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How to earn a billion dollars

• cindyllm 3mo ago
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• deleted 3mo ago
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• chanakya 3mo ago
  Even AOC doesn't believe what she said. She's saying it because she has a startup of her own which sells ideas, and gets paid in votes. It may not be 93%, but she's had a pretty good growth rate, and when you get to about 50 million, you have a great shot at being President. Ideas which bash rich people have had a growing market for a while, and she's good at it, and people are telling their friends about her.
• BowBun 3mo ago
  I've always respect PG's articles (obviously), but him pointing to a sole founder at a high growth rate (which founder btw, what is the product) as 'proof' that no bad has been done to reach that level of growth is so incredibly naive! His founder is not at the level we are talking about. They obviously would not represent the 'bad' that AOC was trying to make a point about. Why don't you pick your actual billionaires? Airbnb - Ignored and exploited local housing regulations, over time the blowback has been HUGELY negative. Here the 'bad' is the commoditization of housing in peoples' homes, causing housing problems. Coinbase - For years, they built their business on bitcoin being used on dark nets for illegal purposes. There's the bad. If they were truly good they would have done KYC from day 1. Why would they? Billionaires gotta break rules. DoorDash/Instacart - Exploitation of cheap labor, they _consistently_ underpay workers, hire undocumented laborers for that purpose, and pit laborers and consumers against each other rather than improving the system. These, Paul, are the actual billionaires AOC was talking about. Not your young founder making the 200th to-do app. Really unimpressed and disappointed by the shallowness of his thinking here.
• zacksiri 3mo ago
  Thank you for publishing this. I've been following Paul Graham and his works for a long time. It's refreshing to see everything written down in a document like this. This is the bible for startups. Honestly, it's beautifully simple but not easy.
• Glyptodon 3mo ago
  PG seems be becoming more and more disingenuous. People using the word "earn" almost always mean "you can't get this from wages." This doesn't mean that the effect of growth isn't real - almost any business that scales even moderately, but none the less scales, and is profitable, can make its owners millionaires or better. But this does not mean that those riches were "earned." Or that the person who started the business had more glorious suffering than some rando who works 80 hours a week of part time jobs to keep a roof over their kids' heads. Rather, it is inherent to finding a scalable business and not screwing it up.
• ozgung 3mo ago
  Well... but the billionaires, or billion dollar companies DO "break rules, abuse labor laws, pay people less than what they’re worth"... also manipulate markets, bribe politicians, evade taxes, sell user data etc. Even Trillionaire(s) and trillion dollar companies do that. Why do they do that then, if the only things they need are those two numbers and a product that people love ^_^? Because there are more than 2 numbers even in pg's simplistic example. Third number: You make $10K monthly today. How? If your cost is $9.9K this doesn't mean anything right? Everyone can do that. So how you earn that $10K is more important than those other 2 numbers. You want more profit and less cost. That's when you start breaking the rules and doing bad things. You have to compete, and it's easier to win if you cheat. If there are cheaters in the game, they would win the competition, not you. And there are always cheaters in the game. Silicon Valley's system is different than the rest of the world. They give the founders some sort of an infinite money glitch (for a limited time). They don't care about the third number. They care only about the Growth number. Because what they really care about is the Market Domination. They want to BURN money to BUY that market. In most cases, globally. That's why billions of people in the world are using Facebook's products daily. Not because Zuck had a great idea in his dorm room. Not because Poke feature was that viral. But because US needed to dominate the upcoming social media world. For profit, but more importantly for politics, for gathering information, for tracking people, for controlling (social) media and narrative, for security. So the system funded his startup, along with other similar startups in case any of them becomes the winner. And they didn't give just money, they give all the network, permission and privileges to win. That's why Hans Zuckerberg from the Berlin startup scene hasn't become a billionaire but Mark did. This is exactly the same playbook with the AI game today. My 70+ parents at the other side of the World use ChatGPT daily for FREE. They will never be the paying customers of OpenAI. OpenAI gives its expensive services for free, because they want absolute dominance in the global market. They can't lose that. Note that such a game plan is impossible for any company outside of Silicon Valley. Only state-controlled companies can play that game in the rest of the world. But for SV, it's not really clear who's controlling who.
• jmount 3mo ago
  Not quite on topic. But I feel there is an issue in politics where many non-wealthy people vote as if they are "temporarily inconvenienced billionaires." That is they endorse policies that favor billionaires, as they have some hope of being one someday.
• tmsh 3mo ago
  AOC’s point is simply that when growing exponentially from 250M to 500M to 1B usually whether using exploitive rails one is conscious of or not - someone is bearing an unfair burden. That in 60 out of 60 examples of YC billionaires and all billionaires with maybe a few exceptions - people do not go out of their way to ensure nobody is getting hurt and everyone participates fairly. People are too excited about the exponential growth and their goals. I don’t even think it’s AOC’s main point that these people are at fault. Just that the system is at fault for not ensuring exploitation is minimized further for the rest of the 99%. (Great essay on how to be a billionaire though. Could billionaires give back more? Yes. But creating market value like that is both worth celebrating and evolving.)
• stephbook 3mo ago
  Elon Musk easily earned the billions for SpaceX. It's providing space internet to Ukraine, an innocent democracy that's under attack. The technological feats of rocket reuse and the vision of Mars don't even matter, insofar as they're just tools to attract the capital. Any other method that supports Ukraine just as well would have also been worth a billion. Patriot interceptors cost many millions, so 100-200 are already worth a billion! Is SpaceX internet worth 200 Patriot missiles? Easily. I think politicians restrict "earning" to "wage income", which is kind of an arbitrary line in the sand, and would also be untrue. SpaceX/Tesla would also have paid Musk billions in cash if stock wasn't allowed.
• erelong 3mo ago
  lots of moving parts on this discussion but I'll boil it down to: the ratio of the average individual's wealth to 'illionaire's wealth feels "wrongly asymmetric" for a lot of people (CEOs making ~300x that of average worker) the question is basically about how that startup scaling at 94% translates to scaling up the individual's life (who faces alleged "stagnant wages") or in other words, how can entrepreneurs create an approach for society that facilitates individuals scaling up their wealth? There is for example a perception that a person working all waking hours on a low amount of pay - like minimum wage, and without investments - could never become a 'illionaire through their "honest hard work"; ergo becoming a 'illionaire requires something beyond this "honest hard work" (implying illegal and or unethical means)
• simianwords 3mo ago
  I feel like a primer on Labour Theory of Value is important in this thread. This a debunked theory that is still being used by populists to justify their anger on the System TM and in particular, the billionaires. Folk LTV interpretation is that people's wages are supposed to be proportional to their hours worked. Obviously this is false -- everyone knows this but people still repeat it because it has populist memetic value. That LTV is debunked and proved to be useless is very easy to demonstrate -- the single person (who was a Marxist) who took this theory seriously abandoned it. He's not the only one though. I asked ChatGPT this: "who is the single one contemporary person who took labour theory of value seriously in an academic sense?" ChatGPT: G.E Cohen. (G.E Cohen is an Analytical Marxist BTW) Here's what G.E Cohen has to say specifically on LTV: 1. "labour theory is, moreover, false" [1] 2. "The labour theory of value is not a suitable basis for the charge of exploitation laid against capitalism by Marxists, and the real foundation of that charge is something much simpler which, for reasons to be stated, is widely confused with the labour theory of value." [2] [1] https://andrewmbailey.com/money/readings/cohen https://andrewmbailey.com/money/readings/cohen [2] https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/3128-the-labour-theory https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/3128-the-labour-theory... So here you have the one guy who took this flawed concept seriously, * from the side of Marxism * and then has to conclude that it is false.
• wcfrobert 3mo ago
  I read pg's collection of essays (Hackers and Painters) in my 20s, and it single-handedly prevented me from being radicalized by leftist ideologies. The one insight from the book that I will always remember from the book is this: if you want to be rich, make something people want. Money is fiat to the value you've generated in growing the economic pie. It is in fact possible gain wealth ethically. However, there are several addendum to this argument: 1. Most billionaires are hedge fund or private equity managers whose name no one has ever heard of. They provide liquidity or allocate capital or something. It's actually a major PR failure that people think Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk when they think of billionaires; If we can ignore their character for a second, these guys are actually hyper-productive and they've created immense wealth for society and are compensated in a power law sort of way. 2. Rich people make money with money - in the form of dividends, interest, rent, etc. Poor people trading labor for money. Salary only scales linearly; therefore, generating value for society is only half of the equation, you must also have ownership, or slowly invest your earned capital to eventually make money with money (i.e. retirement). 3. There must be a growing economy, otherwise it's a zero-sum game; a fixed-sized pie. In a stagnant economy, the customers you gained are customers another company lost. The wealth just shuffle hands from laid off workers to your employees. I think this is why Jeff Bezos once remarked that a stagnant economy is incompatible with free democratic society. 4. There must be a new frontier, otherwise the chance of success is pretty much zero. Software is this generation's new frontier. There are no bars to entry. You just need a laptop and the skill to arrange symbols on a screen in the right order. It's literally alchemy. On the other hand, non-software startups can't just do things. In many cultures, maybe due to their lack of growth, "entrepreneur" is actually very low status. It's synonymous with ne'er-do-well who can't find proper work. In the case of USSR before its collapse, it's synonymous with literal thieves and black market thugs.
  • igravious 3mo ago
    > I read pg's collection of essays (Hackers and Painters) in my 20s, and it single-handedly prevented me from being radicalized by leftist ideologies. Strap in folks, this is going to be a doozy > The one insight from the book that I will always remember from the book is this: if you want to be rich, make something people want. and then there's “Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” https://biblehub.com/matthew/19-24.htm https://biblehub.com/matthew/19-24.htm > Money is fiat to the value you've generated in growing the economic pie. This is gibberish, fyi (in case you didn't know) -- I can't even begin to de-garble it > It is in fact possible gain wealth ethically. I think this does get to the crux of the matter. I grant you that there is a sizable chunk of the population, most of them lefties, that do believe this. I personally, as a matter of principle, do not believe this. However (you just knew there was a however) I think it is let's say tricky to accumulate a vast amount of wealth obscene wealth ethically. We know from wage stagnation https://aflcio.org/2015/1/15/five-causes-wage-stagnation-united-states https://aflcio.org/2015/1/15/five-causes-wage-stagnation-uni... that the system is rigged. So fair play to anyone that opts out of playing the game and decides to join the rentier class https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/applied-and-social-sciences-magazines/class-rentier https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/applied-and-soc... More power to them, but let's not pretend the system itself isn't lopsided, captured, rigged, and unfair. > However, there are several addendum to this argument: addenda is the plural of addendum > It's actually a major PR failure that people think Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk when they think of billionaires; If we can ignore their character for a second, these guys are actually hyper-productive and they've created immense wealth for society and are compensated in a power law sort of way. This Jeff Bezos? https://www.btimesonline.com/articles/177080/20260414/amazon-warehouse-death-sparks-outrage-as-workers-claim-they-were-told-to-keep-working-around-body.htm https://www.btimesonline.com/articles/177080/20260414/amazon... Or this Jeff Bezos? https://metro.co.uk/2025/09/24/inside-never-ending-nightmare-amazon-driver-forced-pee-bottles-make-deadlines-24249555/ https://metro.co.uk/2025/09/24/inside-never-ending-nightmare... Or this Jeff Bezos? https://www.epi.org/publication/corporate-union-busting/ https://www.epi.org/publication/corporate-union-busting/ Oh, he's so hyper-productive > 1. Most billionaires are hedge fund or private equity managers whose name no one has ever heard of. They provide liquidity or allocate capital or something. fun fact: “Before founding Amazon in 1994, Jeff Bezos worked at D. E. Shaw & Co., a quantitative hedge fund in New York. He was there from 1990 to 1994, becoming a senior vice president by age 30.” What I'm not saying. I'm not saying that Mr Bezos isn't a smart guy. I'm not saying that he isn't hard working. I'm not even saying Amazon isn't an amazing company. > If we can ignore their character for a second No, I am unwilling to, why should we? Look, I'm not anti-capitalist. I look up to Elon Musk. I think what he has built and is building are astounding human achievements. Musk and Bezos didn't create this lop-sided system and I am not going to fault them for taking advantage of it. But as I said before -- let's not pretend there's some magic exponential money tree that some among us are just ever-so-gifted at growing for themselves and acknowledge the system is broken for the majority of people. It takes a special sort of myopia to ignore the obvious and plentiful social ills of the day. And do not take this as an attack on the system itself. As I said, unlike many other I am not an anti-capitalist. I do not believe that capitalism is inherently evil or wrong or bad or whatever. > 2. Rich people make money with money - in the form of dividends, interest, rent, etc. Poor people trading labor for money. Salary only scales linearly; therefore, generating value for society is only half of the equation, you must also have ownership, or slowly invest your earned capital to eventually make money with money (i.e. retirement). Yes, we know how the world works > 3. There must be a growing economy, otherwise it's a zero-sum game; a fixed-sized pie. In a stagnant economy, the customers you gained are customers another company lost. The wealth just shuffle hands from laid off workers to your employees. I think this is why Jeff Bezos once remarked that a stagnant economy is incompatible with free democratic society. ??? what's the size of the pie and whether it's growing or not got to do with anything. The problem centers on the how unequal the relative sizes of the slices of the pie everyone is getting over time. Which leads us to wealth redistribution. You lot (you and pg and people like you) can call the rest of us "radical leftwing ideologues" all you like but the longer this inequitable dynamic goes on the likelihood of a violent revolution goes up. If you want to avoid pitchforks and guillotines and "eating the rich" (I'm not advocating any of this btw, I'm just saying that this is where ignoring structural inequalities leads) -- you know way back when they used to have debt jubilees because they our forefathers recognised that inequality (growing inequality between the haves and the have-nots to be precise) is a fundamental truth of the world, an iron law akin to the law of gravity. > 4. There must be a new frontier, otherwise the chance of success is pretty much zero. Software is this generation's new frontier. No, what must happen is that when you find yourself writing a string of non-sequitur gibberish … the sane rational self-preserving piece of your brain must stop feeding the gibber-crank oxygenated blood > There are no bars to entry. You just need a laptop and the skill to arrange symbols on a screen in the right order. As the kids say "wow, just wow" > It's literally alchemy. It's literally and metaphorically not. > On the other hand, non-software startups can't just do things. In many cultures, maybe due to their lack of growth, "entrepreneur" is actually very low status. It's synonymous with ne'er-do-well who can't find proper work. In the case of USSR before its collapse, it's synonymous with literal thieves and black market thugs. I would say it's almost a guarantee that going by the rest of what you've written here this short snatch is undoubtedly horseshit PG's essays function as ideological inoculation for a specific demographic — young, technically skilled, meritocratically inclined. They don't prevent radicalization; they redirect it from class analysis to techno-libertarianism. You think you've avoided leftist ideology, but you've absorbed a different one: the "just-world" fallacy with startup characteristics.
• rib3ye 3mo ago
  So who was the woman he mentioned growing her company at 93% a month?
  • PurelyApplied 3mo ago
    Certainly not fictional. You just haven't heard of the company that doubled every month for a year, which obviously they did because why wouldn't you?
    • inigyou 3mo ago
      Personally I always choose to put the growth lever at 100% - it just makes sense.
• ekjhgkejhgk 3mo ago
  Phew this guy hasn't had a new idea in a long time.
• knorker 3mo ago
  Wow, Paul Graham REALLY missed the point. How ironic. Extremely successful person tries to justify why he's better or smarter than you, and the way he does it proves that he doesn't even understand what the other person has said. He kind of proved the point he intended to disprove. It's not quite as bad as a lottery winner saying "anyone can earn the jackpot", but it's in that direction. AOC wasn't even being easy to (deliberately) misunderstand, here, like Obama was when he said "you didn't build that". Of course, like the tan suit critique, the "you didn't build that" pearl-clutchers were all arguing in bad faith. I don't think Paul Graham is arguing in bad faith here. This post is just, for lack of a better word, "stupid".
• duped 3mo ago
  > Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination. > Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications. - Paul Graham, "What We Look For in Founders" I also want to add my own characterization. It is my personal experience with YC founders that YC has coached them in business practices and philosophy that could be characterized less than charitably as "how to con people and get away with it." I understand the PG doesn't believe this himself and every partner has different advice. But there is a consistent pattern of dishonesty and manipulation that is not innate to founders but taught to them directly by YC partners and it is impossible for me to square this essay with how those founders PG has coached over the last 20 years behave. Maybe it's possible to become a billionaire without cheating. But all I know is YC won't teach you how. --- Aside, it deeply bothers me how tone deaf pg is politically. There is a meta to AOC's messaging that he's not reading, which is that wealth is unattainable for the masses and there are oligarchs in our society manipulating our systems to empower and enrich themselves. You are making a rhetorical error by attempting to debate a single sound bite instead of addressing the systemic problems that AOC and progressive democrats are voicing.
• ElProlactin 3mo ago
  > A couple days later I was talking to the founder of a startup I'd funded. I began by asking, as I usually do when I meet a founder, what her growth rate was. 93% last month, she said. I pointed out that this meant her net worth was also growing at 93% a month. She was getting richer at a stupendously rapid rate. This is such a weird statement to see. The idea that a startup founder whose company is growing at 93% month-over-month has a net worth growing at the same rate is just so logically wrong that it's bizarre to see someone stating this. Even putting aside the fact that "growth" can be tracked by various metrics (revenue, customers, registered users, etc.), the idea that any given "growth" rate tracks 1:1 to the paper valuation of illiquid equity in an early-stage private company is so naive to be silly. > 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. 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. Delve, anyone? Startups can lie, cheat and steal, and their customers "love" them until they find out they've been duped. And let's not forget that more than a few have been accused of lying about how much "love" they really have (by misrepresenting their traction). Fake it until you raise it. Also, this reasoning is very narrow. A company's customers might love it because it allows them to benefit from something that has external costs that disadvantage other groups, if not society at large. Cheap outsourced labor, regulatory capture, network/monopoly rents, tax shenanigans, etc. A lot of companies also try to hack referrals, which sometimes involves using dubious tactics to get users/customers to sign up for something under questionable pretenses. In other words, people recommend products and services to their friends not solely because they love them but because they're given a personal incentive to. These can be really effective even when it's pretty obvious people are doing something that won't benefit their friends.
  • grok22 3mo ago
    > This is such a weird statement to see. The idea that a startup founder whose company is growing at 93% month-over-month has a net worth growing at the same rate is just so logically wrong that it's bizarre to see someone stating this. Exactly, kind-of weird for pg to be conflating these things...and very few comments engage with this part of the "incorrectness" of what pg said.
• breakyerself 3mo ago
  You can aquire a billion dollars. Nobody has ever earned a billion dollars.
• calmbonsai 3mo ago
  I've read (and re-read) all of PG's essays over the years. Often they're wonderful fonts of wisdom. Sometimes they're myopic and poorly supported, but never just plain wrong. This is, sadly, a first for him. AOC (the politician referenced) did not mean that earning a billion is "impossible". She, very clearly, stated within the context of that interview that Billionaires must be an extractive class at the cost of normal market efficiencies due to the rent-seeking behaviors of the monopolies that must exist to attain that level of wealth.
• clear-octopus 3mo ago
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• furyofantares 3mo ago
  > What she meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way. She certainly frames it in a way that you have to personally cheat, or personally create the myth that you've earned it, or at least it can be interpreted that way. But I think it is the system itself that causes unearned[1] money to accumulate. Money begets power begets money, with or without any intention of the actors to exploit this is any bad way. I don't think we know a better system, but I do think we can point to the level of wealth accumulation and say this is a bad property of this overall very good system, and we should try to do something about it. [1] Or rather: Money to accumulate disproportionate to the earning. We can say that many billionaires have earned something very significant and ALSO say the accumulation is disproportionate to that, and that there is an opportunity here for improvement.
• mercutio2 3mo ago
  As a committed market-socialist, the extent that the HN commentariat has turned into a reflexively nihilistic anti-free-enterprise is a fairly astonishing turn. It’s like my belief system turned into the maximally idiotic version of itself. “Externality” is thrown about as a term almost completely disconnected from any economic grounding of the term. If you make externality mean “anything I find aesthetically displeasing”, then yeah, sure, billionaires create and benefit from externalities, if your aesthetic is egalitarian comity. But if you mean “legitimate societal goals, legislated and agreed on by a representative body” are being violated left and right by billionaires, gimme a break. Go ahead and tax capital gains way more. Ending the estate step up in basis sounds great. Break up the “borrow” part of buy-borrow-die, while you’re at it, and treat encumbrance on capital as a taxable event, we could probably make that work, too, although the middle class might foam at the mouth if that was applied broadly. But, man. The cynicism, confiscatory and controlling instincts on display are enough to make me upgrade Ayn Rand from “hypocritical nut” to “maybe she was on to something when the general population gets tall poppy syndrome.” Markets work. There are externalities, but we can, and should, legislate fixes for social goals that we actually agree on. But stiflingly heavy regulation is really bad for incentivizing creation of new knowledge and wealth. You can still believe in caring about people, and building (incentive aligned) social safety nets without destroying people’s incentive, and thus, because intellectual capital formation depends heavily on network effects, people’s ability, to create many kinds of value in the world. Actual socialists recognize that capital is incredibly useful, and incredibly valuable. Leveraging capital is incredibly beneficial to the world. Pretending that the people leveraging that capital are somehow guilty of an original sin just by leveraging capital markets, which is really what these screeds against anyone holding controlling interests in companies they were instrumental in creating, seem to be about, leads down a terrible path. Demonizing people creating things is petty and unbecoming for a political movement.
  • awesomeMilou 3mo ago
    > Demonizing people creating things is petty and unbecoming for a political movement. i think a more rational argument would claim that this isn't about demonizing people who create, it's about societal inequality. i don't think mark zuckerberg, elon musk or larry page and sergey brin got demonized for creating their products in the first 10-15 years after launch, it's what happened after, the accumulation of wealth, the extension of power, that get's any rational person believing in a free market socialist economy nervous. > Pretending that the people leveraging that capital are somehow guilty of an original sin just by leveraging capital markets, which is really what these screeds against anyone holding controlling interests in companies they were instrumental in creating, seem to be about, leads down a terrible path. do you think that they should still be forced to leverage their capital within democratic boundaries? because from what i've heard most founders carry significant power due to their wealth and share increasingly anti-libertarian values, to secure their wealth. if those democratic boundaries prove to be innovation stiffling, fair, that is definitely an issue, but wouldn't it make sense to argue to then try to adjust those boundaries from within the democratic framework? one could also make the claim that one popular strategy for securing the gains of a succesful innovation is regulatory capture - a strategy that is increasingly employed by large companies to close of markets and secure market monopolies or duopolies. in a sense, they are stifling innovation themselves by closing a market to competitors, via instrumentalizing what they usually critize: regulation, no? it's like you said, these can coexist, but from my perception it's as if these billionaires don't want them to coexist. and im not thinking about regulatory drama involving diesel generators for AI datacenters or anything specific, just the mere power accumulation and general radical tendencies you find with these ultra wealthy interest groups.
• crispyambulance 3mo ago
  The thing about "compound growth", even in the most general sense, is that it ALWAYS ends, and that end is typically a crash of some sort. In biology there's the notion of a growth curve. It starts out with the familiar "compound interest" exponential growth, but unlike Econ-101 textbooks, that curve then proceeds to resource depletion (overshoot), followed by "die-off", followed by extinction, where (N -> 0, where N is usually something like yeast-cell count, but if you're applying this model to something else, it could be stuff like well-being or money).
• proee 3mo ago
  Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. Not all companies are growing because they are making their customers happy. Some are fully exploiting their customer, users, environment, etc. This mindset is what makes capitalism very ugly, and im not sure how one backs off the throttle a bit to grow responsibly?
• lackoftactics 3mo ago
  Paul has to update to trillion dollars now
  • ozgung 3mo ago
    That's easy. It just takes another 9 months.
• thelastgallon 3mo ago
  > starting from 2 million && 93% growth > 9.45 months to become a billionaire (500x growth) There is a much simpler way to become a billionaire. No Revenue (Silicon Valley): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo
• owenthejumper 3mo ago
  How to make a billion: Step 1: Have millions
  • ozgung 3mo ago
    Step 2: Double it 10 times. Now you have billions. Enjoy. Sadly this is the actual advice in the post.
• coffeemug 3mo ago
  “Billionaires v. the underclass” is such an unsophisticated discussion. Markets have all kinds of externalities, equilibrium traps, information asymmetry flywheels, and hundreds of other phenomena that interplay to trip people’s sense of fairness in all kinds of ways. To pick just one example, infinite scrolling can be seen as a modern equivalent of cigarettes— a product that made people billionaires, and that consumers obviously want but are not free to stop using because of hyper-sophisticated dark patterns. Is Elon a trillionaire because he created a trillion dollars of value from thin air, or is it because he created an information asymmetry flywheel that lets him allocate capital more efficiently than other actors? It’s genuinely unclear to me whether the universe in which we incentivize this kind of scale is better than the universe in which we do not (because the counterfactual universe has massive externalities too). But this is obviously not just a matter of compounding value creation and becoming a billionaire fair and square in ten years.
• thelastgallon 3mo ago
  The people who create real value rarely make any money. Linus Torvalds created Linux which allowed companies to use commodity hardware. Before Linux, every company had to pay massive taxes to Sun (Solaris) or IBM (AIX) to run a server. With Linux, commoditty hardware ecosystem blossomed, and the first companies like Google built massive datacenter. This wouldn't have been possible if they had to buy Solaris servers to run their datacenters. The value created by Linus is probably tens of trillions of dollars. I don't think he is a billionaire. There is a guy who is a trillionaire today. It is hard to make an argument that Musk created more value than Linus. Tesla is a trillion dollar company with negative YoY growth. Linus Torvalds is not a visionary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-YL0BeWZyU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-YL0BeWZyU The people who become billionaires are experts at becoming billionaires, creating value probably has nothing to do with it. They have either inherited wealth or in the right networks. The example PG gives of starting with 2 million USD is someone who is already incredibly wealthy and in the top 1% (1% globally, not just US). As always, there may be some rare exceptions where the founders actually created value and became billionaires.
  • slibhb 3mo ago
    > The people who become billionaires are experts at becoming billionaires, creating value probably has nothing to do with it Give me a break. Elon has created a huge amount of value. Every third car I see on the road is a Telsa and the US was relying on Russia to reach the ISS before SpaceX.
• ElijahLynn 3mo ago
  Weird to see Graham take AOC's quote out of context: Graham: 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. Per his link in the article: AOC: there is 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
  • blast 3mo ago
    What's inaccurate in how he quoted her? The context seems fully consistent with the quote.
    • PunchTornado 3mo ago
      because "earning" meant something different in AOC' speech.
      • deleted 3mo ago
        [deleted]
      • twothreeone 3mo ago
        It's not the verb "earning" that's different, it's the (implied) noun it is referring to: "wage" (AOC) vs. "capital" (Graham).
  • twothreeone 3mo ago
    Yeah he weirdly dodges it. Completely unnecessary too, because he could've just said something like "the average american male yields roughly 90k hours of labor over their lifetime before retirement, so earning a billion dollars only requires an hourly rate of about $12k - It's hard, but it's not impossible". Of course when you put it like that it sounds completely ridiculous :)
  • jarjoura 3mo ago
• mullingitover 3mo ago
  The thing about billionaires is that it's almost entirely paper wealth. The real thing they have is a collective agreement that allows them to have the power to direct a bunch of capital toward production. If they ever just decided to cash in their chips and buy a dragon hoard of gold instead, the paper wealth would vaporize really quickly. The problem that really exists here is that this small group of individuals has too much power. The feudal system existed for a long time, there's arguably a tendency to return to it, and this is the thing that truly makes people uneasy about the concentration of power outside democratic processes. How do we get rid of the despots? At least with democratic process there's a way to vote them out, their terms expire, etc. With hoarded wealth, and especially (as we see with cases like the Waltons and now the Ellisons) generational mega-wealth, we have zombie feudalism clawing its way out of the grave. I don't think there's a problem with someone earning the trust of a bunch of investors and being granted a lot of power to direct resources in their lifetime, but the intergenerational transfer of unearned power is a place where a crackdown is certainly warranted.
• ConorSheehan1 3mo ago
  Very disappointing. 1. This is a strawman. Mention a startup but not what it does. Wave your hands at growth as much as you want, but it doesn't prove you didn't hurt anyone to make your billion. I think people would find it quite easy to pick apart the actual named companies like AirBnB, Facebook, Apple, Google. Lots of people got hurt by these companies in the name of growth and profit. 2. The distinction between having and earning a billion is irrelevant. You make a billion? Cool, now stop. Give someone else a slice of the supposedly infinite pie. We. Are. Starving.
• satvikpendem 3mo ago
  I didn't know there'd be so many anticapitalists on a forum by a VC company.
• wnc3141 3mo ago
  Own a significant chunk of a rapidly growing large company, or be LeBron james.
• rybosworld 3mo ago
  I read this and see two possibilities. 1) PG honestly believes that his audience is unfamiliar with compound growth - i.e., an insult to the audience's intelligence. Or 2) PG honestly believes that the founder of a successful startup is directly and wholly responsible for the level of magnificent growth a company achieves. The 2nd one is some Ayn-Rand-like school of thought. That there are great people who have 1000x the work output of those around them. PG more or less alludes to this when he says stuff like > The reason her startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built. Notice how the credit for the startup's growth is credited to the founder? > 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 Again, crediting founders for the entirety of the company's growth. This is obviously flawed thinking in any company that has employees beyond the founder. Those employees are doing a significant amount of the work. And in any company with more than say, 5 people, they are doing the majority of the work. PG and people who think like him believe ownership==credit. That's the whole problem.
  • ErrantX 3mo ago
    Important context is; he is speaking to a generally small-c conservative. So 3) he is well aware of his audience and is talking to them directly.
  • ip26 3mo ago
    Regardless his actual private beliefs, one of his "jobs" is to create new unicorns ycombinator can invest in. So evangelizing startups in general and spurring new entrepreneurs is very much in his interest, and spreading this kind of mythology seems like a useful step to that end. He only needs a small number of people to buy into it.
  • deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  • wrsh07 3mo ago
    I'm somewhat confused by this. Many of the early startups are literally just the founders, and if they find product market fit without bringing anyone on, there's nobody else to give credit to. I've talked to a lot of seed stage startups this past year, several of them have achieved PMF and have several large customers. None of them have more than five people. If the companies didn't exist, nobody else was going to build the things (most of them) are building. Where should you assign credit in this case? Some of them largely eschew AI programming assistance as well. Surely for these companies, if the founders get to several million or tens of million in revenue without hiring any more people, those people have successfully become millionaires and we can credit them as such, right? Or do you simply think this is impossible?
• deleted 3mo ago
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• alexashka 3mo ago
  > 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 He actually thinks he trained people to become billionaires. I like how he thinks everyone else is an idiot - look, if you make a thing bigger many times - it grow big, reaaaal biiig! Take out your calculator, look, number go biiig!
• pipes 3mo ago
  The amount of negativity to this is depressing. No one seems to be contradicting anything he's saying here, instead it's just vacuous ideology "extraction" etc etc. Purposely narrow reading. I've got kids, I want people creating start ups they can work in, the alternative is too grim.
  • chipotle_coyote 3mo ago
    What if -- bear with me here -- it's possible for bright, motivated founders to create startups that your kids can work in, but those founders could be content with merely making a hundred million dollars? Because, and I don't know if you know this so you may have to take it on faith, that is still so much money that said founder and their family and very likely their descendants can live in extreme luxury for the rest of their lives even if they stop working right then. I don't know what the best solution to the problem of wealth inequality is, but I know that we need to collectively get over this "but if people think they will be limited to a mere hundred million dollars in wealth they will have no motivation whatsoever to work" nonsense. You know what the motivation is? It's still a hundred million dollars, that's what.
    • hparadiz 3mo ago
      [flagged]
      • calgoo 3mo ago
        what are you talking about????????? 100 million is a fortune, and only people in the SF bubble could even consider that a drop that is pissed into the wind. I would say that you need to take a serious step back and actually contemplate life around you. 100 million is a fortune, and no one actually NEED that much money, if they do, then they have lost touch with reality.
        • hparadiz 3mo ago
          In California that's only 100 homes. That's what's normal for us. Increased market efficiency should actually be lowering taxes, not increasing them just to make you feel good about yourself.
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• OtomotO 3mo ago
  You cannot EARN a billion dollars. (Unless there is hyper inflation) You can only get a billion dollars.
• wy35 3mo ago
  PG missed her point to an astounding degree. I’m sort of dumbfounded at this level of misinterpretation.
  • zephen 3mo ago
    > PG missed her point to an astounding degree. To be frank, this seems unlikely. > I’m sort of dumbfounded at this level of misinterpretation. It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. -- Upton Sinclair Obviously, Paul Graham could understand, and I submit he does understand, and he doesn't even have to worry about a salary, but, like a not-quite-so-jaded version of a Koch brother or a Walton, he has a point of view to maintain and propagate.
• BrenBarn 3mo ago
  More sanctimonious billionaire apologism. Nope, all wrong. You can't earn a billion dollars, and nothing in this essay shows you can. You can get a billion dollars, and maybe you can even wind up with a billion dollars without being mostly evil (although I'm skeptical), but you can't earn it. Graham is confusing "I did some stuff and my net worth increased to a billion" with "I earned a billion".
• hackerbeat 3mo ago
  if you wanna make a billion, you need to help a billion people.
• dreambuffer 3mo ago
  Putting aside that PG does not engage with AOC's point, he also doesn't engage with the much stronger argument against them: Billionaires are clearly a national security risk.
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• neilv 3mo ago
  > 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. What do users really want? To have illegal hotels that then help keep a generation out of home ownership? To have an exchange for cryptographic tokens that are used almost entirely for financial scams and organized crime payment infrastructure? To have an online forum that made so many long-time contributors who built the content and appeal feel so betrayed, that often the top solution to a posted problem (you find in search) has been deleted in protest? To have a non-profit spun off, ostensibly for the benefit of humanity, and attract talent and funding that way, then coup and rug pulled? Other big successes?
  • pj_mukh 3mo ago
    "To have illegal hotels that then help keep a generation out of home ownership?" To solve this, New York City (basically) banned Airbnb's and home ownership is now famously more accessible in the City? I am not even asking for home ownership + rentals to be solved, I am asking whether it got even slightly better because of this ban? Meanwhile, I can't visit my sister because the regulation cartel..I mean Hotel Lobby has spiked pricing to the high heavens. Maaaybe we need to revisit some of these easy assumptions on your list?
    • runarberg 3mo ago
      When you put oil on fire, it will suddenly stop burning as soon as you stop putting new oil on it. The housing crisis has multiple causes, regulatory framework which benefits existing homeowners is one of them, capitalists treating houses like the stock market is another, and Laissez Faire hotel market did only make it worse (like a gasoline on a burning fire). Now that the thing that made a bad thing worse has been banned, that does not mean the damage it caused has been fixed, nor does it mean that the other causes have been resolved either.
      • pj_mukh 3mo ago
        No because Airbnb bans are basically political bike shedding. Yell at the guys sprinkling oil on the fire because taking on the NIMBY's flooding the region with oil is too difficult. "Multiple causes" is just mealy-mouthed pussy-footing, there is one big cause and then a bunch of other distractions as the numbers now prove.
• titzer 3mo ago
  How astonishingly tone deaf. Per Paul Graham, you become a billionaire by working really hard for 9 months with the growth rate is jacked at 93%. Or you work five years to keep a growth rate jacked to 15%. Literally nothing else to it. He literally says that exponential growth is like magic. Yeah, no kidding. A mathematical formula where the magic of speculative markets and a stupendous amount of money floating in the stock market can just float right up your alley. Just take your place on the top of a pyramid of growth and stay there! How does one write this with a straight face? Most people work linear jobs, with linear creation. The amount of work that they actually do in a day is what they can accomplish with their hands, their minds, their intellect. Whether it's laying bricks or polishing gemstones or cleaning toilets, or teaching kids for that matter...most people cannot just become a billionaire. They can't just growth it real hard. They have to first escape the very real linearity of making a living wage, providing for a family etc. They don't have the luxury of throwing around capital they don't have. They can't just issue their own cryptocurrency or stock and get the market to start funneling it all to them. Hell, their limited investments in stock will only get them piddly millions if they're lucky. It shows how absolutely broken the system is that people will just say this in a straight face and expect us to not just guffaw at it. Paul, I hope you read stuff here because growthism is exactly why the system is so fucked up right now, and enshittification is the proof positive of how little all the oversized monsters out there give a shit about how anything works in reality. Just 93% growth your way there. Good idea, thanks for the tip, Paul.
• scubbo 3mo ago
  A deeply repugnant man, carrying out painfully-obvious sleight-of-hand to obfuscate the clear gaps in a cancerous philosophy. I'm pleasantly surprised to see the comments being so critical.
• yieldcrv 3mo ago
  last time I waded into this discussion with my own examples, the "billionaires exploit people" maximalists kept moving the goal post indefinitely I had asked "what about a fund manager earning the carry" management fee and performance fee, employees not entirely necessary. the main result was a brief back and forth to understand that role, because this class of people are completely separated from all the exceptions that break their argument, and then a brief moment of acceptance, before focusing on the prevalence of this kind of billionaire amongst all billionaires. Which I thought was funny because there are not many billionaires to begin with. 20 fund managers on the list would be a large percentage of billionaires.
• vixen99 3mo ago
  I get the impression that a rather large number of HN commenters hereabouts have a very favorable view of https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/04/a-good-life-for-the-99-isnt-a-pipe-dream-it-can-be-done-heres-how https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/04/a-good... by Thomas Picketty.
• phs318u 3mo ago
  I think “earn” is the wrong word.
• black_13 3mo ago
  [dead]
• crankyOldGuy 3mo ago
  He is mixing apples and oranges here...he really should know better. When he asks "how fast are you growing", to any business operator, that refers to revenue. That's not at all the same as "how fast is your net worth growing". Net worth for a publicly traded company is what the market thinks your future cash flows are worth, NOT your revenue growth. Obviously, more revenue growth is better, but it doesn't automatically translate into higher net worth. You could imagine a situation where revenue is growing like crazy, but net worth declines...because the stock price is based on the expectation that growth will occur at an even faster rate, or that profitability isn't living up to expectations.
• EsotericSoft 3mo ago
  Is it "bad" to hoard the money? As founder/CEO seeing insane growth, should she share some of it? How much can she hoard before it becomes bad?
• RugnirViking 3mo ago
  A true, but vapid speech. You can grow to be a quintillionaire if you start as a trillionaire and grow at 990% a month for X months, too. It's almost as though the devil is literally in the details? I don't even think it's wrong, it just says almost nothing about anything that isn't blindingly obvious. Maybe the most interesting observation is a buried point near the end that the natural cap on this is market size. There's a much more interesting speech there about expanding the size of your market, both to governments and to businesses leaders. But this isn't that speech
  • enraged_camel 3mo ago
    >> A true, but vapid speech. PG got into an argument with AOC about it on Twitter. It sounded like he was personally offended by what she was saying. Which makes sense because, as someone who has helped startup founders become famously wealthy, he probably took her statement as an attack on his identity. Perhaps PG should follow his own advice, though: https://paulgraham.com/identity.html https://paulgraham.com/identity.html
• seahawks78 3mo ago
  Great article by PG! Too bad he did not specify the play book, i.e. to enter the public market at highly unrealistic inflated valuations so that VCs and founders can make bank while the general public become bag holders for next 5-10 years. I got mine, up yours!
• BryantD 3mo ago
  It’s a shame Graham has failed to understand the point of the statement he’s trying to critique. The argument isn’t that earning money is inherently immoral. The argument is that you can’t earn a billion dollars without assigning a higher percentage of revenue to yourself than is fair. I’m not going to argue that one way or another here, because I don’t think it’d be a useful discussion: I’m just pointing out that Graham doesn’t engage with the key premise. He also might want to check his percentages a bit. Funding 30 startups which have produced billionaires is nice. It represents 1% of the world’s billionaire population. You know who really knows how to make new billionaires? The world’s richest families, that’s who.
• oulipo2 3mo ago
  Did he... totally miss the point of AOC? She said that no amount of "work" can "earn" billion dollars. So you earn billions through capitalism by rent, through owning companies, and having other people work for you. And ultimately, it should be obvious that societies have to cap this
• tehjoker 3mo ago
  Sure in some out even most cases growth starts in this nice way. There’s two problems though. In order to sustain that growth number, usually ever greater interventions become necessary. Second, there’s the marxist critique that while it’s true that owners add management decisions, it’s their employees that actually do most of the valuable work and are then underpaid relative to their contribution. If they were fully remunerated then there would be no profits. Third, while it is good to incentivize building things people want, it doesn’t make sense to reward people with class status that crushes everyone under them. It should get exponentially harder to make money like levels in a video game at best.
• pandoro 3mo ago
  > What she meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way. > 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. There is no doubt that Graham is right in saying there is a formula to becoming a billionaire and that formula involves creating products that help your users in some way. However this is very narrow, reductionist interpretation of AOC's comment. You need to put it into perspective of the massively increasing global wealth inequality. In 2011, billionaires owned 4.5 trillion USD of wealth. Today, fifteen years later, it's 20.1 trillion USD. This amounts to about 20% of the entire planet's GDP. That means 0.000003% of humans capture 20% of the value globally created. The top 12 billionaires own more than 50% of the bottom half of humanity. How can you sensibly argue that this is not exploitation?
  • agrajag 3mo ago
    GDP is a measure of the amount of commerce per year, while global wealth is a net accumulation of all the work that has happened in human history. Billionaires obviously get a disproportionate amount of income per year, but it’s far from 20% of all the world’s GDP. To make your math work that would assume they got all the wealth in a single year.
    • pandoro 3mo ago
      You are right that I should have said "That means 0.000003% of humans own 20% of the value globally created" instead of capture. However, getting relatively accurate and meaningful numbers for billionaires income is probably virtually impossible. Hence the comparison to their wealth which is known. I think it's still a valuable and common comparison. See https://stats.areppim.com/stats/stats_rich_26_trend_percentxgdp.htm https://stats.areppim.com/stats/stats_rich_26_trend_percentx... or this New York Time article: https://archive.is/KvbQH https://archive.is/KvbQH or this Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2026/may/15/wealth-britain-billionaires-gdp-rich-list-inequality https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2026/may/15/wealth-br...
  • chad_c 3mo ago
• laser 3mo ago
  At scale the only utility of wealth is the power it gives to allocate the means of production. The vast majority of ultra high net worth individuals spend a tiny fraction of their wealth on personal consumptive activities, the only true "cost" born by society. But in exchange for this small cost aside from the benefits accrued to society existing in a natural state of free trade and commerce, society also gets to have its means of production managed by those most qualified to do so—those that created the means and have the most to gain from it continuing to operate well and most to lose from it failing to deliver value. The counterfactual, a society in which the means of production are allocated by those that did not create them and do not stand to lose in their inefficient operation, is already familiar to many, in government services and old oligopolies with low insider ownership.
  • greedo 3mo ago
    "most qualified to do so" Yes, us poors should be reminded that our bettors will create the means blah blah blah. You know who funded Arpanet? How the transistor was developed? On and on, taxpayers funded it. And now we have leeches acting like teenagers who think they invented sex.
    • laser 3mo ago
      Public investment is wonderful, even if the return on capital is lower than private allocations. Unfortunately, public investment is about 4% of GDP while total government expenditure (across all levels) is around 40% of GDP. Sadly this means a marginal dollar allocated to taxes under current spending is hardly going towards the next Arpanet or transistor. Compare this to when Arpanet was invented in 1969 public investment was about 10% of GDP on government spending 28% of GDP. So we've gone from a society using over a third of government spending to invest in the future, to less than a tenth.
      • hankbond 3mo ago
        Do you have any links or topics you can drop on me to learn more about your perspective? I find it to be really interesting.
• GreenSalem 3mo ago
  Words of wisdom. PG is always worth Reading. The haters do not seem to be actually reading and comprehending PG's article. I have news for you. The article is not written for those of you who are comprehension challenged...
  • burnte 3mo ago
    Alternative view: People ARE understanding him, and disagreeing. Even Paul can have a minority view, and even Paul can be mistaken. Even people whoare always worth reading are sometimes wrong, and sometimes seeing how really smart people get things wrong is just as informative as when they get it right. Becoming and being a billionaire is solely a mathematical exercise.
• wat10000 3mo ago
  I remember when Facebook, I think it was, was going public. There was a ton of consternation about avoiding a “Google chef” situation. Google had a chef that got paid a bunch of equity as if they were an engineer, and they got filthy rich when Google went public. This was, of course, an outrage. A lowly chef getting rich from a startup IPO! We all know that the founders are supposed to get wealthy beyond all reason, regular engineers are supposed to get fairly rich depending on how early they started, and regular people aren’t supposed to get anything special. As if the chef didn’t contribute. People have to eat! We have weird ideas about who deserves the rewards. This idea that starting a company that gets big counts as “earning” a billion dollars makes some strong assumptions about who deserves what.
• galenptacek 3mo ago
  Someone told me it was impossible to become an avogadrillionaire (to have a net worth of one mole, or approximately 6.02 x 10^23 dollars.) Now there's this founder I know whose startup grew 93% last month. Let's be conservative and say she has 2 million dollars. Let's calculate how many months of 93% growth it takes for something to grow 301,100,000,000,000,000x. The log base 1.93 of 301,100,000,000,000,000 is 61.2091. That's about 5 years and 35 days. Is it really impossible to grow 93% month over month for 5 consecutive years? I can imagine some startups that can. There are two numbers that determine whether you can make one avogadrillion dollars. One is your growth rate, which doesn't matter at all. The other is the size of the available market. Simply identify a market that has on the order of 10^20 times the demand that is currently being met. Understand what your users want. Ask ChatGPT for advice.
  • free_bip 3mo ago
    Yes, yes it is impossible. And I'm sure ChatGPT could easily tell you why.
    • galenptacek 3mo ago
      I've been proven wrong. I will now delete my initial comment.
      • tasuki 3mo ago
        The person you're responding to didn't understand your original comment, I don't think they're capable of understanding this one either.
  • pmxi 3mo ago
    PG acknowledged that growth is limited by market size. Markets to support "avogadrillionaire" level wealth may not current exist. However, there obviously exist markets to support billionaire level wealth, as evidenced by the at least 30 billionaires produced by YC, and the many others.
    • 3mo ago
• dh2022 3mo ago
  Extremely disappointing post from pg. conflating income with revenue, assuming one can extrapolate a week-on-week growth rate to any other week (never mind 9 consecutive months or 5 consecutive years), giving as positive examples Google and Facebook. pg is way too smart to believe even half of this nonsense. I guess he thinks future UK politicians (the audience of his speech) are that stupid. Or maybe that speech was just to vehicle to make himself heard spewing this nonsense. Heard by whom? Very disappointing indeed.
• Upvoter33 3mo ago
  You know, there seems to be a hidden thought here that it's either just (A) let the Founders do their thing and of course they will provide great value and happen to become billionaires as a result or (B) tax those crooked cheaters who are taking our wealth. There could be alternatives. For example, laws that ensure ownership of said companies is more widely held, so that the wealth is more evenly distributed among those who created it, for instance.
• robertnowell 3mo ago
  the main concern here is what is needed to create and sustain that growth rate. here are three potential issues: 1. there is a short term incentive for lying -- tricking people can get you a long way (e.g. delve) 2. there's a genuine long term incentive for selling products that have short term benefit but long term harm (e.g. gambling, cigarettes, etc). 3. there is a durable incentive to sell products that genuinely benefit for your customers but cause net harm to society -- this last one is a hard problem of capitalism, and imo it's the gov'ts job to make sure that such companies are not allowed to win.
• montagg 3mo ago
  Having a billion dollars means the rules no longer apply to you. That is incompatible with functioning capitalism—incentives are no longer aligned with the rest of humanity—or personal freedom—rules for thee but not for me. Money is a made up idea that we use to benefit everyone. It's a game that, largely, has positive returns for society. When that is no longer the case, when someone breaks the game and removes themselves from the rules, you have to change the rules.
• nickelbob 3mo ago
  Paul, we know you're not stupid so please engage with the real argument, not a strawman. The middle class is shrinking. Social mobility is decreasing. There's now a man who is worth a trillion dollars. Something is broken. Say something about that please.
• sorry_outta_gas 3mo ago
  [dead]
• jodosha 3mo ago
  But doesn’t he mixing up the concepts of startup revenue vs being billionaire?
• RagnarD 3mo ago
  Those criticizing those earning billions of dollars think of money as some anonymous fixed pie that magically belongs to everyone. On that completely false view of production (and money), of course it would be offensive for people to grab so much for themselves. If that's what production was about, humanity never would have left caves. The ancestors of the fix-pie idea were the ones who would have sneered at the first hut built outside of a cave, at the first crops deliberately sown into the ground, at the first villages built up to provide better living conditions for groups of people including as a trade center. Everything from 100,000 years ago to today is the result of productive human beings who made more of the world. It's an ongoing process.
• PowerElectronix 3mo ago
  It's clear to me that in order to get a billion, you have to swidle a lot of people out of their fair share of the billion. As soon as the person that has "The Idea" keeps their 60% stake of the company while the army of minions are working their assess off to get that idea to a billion dollar valuations are given crumbs or no stake at all, you know who is swindling who.
  • pclowes 3mo ago
    False, you just make something very valuable. To get people to help you make it you offer to pay them and they willingly exchange their time for that money (or equity if they also think it will be very valuable someday or you have a record of making valuable things in the past) Who is the person swindled here? Who agreed to something and was deceived? Who was stolen from? This process is net wealth creation. The wealth is generated, not taken from somebody else.
    • justinmarsan 3mo ago
      I guess the point is that to reach the billion scale, you cannot be doing all of the important part on your own... So somehow, out of all the hardworking smart people you gathered yourself with, you decide that you're the genius that needs to benefit from the market value, while everyone else just gets compensated for their time... The actual people doing the actual work, day to day, talking to prospects, building the things... But you had the idea, so it's just natural that you get the vast majority of the reward. Maybe that makes sense to you... And like I disagree, but that's cool... But I cannot picture myself ever becoming a billionaire... I would have shared so much with the people that contributed to make me be a 100-millionaire way too much to reach the next step... And I'm sure I'd be happy to have 100 millions, and have people happy to get great compensation to do that with me... Still, I agree it's not stealing. But the fairness of the situation is still up for debate.
      • pclowes 3mo ago
        Do you feel like the cafeteria workers at SpaceX who were paid standard cafeteria wages when they started plus some equity that everybody considered worthless at the time and now makes them multimillionaires feel like they were treated unfairly? I am struggling to understand where the unfair part is coming from. Nobody is making anybody do anything. Everything is transparent and above board. Everybody in this scenario is willingly working market wages (except for founders and early hires who work below market and take equity for a couple years because they believe in the idea)
• Nekorosu 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• vibe_that_works 3mo ago
  It would be so much better if PG was not forced to write this essay. Everyone and that includes AOC has a right to free speech, but I believe that mandatory platform context would really help the internet. For example, here: "Earning your fruits of labor morally as opposed to the mere market value of labor and capital is a concept derived from Karl Marx' Theory of Alienation. More than 15 million people have died under socialist rule from starvation alone."
• SJC_Hacker 3mo ago
  1) Start a company 2) Sell 0.000001% of it to a friend for $1 3) Congratulations, you are now a billionaire (on paper)
• maxnevermind 3mo ago
  "Now you see why, when I meet a founder, the first thing I ask about is their growth rate." This obsession with growth instead of progress or value rubs me the wrong way, given the trend for enshittification of services sooner or later, also remind me of a video I watched yesterday when a founder gives examples of private equity people trying to force growth no matter what: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4vNIsVY-0Y&t=412s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4vNIsVY-0Y&t=412s
• keeda 3mo ago
  Here's a fun query to try with Google AI overview: "How many of the top 20 billionaires in the world have companies that have NOT been in legal trouble for anti-worker, anti-consumer or anti-competitive practices." The answer begins with "Exactly zero" and goes from there. It's the same answer up to the top 50 billionaires, but up to 20 it might even give you a summary of infractions for each billionaire. Not only were the extrapolation calculations in TFA very https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/, what was funnier was when PG tried to counter AOC's point ("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.") by talking about how he personally knows like 30 founders who have become billionaires. And I was like, no way is he thinking about Chesky and AirBnB, who literally started off with multiple regulation-skirting shenanigans and whose effects on neighborhoods have been heavily criticized... And then he mentions not only AirBnB, but also Facebook!!
• bluecheese452 3mo ago
  Pg is such a POS.
• a34729t 3mo ago
  This reeks of "Billionaires are persecuted" a la Silicon Valley (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JBZTHxZvOwg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JBZTHxZvOwg). Billionaires are great when the tide is rising. However the challenge for the young generation now is the tide is going out: Housing is expensive, there fewer good jobs, AI is coming for these jobs if they arent outsourced (or we bring in guest workers), plus the specter of supporting all the seniors. This is a problem is every developed and developing country. Maybe it's worth reflecting on how billionaires could inspire the next generation and help drive society in a better direction. If you are gonna argue capitalism is good (it is) you need to make a credible argument to individuals who arent doing well. Society (or the country) doing better doesnt make people feel better if they personally cannot find a job or afford housing. The founder of Huawei is the right billionaire role model- not PG -and he at one point stated when you employ thousands of people, you start being responsible for their welfare!
• m0llusk 3mo ago
  Working under Steve Jobs at NeXT and then Apple it was always about excellence and could grandma use it. Money as the key to everything never came up. That kind of thinking led to iPhone and Apple as it is today. Seems like this money first thinking leads to relatively shallow achievements. Also notable that making a billion dollars appears to slam the brakes on innovation as billionaires focus on shell games like mergers and acquisitions.
• auggierose 3mo ago
  If pg doesn't understand that the way he uses the way "earn" is very different from the way that AOC uses "earn", then I guess he is just not that smart. AOC also doesn't say anything about "moral", etc. You can behave perfectly morally in US society and "earn" a billion dollars. It is just that, no matter what exactly you did, you didn't actually "earn" it. Of course pg is smart enough to understand that there are two different meanings of "earn" at play here. It is just that he chooses to ignore the second one, because the second one is hard to define exactly, and it puts him out of his comfort zone. He likes being right more than finding the truth (like most of us), and so ignoring the second meaning is the easy way out. The trouble is, just because something is difficult to define, doesn't mean it isn't essential, or important.
  • danielheath 3mo ago
    The confusion is, in part, because one of the functional underpinnings of capitalism is “make a bet” as a method of allocating resources. Those whose bets paid off didn’t “earn” the money, they “won” it. Calling it “earned” confuses “being morally deserving” with “receiving”. The positive functional effect of “take a risk and get more money if it pays off” is that folks who allocate capital well end up with more capital to allocate. Of course, this is imperfect ; there are those who allocate capital poorly (by some definition) yet win returns anyways, and some who allocate it well while being unable to capture the value they create.
  • brigandish 3mo ago
    > AOC also doesn't say anything about "moral", etc. She says you can't earn it and then gives several examples in a row of immoral and/or rentier economic practices. At no point does she give any example that is what most people would call moral behaviour. She does not give the example pg gives, of simply working hard for it. The implication is that it is impossible to earn that level of wealth morally. Earn is already defined in the dictionary in both ways perfectly well, and she is using the sense of deserved. pg clearly knows she's using it that way, and his argument is: 1. You can make a billion dollars 2. You can do it by making something people want That deals with both senses of earn because none of AOC's examples apply and he adds that: > 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 How is that immoral? How is that unearned? If you think it's unearned then you've failed to understand the maths he elucidates in the article, or you've taken a position that earning large amounts of money by any means is immoral (or, like AOC, wish to present the straw man that it's only possible through immoral means).
• overgard 3mo ago
  Here's a fun exercise, go look at the current tech billionaires and tell me which guys (it's basically all guys) you're super stoked about having a billion dollars because they're using it to do so much good for the world? Because as far as I can tell they're just creating a massive surveilance state while engaging in naked class warfare. Whether you can "earn" a billion dollars, I'm not convinced those people should have a billion dollars.
  • j-bos 3mo ago
    Gaben
• w10-1 3mo ago
  What differentiates the thing me and my friends want from a scaling business is the whole business. I know young people excited about making fantasy figurines or simplifying 10 minutes of daily administrivia, but that’s not going to fly. Aristotle describes four causes, and pg has given two; not because he doesn’t know the rest, but because this post is not intended to guide people, but to tamp down the demonizing of success, lest it usher in a Cold War on Capitalism. There’s much to criticize, but today politicians are desperately herding outrage to make up for their ineffectual performance, so instead of criticism resulting in field-leveling regulation, we’re just seeing haircuts that send the rats scurrying off the boat and fuel for the fires consuming it.
• flipgimble 3mo ago
  Doing a quick search in comments, and I see the prefix “enshit” used 5 times so far. That is telling. For most of my adult life technology was associated with unquestionable improvement and progress. We got used to a series of “revolutions” where you felt that your quality of life improved, even if a few ruthless and amoral business people amassed all the resulting wealth. We assumed that is just how the system works. But now technology is just as likely to be associated with scams, rug-pulls and using investor capital to capture a market and destroy competition. We are being trained to assume trickery with every software update, forced terms of service change, or company acquisition. Not to mention the absurd corruption when tech billionaires collude with incompetent politicians. It’s just a trend in sentiment I’m seeing that goes against the “just build anything and the world will give you billions” cheerleading from 2000s.
• oatmeal1 3mo ago
  PG makes little effort to identify what it means to earn something. Some people consider effort the measure of whether something is earned. Some believe luck should be subtracted from result to get what is earned. Some say you cannot earn the benefits you receive from your genetics. No idea of what it means to earn something is given except for making users happy while "not cheating" (who decides what counts as cheating he doesn't say). No consideration for ideas such as economic rent, inherited advantages, or negotiating leverage are discussed. There is no way anyone responding to him has a lazier argument than he does.
  • johnea 3mo ago
    I think we can clearly say that capital gains are not earned. Someone who lays bricks, "earns" their income; someone who's wealth increases as a bricklaying company's value increases, does not. In this sense, it is indeed impossible to "earn" a billion dollars...
    • YZF 3mo ago
      So if I'm a brick layer and I decide to innovate and build a machine that can lay bricks faster and cheaper, and I hire people to help me do that, suddenly I've not actually earned anything? If I'm a farmer and I use a horse and a plow to plow my field instead of with my bare hands then I've not earned anything? Putting your capital towards these things is absolutely "earning" and the modern economy is just a generalization of that which enables capital and need to find each other more readily. We should all go back to being hunter-gatherers? Or how do you propose this is going to work?
      • collingreen 3mo ago
        You gave examples of creating and inventing things and employing and leading people. Those are value creation. I don't think I fully agree with it, but OPs point wasn't about any of that and instead said capital gains (and clarified further - fungible, uninvolved capital without any other contribution). That's really different. If you want to attack that maybe use an example of passive index investors or pension funds allocating capital to a vc.
• braden-lk 3mo ago
  Purposefully obtuse.
• silexia 3mo ago
  Everyone needs to hear this. Each dollar represents a favor exchanged between people. A billion dollars is a billion favors. A billionaire is someone who did a ton of favors for others.
  • aguacaterojo 3mo ago
    1 person can do another person a favor which involves fucking over a 3rd person.
• skyberrys 3mo ago
  I think it's missing the outflow. Any startup could have a big growth rate, but founders who are empathetic will also have an outflow from their own resources to the resources they are managing, meaning to sustain the growth rate as the years pass more of the earned growth has to be distributed to increase the growth rate. In summary acquiring new customers costs more money the bigger you are.
• aabajian 3mo ago
  How can someone so successful be so naïve? The statement, "impossible to earn a billion dollars," is not meant to be taken literally. It is used to underscore the fact that founders (and early investors) are paid ridiculously disproportionately to their employees. There is no labor that a single person can do (without the help of their employees, family, friends, network) that justifies earning $1B.
  • spprashant 3mo ago
    He is just being willfully obtuse to make a point. This has to be one of his weaker essays. He is trying to "gotcha" AOC by talking math instead of debating the larger point. The kind of thing he has himself argued against in the past.
    • calf 3mo ago
      Good luck someone trying to gotcha AOC, I look forward to hearing her reply, with great relish.
  • sgentle 3mo ago
    It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his net worth demands he not understand it.
    • Matumio 3mo ago
      Original quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
  • MitziMoto 3mo ago
    It's crazy to me that someone as distinguished as PG, as well as so many of the comments here on HN, completely missed this point.
  • jojobas 3mo ago
    Billionaire founders make some millionaire employees. Why are they (or rather us?) entitled to more? They are working market jobs for market pay.
• wayeq 3mo ago
  It is more impactful to me to instead think of it like this: Elon Musk's net worth is roughly 1 million times the median American's. So Elon "earned" as much as the combined life savings of a city roughly the size of Houston or Phoenix.
• digitaltrees 3mo ago
  I am a capitalist. But I feel most capitalists are shortsighted. The problem isn’t a person being wealthy. It’s a person capturing a market and making competition impossible. The problem with most analysis about capitalism is that it fails to appreciate that, over time, capitalism will destroy itself as winners capture the market, stifle competition, and the very ecosystem that created their wealth in the first place. If you love the benefits of capitalism: the price setting function, the innovation, the broad wealth creation, you have to prevent the accumulation of market power that leads to monopolies or you will watch as the market evaporates and monopolies turn into aristocracy and collapse
• steele 3mo ago
  Exploitation Luck
• lolbert291 3mo ago
  [dead]
• TacticalCoder 3mo ago
  The really just question to ask though is: how rich can a politician get? And I'm not talking --even though that's despicable-- about a billionaire-now-president that enriches himself and his family. I'm talking about the estimated wealth of the like of of Ilhan Omar (the somali woman politician). Just like jesuit priests do take a vow of chastity, I think politicians should have a vow of poverty. The only way to have a functional society is not to prevent the billionaires from getting to a billion: it's to prevent politicians from enriching themselves.
• usernametaken29 3mo ago
  I think it’s astounding that the author can’t see that individual goodness or badness doesn’t necessarily mean you will not cause societal harm. He lists AirBnB and Facebook as successful billion dollar companies, in which likely the CEO did not have malicious intentions, but these companies are harming society at humongous scale unlike we have ever seen before (addiction and housing crisis). Given that this post reads like a really bad contradictory hyperbole that neglects real world consequences pretty much entirely.
  • atq2119 3mo ago
    Agree with most of this except come on. Facebook was born out of a misogynist precursor. The idea that its CEO had no malicious intentions is ridiculous.
• alliao 3mo ago
  making customer happy is one thing, didn't huxley specifically wrote about how consumer hedonism is how tech bros gain control? lol honestly are we at the end stages that billionaires are trolling oxford union... so DIRE
• didibus 3mo ago
  She's saying nobody can truly work a billion times more, a billion times harder, a billion times smarter, so nobody can actually earn a billion dollars. Given that, how can some people be worth as much? There has to be some capture of wealth somewhere such that even though nobody can actually earn as much, they can be worth as much.
  • psawaya 3mo ago
    Your unstated assumption here is that all work (per unit of time) is equally valuable.
    • didibus 3mo ago
      Not really. That's why I said no one can work a billion times smarter. There is a "hack" to wealth, and PG has explained it here. You need a large addressable market with little competition where you can capture a small amount of value from a huge number of people at scale. Individually, that value is often not worth much. A surgeon can save your life, and you'd give up most of your fortune for it. A starving person would do almost anything for food. Most startups don't create that kind of value for any one customer. They create a little bit of value for a lot of customers, and at scale that turns into enormous wealth. That's what people are arguing when they say scale is a form of cheating. Maybe you got into the position to own it through harder work, smarter decisions, more risk taking, more grit, or more luck. But not a billion times more. Once you own it, you've locked yourself into a growth curve that scales with little additional work. In many cases, it gets easier as it grows. Past a certain point, wealth is no longer tied to your work. It's tied to your ownership. That's also why CEOs want equity. They don't want to be paid solely for their labor. They want ownership in large scale production so they can benefit from the growth of the system itself and eventually sell that ownership for far more than they could ever earn through wages alone. This is why, as a software engineer, I favor equity compensation and have benefited from it myself. But I don't think I've worked harder than countless people in jobs that don't have this characteristic. I wasn't paid more because I worked more. I was paid more because I owned something that scaled. That's the "cheat."
• michaelteter 3mo ago
  The new rich have warped concepts about how they "earned" their wealth. Very, very rarely does someone actually build or provide something so significant that it results in them profiting enough to become that wealthy. Instead, they (possibly unknowingly) play a complex game that essentially defines complex rules that result in outsized rewards while obscuring the real process of gaining those rewards. Most of this revolves around magic numbers. The best example is "valuation". Valuation in theory is reasonable. But after just a couple of iterations of mixing leverage with hype and gambling (with other people's money, of course), there is now enough artificial wealth to invest in new ventures to get some % ownership. And based on the amount paid and the percent received, the venture now has this official value. There's no legitimacy behind this calculation other than the fact that everyone agrees to play this game. Now that your startup has a nice big valuation, you go through several successive rounds of funding - where each round serves two purposes: 1. give you more cash to burn so you can move faster than regulatory bodies can keep up (Uber) or enough spare cash that you can slow the regulatory processes by throwing lawyers at it, and 2: pay the previous investors a nice reward. Repeat this process several times, eventually resulting in an IPO where you dump all this false value on the general public (or nowadays, all the pension funds and government-forced personal investment accounts). In other words, the last buyers pay for all of the false value. Then they wait for a reward that often doesn't come. Ironically, part of why this system spawned and has worked so well is that once large, publicly traded companies became fixated on quarterly EPS numbers (so the execs can hit their bonus targets), those companies became slow and useless for innovation. But they had magic money with which they could buy up startups who are actually trying new things. This entire system is astounding in its perversion compared to how business worked 40+ years ago.
• Yhippa 3mo ago
  If you draft Tom Brady in the sixth round, you can win seven Super Bowls.
• RexFactorem 3mo ago
  [dead]
• FabioBertone 3mo ago
  "What she meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way." AOC was right. Airbnb disregarded their impact on rents in touristic cities, and competed with hotels by running faster than regulations. Kalshi is gambling. Doordash leveraged underpaid delivery drivers on unfair contracts. Instacart cheated con consumer fees. Reddit was based on (milked and abused) volunteer moderators. I stop because I don't know all the 30 billionaires that YC created... But this subset of companies should cover 30% of them. I am happy we have innovation in the world, but claiming these things are not bad for society and ways to cheat to the top is... Lying
• phoneafriend 3mo ago
  Paul focused on the most beneficial pathway - finding product market fit and growing into it - what many of us here aspire to provide. What comes after? Both things can be true: - the incredible benefit brought about by YC companies as they grow into their markets and mint billionaire founders... - monopolizing, price fixing, what can feel like gouging, etc. as the temptations of what may be currently possible war with what may be ultimately wise (and for whom)... Kind of like: - the temptation to appeal to the increasingly common set of hash-taggable moral & political absolutes... - the more measured, wisdom-dense sharing the best possible, and fortunately (hopefully? maybe?) most common form of billionaire-minting... Is, or was there previously, a different, more American-value-compatible status quo? ... Historically did we IPO earlier, leaving more of the exponential on the table, leading to greater public wealth, resilience, opportunity, and capability? ... Is the profit-margin gas pedal ever pumped a tad aggressively preceding this, inducing trust wobbles in the public and customers as prices are raised and services degraded the quarter before, with share price corrections the quarter after? ... Do we (should we) maintain relatable humility in the face of success and wealth - surely earned, though perhaps better enjoyed by more enduring trophies (disease eradication; public works enhancements; life extension progress) than a mega-yacht in the Mediterranean? Very easy to be a keyboard-warrior. Very hard to provide $1B in new capability and value. Good read as always. Back to work.
• jacobn 3mo ago
  Make a billion / deserve a billion. Ok. Given how tech has gone from nerdy underdog to Orwellian, Machiavellian, dopamine-peddling overlord, I’m actually a bit surprised people aren’t more angry / upset. Over the last 40 years there has been two career paths with “disproportionate leverage”: tech and finance. I believe in capitalism, contracts and the rule of law. A founder starting a company and attracting capital, employees and customers and generating tremendous wealth I see as an opportunity, not a bug. But if I were in a normal career the wealth generated by tech & finance would certainly look & feel like some form of cheat code. The last forty years have been a huge transient. Massive. AI will probably push it even further. I hope we as a society and democracy can survive the strain.
• chews 3mo ago
  change the title to "How to make a billion dollars", no one earns at that level...
• waterTanuki 3mo ago
  Paper trillionaires are a myth https://github.com/PersianHodHod/wealth-in-pixels/blob/master/THE_PAPER_BILLIONAIRE.md https://github.com/PersianHodHod/wealth-in-pixels/blob/maste...
• srpablo 3mo ago
  Disco Stu meme Paul is my favorite example of "brain gout." I learned what gout was as "a disease kings used to get by eating foods that were too rich." Paul's writing when he was closer to reality, in the early 2000's, was a lot more insightful, because he was closer to reality. But if you've spent 21 years never having a material concern, and increasingly interacting with other rich people (or young people who idolize them), it takes a toll on your grasp of things. It's a king eating rich foods for decades. Like his "wealth tax" piece, he's very proud of doing elementary maths that ignore a major part of the reality at the start (in that case, he was assuming that their money wasn't growing, just being taxed, which... my man). It's sad to see, and I hope anyone who gets financially successful takes the lesson to try as hard as possible to keep living like normal people do. Buy your own groceries. Cook your own meals. Keep close to the friends you made before you were rich.
  • thesmtsolver2 3mo ago
    [flagged]
  • OrangeMusic 3mo ago
    > Buy your own groceries. Cook your own meals What's the point of being rich if you're living like a chump!
    • bob1029 3mo ago
      Cooking your own meals is the most assured way to eat like a king.
    • david_rugaex 3mo ago
      In my earning life, contrast my prior student life, buying groceries and cooking good food is my greatest pleasure. That's maybe a 30% growth across the last ten years? It's reasonable to expect that in 2040 I'll be eating eighty meals a day and be happier and healthier in similar proportion.
    • a3f8c2d 3mo ago
      Cooking your own meals is “living like a chump”? That attitude says more about your values than your wealth.
• merelydev 3mo ago
  Clearly the system has vulnerabilities. Billionairs managed to exploit these. Asking whether this is good or bad is liking asking if hacking is good or bad for society. If vulnerabilities exist someone will exploit them, thats the arbitrage. Instead of hating the hacker, we should ask can we have a system that is not vulnerable to"exploitation", which naturally leads to the old Capitalism vs Communism debate. Capitalism is still the most decentralized system we have, if a worker is feeling exploited they can leave and work elsewhere but most importantly they have the option of starting their own business and utilize their skills. But capitalism's main vulnerability is that of investors that can buy up whole industries and collude and bring centralization. Communism is inherently centralized, only works on a small scale like a village, on larger scale it requires strong leadership that can resist the temptations that come from centralized power, but strong leadership doesn't last forever.
• eudamoniac 3mo ago
  I have no problems with PG or with the existence of billionaires in general, but this is just a poorly thought essay. All of the arguments about growth are specious, and he frequently makes unsound leaps of logic. If I saw this in the wild, sorry PG, but I'd think this is an amateur blogger posting yet another something he edited longer than he thought about.
• light_hue_1 3mo ago
  I'm amazed that PG can't see his own arguments clearly lead to massive social harms. Facebook once existed as "How is a company going to make money from undergrads stalking one another online?" but that company didn't make it big. It was only when it turned into an addictive harmful website that thrives by massively raising the suicide rate of kids, that's when they made it big! AirBnb once existed as "Who's going to pay to sleep on an airbed on someone's floor?" but they didn't make a billion dollars doing that. It wasn't until it turned into a DYI hotel that displaces local resident, concentrates wealth, and makes housing unaffordable. That's when it made serious money. So yes, nominally, each of these startups sounds good. But many of them turn into rent seeking, closed ecosystems, that prey on users. > You must look at the world around you and see how it's actually done. Correct. I wish PG would do that. Instead of telling this idealized fantasy.
• EagnaIonat 3mo ago
  Not sure if it's someone finding out about compound interest for the first time, or a veiled advert for start-ups.
• Valakas_ 3mo ago
  The post of this man (Paul) motivated me, although not for the reasons I assume he intended. If someone like this guy can achieve success, then really anyone can. His logic is truly idiotic, and if someone whose mind creates that can be successful, then success is open to everyone for sure.
• kelnos 3mo ago
  It's a bit rich that pg uses Facebook and Airbnb as examples in an article about earning lots of money without cheating. If he truly believes those companies didn't cheat, then I think his definition of "cheat" is far removed from what most people might think.
• jibal 3mo ago
  > What she meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way. That's not what she meant. What she meant was that he was misusing the word "earn".
• rubenvanwyk 3mo ago
  I literally didn't read any comment that spoke to the context to which PG was speaking - Oxford Union. Any sane, rational person would offer different advice to people they see as "future prime ministers and billionaires" or at the very least people influential in future policy decisions, than they would to society in general.
• kraf 3mo ago
  I asked ChatGPT how many billionaires the US can have if every one of them has "just" 1 billion and if everyone else has basically nothing (i.e. zero net worth). It said that the theoretical maximum is 174,000. In a country of 340 million. That sounds to me like the chance to make it is a lot lower than 0.05% Maybe we should just stop pretending that everyone can make it and that it's mostly people who already come about with vast amounts of luck (means = luck, opportunity = luck) who have even a chance to make it. People with cool startup ideas cannot just make it. Working hard is not enough. Growth is not good enough. They will likely just be destroyed in an increasingly unfair and predatory market.
• aakresearch 3mo ago
  How do you know that someone is about to lose their computing chops? They waste a paragraph explaining a convoluted roundabout way to answer question "how many months of 93% growth it takes for something to grow 500x" with useless precision. A kid just started with BASIC learns by heart in a week that 512=2^9 :)
• bjhess 3mo ago
  Now this is a thoughtful consideration of the billionaire topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48536483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48536483
• lylo 3mo ago
  Isn't his entire point on this short talk that one can become very wealthy by creating a product that people love and want to tell their friends about? I think it's also a nudge to students at one of the most prestigious universities in the world to consider building a startup. That's it. I don't think there's anything insidious or controversial or misleading here. It's a simple talk to a bunch of clever students using contrived examples that emphasise this point.
• bawana 3mo ago
  We dont want a billion dollars. We want a life that’s worth living. A world without corporate T.rexes looking to consume the young. Go f@ck yourself
• bawana 3mo ago
  We dont want a billion dollars. We want a life that’s worth living. Not hamster wheels in a world of corporate T.rexes looking to consume the young. Go f@ck yourself.
  • HeartStrings 3mo ago
    Speak for yourself bro. I want a billi
• onikolas7 3mo ago
  How to actually make a billion (the YC formula): 1. Work hard to build a great product. 2. Get VC money. 3. Offer great product for free by spending ridiculous amounts of VC money. 4. Switch to a paying model once you have starved any competition with your free offering.
  • askl 3mo ago
    Or 4. Do a "successful exit" and let some other fool figure out how to make the company profitable.
• ookblah 3mo ago
  you can also yolo on 0 dte options like 10 times in a row and become one too lol. i fail to see his point in that calculation, he takes an obvious truth, which is sustained growth rate = billionaire and nothing evil about that, but then mixes it in with the fact that 99% of companies stall out and then you have to play politics and extraction to get yourself over the hump. show me a company does that without compromising deals and making deals w/ the devil, etc. the "hard" part isn't sustaining 15% growth over years, it's doing that in a way that is as reductive as he tries to make it "just build something people like!" and not having VCs and other bullshit trying to backstab and force you into making questionable decisions.
• mvc 3mo ago
  > The reason her startup was growing so fast was that she and her cofounder had been working their asses off Just the co-founders eh? Fuck off Paul.
• avmich 3mo ago
  I wonder - to grow, say, 15% per month people have to pay the founder specific money for the product. Why exactly they pay that amount, and not less, say? Is it because they want founder to become a billionaire? The growth is measured in money, not product/service transactions.
• mbgerring 3mo ago
  This is so stupid. You can’t “earn” a billion dollars doing the thing that the vast majority of people do for money, which is selling your labor. No one can argue with this. We all understand that if people who own a lot of capital give a lot of it to you, you can grow that capital into more than a billion dollars. Most people do not have access to the kind of capital required to do this. Most people never will. The avenues open to the vast majority of people on Earth cannot lead to becoming a billionaire. Paul Graham knows this, and he is being deliberately obtuse.
  • mbgerring 3mo ago
    “All you have to do is have a good enough idea and someone will fund it!” This is a myth. To access capital, in Silicon Valley and anywhere else, you have to engage in elaborate court protocol and social climbing. You have to have the right kind of idea, in a niche that is interesting among the capital-owning class. Look at what’s getting funded in Silicon Valley right now. Nobody wants any of this AI shit. There is no issue in America that is more unifying across all of our usual dividing lines than opposition to AI. It’s getting funded because AI is interesting in the social universe of people with billions of dollars to invest.
• stefantalpalaru 3mo ago
  [dead]
• 2001zhaozhao 3mo ago
  It's probably possible to earn a $1B as a good startup. I think this article is right that it is a lot more possible to ethically get there as a startup than through other means, which are often much more political and thus overwhelmingly reward the people who are willingh to do whatever is necessary. However, it's still sure as hell a lot easier to earn it as an exploitative startup than as a good one.
• daischsensor 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• runamok 3mo ago
  I like how the fact that most likely this theoretical company is not a company of 1. What about the employees frankly doing most of the work? Are the customers getting a good product at a fair price? Are their vendors getting paid a fair and sustainable amount? Are the regions they exist in getting paid the correct taxes to repay them for the services and infra they provide? Contrast how Steve Jobs treated most Apple employees when Apple went public vs. how Steve Wozniak did. I do agree a founder that creates something valuable (in both financial and societal ways) is mostly a good thing. But when you look closely enough at how gig workers are treated you start wondering if the billionaires minted at Uber, Amazon, etc. can ever fantasize that they have clean hands.
• burlesona 3mo ago
  It's interesting to me how different the tone sounds if every time he said "users" you substituted "people" (or if that didn't make sense in context, substitute "customers"). I find the post positive and encouraging as written, but I've realized that "users" has become a tainted word in the mass public.
• aakresearch 3mo ago
  Impatiently waiting for the follow-up "Why Earn a Billion Dollars". I believe it is a few keystrokes from being finished. Any minute now...
• jackzhuo 3mo ago
  [dead]
• iDemonix 3mo ago
  I miss the days when PG articles were actually worth reading, and not just spurious drivel from yet another person that hasn't been in touch with reality for decades.
• adamqureshi 3mo ago
  I do not want to earn a billion dollars. I want to earn a billion minutes to live longer.
• haash 3mo ago
  Buy a wish willow stick and break it in half
• chistev 3mo ago
  For future readers of this thread, check out a related thread based on an article by the same author - Billionaires Build https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25302527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25302527 520 points on Dec 4, 2020 916 comments
• CamelCaseName 3mo ago
  pg should just get every founder to trade wallstreetbets style for a few days. they'll be doing this calculator exercise intuitively
• smallmancontrov 3mo ago
  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.
  • Muromec 3mo ago
    >Morally speaking, figuring out how to mitigate this toxic byproduct is part of our remit What's hard to figure out here? You either pay taxes or you build cathedrals. While you are doing neither the communist tendencies keep growing, because people see they are squeezed. It's that communism has any answer to it really, but the tendencies will keep growing until something happens.
    • kpw94 3mo ago
      > What's hard to figure out here? Negative externalities are hard to figure out. Since parent mentions "toxic byproduct": Say you're the company that invented Teflon pans. you made billions. You saved billions in time for all the users of the pans... A true entrepreneurial success. But, by how many billions did you fuck up the environment, people's health etc with the spread of PFAS everywhere?
  • andai 3mo ago
    What's the byproduct of human-level AI and robotics?
    • smallmancontrov 3mo ago
• sanswork 3mo ago
  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.
  • csallen 3mo ago
    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."
    • sanswork 3mo ago
      I don't have an answer for that, again I don't subscribe to that belief and I think risk should be highly rewarded. That said the market is a terrible judge of fairness since it's a feedback loop so luck early on can definitely allow you to extract an unfair amount of value later(this is what Wilkinsons employee was saying basically, Andrew pointed out that they offered them share packages instead of salaries and the employee replied that his employees couldn't afford to live without a salary like he could so it was never a real option so they didn't actually have a chance to capture a fair amount of the value from their work). (It's been a while since I read the book I could be getting some of the details slightly wrong)
    • oatmeal1 3mo ago
      The market is not some independent external arbiter. The market is based on rules government creates. Those rules can be exploitative - It may be perfectly legal to make payday loans to financial illiterates, or treat animals cruelly in meat plants, or simply to use marketing in a way to manipulate people's behavior subconsciously (which almost every company does). Everyone who makes a billion dollars must attribute that success to themselves, but also the people who built the roads their product is delivered with, the teachers that taught them in school, the doctors that keep them healthy, etc. What fraction of the wealth earned by a billionaire society is entitled to for its contribution will always be a fair policy debate.
• tsimionescu 3mo ago
  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!
  • cma 3mo ago
    There was also the whole Craigslist spam stuff airbnb did to bootstrap growth
    • reactordev 3mo ago
      Paired right next to the “personals” ads they used to have.
  • Findeton 3mo ago
    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.
• goyozi 3mo ago
  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.
  • layer8 3mo ago
    It’s appalling that it is at the top of the front page. (Edit: At the top of https://news.ycombinator.com/classic https://news.ycombinator.com/classic, at present.)
    • fakedang 3mo ago
      What's the difference between HN normal and classic?
      • layer8 3mo ago
        Classic is based on votes from older accounts: https://news.ycombinator.com/lists 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.
  • ahartmetz 3mo ago
    Unfortunately, there was plenty of not understanding exponentials on display during Covid, including from politicians, journalists and other public figures.
  • smeej 3mo ago
    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.
• wg0 3mo ago
  Does that work always without fail with anyone anywhere anytime?
  • NoOn3 3mo ago
    Most likely that this works in a small number of all cases.
  • pcrh 3mo ago
    For those that pg has sponsored it has happened a few times out of ~5,000. Better odds than the lottery, for sure.
    • NoOn3 3mo ago
      Because he sponsored those who already have something really valuable, and not just anyone.
    • wg0 3mo ago
      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.
    • tim333 3mo ago
      He says ~30 out of 6500 companies which if you estimate two founder per company comes out at 1/433.
• haritha-j 3mo ago
  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.
  • andai 3mo ago
    Is that the incentive structure?
  • ahartmetz 3mo ago
    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".
    • hilariously 3mo ago
      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.
    • inigyou 3mo ago
      One billion is huge for a citizen, are you sure you don't mean one million?
      • ahartmetz 3mo ago
        I mean how much you need to "take" / earn from each other citizen to accumulate the billion.
• filup 3mo ago
  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.
  • cm2012 3mo ago
    That is wonderful. What makes billionaires valuable to society is that the act of trying to make a business worth a billion dollars that people want is really, really hard. It essentially punches you in the face constantly. You have to power through a bunch of really tough situations. There has to be a really strong reward at the end to make it worth it. Otherwise everyone would just toy around with free projects.
    • filup 3mo ago
      Hopefully the billionaires are happy with the reward at the end of the tunnel. I suspect they may envy the laymens position in life eventually. You loose alot becoming wealthy in the monitary sense. There are many ways to define richness and wealth beyond what society defines it as. As they say, more money more problems.
• andai 3mo ago
  >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.
• thrance 3mo ago
  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.
• NoOn3 3mo ago
  An obvious calculation. The real world cannot be calculated so easily, It is changing unexpectedly and quickly.
• cnees 3mo ago
  "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.
  • lostmsu 3mo ago
    How does it work with theoretical distant poor aliens and any amount of money?
  • cnees 3mo ago
    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.
• blfr 3mo ago
  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.
  • dmurvihill 3mo ago
    What's missing is that the billion-dollar value is based on the expectation of exploiting the employees/customers/environment to achieve profit in the future.
    • edanm 3mo ago
      Missing cause it's not true.
  • rayiner 3mo ago
    > 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. Well that’s wrong. Exploitive businesses do exist. Rent seeking and arbitrage does exist. But the ire today isn’t directed to Wall Street or private equity. It’s being directed to people who built real companies. It’s not inherently exploitive to sell a customer a valuable product or employ someone to build that product. In the 1990s, it took weeks to order something by mail. Amazon can now deliver me stuff the same day of the next morning. That’s amazing, considering that it’s all done with trucks, warehouses, and other things that already existed in the 1990s. Whoever made that happen when USPS couldn’t do it deserves to be a billionaire.
    • WarOnPrivacy 3mo ago
      > Whoever made that happen when USPS couldn’t do it deserves to be a billionaire. This bit might be a bit unfair. USPS and Amazon Delivery are different services, fulfilling different needs. Neither will deliver a pizza in 30 min or less, for example.
• givinguflac 3mo ago
  Woof. This article is pretty impressively tone deaf and seemingly missing the point (on purpose?)
  • antonvs 3mo ago
    > (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.
• masfuerte 3mo ago
  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.
  • inigyou 3mo ago
    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.
• echoangle 3mo ago
  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.
  • causal 3mo ago
    I mean there's also just sheer luck. Getting billions is probably more about luck than hard work OR corruption, even if those two things can increase your chances. But luck is also not "earning" in most senses of the word.
  • zozbot234 3mo ago
    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.
    • echoangle 3mo ago
      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?
      • 3mo ago
• JKCalhoun 3mo ago
  "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.
• yawpitch 3mo ago
  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.
  • AnimalMuppet 3mo ago
    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.
    • yawpitch 3mo ago
      As a first pass, you’ve accumulated all that money, thus you’ve actively or passively, knowingly or unknowingly, taken advantage of a perverse systemic bug that allows that sort of money to accumulate in any one person’s hands to begin with. But point me at any given billionaire and I can provide more context-specific examples, sure.
      • AnimalMuppet 3mo ago
        Start further back. You need to defend that allowing that much money to accumulate in any person's hands is indeed a "perverse systemic bug". The default framework is one of private property. If you make it, it's yours, and (modulo taxation), nobody has the right to take it from you. In that framework, it's not a bug that, if someone makes a billion dollars, they can accumulate a billion dollars. So, do you reject that framework? If so, on what authority? Given that it's the default framework, "I reject it" doesn't cut it. "I think it's immoral" is slightly better, but you need to demonstrate that someone accumulating that much money is more immoral than taking it from them would be. Or are you claiming that it's immoral for any one person to receive that much money? In a free economy, if others voluntarily exchange that much money for what the person supplies, why is it immoral? What is your moral authority for claiming that voluntary transactions are morally wrong, just because too many of them go to one person?
        • 3mo ago
• dml2135 3mo ago
  Ew
• vrganj 3mo ago
  Yikes. There is no ethical way to become a billionaire. It always involves exploitation and cheating, including in the very examples named by Graham. Airbnb got rich by creating a housing crises all over the world and skirting hotel laws. The factories making Apple products are so bad they installed nets to catch people trying to commit suicide by jumping from windows. Facebook... do we even need to talk about that one? I'm not sure if it's malicious manipulation or wilful self-deception, not being able to come to terms with the consequences of his actions. Either way, it's a bad look and he'd be well-advised to reflect on his actions and statements some more instead of giving grand speeches trying to impart his supposed wisdom.
• strtok 3mo ago
  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.
• sethammons 3mo ago
  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.
  • Unbeliever69 3mo ago
    Honestly the most insightful comment in this conversation. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." I would substitute the word "paved" with "begins." It is the very rare business that inevitably doesn't succumb to enshitification.
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• readingnews 3mo ago
  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.
  • zozbot234 3mo ago
    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.
    • selfsimilar 3mo ago
      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.
    • didgetmaster 3mo ago
      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.
  • epolanski 3mo ago
    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.
  • groundzeros2015 3mo ago
    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?
• douglee650 3mo ago
  (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
• thomassmith65 3mo ago
  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.
  • pseudalopex 3mo ago
    > 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. Graham's admiration of scammer Austen Allred is evidence for this.[1] [1] https://xcancel.com/paulg/status/2019770359830949961 https://xcancel.com/paulg/status/2019770359830949961
  • AnimalMuppet 3mo ago
    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?
    • thomassmith65 3mo ago
      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.
      • graeme 3mo ago
        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.
• happytoexplain 3mo ago
  >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.
  • rkourdis 3mo ago
    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.
• 0xbadcafebee 3mo ago
  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.
  • dasil003 3mo ago
    > 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.
    • 0xbadcafebee 3mo ago
      So which laws are they allowed to break? All of them? You'll probably say "no, it's my own personal morals which they should abide by". To which someone else will say "no, your morals are crap, my morals should be the yardstick for corporate ethics". Then you might say "it should be the laws that most of us think are okay to break are optional",..... but at that point you're getting consensus on laws, and that's called governance, which you have representatives for. So then you might say "but our leaders don't represent us", at which point, your decision is probably to either 1) demand that your leaders proactively amend laws that the people find onerous (which brings up a whole nother can of worms re: democracy), or 2) let the companies do whatever they want because you can't be bothered. So we all just go with 2) and now it's easy to become a billionaire, just break the law. That's a lot of leaps I just took, because it's honestly way too complex to get into litigating when people/companies should be allowed to break the law. The much simpler answer is to simply not let companies/people break the law, and fix the law when it needs fixing, and not just so one dude can become a billionaire real fast.
• RickJWagner 3mo ago
  It’s like fertilizer, for jealousy.
  • hilariously 3mo ago
    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 :)
    • deleted 3mo ago
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• jameskilton 3mo ago
  There is nothing more evil in this world than the pursuit of power and wealth.
  • teddyh 3mo ago
    “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#6:10 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_(King_James)/1_Timothy#...>
    • 3997531578 3mo ago
      [dead]
  • simianwords 3mo ago
    This is what weak people say to comfort themselves in a world with hierarchy and power differential.
  • tim333 3mo ago
    Most people do that to some extent. There are worse things.
• reinitctxoffset 3mo ago
  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.
  • groundzeros2015 3mo ago
• leto_ii 3mo ago
  > 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...
  • abraxas 3mo ago
    Moreover, he conveniently forgets the millions of aspiring founders who did not even get into his puppy mill to get a chance to play the 5% odds. In many cases their only obstacle was not being born in the United States and living in California. Paul if you are so rich why aren't you smart? Or is this the age old problem of getting a man to understand something when his paycheck depends on him not understanding it?
  • tim333 3mo ago
    >Easy, right? He specifically says it isn't.
• proofofcontempt 3mo ago
  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.
  • ModernMech 3mo ago
    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.
    • titzer 3mo ago
      Oh, this is already the case. As they say, the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed yet. What's broken is accountability. No one will hold those in power accountable, so instead they mutate into criminals because they can. Then they attract the rest of the criminals and it becomes a critical mass of maniacs, kakistocracy.
  • anon84873628 3mo ago
    As they say, every 10x growth requires doing things differently. Eventually those things become immoral.
• UltraSane 3mo ago
  The answer is easy, steal the value created by thousands of your employees.
• atmavatar 3mo ago
  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".
  • deleted 3mo ago
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  • chistev 3mo ago
    I came to read well constructed rebuttals like this.
  • Forgeties79 3mo ago
    > 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.
    • joefourier 3mo ago
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• AnimalMuppet 3mo ago
  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...
  • hilariously 3mo ago
    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!
    • AnimalMuppet 3mo ago
      I didn't say "higher taxes". I said "take it" - meaning take all of it. Confiscation. That's what I think many of these people are trying to say, without quite saying it.
      • hilariously 3mo ago
        Totally a realistic scenario that's totally happened before! Totally a reasonable concern and not something that's a made up bullshit scenario!
• belZaah 3mo ago
  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?”
• ZeroGravitas 3mo ago
  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.
  • inigyou 3mo ago
    He writes for an audience and knows what he's doing.
• djoldman 3mo ago
  > 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. $2 million * 9.45 months * 93% growth rate = earning a billion dollars, ok. Does that really address what AoC was saying? She wasn't saying that the math doesn't math.
  • AdamN 3mo ago
    I doubt he listened to what she said - just a soundbite on Fox News or worse Facebook.
  • csallen 3mo ago
    Did you read his post at all? He knew what she was saying and addressed it clearly: > What [AOC] meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way... The reason [my founder's] startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built. So she could feel from her own experience how wrong [AOC] was. She wasn't exploiting anyone. Exactly the opposite in fact. The reason her startup was growing so fast was that she and her cofounder had been working their asses off to make their users happy, and as a result the users had been telling their friends. And that gets you exponential growth. In other words, this founder being on a trajectory toward billionaire status, through doing little but working to provide something of value to those willing to pay for it, belies the claim that you must be doing something unethical and cannot earn one's way to a billion dollars.
    • 3mo ago
• mystraline 3mo ago
  You do not EARN 1B$. 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.
  • missedthecue 3mo ago
    In tears laughing that people still believe the labor theory of value. How is this possible. What's next, bringing back miasma theory and spontaneous generation?
    • mystraline 3mo ago
      Well, for starters, Elon Musk actively adheres to the Labor Theory of Value. He named it differently, with the "Idiot Index". Except, its an inverse LTV. Both theories use the SAME formula. Final Price = Raw Materials + Labor + Overhead + Profit The difference is that Marx pushed that labor is what makes a thing have value. Wheres Musk pushes that humans have 0 value, and should be removed whereever possible. Same thing, different conclusion. And know what happens when we get "perfect idiot index" of 1.0? There are no workers, no money, and wealth is accmulated purely in the hands of the elite. Hell, even Ford saw this in tge early 1900's - who'd buy cars if nobody can afford them?
      • missedthecue 3mo ago
        The labor theory of value is the idea that a commodity’s economic value is ultimately determined by the amount of socially necessary labor required to produce it. I'm not a Musk fanboy and I don't know what the idiot index is, but if he buys into the LTV, he's incorrect. There are very very simple proofs to invalidate the LTV, for example the fact that two items requiring identical amounts of socially necessary labor can have very different prices. In my experience, I have only met one person who earnestly believed it (an old college classmate) and his basis was self-admittedly purely ideological. In the end, I think the most elegant way to think about it is to reverse the causal arrow. Labor does not create value; perceived value decides which labor was worth doing.
• dgudkov 3mo ago
  Benefits of being a billionaire are vastly overstated. To live a happy life, you don't need to be a billionaire.
• holistio 3mo ago
  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.
  • TheOtherHobbes 3mo ago
    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.
• bix6 3mo ago
  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?
• thedevilslawyer 3mo ago
  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.
  • tome 3mo ago
    Sadly, I don't believe that many college grads reasonably well educated in anything other than a scientific field understand exponentials.
• jrm4 3mo ago
  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.
  • simianwords 3mo ago
    There’s no exploitation involved because it is not a zero sum situation.
    • jrm4 3mo ago
      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."
      • simianwords 3mo ago
        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.
• ceejayoz 3mo ago
  > 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.
  • ralfd 3mo ago
    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.
    • ModernMech 3mo ago
      It's not a reliable system if out of 6000 tries over 20 years there are only 30 instances. That looks more like gambling.
    • ceejayoz 3mo ago
      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.
  • IAmGraydon 3mo ago
    You’re suggesting that selling others’ talent isn’t legitimate “earning”? Why?
    • ceejayoz 3mo ago
      I'm saying there's a difference between earning and benefiting from.
    • jLaForest 3mo ago
      Selling others labor isn't legitimate earning when you get a higher share of the labors value than the laborer themselves.
• zarzavat 3mo ago
  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.
  • tim333 3mo ago
    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.
  • tome 3mo ago
    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.
  • oreally 3mo ago
    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.
• drdrek 3mo ago
  its even easier with a 9999% month over month growth
  • inigyou 3mo ago
    If you can grow 10000000000000% every millisecond you can start from one cent and become a billionaire in one millisecond!
• dist-epoch 3mo ago
  > 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.
• smokefoot 3mo ago
  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?
• latexr 3mo ago
  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.
• jdw64 3mo ago
  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.
• TrackerFF 3mo ago
  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).
  • WalterBright 3mo ago
    > salaried workers can't use leverage to increase their earnings Of course they can. They can invest, say, 20% of their income into stocks. They can borrow money to invest into stocks, too.
    • paulryanrogers 3mo ago
      Plenty of workers have to take loans just to pay rent or healthcare. And even if they did borrow to invest, they can't sell without paying CG. And what if they bet wrong?
      • WalterBright 3mo ago
        When I couldn't pay the rent, I acquired a roommate. Very few young people need to see a doctor. As for CG taxes, they don't apply if you don't sell, and no CG taxes are owed if the gains are less than $49,000. > And what if they bet wrong? Everything in life is a risk. The idea with stocks is to diversify, which you can do by buying an ETF.
• OtherShrezzing 3mo ago
  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.
  • AdamN 3mo ago
    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.
    • ProllyInfamous 3mo ago
      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.
• hmokiguess 3mo ago
  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!
• weavejester 3mo ago
  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.
  • not-a-cat 3mo ago
    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
    • weavejester 3mo ago
      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.
  • didgetmaster 3mo ago
    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.
• AdamN 3mo ago
  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.
  • checkthisgot 3mo ago
    Yes, I agree. You need to create a brand or to be a brand.
  • sershe 3mo ago
    Why does it usually imply extraction and externalities? What are those for Taylor Swift and Michael Jordan? The actual "usual" things in common between these and e.g. Amazon are massive value creation for consumers, economies of scale. Focusing on completely optional and often imagined "externalities" just reveals a certain mindset (one could find some for cases like Amazon, but bezos became a billionaire in 1998 so whatever Amazon does after that doesn't directly apply, unless the goalposts are moved). An example I love is hollowing out of this or that. The fact that people wanted to shop at Amazon (especially in 1998) and not a local bookstore, like the fact that people want to go to a Taylor Swift concert and not your indie band's is not an externality, it's a skill issue.
  • rayiner 3mo ago
    Your phraseology of “extract” suffers from the same problem as AOC’s. You’re conflating value creation with value extraction. The problem with AOC’s argument is she’s recycling a 2008 talking point into a context where it doesn’t make sense. Financial entities making trillions moving money around raises questions about whether value is really being created. When I get three Amazon packages delivered to my house every day, there’s no question about value creation.
    • lkjdsklf 3mo ago
      You’ve entirely misunderstood her point. Her point isn’t that Amazon is bad because it’s a trillion dollar company Her point is that Bezos is bad because he and Amazon could have paid that driver 10x what they make and still had more money than they could spend in 100 lifetimes The distribution of the gains is absurdly weighted towards the top
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• jmull 3mo ago
  "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.
• AIorNot 3mo ago
  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?
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• tim333 3mo ago
  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.
  • bwhiting2356 3mo ago
    they keep moving goal posts. Show me an entrepreneur making 10M AOC says fairly earned it.
    • protocolture 3mo ago
      Probably herself.
  • twoodfin 3mo ago
    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.
    • Glyptodon 3mo ago
      Getting loans seems definitionally and literally very much not something that involves earning. "Earning" is a subtle word with a variety of usages. One usage is limited to wages or return on labor or effort, and in that sense can refer to anything where a reward is due and proportionate to an effort, like a treat after a hard workout, buying a car after saving for years, or wages. Another usage focuses on profit. When AOC talks in the zone of this first sense, it should be understood that there is only an implied fair reward for sweat and tears, and that past a certain point it's really entirely unrelated to wages or effort.
• wesbz 3mo ago
  Paul Graham seems pretty self-centered...
• theopsimist 3mo ago
  - 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
  • tome 3mo ago
    How many would it be?
    • theopsimist 3mo ago
      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
      • tome 3mo ago
        Why haven't you saved a baby's life?
        • theopsimist 3mo ago
          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.
          • tome 3mo ago
            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.
  • theopsimist 3mo ago
• owaiswiz 3mo ago
  > 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.
  • zarathustreal 3mo ago
    Not giving everyone equal % is exploitation? Interesting, by that logic every participant in the economy should also be required to bail out any startup that fails otherwise we’re exploiting the founders! They’re taking all the risk and we’re getting all the benefit of the services and goods they create!
    • inigyou 3mo ago
      Well yeah? We should have really wide safety nets actually, so people can try startups and feel comfortable that they might fail. What kind of losses are you envisioning - is it just salaries?
      • therealdrag0 3mo ago
        Some have argued American bankruptcy laws is a contributing factor to how many companies get founded, more than most/all other counties in the world.
    • Muromec 3mo ago
      It may not be exploitation, but one can question how fair is the exchange rate of risk to reward and whether answering "free market" makes the question go away.
  • migueloller 3mo ago
    Let’s not be silly. If there are 10 people each with 10% and the company grows by 93%, then everybody’s shares, including the founder’s, grows by 93%.
• DanHulton 3mo ago
  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.
  • fractallyte 3mo ago
    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".
    • mashlol 3mo ago
      Do you have an example of someone doing that? I suppose the argument would be we wouldn't know - but personally I don't buy it. It's possible to not be "famous" as a billionaire, but it's not possible for people in your life not to know.
  • twoodfin 3mo ago
    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 $.
• mehulashah 3mo ago
  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.
• newaccountman2 3mo ago
  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.
• urig 3mo ago
  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.
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• dtj1123 3mo ago
  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.
• tome 3mo ago
  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.
  • ModernMech 3mo ago
    >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". I love how the billionaires hoarding resources to entrench their own power are not the greedy ones in your telling.
    • tome 3mo ago
      Oh, I don't know any of those. The only billionaires I know of are those providing service to consumers or businesses that people can freely decide whether to pay for or not. I just subscribed to another thing on Amazon for far less in price than the value I get for it. Thanks Bezos! The selfish people I know of are politicians and online commenters who think they're entitled to the wealth built by other people.
      • ModernMech 3mo ago
• 3uler 3mo ago
  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.
  • wrsh07 3mo ago
    > most people who’ve built something people love are not billionaires I don't think his advice was simply "build something people love." In fact, he specifically spends a lot of time trying to make it extremely clear that a necessary ingredient is compounding of an extremely high growth rate. So I'm not sure if your take is intentionally misleading or if perhaps we read different essays
• xqcgrek2 3mo ago
  What an out of touch buffoon. AOC is right, billionaires are a policy failure, and pg is making her point.
• d_burfoot 3mo ago
  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.
  • groundzeros2015 3mo ago
    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.
    • astura 3mo ago
      >One reason why doctor is more popular is the process for becoming one is high effort but low risk. Disagree completely that becoming a doctor is low risk. The amount of residency spots is capped and is smaller than the number of people graduating from medical school. Every year thousands of MDs are prevented from going to residency and thus prevented from practicing medicine, even though they graduated from medical school. https://dailyorange.com/2026/03/opinion-amid-u-s-doctor-shortage-new-graduates-are-left-unmatched/ https://dailyorange.com/2026/03/opinion-amid-u-s-doctor-shor... >In 2025, 9,541 applicants went unmatched, including 2,409 soon-to-be graduates of United States schools awarding Doctor of Medicine and Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine degrees.
      • groundzeros2015 3mo ago
        Compared to what? Every other high status high paying career has less defined criteria for success. Where else can I sign up for a program to make 500k? You just have to do well in medical school (an artificial program with stated requirements) and you’ll make it. Are the career outcomes for those with medical degrees bad? Don’t they have a ton to options? What’s the risk?
• camgunz 3mo ago
  > 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.
• functionmouse 3mo ago
  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?
• stephc_int13 3mo ago
  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.
• mlhpdx 3mo ago
  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.
• Demiurge 3mo ago
  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.
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• epsteingpt 3mo ago
  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!
  • wtfHN26 3mo ago
    > 3. Nonethless there is and should be a limit to wealth acquisition, given moral hazard. How do we determine that limit ? Most Americans ( middle class and above ) are richer than most people in the world. Way richer than most people in Africa or poorer parts of Asia can ever aspire to be. Consider that when competing for resources these poor people are competing with wealthy middle class Americans. Add to that the USD being world's reserve currency makes life easy for a small part of global population earning in the USA and makes it harder for people in every other country whose currency might not be competitive compared to the USD.
    • cj 3mo ago
      > How do we determine that limit ? How about a cap relative to GDP? Elon Musk's net worth is 3% of USA's annual GDP and 1% of global GDP. I'm not a fan of limiting wealth among the upper class. But I am a fan of stopping a small number of individuals from controlling a significant percent of the world's GDP because if that trend continues, we'll end up with individual people more powerful than the governments that are supposed to keep them in check.
    • sethev 3mo ago
      By legislation and policymaking - just like any other numbers we as a society end up picking (like the age to get a drivers license or buy alcohol or the income tax brackets). Just like those cases, what other countries are doing would mostly be irrelevant - except, just like now, people may try to find arbitrage opportunities by getting creative about where they live.
• Twey 3mo ago
  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.
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• fitsumbelay 3mo ago
  "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 ...
• paulsutter 3mo ago
  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
• root-parent 3mo ago
  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.
• notarobot123 3mo ago
  > 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. The idea of becoming rich is as old as society itself but it has not been a static concept. It is an idea shaped entirely by the things mentioned - ideology, culture and history. There is no wealth accumulation without ideology of one sort or another. It's fair to resist a view of wealth that may seem flawed but it's disingenuous to assume this can be done from a neutral position.
• stego-tech 3mo ago
  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. EDIT: One thing I would add requires quoting PG. > 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. What do users really want? What could you do for them that would make their lives dramatically better? That kind of empathy is what we look for in founders, and what we cultivate in the ones we accept. I will flatly reject that YC startups of late have any shred of empathy for their customer base, in general. If they had any shred of empathy for their customers, they all wouldn't collectively lean into the "permanent underclass" and "AI job replacement" narratives so often spouted by their predecessors. In fact, I would go so far as to argue the only groups with a shred of empathy for their customers might just be the non-YC startups or the FOSS groups cranking away in spite of all the headwinds. Nobody - nobody - makes a billion dollars through empathy alone. At some point, one has to make a conscious decision to say "I demand more returns than reasonable relative to my costs, and I expect my customers and/or employees to bear that burden on my behalf." Otherwise we'd see a parade of companies demanding caps on margins to drive prices lower or wages for workers higher, thus creating more spending money among workers that in turn produces more economic activity. We do not see this outcome, therefore we cannot ascribe empathy as a source of wealth.
• Kuyawa 3mo ago
  We can't romanticize making money, it's a ruthless field where mostly politicians, the military complex, and drug traffickers thrive, and a few startups that cater to the global economy, which are very very rare, so rare than only 30 out of more than 6000 have succeded in Paul's own words. Amazon was first, then Uber went world wide, so did Airbnb, and now OpenClaw, so yes, the AI gold rush opened the gates for new opportunities but only a few will make it. We all can run the race for sure but most of us will only get tired at the end while the lucky few will take all the prizes and our corpses will be their podium, as it's supposed to be. Still, we have to run because there is a chance, a very slim chance which is more than zero hope.
  • WalterBright 3mo ago
    Musk minted 4000 millionaires last Friday. In the 1990s, the Seattle Times reported that over 10,000 Microsoft employees in the Seattle area were worth over a million dollars, excluding the value of their homes. I know a minor NVIDIA employee who is worth well over 8 figures. Amazon zillionaires abound around here.
  • csallen 3mo ago
    > only 30 out of more than 6000 have succeded At becoming billionaires. Many more than that succeeded at making a good chunk of money that was life-changing for them, their families, their early employees, etc. So I think your reading of the chance of "hope" are overly cynical. Of course it's not easy to make millions, but it's not so bleak and the market isn't so ruthless that it can't be done for those who try intelligently and persistently. And of course, even below that level of wealth, there are tens of millions of people who work regular jobs and are able to afford pretty high standards of comfort and living by any yard stick that's ever been used to measure.
  • rhubarbtree 3mo ago
    This aren’t great example are they? Amazon is famous for being a terrible company to work for, on the logistics side. Airbnb has caused all sorts of social problems. Uber results in people working for peanuts and has circumvented labour laws. I think there are some startups that have created large scale value without doing something malevolent, but not those ones. Things like Linear. Good tool for software dev, no one harmed.
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• MinimalAction 3mo ago
  First question: why? Why should I (or anyone) earn a billion dollars? PG made it seem like that's the ultimate goal somehow. Also, why only a billion dollars, PG? You see your infinite cancerous growth machine doesn't stop? This article did not sit well with me. I have found myself rereading Beyond Smart, How to Write Usefully, The Need to Read, Life is Short. But this one is harmful; nobody needs a billion dollars.
  • nunez 3mo ago
    Why do many Americans feel like they need SUVs? Or huge 3000+ sq. ft. houses? Or five-star luxury vacations to impoverished countries where they barely have to lift a finger? My take: they don't; nobody does. But when you aren't successful and don't have a lot, and when "success" is marketed to you as "big SUV; fancy big ass house; private jet; fancy vacations", you get trained into think you need much more than you actually do to be happy.
  • lyu07282 3mo ago
    > why? Why should I (or anyone) earn a billion dollars? The once was a time where everybody reached similar questions, like "why does our monarch deserve to own all this wealth?" and "why does this plantation owner deserve to own these people?" Today it is the myth of meritocracy, they worked harder, or were smarter, and that's why they deserve it. Its all the same moral sickness. The future is socialism or barbarism, everyone get your heads out of your asses and choose.
  • onlyrealcuzzo 3mo ago
    Certainly, $1B is a lot of money... But you probably need >$10M to not HAVE to work and live a low-risk comfortable life in even modestly expensive parts of the US. The funny thing about money is, it's really hard to save $1M and $10M, but once you get there, it's pretty easy to grow that substantially. The fundamental problem in the West, IMO, is that we make it so hard to save even small amounts of money, and so easy to compound huge amounts of money (and no the EU is not much better on this front than the US). It should be the opposite.
    • 3mo ago
• grim_io 3mo ago
  To me, earning something means deserving something. I don't think that the current system rewards those deserving the largest cuts of the pie. If you want to argue how to get a billion dollars, sure. But to me that is different than earning it.
  • csallen 3mo ago
    Why would you say that people don't deserve money that others willing gave to them in return for something they wanted and found to be worth it?
    • inigyou 3mo ago
      Good question. When the robber pointed his gun at my head, I thought: since I am willingly giving this man my wallet in return for my life, he must have earned it.
      • csallen 3mo ago
        All of your analogies fail because you ignore the fact that (a) most people are happy shoppers who genuinely enjoy buying much of what they buy, and who anticipate newer and better releases of games, movies, restaurants, and other products; and (b) most people could simply opt out, own nothing, and go live in the woods if they wanted to, but would strongly prefer not to. You yourself are using an expensive phone or computer to type Hacker News comments, presumably not at gunpoint because you choose to do so. Which means you think it's better than the alternative that you're apparently glorifying.
        • deleted 3mo ago
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        • titzer 3mo ago
          People share a terrifyingly large amount of DNA with mice and apes and other creatures that can become hopelessly addicted to self-destructive behaviors. What is also interesting is the susceptibility of many people to believe really insane things. People join cults. People start cults. People do the cinnamon and tide pod challenges. People jump of bridges. People commit copycat suicide. People do lots immoral and stupid things when that's society's standards. And no, I don't think that most people are "happy shoppers" but seem deeply disaffected about their lives, and shopping might be a compulsive behavior that helps them soothe underlying fears of dread.
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• barnabee 3mo ago
  Money, property, limited companies, intellectual property laws, patents, contract law, etc. etc. are things on which all successful businesses depend. These are social constructs - societal "technologies" if you like. They work because as a society we agree that they should and enforce them through the rule of law. The assertion that it should be "impossible" to be a billionaire (or trillionaire, gazillionaire, whatever) is really an assertion that a just and moral society would design all of these things to prevent that outcome. And I think it's pretty reasonable to say that we ought to set society up such that as someone gets wealthier we take money away from them at faster rates, so that beyond some level of wealth it is very difficult to continue to get richer. Unfortunately, a lot of people are captured by rather libertarian ideas about government, money, property, etc. that seem to prevent many people (at least in the US, UK, et al.) from behaving in anything but the most selfish, individualistic, and antisocial of ways.
• fjni 3mo ago
  The lack of genuine desire to understand each other is what is astonishing. I don’t know where “the politician” went with that comment, but for me the more pressing conversation is whether we want a society where many are struggling and some make a billion dollars. You benefited from society, clearly, which is not to say you didn’t work hard. But it seems entirely reasonable to me to ask you at that point to give back. We can knock plenty of people back to mere “hundred millionaire” status, they’ll be fine, and we can do a whole lot with that money.
• evilturnip 3mo ago
  Yes, growing at average 15% a month will make you a billionaire in so many months. But somewhere along that trajectory you've tipped the balance from "eveyone is benefitting" to "in order to grow larger we need to exploit and extract." Clearly nothing is universally the case, but this pattern repeats in enough freqeuncy that it's effectively the case.
• jackmott42 3mo ago
  A reminder that in a recent Paul Graham blog post, he vowed to help the 2nd Trump Admin crush woke youth, and asserted that racism isn't bad as the left thinks. In the following weeks we saw Elon do two Nazi salutes in front of the presidential seal, and we saw the Trump admin hire tons of thugs to rip minority children out of their beds, and those same thugs have murdered a number of citizens, with Stephen Miller loudly shouting that they have absolute immunity. I'm surprised Paul Graham and the signers of the blog post are not to embarrassed to continue posting their thoughts. At worst Paul should stop talking, better, he should apologize and admit he is a fool.
• whatever1 3mo ago
  Even if we agree that Billionaires are better capital allocators and power yielders than elected govs, let's see what happens after they die. Their money goes to heirs who did not earn billions and do not know how to allocate it, or to questionable non-profits. So it ends up being a huge drag for the society.
• mohamedkoubaa 3mo ago
  The problem is in accounting. A stake in a speculative asset that's valued at an absurd multiple of ARR isn't exactly the same kind of thing as owning all the property of a slum and extracting rent. I am for a wealth tax so long as it discriminates on the type of wealth, but we aren't ready for that conversation.
• charlescearl 3mo ago
  "“Destruction becomes the principal commodity produced by capital. Militarism will lead accumulation, which will theoretically demolish any limit to capital.” The Accumulation of Waste, Kadri, https://brill.com/display/book/9789004548022/front-7.xml https://brill.com/display/book/9789004548022/front-7.xml Monopoly Capitalism, Baran and Sweezy https://archive.org/details/monopolycapitale00bara https://archive.org/details/monopolycapitale00bara Labor and Monopoly Capital, Harry Braverman https://ia801604.us.archive.org/12/items/023978561/Braverman-Foster-Sweezy.%20Labor%20and%20Monopoly%20Capital.pdf https://ia801604.us.archive.org/12/items/023978561/Braverman...
• danlitt 3mo ago
  But "earning" does not mean "obtain without cheating"! Nobody (that I have spoken to) speaks of earning their lottery winnings. The claim is that owning a company worth a billion dollars is more like winning the lottery than it is like earning money. And it is! The whole discussion about exponential growth is idiotic and not worth responding to. But if you think of what he actually means - having a total addressable market of at least a billion dollars and being able to effectively capture it - it is obviously primarily due to factors outside of your control. The sort of company PG is talking about typically revolves around a good technology that has a network effect somewhere that leads to market concentration. People do not get good ideas by working hard, and markets are not made easily monopolizable by hard work. Execution of an idea requires hard work, but companies that are only good at execution do not win. Obviously you can engage in hard work to improve your odds. But the returns are out of scale with the hard work. This is all people mean when they talk about "earning" money - if it's in proportion with your work, you earned it; if it isn't, you didn't.
• evanjrowley 3mo ago
  We're just temporarily embarrassed billionaires.
• mlsu 3mo ago
  You can tell that he doesn’t really think too deeply about any of this, because the way he wants to illustrate the point is by typing the numbers into a calculator. It’s as if the money comes right up out of thin air, isn’t it? He inadvertently gets close when he talks about Facebook being about people doing stalking. PG, is stalking a good thing or a bad thing, hmmm?
  • skybrian 3mo ago
    There’s no conservation rule for an asset’s value. Market cap comes mostly out of thin air because people believe a company is valuable. If they change their minds, it disappears. (Market cap is estimated based on transactions that are a small percentage of market cap.)
    • Alpha3031 3mo ago
      Traditionally, the value of a security is a prediction of its future cashflow to perpetuity discounted by a capitalisation rate. While it is true that some securities these days are sold as something not dependent on future cash flows, and insiders are paid off by selling something misleading to retail investors, that is known as a Ponzi scheme and is traditionally prohibited by securities regulations.
      • skybrian 3mo ago
        Predictions aren’t physical and can be wrong.
        • Alpha3031 3mo ago
          There is nothing physical about any financial transaction (except some electrons moving I guess), that doesn't mean that they aren't supposed to approximate something that happens in physical reality. A billion dollars is control.
          • skybrian 3mo ago
• therepanic 3mo ago
  > So how do you find startup ideas without looking for them? By working on projects with your friends. That's where the very best startups come from. Initially they're not even meant to be companies. They're just something people built because they thought it would be cool. That's how Apple and Google and Facebook all started. None of them were meant to be companies at first. That’s cool and it’s a cool post, sure, but it sounds ridiculous when you look at how many dumb GPT wrappers there are in YC batches nowadays.
  • nunez 3mo ago
    It's incredibly naïve at face value.
• arjie 3mo ago
  There is an argument to be made that societal structure enables much of that wealth to be made. J K Rowling can make a billion dollars not just because people want her stuff and give her money for it but because we have a system of intellectual property and a bunch of guys who enforce it. We all pay for that and Rowling benefits. It’s true that this happens, but our system of taxation takes care of this pretty well. There are exploitable gaps in the logic where loaning against owned collateral is not considered a realizable taxable event and it’s reasonable to attempt to close these. But like most things I find that things fall down when actual policy needs to be written. The only example is the SEIU proposition in California which is backdated and requires many people to give up half their ownership in a company. I can’t be brought around to supporting those outcomes.
  • stackbutterflow 3mo ago
    She can sell books because millions of kids were taught to read. How fair is it that she becomes a billionaire while most teachers struggle?
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 3mo ago
  "Since we started it in 2005 we've funded about 6500 companies." "... 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." "I felt like a skating coach hearing someone say that it's impossible to do a triple axel." Imagine a skating coach who has been training skaters to execute triple axels. If he has spent 21 years training 6500 skaters and only 30 of them are able to perform triple axels, would you take him seriously That's less than 1% (0.0046%) With that extremely low success rate, how valuable is the "training" Maybe there is no causal link between the "training" and success Less than 1% succeed It's easier to argue that there may be a causal link between the training and failure, or that "training" has no effect at all on the success rate Over 99% of those who "train" with this "coach" fail Maybe it's not a bad deal for the coach is he gets paid fees by his real clients, the limited partners, regardless of outcome But is it a good deal for the skater given a less than 1% success rate The coach, on behalf of his clients, the limited partners, is providing a loan to the skater. If the skater learns to perform the triple axel, i.e., becomes a billionaire, this will enrich the coach's clients and the coach. The skaters are not paying the coach. If they are one of the more than 99% who fail to perform the axel, then they are only wasting their own time and effort "Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Jared Friedman, Jessica Livingston, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of this, and to Arwa Elrayess and the Oxford Union for hosting me. Funny that none of these the proofreaders caught the misspelling of "billionaire"