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Nobody becomes billionaire by working. You become a billionaire by exploiting others work.
Exactly…
Edit: I’m not saying they didn’t work but there is a limit of money someone can make working by themself, so at some point they start to delegate stuff to make more money, so yeah at the end start exploiting someone else to make more money.
Notch is a billionaire. He made Minecraft as a solo project, it became what it was, then he sold it to Microsoft.
Not saying that most billionaires didn’t get there via exploitation, but I don’t think it’s a strict prerequisite.
Notch initially developed Minecraft by himself when he started the project in May 2009. However, as the game gained popularity, he founded the company Mojang in 2010 and brought on additional developers to help improve and expand the game. By the time he sold Mojang and Minecraft to Microsoft in 2014, it was a collaborative effort with a team of developers.
A fair point. It’s been a while since then. I didn’t recall that.
That said, he’s just an easy example. There’s a few other people who could be used. There’s a billionaire who was an early Bitcoin adopter for example.
And it certainly would have been possible for Notch to become a billionaire without hiring people. The company only had 25 employees in 2014, and was doing $330million in revenue every year. There’s certainly a path he could have tread to still becoming a billionaire without hiring anyone.
It would have been harder, taken longer, and not been as profitable for sure, but doable.
I don’t believe it, it’s just too many things to do, not just the development but everything around it. And once you lose momentum, people go and find some other game to play. Timing and luck are very important.
The argument is usually there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism. As in every part of the system is exploitative. The computer he used to program exploited workers and natural resources. The clothing he wore made in sweatshops. All the food made by exploiting animals, etc.
Therefore those with the most money must’ve cumulatively exploited more than others regardless of how they made the money because the exploitation is unavoidable.
Sure, but that argument is specious as hell, right? Like, if everyone in the United States decided to give you a $5 bill, does that instantly make you a bad person who exploited labor to get where you are?
“There is no ethical consumption under capitalism” is simply a rhetorical device to outline the flaws in the system. It completely breaks down when used as justification to villainize someone.
Your position could be equally stated as, “anyone who has more money than me is a worse person than me, and anyone with less money than me is a better person than me.” It’s a misuse of the “no ethical consumption” idea on its face.
I think the argument makes more sense when applied to villainize billionaires. Like there’s makes more money and then there’s makes many orders of magnitude more money. You’re much closer to a millionaire than a billionaire.
Then “anyone with money then me” becomes “anyone with 10,000x more money than me” and you can see where the arguments starts to make sense again. Did this person work 10,000x more than me? Obviously that’s impossible and therefore someone must’ve been exploited.
The issue is that becoming a billionaire has more to do with being lucky than it does with direct exploitation.
If everyone in the US chipped 5 dollars into a pool, and it was randomly given to one person, that person would be a billionaire.
And yes, they have a huge concentration of other people’s labor represented in that cash. But the person who won the pool isn’t a bad person because of that. They didn’t exploit anyone themselves. Just because someone somewhere at some point under capitalism was exploited, that doesn’t lay the moral condemnation at the feet of the lottery winner.
Exploitation is a loaded term, with many negative connotations. It’s more neutral to state the same thing as, “Nobody gets to be a billionaire without accruing the surplus value of other people’s labor.”
And that’s true of Notch, too. Minecraft wouldn’t exist without countless people who built the computers, the OS, the Java language, built out the Internet, operate the electrical grid, operate the payment networks, litigated and legislated copyright law, et cetera.
Now, you might say that all of those people got compensated for their labor, and it’s true. (That’s why the negative connotations of exploitation don’t apply.) However, the result of their labor unlocks immense value, which they do not share in because of the way the Internet developed. We could easily imagine a different scenario in which the online services won, an alternate reality in which Notch worked as a programmer for PepsiCo-Prodigy-AOL, and got paid a very good salary to create Minecraft for it. Then, it would be fair for the company to reap all of the subscription fees generated by putting the game on their network service.
We can say that in both scenarios, as long as we’re imagining, Notch would have put in the same amount of work. In one, though, he’d live a decent, middle-class life, with a corporation reaping the surplus value of his labor. In our world, he’s a billionaire, benefiting from the surplus value of others’ labor.
Okay, to be clear, are you arguing that the dichotomy we are choosing between is Notch becoming a billionaire or a corporation reaping the benefits of his labor? I think if those are the options, I prefer the universe where Notch is a billionaire, lol.
I don’t think that’s what you’re saying, but I’ll admit I’ve read your comment a few times, and couldn’t really latch on to what you point was.
But to just free associate off of what you said, I think there’s a lot of value to many in the safety of a job vs the life of an entrepreneur. I’m in that situation myself. I know I could easily make 1.5-2x my current salary if I just stood up and LLC and did all my work as a 1099 employee. I’d be able to keep all my current clients and basically nothing would change. I could set my own hours and not have a boss to answer to. But it comes with a lot fewer safety nets, and it means that all the unpleasantness and risk of “running a business” would all fall on me.
Am I running the risk that I could build a billion dollar product and giving all that surplus capital to my company? Sure. But the odds of that are terribly low, and honestly, it’s a gamble I’m more than willing to take to avoid having to deal with the overhead and risk of striking out on my own with no top cover.
The point is to explain what people mean when they say that nobody becomes a billionaire by their own effort alone. It’s impossible for one, single human to generate that much value. Notch just got incredibly lucky.
You have a good point about the difference in risk versus reward of entrepreneurship compared to a job. People often choose the job because the alternative is destitution. It’s not a free choice. Rates of entrepreneurship are much higher in countries that have a robust social safety net. Places like the U.S. actually have a relatively low rate.
Ok but how much more money have made Microsoft with Minecraft exploiting other people?, I’m not saying they isn’t a billionaire I’m just saying at some point people start delegating work or like in this case selling it to someone who can delegate the work to make even more money.
You’re moving the goalposts though, you realize that right?
Your initial position was that you have to have exploited people to be worth a billion dollars (with an implicit “directly exploited,” since if you can’t make any money without indirectly exploiting people, which would make your point even more pedantic than I’m being.)
Other people later exploiting others to profit off your product is irrelevant. Hell, it’d be irrelevant if you made your billion dollars and then started exploiting people yourself. You still would have, in fact, become a billionaire without exploiting people to do so.
What about the billions Microsoft paid which are made off exploiting other people? Dirty money…
Sure, but if that’s the argument, then everyone who has ever bought a laptop that shipped with Windows on it is equally guilty.
Perhaps even moreso. Those people are giving money to Microsoft. He took a billion dollars away from them.
But like, this is classic motte and baily. Your initial position was “all billionaires exploit labor for profit,” but when under scrutiny you just retreat to “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, so he’s guilty by virtue of simply participating in the system.”
Oh I would classify everyone who gives M$ money as guilty.
Wow you want to regulate private business? Sounds pretty woke /s
Read this idiots post history everyone
Definitely not 9-5, M-F. Most billionaires inherited substantial wealth to begin with. But executives, in general, don’t have “hours” in the same way as rank and file workers. It’s more about knowledge and meetings — well, hopefully knowledge — so you might have an 11am meeting, a 2pm call, and then a 7pm dinner with a potential investor or whatever. You don’t really “work” in between those obligations unless it’s a small company (where you probably aren’t a billionaire anyway). At most, you need to make a board report or PowerPoint for a presentation or something like that.
Billionaires who just own things and aren’t in the C-suite don’t work much at all. Even if you’re on some boards, it’s not much in terms of actual obligations. There’s definitely tasks to do but it’s also definitely not a job. So, a bit like being a landlord.
Just to add, they pay someone to make the board report or PowerPoint presentation for them.
No they do not. But they do emit about 1 million times more CO2 than the average person
Lol
I feel people still don’t understand how much a billion is. One Million dollars would still be life changing for most people here, but consider that 1 million seconds ago was 11 days ago, 1 Billion seconds ago was 31 years ago.
To put it in another perspective, a very bad investment would yield you 0.1% monthly. This means that if a billionaire was to invest money the worst way possible, he would have to spend over 1 Million dollars per month to ever decrease his fortune.
If you had an infinite money machine, that as long as you don’t spend more than a million per month it just keeps on growing, would you ever work? Yeah, thought so, billionaires are the same, they might have hobbies, and those hobbies might be something others consider work, but they’re not working.
I personally believe that if a person ever gets 1 Billion dollars he should receive a letter congratulating them for winning capitalism, and informing them that any cent above 1 Billion will be taxed at 99.9999% (including investments).
I’ve always liked the saying “The difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is about a billion dollars” to really drive it home.
Eat the rich
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I don’t know about a million being life changing. Can’t even buy a house for a million over here… Especially in USD, lol.
It’s enough to wipe out most people’s student loans, and buy a reliable vehicle, then put a down payment on a house. That’s life changing.
Well, lucky you. But when houses cost over £2m, £1m down payment won’t make me able to afford shit.
That’s still a 50% down payment on that house, your mortgage payments will be a lot less than your rent. So you’ll have a place of your own and more money every month, plus be investing in your capital instead of pissing money away. If that’s not life changing for you then nothing is.
There’s a 4.5x household income limit for mortgages in the UK. So if your combined income is £60k (for a family where both parties have average UK income), the most money you can borrow is £270k. And then you look at something that’s not immediately falling apart and you see this https://www.zoopla.co.uk/for-sale/details/67606066/ you instantly know that you can’t afford anything even with £1m in your pocket.
That’s unless you want to settle for a garage transformed into a “one bed house” https://www.zoopla.co.uk/for-sale/details/66317679/
Another option would be to move to some part of London like Barking, but I’d rather live in a shed than a drug den.
So yeah, I’m happy for you if £1m is life changing for you.
But also as a general rule places don’t let you spend over 30% of your income in rent, 60K that you mentioned for a couple is £4186 per month, so the maximum rent of that hypothetical person is £1256. Which wouldn’t also allow you to rent a house like the one you showed, so it’s pointless. The house where a couple that earns 60k lives can absolutely be bought for close to 1 million (if not less). Whoever is living in a 4 bedroom house like the one you pointed out earns a lot more than 60k and so they can finance the rest.
There’s no limit on rents in the UK. You can spend all of your money on it if you wish.
Welcome to a day in the life of a billionaire. You’ll need to get up nice and early for a personalised yoga routine devised by your trainer, and then it’s straight out of the house to work. You’ve got breakfast scheduled with a CEO, and you’re going to spend an hour objectifying women with him before heading into the office. Quick hello, report from your executive team, and now it’s time for a power brunch with the man who sources child slaves for you to have sex with. Private jet flight to the next city over for lunch, you have a corrupt mayor to bribe so the minimum wage won’t go up. Then it’s time to fly back and spend an hour in your office looking important. You ended up sleeping with your secretary instead of getting anything done, but hey, we can’t all be faithful to our wives. Now that it’s 2pm, you’ve got to go play golf with your “professional contacts”. You refer to your caddy with a racial slur. At 4pm, you go back to the office for the last time today, where your son is waiting for you. It’s very hard educating a young man on how to inherit a fortune 500 company that runs itself. You spend most of the next hour telling him about golf. At 5pm, finally get in your limousine to go home. You’ve been working all day, and you’re beat. You praise yourself for your work ethic, and wonder if the single day you work next week is going to be as hard.
At which part of the day do you sit around and shitpost alt right propaganda on Twitter for hours?
You write all of that in the middle of the night to distract yourself from the guilt which robs you of your sleep, before your heavy medication kicks in. You give it to your social media staff in the morning to post throughout the day.
Sounds exhausting 😅
It’s not work it’s more like a hobby. Work is what people do to survive. See working class vs owner class.
Wealth hoarders can either obsess or not obsess about hoarding more wealth, like any person with a hobby.
So, how much time they spend on their hobby and what hours they spend on their hobby really depends on their temperament.
What kind of dragon are they?
Are they a chromatic dragon like Bezos or Musk?
Are they a metallic dragon like Swift?
Either way they still smash smallfolk, it’s a question of if it’s purposeful or not.
True
There isn’t one type. There are the ones like Bezos and Dell, who got rich by growing one or more businesses, and are still at it. They likely don’t work normal hours, but they likely work more than 40. Some of those, like Gates, get older and move on to other things like foundation work, but not an actual job. Hard to say what kind of hours they work. Then there are the ones like Christy Walton, who inherited their wealth and don’t really ever work.
Best/most honest answer here.
It’s ridiculous to assume they don’t work. They don’t have to but I bet most if not all of the billionaires that didn’t just inherit their fortune are total workaholics.
Yeah, that’s mostly the case. There’s a lot of people here just making a lot of assumptions, but there’s quite a bit of information on billionaires as individuals. For instance, there’s this Forbes list, where you can click each one to get a summary of how they got rich.
they don’t work, they are the real bums doing nothing all day, living with the profits of OUR (the working class) hard work.
They don’t work and are the reason why the workers don’t have a good life.
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What are you basing that on? Here’s a list - most are workaholics.
Hard disagree. Proud of you for posting a list of richest people though. Here I have a link too https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
What are you disagreeing with?
And I in no way was saying that the wealth inequity wasn’t absurd.
That most are workaholics. I do not agree with that. Like the general premise of the comment you posted is what I disagree with I guess?
Oh, well, that’s pretty well documented. Most of those guys started companies and worked giant amounts of time.
I mean, literally the first person listed is Elon Musk. If you think he’s a hard worker who only got there through grinding then I have a bridge to sell you.
You’re going to take a single counter example and throw out everything else? I also mentioned there are different types, and some are like Christy Walton, who haven’t worked at all. But neither of those examples means that there aren’t a bunch of workaholics on the list.
Look, at least most of us agree that the wealth inequality is grotesque, but I’m not sure why you have a hard time with the concept that a lot of people get rich by focusing on making money and working very hard at it. I have a hard time with the concept of a CEO making orders of magnitude more than the average worker’s salary, but that doesn’t mean they don’t work a lot.
And you’re asking people in lemmy this?
It’s like asking your highschool friends if models make good money
Where should I ask then?
Financial advisors for the Uber rich. I remember hearing an interview of one on…radio lab or this American life or… Something…I can’t remember it was years ago, but anyway she described what it was like. They don’t use passports, they would call her to find bracelets they lost in taxis, it didn’t sound like they were working at all. I don’t remember if she went into their work schedule, but financial advisors are treated like baby sitters, or at least she was.
I thought that might be a good place to start, I’m sure some of them have written books about it, or done more interviews.
Bold of you to assume they work.
They don’t really have to work at all.
Just look at the industrial amounts of bullshit spewing from Elon Musk’s Twitter feed.
Clearly the answer is no.
I would suspect never.
Either they are obsessed with their “work” and do it far more than that, or they do nothing.
No
