then the company has grown to be worth $193 and her share has grown by $9.30 which is still indeed a 93% growth rate for her wealth, which started at $10 and now rises to $19.30.
The pursuit of everlasting growth that pg describes inevitably results in cheating. At a certain point the market reaches a saturation point and if you're capitalising on every possible opportunity to retain your high growth rate, that will include hoarding resources and circumventing consumer protections.
The hoarding resources and circumventing consumer protections is just the start of it.
Eventually it becomes rational to start buying politicians, and subsequently laws. The next obvious avenue is to then control entire government agencies like the FAA or the FCC and just write favorable laws and regulations they don't even have to circumvent.
But even that isn't the end because they're growing too fast, they actually outgrow the law, so breaking it becomes a rational, profit-driven choice. Huge fines? Regulators breathing down your neck? No worries! Just spend more money then has ever been spent in an election to their favored presidential candidate, and then they get to just shut down investigations into themselves!
But even that isn't enough -- soon it becomes a rational business-forward goal to take over the entire government; or even better become the government. First a city, then a state, then a nation. Guess what folks EVEN THAT won't be enough. Not even everything on this entire planet Earth is enough for them; they also want the Moon and Mars and the entire solar system. They will have to become God at some point for this growth to keep up, and that will still be too little for their egos to bear. Something has to give.
Impressed at the commentary here, which correctly points out Paul dodges the entire issue at hand.
Three things can be true: 1. Growing at a rapid rate over long periods of time is hard, doable and rewarding 2. Incentivizing the discovery of these things is good for society. 3. Nonethless there is and should be a limit to wealth acquisition, given moral hazard.
To make a similarly glib counterargument to Paul G:
If it's the founders who earned the same monetary value of the companies they created ("because they're responsible for it"), they should bear the same moral and legal responsibility for the externalities.
So far, only SBF is in jail. Lots more of these companies have broken the law.
Let's throw the founders in jail too - they can keep their money!
SBF is only in jail because the people he targeted for scamming were the rich.
Nobody who illegally make the rich richer goes to jail, they get a promotion usually
Correct.
There's a huge social element. No one wants to throw their buddies in jail.
It looks bad on the golf course (or at Burning Man / Sun Valley if you're in tech)
Playing devils advocate here:
Maybe the politicians position is that the whole system is based on cheating and everyone who partakes is acting immorally?
Is it fair that the founder got education and some money to start his company while other people are living on the street or have to care for relatives? If they come from a relatively privileged position and manage to build a company that ends up being successful, did they earn that money?
I don’t think the cheating people criticize is necessarily criminal fraud.
Edit: and the second thing people seem to criticize is that just keeping your company growing often seems to involve some unethical things. Basically every company that’s manufacturing hardware is doing that in Asia under inhumane conditions, so they probably can’t really claim they earned their money and it’s just maths.
If the only viable alternative is that nobody gets to start their business rather than some idealized best case of everyone getting a chance of it, then yes, it's probably fair.
I don’t think the only options are the current way or that nobody is allowed to start companies.
Im not from the US so I’m probably not doing a good job at the devils advocate thing but I could imagine that you just tax the people that start the business so they still get some healthy personal wealth by redistributing the truly extreme wealth back to the workers/society.
There’s probably some motivation problem to grow the company further at some point but maybe you could limit the percentage any individual can earn by holding the company or something like that?
There are models of business which don't assume a handful of people - some of whom don't even do the work - get to keep the profits, and the rest are disposable.
Businesses are started without VC capital all the time, especially outside of the US and SV circles.
Technically if you look at AOC's statement he mentions
>AOC: “There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned. You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that”
there's some truth there in that PG is talking about capital gains as the owner of a company and AOC is talking about earnings as payment for labour which are different things both in reality and in tax policy and law.
The capital gains can be unfair in that most of them go to founders and VCs and not much to other employees and stakeholders who have contributed as well.
Putting the scale of dollars and the startup world aside, AOC’s comments read that way would suggest a farmer who gets a series of loans from the bank to help him expand his family farm from a $200K sole proprietorship to a $10M sole proprietorship didn’t “earn” it either.
I don’t think a definition of “earn” that excludes cases like that captures the generally understood meaning.
The farmer doesn’t own that mega farm until he pays off the loans.
How does he get the money to do that?
Well there are plenty of massively successful companies that Paul famously said no to investing in, for stylistic and opinionated and not greedy reasons, like Palantir. I'm sure in Paul's opinion they are doing something bad. Maybe not in Gary Tan's opinion. That is to say, not only is this stuff subjective, but it's complicated. Palantir and Flock, their main customer is the government, which complicates the story even further.
Conversely, I suspect the politician is defining that "all things that earn a billion dollars" are in the "bad" category.
LeBron James has, between playing basketball and endorsing things, earned a billion dollars. What bad thing did he do, other than losing the finals a few times?
If she meant "impossible" as hyperbole (as one might use "nobody wants a stylus!" to mean "very few people want a stylus!") then I agree with her.
If she meant "impossible" completely literally, then she is wrong.
This then that makes the argument very hard to respond to.
"No I didn't mean this [virtuous example]. I meant the vast majority of [unnamed nefarious actors] which I don't need to elaborate about as their existence is obvious."
Once you say it's just hyperbole and you don't mean it literally, then the only way to prove it is a statistical argument.
"The overwhelmingly share of company founders and companies are bad and don't earn their money." is a big claim that requires more than vibes.
Would anyone take literally the claim that it is impossible to attain a billion dollars without 'doing something bad' or 'cheating'? Someone with $100 billion, who wanted to disprove it, could do so in five minutes, by cutting a $1 billion bonus check to his nanny.
A classic Motte-and-bailey argument
He probably signed advertising contracts.
A tremendous amount of advertising towards kids which very explicitly uses tactics to exploit their insecurities and get them to pressure their parents (many whom can’t really afford it) to buy them gratuitously overpriced shoes or other products which the kids don’t actually need at all.
It’s an industry of low-grade exploitation, generating products that people mostly don’t need. It’s bizarre. It fits squarely into the category AOC is trying to define here.
Aren't shoe companies notoriously scummy in regards to human rights? Nike has quite a lengthy controversies section on Wikipedia, and they're where a lot of his money came from.
Yeah, you can choose between two worlds: in the current one, Nike is producing shoes in you don't want to really know circumstances and is paying LeBron ~$40M a year.
In another world, LeBron is still a millionaire, getting a nice $1M a year. The rest, a mere $39M, which in Paul Graham terms is just a couple months from turning into a billion, goes to the hopeless kids actually churning out the god damn shoes.
LeBron did nothing wrong. The system is this corrupt.
If you wish to live in a world of mediocrity then reward no one for merit. Look no further than to history to see the results of a merit less society.
Nike has some of the best labor policies of all the shoe companies now. Their controversies were in the 90s.
I've been able to calculate logarithms for well over 20 years.
That's not the problem.
The problem is even simpler mathematics. Proportions. How much do we give to first employees? How realistic is that John Smith, first salesman of the company is getting 2% and should consider himself lucky, while I, Peter Boss retain most of the company?
We always talk about the dilation of the founders' shares and its relation to the VC portion.
What is the usual proportion of the shares held by the founders and the first 10 or 100 employees?
Is that proportion usually realistic with regards to the effort put in and the risk assumed?
Is that risk usually really that heroic or most of us in the "can found a startup" caste can usually go back to jobs that already pay well over average?
I am the founder of a company. I want it to succeed. I don't want to become a billionaire, but I want the people that help me build it to have similar successes to mine.
If we succeed, I don't want my car or house to be 10x more expensive than of those people who joined me first.
There's something seriously rotten about telling university students about billions. The issue isn't whether anyone can earn a billion dollars. Nobody actually needs a billion dollars.
The question they should be pondering is given the excess of talent and opportunity they have, how can they help the people around them and give something back to society.
Simply, neoliberal capitalism is sociopathy with quarterly returns.
The assumptions are:
1. A uniquely special class of people do all the work that matters. They're astoundingly gifted, talented, and insightful, and have a rare ability to make profits happen by having very special ideas, owning Important Things, and telling everyone else what to do. These prodigies deserve everything. They are not to be criticised or judged by their inferiors. Ridicule only proves their superiority.
2. The work everyone else does is far less important. Most of the people doing it are interchangeable and literally disposable. Sometimes they deserve nice things, in a limited sense, if it's hard to make things happen without them. But mostly no.
3. Negative externalities - pollution, ecosystem collapse, spiralling asset prices, financial and political instability - aren't real. If they are real they don't matter. If they do matter they're someone else's fault.
4. It's absolutely fine to treat other humans with aggressive indifference and outright contempt as long as Number Goes Up. In fact it's expected.
>an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars… What she meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way.
This assumption is depressing. That the only alternative to "earn" is "cheat".
A system of diminishing work (i.e. where money makes money), especially combined with inheritance, means every dollar is arguably less earned than the last. That system is fine and actually very useful, but that diminishment becomes a big problem at large enough scales. We've been operating at that scale for many decades.
Precisely, I like the term "diminishing work". I think a lot of disagreement comes from differing definitions of "earning", or "ethically earned", but working 12hr days hard labour to earn $1000 and putting $10k into a stock that goes up 10% intuitively seem different.
I think the distinction the politician tried to make, was that you don't "earn" a billion dollars the same way the vast majority of people make their money. You become a billionaire by company ownership, not getting cold hard cash.
The hierarchy of wage looks something like:
1. hourly pay (how many hours you can work sets the maximum possible salary)
2. base pay + cash bonus (the cash bonus starts to increase your earning potential. Sometimes the bonus can be huge, for traders, salespeople, etc.)
3. base pay + stock options (the stock options can outsize your base pay by big margins)
4. stock ownership (almost all your wealth is tied up to the stocks)
The vast, vast majority of people are stuck at (1), and will never move to (2). Nearly all billionaires are at (4).
The average worker will work around 100k hours in their lifetime. If you started working today, with a 2% inflation rate, you'd have to start getting paid close to $6000 / hour in order to reach a billion dollars (pre-tax) in total income by the time you retire 50 years from now.
Another factor to consider, is that salaried workers can't use leverage to increase their earnings. A startup founder can find investors and raise money, which works as rocket-fuel for their company. You can practically outspend your competition. That is simply not possible for regular workers, without breaking rules (as in outsourcing your job, taking on several jobs and outsourcing those, while collecting).
You say "stuck at (1)" as if most people actually desire this kind of wealth and are trying to become entrepreneurs.
The simple truth is that many people don't want to step into that kind of intensity and uncertainty, or lack the skills to succeed in a cutthroat industry.
The idea that founders are somehow "cheating" is hilarious to me. Anyone in the developed world can easily become a founder, why don't you try it?
I'm saying "stuck" in the sense that their earning potential is completely dependent on how many hours they put in, and how much their annual raise is.
While many don't necessarily value pay as #1, it is important to people. If a regular worker receives a 20% pay increase, that's huge compared to not getting anything, or something which barely covers inflation. Even though the dollar amount may not be much compared to others.
Also: Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes is well on his way to being a billionaire, assuming he’s not already there. He has natural talent, to be sure, but so do successful startup founders or successful bankers or successful lawyers. He didn’t “earn it”?
The idea that people don't want financial security or independence is absurd on its face. If you look at people who have founded billion dollar companies, you see that those people aren't a representative cross-section of society. You see factors such as:
1. Coming from a relatively affluent background (eg Bill Gates's father was a successful lawyer);
2. Social status. For example, Sundar Pichai came from a relatively modest socioeconomic background but he's also upper caste;
3. Even having access to a top-tier education (eg Stanford) generally shows a lot of privilege, Social connections, financial security, probably access to a quality education prior, tutors and so on;
4. Even just being white in the US means your family had access to create generational wealth that minorities didn't. The post-WW2 GI Bill famously discriminatory in providing cheap mortgages (as well as subsidized college eduation).
One cannot overstate the opportunities available to you if you are "free to fail". If your family can support you or even you can live at home then you have the option of starting a company and being unpaid for a long period.
As for founders "cheating", well that's a different story but also objectively true. Many companies extracted value by essentially breaking the law and getting large enough before enforcement caught up with them, which allowed them to buy those changes. AirBNB and Uber are good examples of this.
The myth of meritocracy has been so successfully propagandized it's no wonder that so many people see themselves as "temporarily embarrrassed millionaires".
There's a kind of Efficient Market Hypothesis of career advice that I wish PG took better notice of.
If a career path (e.g. startup founder) outperforms at time T1, then this fact will diffuse quickly throughout society, causing the path to become overcrowded, which pushes down the average performance. So at time T2 the path will no longer outperform. This is analogous to a stock becoming overpriced due to hype. I consider the founder path to be enormously overcrowded at this point.
The key to finding a good career is to play a kind of Money Ball - find paths that, for whatever reason, are mispriced and thus undercrowded.
True, but only when you consider value as a combination of risk, reward, status, etc which is weighted by an individual’s preferences.
One reason why doctor is more popular is the process for becoming one is high effort but low risk. So if you have any risk tolerance you’re probably better off using that effort elsewhere.
What occurred to me reading this was the wage. Initially, and famously, the hours put into building a startup result in sub-par wages. But the amount of work by an individual never increases as it is limited by human capacity. In a successful startup with continuous growth the wage is ever increasing, to the point of absurdity.
That’s weird. I grew up around farming and farmers. A group also very proud of the work they do, in a profession where the wage is also indirect — sometimes negative, sometimes a fortune, always based directly on the work they’ve done. Year after year, the work.
That’s different.
I’ve always identified two sets in the realm of entrepreneurs: those that want to “be rich”, and; those that want to “become rich”. The latter group is perhaps more admirable as they acknowledge the process and the value creation whereas the former seek only the status. But neither are often interested in the work of it.
[delayed]
Why would you even WANT to become a billionaire?
Wealthy, sure, but becoming a billionaire effectively destroys your place in any of your social circles. It obliterates any dynamics of trust and interdependence you may have and replaces them with a gnawing unease about if they’re still hanging out with you, or if they’re hanging out with the money.
Not to mention, Graham entirely fails to differentiate between EARNING a billion dollars and HAVING a billion dollars. You can be part of a structure that earns a billions dollars without “cheating”, there are all kinds of companies that do that. But if you let that wealth accumulate in yourself? There’s something wrong there. You are almost guaranteed to be under-valuing the contributions of others, or the externalities of the systems in which you operate or SOMETHING.
And even if you’re not? That’s a dragon’s hoard of money. You’d have a very difficult time spending that much money on yourself and your lifestyle, and I find it hard to justify sitting on the rest, just to have it. It is literally a hoarding problem at that point. You do not need that money, it is actively making your life worse (look up the Billionaire’s Social Calendar: it’s the list of ultra-wealthy-only events that billionaires must attend if they want even a chance of interacting with people as peers instead of dependents), just let it go.
There’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the mechanics & incentive structure here:
Take Mr. World’s First Trillionaire, Elon Musk. He doesn’t have a dragon’s horde, his money is almost entirely invested in SpaceX and Tesla, building things he wants to build. SpaceX didn’t IPO so he could have bragging rights with his Forbes list peers, it IPO’d because it was the most efficient way to get more capital to grow and achieve its various strategic aims—largely set by Elon and its other preexisting owners.
You can take that away either proactively by making such ownership structures impossible or retroactively through taxation forcing current ownership to sell, but the end result is the same: No incentive for folks like Musk or Bezos to use their skills on big, ambitious, capital-intensive enterprises. Control is what matters, not $.
You don't have to advertise that you're a billionaire. You can live quite normally while quietly changing the world as a "side job".
Is this the same Paul Graham who says that founders need to be the kind of people who are prepared to break the rules? That is, cheat.
His essays are, themselves, "cheating" (in the sense of a life hack). Say what people want to hear today, even if it contradicts what you said yesterday.
"You not only don't have to cheat to make this happen, it will happen automatically if you just keep making customers happy."
Call me cynical but ...
"It's impossible to earn a billion" means it's impossible to work hard enough to deserve to have a billion dollars in a world where so many people died for lack of money, not that it's impossible to get it without cheating.
Another solid interpretation is that nobody gets a billion in wages. You have to own something that appreciates, and it appreciates because of the people who work for you, and you take disproportionately much of the benefit.
How does it work with theoretical distant poor aliens and any amount of money?
I enjoyed this, but the thesis is misleading. Paul’s own examples here were Facebook, apple etc. I imagine that the politicians point was that beyond a certain point, you do have to be unethical to continue that growth rate. Facebook is notorious for doing plenty of this. Apple too is known for exploiting developers.
If we extrapolate to trillionaires, we know for a fact that you need to be an all-around dousche that manipulates politics and literally cuts government funding to the poorest and most vulnerable groups to get there.
And since this post has a numbers focus, zuck is worth 195 billion. Would Facebook’s negative influence be noticeably less if they spent 194.9 billion on reducing the harms of Facebook, and zuck remained a millionaire? I believe so.
Yup. Billionaire - doable without too much ethical compromise (e.g early Google). The thing is that a billion isn't much per "first world" citizen if that is roughly your market. Many-many-billionaire - would need some good example, I can only think of bad ones. The SAP guys maybe? But they aren't exactly the richest. The only bad things I've heard about SAP are "making clunky software" and "charging too much money".
Early Google got that money because of the eventual market capture and implied evil they would definitely do because they are an american advertising company.
One billion is huge for a citizen, are you sure you don't mean one million?
I mean how much you need to "take" / earn from each other citizen to accumulate the billion.
The first billionaire I followed was gates. He did pretty horrible rent extraction to businesses all over the world. See monopoly trials and other similar things that didn’t go to trial.
Is that the incentive structure?
The real problem is his example, "you start off with 2 million dollars and 95% growth rate".
Fine, show me the average person who can come up with 2 million dollars. I sure as hell can not. I even went to banks and founders with my ideas, cash flow sheets and customer list looking for a loan.
No, I am convinced, the rich already have 2 million dollars, and make themselves a billionaire. The system is rigged against "normal" people.
He was talking about an equity stake in a start-up. Although on paper it is worth $2M, it is (probably) not liquid (i.e, the shares can't be traded easily, maybe at all.) The vast majority of founders don't literally spend $2M from their checking account to purchase their position in a start-up - they get some ownership as part of taking the start-up risk.
Is there some standard he/people use to come up with the initial company paper-stock worth? A 2m company I would imagine needs to have some tangible traction already.
Of course people who have more access to money and parents who understand money would be better at earning it.
Why are you presupposing the world is just when EVERY skill and opportunity is distributed non-linearly?
I, too, would win the marathon if you put me at the last mile marker while everyone else starts at the beginning.
Is that skill?
One in 500 of them makes themselves a billionaire, the rest have thrown two million dollars down the toilet. It's just a fair bet, there's nothing "rigged" about it.
Just because only 1 in 500 makes it to a billion, does not mean the other 499 are failures. Plenty of startup founders turn a few million into much more.
If someone has an idea that 'only' makes them 20 million, I would call that a great success; even if it takes dozens of years to get there.
yes but again, who has $2M to bet, even at 1/500 odds? You have to be a billionaire to make 500 bets hoping one hits, then you’re back to just being a billionaire again.
Well the average person, when you exclude real estate, is neither worth nor has a million dollars, that is true.
But this kind of person isn't rare either, even in Italy or Poland where I live I know many multi millionaires.
Some are farmers, some have restaurants/hotels, some work remotely for US tech companies, some were early engineers in startups.
This article reads like a rather flippant dismissal of the original concern that "earning" a billion dollars cannot be done without some moral compromise.
Sure, if you start off with $2 million and double it 9 times, you end up with $1 billion. Exponential growth is a powerful thing, so it comes as no surprise that maintaining a large growth rate over time very quickly grows a starting sum into a much larger pool of money.
However, his only response for how you should achieve exponential growth is this hand-wavy "make something you yourself want". His only acknowledgement of the concern that maintaining exponential growth may require cheating is a casual dismissal, and his only acknowledgement of the concern that the growth rate will drop off over time is "you'll still get there eventually".
So, while the original concern was that you cannot earn a billion dollars without some wrongdoing, PG's response can be boiled down to "nuh uh".
Regarding "moral compromise," many in this thread are missing the forest for the trees. The trees are taxi drivers and airbnb noise complaints, the forest is a policy environment that is absurdly tilted towards capital:
- Ordinary income has sky-high taxes compared to capital gains, and you don't even have to pay the taxes on capital gains if you don't realize them!
- Inelastic labor supply mismanaged into increasingly soggy demand, mathematically tanking wages
- Attributing credit for job creation to capital without attributing blame for job destruction to capital
there are more, but these are all Political Economy decisions that didn't have to be this way. They are this way because people with money and power wanted them to be this way and were willing to morally compromise to get them this way.
I think it's necessary that capital gains are only taxed when realized - anything else would be an accounting nightmare full of loopholes. However we could define more things as forms of realization - using it as collateral should count as realising it, and maybe casting certain shareholder votes that affect you financially
If I can pay property taxes on the unrealized value of my house, a notoriously illiquid asset with a notoriously subjective and noisy valuation, then billionaires can pay property taxes on their galactic piles of unrealized gains, which are more liquid than a firehose and easier to value than a $2 bill. This could crash the economy if done too aggressively, but the same can be said of every important economic decision ever made.
We've been pushing all the money into the capital economy and all the taxes into the labor economy and this can't go on forever.
> that "earning" a billion dollars cannot be done without some moral compromise.
What did George Lucas do?
LeBron has to be worth a few hundred million. What did he do?
> PG's response can be boiled down to "nuh uh"
Worse, it's just a long post trying to show that doing math with a calculator somehow disproves real-life ethics.
I came to read well constructed rebuttals like this.
> Sure, if you start off with $2 million and double it 9 times, you end up with $1 billion. Exponential growth is a powerful thing, so it comes as no surprise that maintaining a large growth rate over time very quickly grows a starting sum into a much larger pool of money.
Reminds me of this post I’ve seen making the rounds recently about a welder at SpaceX who was making $28/hr becoming a millionaire.
They keep emphasizing he’s a welder, the system works, and at the verrrry end mention he was issued 10k in stock a decade ago at SpaceX and held until it IPO’d the other day. The only “lesson” here is “if you own stock and stock go up you get lots of dollar bucks.”
They keep emphasizing “he’s a hardworking welder.” My response is “great! Let businesses take a lesson here: give all your employees a chunk of the company. Let’s all share in the success!”
But that’s obviously not their point.
I don't think they hid the point that he was issued stock? I thought it was pretty obvious? Which is why they're talking about it now, because the value of those stocks shot up because they went public
Yet they keep talking about an emphasizing how he was a hardworking welder first when, frankly, it’s borderline irrelevant to his being a millionaire.
The thumbnails often just tell the welder story, for instance. It’s very clever (misleading).
> My response is “great! Let businesses take a lesson here: give all your employees a chunk of the company. Let’s all share in the success!”
Don't >95% of tech companies offer stock options or equity, from startups to FAANG?
A cursory search says 74-90% (in the US), but also that’s just tech companies and usually you need to be early. It’s also often in the form of options that take years to exercise and companies have gotten very creative lately in how they screw people out of them.
Looooots of caveats here.
The arguments for or against it being possible to earn a billion units of currency seem to hinge on differences in understanding of the term "earn".
The pg view seems to assume that if there is a causal relationship between your actions and a billion dollars appearing in your bank account, then it counts as having earned that money.
The countering viewpoint seems to consider the words "earn" and "build" as having a similar relationships to money and buildings respectively. If I tell you I built the shed in my garden, then you'll probably take my word for it. If I tell you I built a skyscraper, you'll either call me a liar or understand me to mean that a large number of individuals built it at my request.
I think the second version is more useful and more accurate.
>There are two numbers that determine how big a startup gets, and thus how rich its founders become: the growth rate and how long it continues. You get the first by making something users like so much they tell their friends. You get the second by being in a big market. If you grow exponentially into a big market, your startup will become valuable, and you, as a shareholder, will become rich. You not only don't have to cheat to make this happen, it will happen automatically if you just keep making customers happy.
> Since we started it in 2005 we've funded about 6500 companies.
> Starting a successful startup is the most common way to become a billionaire, so in effect I've spent the last 21 years training people to become billionaires. So far about 30 of them have, but there are many more in the pipeline.
Seems to me that right off the bat he completely undermines his own point - less than .5% of the founders being funded at basically the best connected best financed incubator become billionaires. Easy, right?
I won't even go into the embarrassing math that follows... pyramid scheme salesman levels...
>Easy, right?
He specifically says it isn't.
I don't think this article properly engaged with the criticism from the politician. That's fine, I wasn't expecting it to, but this isn't valuable commentary on the politician's point. I suppose it does serve to demonstrate that Graham and people in Graham's orbit are unable to see a distinction between "have a billion dollars" and "earn a billion dollars".
It's a very sf-bubble type article.
It's depressing really - lost alot of respect for pg over time. Based on his writings it honestly appears that he isn't engaged with any critical writing in any of the social or political (or economic) domains.
The problem with any Sycophancy is that eventually [even the most-egalitarian] leaders lose both perspective as well as control (of their entire organization... world).
Even if the leader wants to hear honest criticism – to receive capital `t` Truth, IMHO: rare – his echelons will sequester any challenge(s) to their status quo, often by excluding dissent(er)s.
----
Thou art mortal, Caesar.
Holy smokes, one could call this condescending but assuming both politicians and an average reader don’t understand how exponents work feels a step above. And that’s before you get to the part where it’s all about a great idea and hard work and definitely zero exploitation while mentioning examples like Apple, Facebook or Airbnb.
>PaulGraham: And how could you possibly cheat to increase the market size?
I can literally think of a million ways.
1) lie to your customers about what your product actually does; this seems inevitable, once (if not before) private equity gets involved.
Using AirBnB as example: all the excess fees which have slowly crept into the final purchase price, while still requiring guests to clean &c
Have you ever listened to a congressional hearing? Or spoken to an "average reader"?
Most absolutely glaze over at the idea of calculating the "log base" of anything. If they ever got that far in math class, they certainly have not used the concept since then and cannot remember what it means or how it works. They might remember exponents, but the compounding of them is absolutely lost on the overwhelming majority of people.
Unfortunately, there was plenty of not understanding exponentials on display during Covid, including from politicians, journalists and other public figures.
It’s appalling that it is at the top of the front page.
(Edit: At the top of https://news.ycombinator.com/classic, at present.)
What's the difference between HN normal and classic?
Classic is based on votes from older accounts: https://news.ycombinator.com/lists
It tends to filter out trite topics and lower-quality submissions, though I have the feeling that it has become less effective for that in recent times.
The most offensive part to me is that it tries to excuse obscene wealth as simply (shrug) a pesky, I mean "magic", byproduct of math.
Regardless, can we talk about the danger to society of having these resulting billionaires and how we ought to address that? I think that is in fact what "the politician" mentioned in the article was trying to address.
(The new American Dream appears to be: be one of the 30 people every 21 years that finds themselves the head of a startup that succeeds.)
Let's put this math in a mirror and do the leftie version of the exponentials:
"The purpose of capitalism is to pay rich people for being rich in proportion to how rich they are, thereby establishing, reinforcing, and perpetuating a class hierarchy where the people on the bottom must constantly pay to exist while the people on top constantly get paid to exist."
Dear reader, if you bristled at how casually this statement ignored that compounding returns are a feature of the real world that we want our economy to model and encourage, now you understand how a normal person feels when a megacorp or megacorp cheerleader casually fails to account for everyone they displaced and stepped on in order to capture the value that they did. "Negligent accounting" is a strategy that points both ways.
> Let's put this math in a mirror and do the leftie version of the exponentials
The plot twist is that the 'rightie' and the 'leftie' are both entirely correct. Which is why most developed economies try to remove sources of wasteful, unearned rent and also include significant amounts of redistribution/social insurance rather than relying on pure market outcomes. This doesn't erase the compounding dynamics altogether, but it hopefully ensures that folks at the lowest end of the distribution can keep a tolerable standard of living that doesn't have them 'paying' too much.
We also want a compounding (progressive) tax rate to address compounding wealth (and perhaps we need a wealth tax?).
Yes, although I tend to think this produces better incentives and is easier to administer if we formulate it as progressive corporate taxation. This structurally discourages mega conglomeration and encourages spin-offs to enhance competition. Also, taxing at the source of profits obviates the need to track down the destinations of profit, who are far more numerous and easy to hide.
The non-explosive way to do this is simply to set the heel above the megacorps today and let inflation push them into it. They will be able to avoid the heel by splitting at their leisure, slowly remediating the consolidation we have seen and restoring competition.
If you start with a mere two million and get really lucky, you, too, can be a billionaire!
Now, if that isn't inspiring, I don't know what is! Some of my rich buddies got to be super rich following my advice!
I really don't know why the average person hates the rich. Those poors are so out of touch!
$2m is the standard seed round nowadays which is what he was as referencing. Anybody who has a good idea and can convince investors can raise this, hence how the new AI founders became billionaires without having $2m of their own.
Come on. Exponentials are deeply counterintuitive, but simultaneously pretty much where all the returns come from in startup investing. I think it’s extremely illustrative, especially to a group that’s probably heard a lot of degrowth propaganda.
> So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars. I felt like a skating coach hearing someone say that it's impossible to do a triple axel. Of course it's possible. It's hard, but it's possible.
"Earning a billion", to the skating coach, is like pulling off a dodeca-axel.
It's not gonna happen through mere pluck, and it's probably gonna involve a lot of other folks' work if it ever happens, who probably aren't gonna get that much of the glory.
Paul Graham is the skating coach himself, as from 6000 startups financed by y combinator quite a few were unicorns. it is olympian level, but it there is a system to it.
I'm well aware of who pg is.
I'm suggesting - and I think the politician was also clearly suggesting - that a certain point of scale it ceases to really be "earning" anymore.
You’re suggesting that selling others’ talent isn’t legitimate “earning”? Why?
I'm saying there's a difference between earning and benefiting from.
You can earn by deploying your own labor to facilitate transactions between other laborers, such as by running a job fair, that's completely legitimate, good, and creates value. You can't just take 90% of someone's wages, or rather, you can, and many people do, but it's theft.
Selling others labor isn't legitimate earning when you get a higher share of the labors value than the laborer themselves.
Because it's not your labor to sell and if you take part of the proceeds for yourself, that's theft.
This is slightly disappointing, but it's probably necessary cope. If you want to build startups which move fast and break things, you have to ignore many problems and many people of this state, country, and world.
You start by ignoring what a "billion dollars" means, and most people don't think it's stock. Then you have to ignore what "earn" means, which most people don't think is getting stock on the assumption that the company you own a portion in will turn a profit one day, possibly many years ahead.
Getting investment without having profitability, getting to keep a portion of this investment, even if the banks that are insured with taxpayer money lose that money, is not what the constituency of AOC think is earning money.
There is a huge amount of technological advancement and personal fortune that I enjoy from this system, but I'm not trying to bullshit anyone that the system is fair.
In conclusion, I do think this attitude is cope that allows a high performing individual to focus on this game and be successful, and Paul Graham seems to be successful, so it's natural.
pg should just get every founder to trade wallstreetbets style for a few days. they'll be doing this calculator exercise intuitively
I think Paul left out the fact that in order to grow that fast, you often need to commit crime.
Airbnb/Bed Boat, Neighbor, Swimply, Uber/Lyft, Bird/Lime, BlackJet, Waymo/Cruise, Splacer/Peerspace, Zenefits, Tilt, Loomis/Stablecoins, Coinbase, Worldcoin, Stripe, AngelList/Sydecar, Polymarket, Uniswap Labs, Doordash/Instacart/Postmates, CloudKitchens, Shef, Done Health, Forward Health, Cerebral, Pacaso, Sonder, 23andMe, Ro/Hims/Hers, Viome, Juul Labs, Oura Ring, Particle Health/Moxe Health, Roblox, YouTube, Popcorn Time, Kickstarter/Indiegogo, Republic/Wefunder, Deel/Remote, Lambda School, Make School, Mission Bit, WeWork, Oyster/Papaya Global, HiQ Labs, FlexPort, Katerra, Zipline, Starship Technologies/Serve Robotics, 3D Robotics, Anduril Industries, DraftKings/FanDuel, Cydia, Eaze, MindMed, Odin, Swarm Technologies, Starlink, Convoy/Uber Freight, Carvana, Tesla, VoltShare.... oh yeah, and OpenAI.
What do all of these companies have in common? They all manipulated markets, bent and broke laws in order to get that "exponential growth". They didn't want to wait around and find out if their businesses would be legally allowed to grow. So they just broke or worked around the law, with the intention of becoming billionaires. But that's okay, because growth rate! We're not doing anything bad, people want these things! Who cares if it might be illegal or the spirit of the law frowns on what we do? Money!!!
This is just one of the reasons why becoming a billionaire requires you to cheat. There's also the tax loopholes, the inducement to harm (both of the customer and by the customer), anti-competition, etc. In order to get these gains, you need to cheat, because if it were easy to do legally, ethically, and quickly, somebody already would have. It's corporate doping.
> Who cares if it might be illegal or the spirit of the law frowns on what we do?
Surely these things are on a moral and ethical continuum and we need to look at them individually? Pretty much every person has broken some law at least once in their lives. I don’t disagree that moral ambivalence is often necessary to make billions, but I also don’t consider all laws sacrosanct, or that breaking the law is the primary measure of a company’s moral standing.
Paul Graham seems pretty self-centered...
How many businesses are there that are worth at least $1 billion and employ no-one but the founders?
When people say that it's not possible to earn a billion dollars, they're talking about the discrepancy between the wealth gained by those employed by the company versus the shareholders of the company. For example, when WhatsApp was sold to Meta for $19 billion, how many of WhatsApp's 55 employees walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars?
The fundamental problem is that it's possible for an employee to generate a hundreds of millions of value for a business, and yet be compensated for a vanishingly small fraction of that. Even if the employees agreed to a particular salary, is it ethical to pay them so little in comparison to the worth they generate, or is it exploitative?
Most, if not all billionaires, reach that status by paying people far less than the value they generate. If you want to become a billionaire, you need to find people who are willing to be paid thousands or tens of thousands of times less than they're worth. You need employees who will generate you $100 million in exchange for being given $100 thousand.
Your post implies that every employee of a successful company is entitled to a share of whatever wealth that company generates.
As a career programmer, I worked for several companies. Each time I took a job, I negotiated what I thought was a fair salary for my wages. Some companies also gave me stock options and one gave me founder's stock. When a company had a good year, they often gave generous bonuses.
Only when I took great personal risk, did I expect to share the rewards that come with a successful company. I was always grateful when I got more than I agreed to work for, but I never felt entitled to it.
A janitor working for a 10x company should not feel entitled to 10x of the salary as another janitor working down the street for another company that is struggling.
That's one viewpoint. No moral nor ethical foundation; just a personal view.
That's not quite what I'm saying. You may very well have been paid fairly for each job you've taken, assuming that the value you generated for the business was not substantially higher than your salary.
But hiring people who are compensated fairly does not make someone a billionaire. If you generate $300,000 of value per year and I pay you $200,000, then I'm only making $100,000 profit off your work. I could hire more employees, but value does not scale linearly indefinitely. Doubling my number of employees does not guarantee I double my profits.
No, if I want to become a billionaire within my lifetime, I need an asset that generates far more money than it costs to buy and maintain it. In other words, I need employees who will generate millions for every thousand I pay them.
Now you might well argue that I'm taking a risk. How do I know if an asset or an employee or a team of employees is undervalued? Not every bet is going to pay dividends. However, while this is true, I don't think this makes it ethical. If I'm a venture capitalist looking to make it rich (or richer), the fact that I'm taking a risk doesn't change the fact that ultimately I'm looking for people who I can pay far less than they're worth.
This wouldn't happen if employees rejected cash-based compensation and decided to be founders themselves. Most employees trade risk for higher cash comp, and end up with less upside. This issue is mostly settled by the employment market
Not everyone can afford to take the financial risk of being a founder, and not every business type can be started with low initial capital.
I don’t know if this take is just naive or dishonest…
building something people love can make you a billionaire, but most billionaires did not build something people love, and most people who’ve built something people love are not billionaires.
> There are two numbers that determine how big a startup gets, and thus how rich its founders become: the growth rate and how long it continues
> The reason her startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built.
> In the real world, growth rates tend to slow down a bit. A very successful startup will probably be growing faster than 15% a month in year 1 and slower than 15% a month in year 4.
It turns out that the people who will invest in your startup when 93% MoM gains are possible want you to do pretty much anything to keep growth as high as possible--also your career, net worth, and employment are tied to this so you're similarly motivated--including squeezing and manipulating those users who loved you so much. But hey, as long as you personally get rich it's fine I guess.
> So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars.
> She wasn't saying, of course, that it's impossible to become a billionaire.... What she meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way.
> But now you at least understand, from having done the math yourselves, that you don't have to cheat to become a billionaire. You've seen for yourselves that there are only two numbers in the calculation, the growth rate and how long it continues. If it's impossible to make a billion dollars without cheating, which of those two numbers is impossible?
AoC quote:
> There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned. You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that.
Come now @pg.
$2 million * 9.45 months * 93% growth rate = earning a billion dollars, ok. Does that really address what AoC was saying? She wasn't saying that the math doesn't math.
Did you read his post at all? He knew what she was saying and addressed it clearly:
> What [AOC] meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way... The reason [my founder's] startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built. So she could feel from her own experience how wrong [AOC] was. She wasn't exploiting anyone. Exactly the opposite in fact. The reason her startup was growing so fast was that she and her cofounder had been working their asses off to make their users happy, and as a result the users had been telling their friends. And that gets you exponential growth.
In other words, this founder being on a trajectory toward billionaire status, through doing little but working to provide something of value to those willing to pay for it, belies the claim that you must be doing something unethical and cannot earn one's way to a billion dollars.
I doubt he listened to what she said - just a soundbite on Fox News or worse Facebook.
I don't personally subscribe to this belief but the people saying it's impossible to earn a billion dollars without doing something bad would say that your founders are doing something bad by exploiting the employees by not returning to the value creators a fair share of the value generated and instead hoarding it for themselves. pg is arguing a strawman to the actual argument when there are far better arguments around rewarding risk though I feel like most people shouting that don't value risk either so maybe that's not a better argument?
Andrew Wilkinson has a whole part in his book about what it's like to be on the billionaire side of this speaking to former employees who feel that you took more of the value than you deserved it was an interesting read.
Who decides what's "fair"? Shouldn't the market decide? Otherwise, of course people will always be incentivized to argue that their subjective opinion is what's fair, and that's almost always going to be, "I should have been given more."
This post hand waves away the inflection point(s) of maintaining high growth rates as you grow. He hints at it saying year 4 growth is harder, but it is _vastly_ harder.
Companies focus of the Rule of 40 and struggle to keep above it. And this struggle is where many in management lose their way.
Enshitification begins. The margins get harder. More corners cut. Employees get treated less well, customers get treated less well.
Instead of telling us "it is just exponential growth bro," do case studies on billionaires and their dealings. In the US, you have billionaire business leaders who have full time employees who require government assistance every month.
The couple of billionaires and near-billionaires I have worked with (and helped build their companies) have not been bad people. But working at their companies pre and post IPO is way different. Less perks, more pressure. If the company culture isn't solid, it becomes bad fast.
What AOC is trying to do here is shift the debate from extracting retribution on people who have violated specific laws (a fair and an honest way to enforce justice in a civil society) to extracting retribution on people who she insinuates "must have done something immoral" based on their net worth (a selfish, dishonest, envious and greedy way to run a society). It's a clever play, and unfortunately for the people of the world who value freedom and a high standard of living, it's going to work. There is enough of the population filled with envy and greed that they'll lap up whatever a politician tells them bogie man of the day is. Historically it's been the aristocracy, Jews, immigrants, but those don't work any more, so now it's generally "the rich". Billionaires are the thin end of the wedge. After them it will be business owners of all kinds, people with second homes, people who send their children to private schools, and generally anyone who has anything else that someone might envy. It's clear that the way society is going people are going to keep lapping this stuff up.
HN used to be open minded about people creating wealth. The change is shocking to me, actually.
This essay is unfortunate because he isn't addressing the true misunderstanding of politicians like AOC, he's not explaining the consumer surplus (why the world gained 50x more from Google than the founders), and he's not explaining that wealth is craeted not taken.
Politicians spend their lives in one of the purest zero-sum systems in existence. Of course they don't have a gut level understanding of the creation of wealth.
But consumer surplus matters most of all. Imagine the net benefit to consumers of Robotaxi and Optimus (ok, ok, assuming they work, for the doubters in the room). Entrepreneurs capture
(underscores to visually identify mag)
--
// 8bn world population / 3,500 billionaires:
0.000000_44
--
// 300mm US population / 1,000 billionaires
0.00000_333
--
// Odds of winning billion dollar powerball
0.00000000_3422298 (play once)
0.0000000_68446 (play twenty times)
0.000000_34223 (play 100 times)
--
// Global net worth vs billionaires
0.03636364
--
// US net worth vs billionaires
0.0942029
Does that work always without fail with anyone anywhere anytime?
For those that pg has sponsored it has happened a few times out of ~5,000. Better odds than the lottery, for sure.
Because he sponsored those who already have something really valuable, and not just anyone.
He says ~30 out of 6500 companies which if you estimate two founder per company comes out at 1/433.
I would not compare to lottery because a lottery ticket is bought at pure chance whereas these startup are taken onboard after very thorough audit.
Most likely that this works in a small number of all cases.
I don't disagree with the essay, but is there any benefit to being a billionaire? Almost anything I could possibly want could be satisfied by being a humble multi-millionaire.
Many of these billionaires they're referring to are paper stock billionaires. It gives you access to maintain control/takeover other companies. For example, Elon made an argument that his package payout (if fulfilled) was so large because it served him to be able to retain control of his company.
Another example would be taking over media companies like what Bezos did, the side effect would be being able to waylay/hide any dirty laundry.
Do you have a want to please millions of people whose lives are improved by exactly the product that your company sells? I could certainly do without that, but it does sound nice.
I'm not sure there is but if you create a company that successfully serves the world's 8 billion population it often ends up worth more than 12.5 cents per head. Or else it maybe isn't providing that significant a service.
With nearly all the billionaire PG mentions the money is the company valuation rather than cash in the bank.
I'm a capitalist through and through but I think its a bit disingenuous to interpret "there shouldn't be billionaires" as "I don't understand exponential". Sure exponential are hard to intuit but that's not what they're saying.
There are facets of the query that are actually interesting (to think about, not surrender to).
- Wealth is a curve like any other, it has a SD, shape, and other curve defining properties
- Motivation and discovery are two important pillars of capitalism.
A core belief of capitalism is that humans, as very fallible machines especially in collectives, do a poor job of managing that curve for others without hurting discovery and motivation. Intervention hurts the very evolutionary traits that make capitalism so successful.
While that's absolutely true, surely we can entertain the idea that there is a theoretical optimal wealth curve that doesn't effect the properties of capitalism we care about in such a way. Perhaps it is never achievable by systems we can design, but there surely is a "better" curve.
Its also evident if you look at psychology. Humans are more motivated by their relative differences (SD bands) vs their absolute values. There are wealth levels that are so abstract and absurd that they actual amount is meaningless to the holder; you'd have a hard time convincing me me $500B and $1.1T make a interesting difference to preservation of capitalist mechanics.
To reiterate: humans controlling the curve is no bueno, full stop. But surely we don't have the theoretically optimal curve.
Some disrespect to PG, but the entire thing reads like:
"Oh, if we just operate in a vacuum, do not closely examine the systemic interactions of our accumulation of such vast sums of wealth, assume there's no moral or ethical quandary that would prevent us from utilizing every game theory strategy available to us, and have consistently high, compounding growth over time, then anyone can make a billion dollars if they follow my teachings, which in turn were formulated over thousands of students and with a success rate still in the single percentage points, at best."
Here's the thing none of these people will ever admit: not everyone can actually succeed at a goal, otherwise it wouldn't be a goal, but a baseline. This is the fundamental grievance I have with these sorts of "wealth whisperers" braying on (and on, and on, and on) about how with a good idea and hard work (and YC's guidance), you too can be a Larry Ellison or Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg type.
Which, no, you cannot. If you could, PG's success rate for billionaires would be 100%. It is not, so clearly hard work and a good idea (and a mentor) alone isn't enough. Yet enough leaders and populace have bought into this fairy tale that we've reoriented society around it wholesale. The presumption is that anyone lacking in obscene wealth has done so by choice, rather than examine systemic incentives and policy failures that make such an outcome the default, rather than a personal choice (or worse, some sort of personal failure).
I'm just so weary of having the same argument with the same people who refuse to bother learning anything that might remotely conflict with their world view anymore. If the response to "maybe we should improve society somewhat" is some banal wealth-building sales pitch relying on cherry-picked statistics and devoid of any wider context, then I think it's safe to presume you're either willfully arguing in bad faith or so colossally ignorant that you're beyond help.
Generally a PG defender (at least nowadays), but he is deliberately misrepresenting what she meant, and/but I think a good % of the students/attendees know that.
An obvious calculation. The real world cannot be calculated so easily, It is changing unexpectedly and quickly.
- So I would like you all to do me a favor please. I would like you to take out your phones and calculate a number. I know this may seem contrived, but I promise it will be useful for you.
I’m thinking of vibe coding a calculator app How Many Babies Died For This where you input your startup idea, life(style) goals and AI token usage and the machine spits out the Net Babies Dead for you to achieve your dreams
Or as someone more elegantly phrased: https://x.com/tobytarrant/status/2065946761332486231
How many would it be?
I mean i’d need to vibe code the damn thing but as a rule of thumb you can save one baby’s life for around $4k
Why haven't you saved a baby's life?
Well let’s say the real (non subsidized) token cost to create the app is $40 that’s 1/100 of a baby i’m saving just by not creating it!
Ah i see you edited your comment, i’ll leave mine as is though.
Yeah I was more interested in why you haven't saved a baby's life for $4000. Maybe I'm being presumptuous, but even if you don't have $4000 in savings and liquid investments you could probably get a loan for $4000, or extend your mortgage. A baby is going to die if you don't.
I exclusively build stuff that I think is cool for me and my friends but I have little drive to market these things and plus they are designed to be completely free forever so I don't think I'll ever be a billionaire.
So nice of pg to mention AirBnB as one of his examples of what a successful startup who "doesn't cheat" means. They just were great people with a great idea who found a market for something people wanted that no one had thought about before, and poof, exponential math billionaires who earned it!
Of course, we'll ignore the huge issues that Airbnb created for cities, customers, and providers. We'll ignore the way they knowingly helped ignore any regulations on tourism as much as they could. We'll ignore the business model of simply being the biggest middlemen around. We'll ignore the fact that their business is slowly being outlawed in major cities, at least in Europe, because of all of the above.
And, surprisingly, if we ignore all of the things these founders do to ignore the law and cheat the market or their competition, we can say that they earned their billions without cheating!
We'll also ignore the fact that the brilliant magic math that us lay people and politicians just don't understand also predicts that the founder whose business is growing 93% per month will not only be a billionaire in 9 months, but a trillionaire 9 more months after that, and surely the world's first quadrillionaire within 5 years. You might think this is implausible, but that's just because you don't understand how exponential growth works!
No, that problem was not generated by Airbnb. There’s growing demand and, because of regulation, not enough is built every year. For example, according to INE, 250k new families are formed in Spain (more than 500k people) and only 100k new houses/flats are built and the yearly deficit has been accumulating for 12 years. That is the real issue and blaming corporations is just the politicians’ easy path to deflect blame, which unfortunately too many citizens eagerly buy into.
Even if it were true that the problem of housing affordability was not affected by Airbnb (it's not, at best it only exacerbated an existing problem), that would not mean it didn't create other problems for cities. Having tourists concentrated in places that are not designed for it, where a hotel license would never have been issued; the problem of too many tourist accommodations, causing an overflow of tourism; problems for neighbors with parties and similar nuissances; problems with untaxed income from the smaller owners; and probably others I'm forgetting.
You can exacerbate a problem (which Airbnb is doing) without being its major cause. Doing that is still bad.
Externalize all the problems, but its "not cheating!" - its just making us all pay for your growth while you take advantage of the current structure of society and generally making things worse.
There was also the whole Craigslist spam stuff airbnb did to bootstrap growth
Paired right next to the “personals” ads they used to have.
Ew
Benefits of being a billionaire are vastly overstated. To live a happy life, you don't need to be a billionaire.
"So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars..."
Paul, playing dumb doesn't suit you.
The first definition of "earn" on merriam-webster.com is "to receive as return for effort and especially for work done or services rendered".
Your chose a straw man, "doing something bad", to argue against because it's so easy to beat.
Much harder to justify that anyone's doing $1B of effort. Being a billionaire doesn't mean you're bad. In fact, it doesn't even matter if they are all bad -- there are always going to be bad people. It means a system that allows, encourages, and protects billionaires might be a problem that needs to be fixed.
Scary idea, I know. But we all only get to go around this world once. Might as well spend our time trying to make it better rather than rationalizing why it's OK to spend all your time trying to make it worse.
What will become of this site once its userbase turns against its corrupt oligarch owners on the basis of it propagating evil things like Flock?
There's an older tradition of thought on the matter with better intellectual pedigree and epistemological hygiene: "Behind every great fortune lies a great crime."
The easiest way to earn a million dollars is to start a business that makes sense and work your ass off running it well. Maybe that's even the easiest way to reliably earn ten million dollars, a million isn't what it used to be.
But at some scale that's far short of a billion the game becomes about asymmetry.
This asymmetry takes many forms. For Steve Cohen it was trading on inside information, for Jim Simons it was (as far as anyone can tell) novel mathematics.
For most of the technology companies in the 21st century it was about privatizing the commons and/or externalizing costs that a well-refereed market would place on your company.
The United States used robust public/private partnerships and a vibrant, thriving university system to build the greatest pile of latent wealth in the sum history of humanity during the 20th century. Everything from the transistor to the integrated circuit to the laser to Velcro to tang to the internet to the web was a product of this holy Trinity of innovation: defense and related public money, well-refereed private companies (even a notable natural monopoly or two under muscular regulation), and a paved path between the Academy and the other two. The gains accrued enough to individuals to keep everyone motivated but largely in the form of status, which confers a desirable station in life but does not compound directly into political power. Feynman and von Neumann and Einstein all seem to have led very enviable lives and are easily as smart and accomplished as anyone in the front row at the last Inauguration (and if we're honest, a lot more), but none of them had a billion dollars or untoward access to the levers of government. All of them paid far more into the ocean of latent wealth deeded to the body politic than they took out of it.
And at some point (my money is on the kneecapping of Brooksley Born, whose architect is now resigning in disgrace from everything for Epstein affiliation and whose most recent post was on the board of pg's protege) the flow reversed. The access caste started to be d away from the competence caste and the singular fortune deeded to the public started to accumulate as a dozen private fortunes that were substantially just the 20th century stuff with a named owner.
You get a billion dollars by stealing it, this is qualitatively different, a distinction of kind not of degree, from how you get a million or even a few tens of millions.
To get a trillion dollars as we have now seen, well first you steal a billion.
PG actually addresses this in other essays. That adage does have more history. But the world literally changed;
1. In pre-industrial society there is less technological leverage, so that it’s very difficult for an incidental or group to help very many people.
Perhaps the closest analog before then was land discovery or conquest (taking other people’s stuff).
2. Post-enlightenment society is one of the first which doesn’t predefine your social role by birth. So you can claim new roles and status from your own wealth.
America has a much stronger sense of 2 which is why European attitudes towards wealth differ.
Mr. Graham is making 2 mistakes:
a) thinking that others don't understand exponential. Any reasonably college educated grad understands it well.
b) thinking that growing 93 percent every month means the founder has put in 93% more effort than the prior month.
Their argument relies upon the ideology that just because you thought and executed an idea profitably means you should continue to "earn" from it.
In the LLM age, more and more people are questioning this, and rather want to goto: effort == earnings.
Sadly, I don't believe that many college grads reasonably well educated in anything other than a scientific field understand exponentials.
Why would you want to earn a billion dollars? You must have the maturity to handle the money. Hopefully you’ll mature sufficiently through the process of making that money but if the money’s fast, that might not happen. I’ve seen people get 9-figure rich overnight. Didn’t change them at all, they are still the wonderful folks they were. But I’ve also seen people drink themselves to death as it turns out a few mill in the bank does not answer the question “wtf do I do when I don’t have to do anything?”
"So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars… What she meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way."
Not exactly the way I interpreted it (emphasis on earn). Right or wrong, I think the vast majority of us think that "deserved money" is money earned from "work".
A simple example would be the billionaire Walton children: their fortunes inherited. Most people would argue that they did not really earn those billions of dollars.
On an admittedly slippery slope, for many, investing and other means where the money makes money is also not regarded as work (and therefore is not earned money).
To wave around the idea of "the American Dream", I suspect that many American's disapprove of any means of obtaining wealth that the average Joe or Jane are not privy to. This idea that you have to be born into money or have money to make money—we are (perhaps naturally) repugnant to.
its even easier with a 9999% month over month growth
If you can grow 10000000000000% every millisecond you can start from one cent and become a billionaire in one millisecond!
This is a strawman argument. It is of course mathematically possible to obtain a billion dollars (although notably much harder to do in a way that is liquid, but let's gloss over that). My somewhat more charitable reading of that claim (shared by other readers here, I see) is that ‘earn’ refers to moral desert. I'm not really a desert-oriented person but let me try to steelman it a bit:
In aristocracies we traditionally assume or imply that a person can deserve a certain wealth or power simply by being born into it. Capitalism, however, sells us the dream of the meritocracy: your (financial) success in life should depend not at all on factors of chance like birth or genetics but simply how much of yourself you choose to sell to the market.
At any point in time you have control of some tangible or intangible capital, including wealth, physical health, social connections, equipment, information, trained skills, et cetera. Some of these assets are gained by luck, e.g. accident of birth; some of them are gained by trading your time; and some of them are gained by spending another asset (whose origin reduces, recursively, to some combination of luck or time). At any point you can, assuming the market is appropriately liquid, spend some of these assets to get cash.
Some of these assets have force-multiplier effects on your future output in certain domains, from which exponentials naturally arise; but the time spent on them remains linear, and so, if we want to ignore inherited factors (the opportunity to spend the time on things without immediate feedback, say, or handed-down insight about which of these investments will produce the most value in the future, or access to the required tutors) the increase in earnings these things _merit_ has to remain linear as well. There is no way to compound your time and therefore, under an assumption of meritocracy, there is also no morally acceptable way to compound earnings, which I would assume is the point the politician is attempting to make. Under this worldview, any exponential compounding that occurs must, mathematically, be a result of systematically undervaluing the time of an exponential number of other people, since each person can only spend a linear amount of time.
In practice, of course, the assumption of meritocracy is simply wrong, and arguably the concept as a whole is internally incoherent (or at least I don't believe we've yet managed to articulate it coherently: we would have to settle the nature vs nurture debate and completely sever the value of a person's spent time from the accidents of their birth, if such a thing is even meaningful). But I think that's where the claim falls down, not in failing to understand the mathematics of exponentials.
The answer is easy, steal the value created by thousands of your employees.
The issue with billionaires is that some of them got insanely rich while being net negative from a societal perspective.
The most famous ones ended-up in prison (Sam Bankman Fried, Elizabeth Holmes, Jeffrey Epstein, Bernie Madoff) but anyone with a basic grasp of statistics and criminal behavior know that many others will escape the justice system forever.
It does not mean that all billionaires are bad, the criminals are not the majority, but there are enough criminals to justify skepticism and scrutiny.
What people mean by "you can't earn a billion dollar" is that there's no work that's useful enough, alone, to be worth that much in reward. How can we live in a world where a moron can have a trillion to their name, while others work arduous physical labor all their lives and end up with nothing?
You might not believe you've done anything "bad" to become a billionaire, but the mere fact that you accumumated so much wealth necessarily means others, somewhere, had to work for it. The mere existence of billionaires is the mark of an unhealthy economy, that doesn't distribute wealth in an efficient or fair manner.
Um, did i just get mansplained compound interest by Paul f*ing Graham? I feel like this has been the subject of condescending advice since the beginning of time.
"But now you at least understand, from having done the math yourselves, that you don't have to cheat to become a billionaire. You've seen for yourselves that there are only two numbers in the calculation, the growth rate and how long it continues."
What could possibly be false in a two-parameter model of reality?
Regarding the scale of what a billion dollars even means, I've recently been thinking of an example which I think might work (but I haven’t tried it on many people yet).
There are 86,400 seconds in a day (24 hours * 60 minutes * 60 seconds = 86400). Now let’s say you spend an average of 1$ every second. That’s every second, including when you’re sleeping or on the toilet. That’s 86,400$ per day, which I hope we can all agree is a lot of money.
If you had one million dollars, to spend it all it’d take you over 11 days (1,000,000 dollars / 86,400 seconds = 11.57).
If you had one billion dollars, to spend it all it’d take you over 31 years (1,000,000,000 dollars / 86,400 seconds / 365 days = 31.71). That is an obscene amount of money.
Reading this, I realize that I don't have confidence in winning under capitalism, so I think it would be quicker to just try to break the game of capitalism altogether. But communism, in my opinion, seems like a concept that is unlikely to arrive, so please wait just a little while until I come up with a new ideology.
He makes it sound simple, and in some ways, it is. You have to not only build the thing, but also find the thing that people want. It’s the latter that’s as hard if not harder than the former.
In addition, the converse is not true. Just because you’ve found something that grows fast and in large market, doesn’t mean you’ll become a billionaire. With all humility, I’ve been lucky to have done that twice, but in a large company. I’m not complaining, I’m just saying that doesn’t necessarily make you a billionaire.
Woof. This article is pretty impressively tone deaf and seemingly missing the point (on purpose?)
> (on purpose?)
As Upton Sinclair put it, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
That quote is just the tip of the iceberg of Sinclair's work, though. He wrote about how when a person's livelihood, reputation, or financial well-being relies on a specific status quo, they often find it impossible to see the logic or ethics in changing it. It can be very difficult for them to confront such issues objectively.
He also wrote about the question of cynics vs. true believers in this situation. For the true believers, he pointed out that the only way for them to resolve their cognitive dissonance (while maintaining their lifestyle) is to block out the truth entirely. They stop trying to understand because actually understanding would be too painful.
And yet, the vast majority of startups fail. This essay about exponential growth is clearly not the whole story.
How does your startup avoid failing? By skirting local laws? Exploiting employees? Destroying the environment? Replacing jobs in a way that makes the standard of living better for the few but worse for the many? Making weapons or systems that coordinate weapons? Submitting to and therefore tacitly supporting oppressive governments?
Sure, there are examples of startups that don’t do these things. But looking at billionaire-class startups (there’s not that many of those to analyze!), there are far more of them in the other category.
It’s like fertilizer, for jealousy.
Yeah man its just all the people who are jealous that are mad and no other reason.
The billionares hands are clean, the climate is fine, the elections are great, there's nothing wrong, close your eyes, stuff your ears with wax, and keep on trucking :)
> Since we started it in 2005 we've funded about 6500 companies.
> I've spent the last 21 years training people to become billionaires. So far about 30 of them have
Since it's a post about math, let's do it.
6500 companies with 2 founders each - 13000 founders.
30 of them became billionaires - 0.2% of them.
So being a tech founder at the most famous startup accelerator in the world give you about 0.2% chance of becoming a billionaire.
Or put another way, only 1 out of every 500 YC-combinator founded startup makes one of it's founders a billionaire.
What an out of touch buffoon. AOC is right, billionaires are a policy failure, and pg is making her point.
He's right. You don't have to cheat to become a billionaire. Stepping on everybody else's throats is a legit part of the capitalist playbook. No cheating involved.
This horrible mentality is what ails tech bro culture today and ruined the tech world for me - chasing billions
Greed mixed with analytical thinking on industrial scale - graham, thiel, musk, hoffman, bezos, zuck all symptoms of “smart” people who screwed this country ultimately - all for what?
Has the changed world that resulted been for the better?
Man I am so tired of rich people. Can they all just go f each other on a little island and leave the rest of us alone to enjoy a normal life?
Please don't bury the lede here of how the author completely and epically misses the point of the statement.
It's not about the math of the thing, it's about the arguably necessary exploitation that must occur to hit those kinds of numbers.
And in fact, IMHO, you don't even need to get to "exploitation" to criticize this mentality.
Any normal human would (and if not would, SHOULD) want to stop "earning" well before they hit those ridiculous numbers. Let's say -- at about 50 million, a normal person should realize, yes, that's enough. Time to pivot to something that doesn't cause so much accumulation. This does happen, we just don't hear about it enough.
There’s no exploitation involved because it is not a zero sum situation.
This is a ridiculously oversimplified application of first year economic theory. No, we do not live in the textbook fantasy of "everyone is always free to make favorable trades and therefore no one is exploited."
Yes but yours is more of an edge case than mine is.
Trades are almost always positive sum with some externalities.
Trades aren’t exploitative like you claim.
If we assume that YC funded about 6,500 companies and produced about 30 billionaires...That is 0.46% using the most flattering denominator possible. And the best reason not to apply to YC.
If you count individual founders, the rate is even lower. So to insinuate this is some kind of training people to become billionaires, is like a lottery operator saying he teaches wealth creation because a few ticket buyers hit the jackpot.
PG is turning an extreme power law outcome into a moral argument. A tiny fraction of founders capture enormous upside, thousands do not, and PG presents the winners as proof that the system is fair. I could not think of more survivorship bias with a halo.
And thee political sneer is also absurd. Startups do not exist outside politics. They exist( or should exist) inside law, tax, infrastructure, courts, labor rules, housing rules, securities law, immigration policy, and government procurement. Uber S-1 warned that its business would be harmed if drivers were classified as employees rather than independent contractors...and described legal and regulatory obstacles as material business risks. In other words...regulatory arbitrage ( corruption? ) as a business model.
Airbnb is an even cleaner YC example. Its own filings describe short term rental law, host registration, tax collection, fines, city restrictions, and New York 2023 rules as materially affecting the business. Its a business that lives lives inside a fight over housing law and local regulation.
And if the claim is that politicians do not understand value creation, then SpaceX is a hilarious counterexample. SpaceX is a company completely entangled with the state and US tax payer. SpaceX has about $22B in government contracts, mostly NASA, and Reuters separately reported a $5.9B Space Force launch award in 2025.
And the biggest logic failure being used here is the so called exponential growth part. The world is not exponential. Population growth is not exponential forever. Demand is not exponential forever. Restaurants, supermarkets, apartments, drivers, cities, and disposable income are finite. Real markets saturate. Growth curves become S curves. Pretending that 15% monthly growth can simply continue for years is nothing more than spreadsheet intoxication.
So instead of the claim you can earn a billion by making users happy, what is reality is, that in a legal and financial system that massively rewards scalable equity ownership, a tiny number of founders can become billionaires if capital, timing, network effects, labor structure, regulation, and distribution all break their way. I don’t think its legal, and the best PG could do with this is a defense of the casino by pointing at the jackpot winners.
Just reflect on this: Of the 30 billionaires Paul Graham talks about, in an essay where, notably, he never once uses the word “entrepreneur” they come from these 14 companies:
Airbnb, Brex, Coinbase, Cruise, Deel, DoorDash, Dropbox, Flexport, Instacart, Loopt, Meesho, Reddit, Scale AI, Stripe.
Less than half of them are profitable as of 2026. None created a vaccine or cured a disease, discovered a new algorithm or mathematical theorem, developed the economies of poorer countries, created a new engine, or invented a renewable energy source. If all of them...disappeared tomorrow...you would probably just use some other payment system, maybe with higher or lower commissions, and argue on some other message board not called Reddit.
The impact on human lives would be zero... or maybe even slightly positive.
I think maybe the fundamental issue is something that he said really late in the essay:
> There are other ways to get rich than by starting startups. Some of those do require you to exploit people. But startups are the most common way to become really rich, and if you want to start a successful startup, the key is not exploitation but empathy.
> How people become rich in your society is one of the most important things to understand about it. You can't let your beliefs about this be determined by ideology, or movies, or historical examples that are centuries old. You must look at the world around you and see how it's actually done.
The "it's impossible to do morally" people are looking at how it used to be done, and how it's sometimes still done. They are right to be opposed to that. But oppose the immoral aspects of it, not doing it at all.
And those who hard-core define a billion as immoral are I think signalling something else: They want the government to take that money, from every billionaire. (If we're talking immorality, we could discuss the morality of that.) But they don't understand that there will probably be second-order consequences of doing so...
You're right, higher taxes on the billionares would create all sorts of second order effects, like the ability to pay for the social safety net for the common folk, maybe educating the populace properly, all sorts of truly scary stuff!
He seems to be regressing, he said this in January:
> The rational fear of those who dislike economic inequality is that the rich will convert their economic power into political power: that they’ll tilt elections, or pay bribes for pardons, or buy up the news media to promote their views.
> I used to be able to claim that tech billionaires didn't actually do this — that they just wanted to refine their gadgets. But unfortunately in the current administration we've seen all three.
Now he's claiming he's trained all these billionaires and they are a blessing to the world, not avaricious sociopaths.
He writes for an audience and knows what he's doing.
You do not EARN 1B$.
You mass exploit labor at scale to exfiltrate 1B$.
You commit wage theft to obtain 1B$ (the largest theft category).
You union bust and fire workers who try to fight for better working conditions and wages.
You engage in monopoly practices to obtain 1B$.
You engage in corruption via 'campaign donations' to lay down laws that benefit you and harm others.
Doctors earn. Engineers earn. Scientists earn. LABOR EARNS.
But billionaires never *earn* 1B$. They exfiltrate, steal, and corrupt.
Hi, this is called “Labour Theory Of Value”. And this is imo a popular theory of value creation a lot of people believe in and it has populist memetic value.
But Labour Theory Of Value has been debunked and is mostly not used anymore.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"
- Upton Sinclair
And, well, you are right that there are 'debunkments' of Labor Theory of Value. Of course, they are put out by hard right-wing laissez faire capitalist enclaves, like Mises. I would never expect them to take a dispassionate view of capitalism, given their extremist position.
https://mises.org/mises-wire/three-arguments-debunking-marxs...
I know an easier 3 step hack if anyone's looking for one:
Step 1 ensure server connection is alive and you see pre-birth screen
Step 2 pick character starter pack of higher surface luck areas (e.g. father runs emerald mine in south africa)
Step 3 identify server grandmasters and rewrite unfavorable rules after birth
Unfortunately I skipped step 1 on this build so I'm looking to improve next time!
Absent circumstances of four digit inflation rates, one cannot earn a billion dollars… one can only accumulate a billion dollars.
If one ever does so, one has definitely done something morally indefensible.
What, exactly, is the morally indefensible thing that they have definitely done? If it's definitely there, you should be able to point out what it is.
Apple, for example, steals 30% of the money of anything you buy on your phone.
Charging someone money that they voluntarily pay in return for getting something of value themselves is not stealing.
What's morally indefensible about that?
There is nothing more evil in this world than the pursuit of power and wealth.
“For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows. ”
— 1 Timothy 6:10 KJV (The King James Bible) <https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_(King_James)/1_Timothy#...>
Most people do that to some extent. There are worse things.
This is what weak people say to comfort themselves in a world with hierarchy and power differential.