this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024
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So, I just looked at the list of the top ten billionaires. It includes: Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook (one hit wonder) Jeff Bezos: Amazon (one hit wonder) Bill Gates: Microsoft (one hit wonder) Larry Page: Google (one hit wonder)
There are several other examples in the top ten list that are lesser known but also one hit wonders, but even if there weren't, that's 40% right there.
I suppose you could argue that those companies do more than one thing, especially Google, but the vast majority of the cash flow for each is behind one product or line of products.
The only differentiator between any of them and Notch is that Notch was a one man team, and therefore wasn't "exploiting the capital generated by his employees."
And let's be real here. You say that a small business can't grow to be a multi-billion dollar business? Tell that to literally any of the above. Microsoft started in Gates garage. Facebook was a college project. Almost all businesses start as small mom-and-pop shops. Some do in fact become multi-billion dollar businesses. Just not the vast majority because, again, it's based on luck.
And look, you keep circling back to try and paint what I'm saying as "it's fine for billionaires to price gouge medicine and stomp homeless people to death" or something. That's not what I'm saying no matter how many times you circle back to it.
To repeat ad nauseum, the only point I'm making is that it's in fact possible to become a billionaire without exploiting other people's labor. Full stop. No other point beside that. If we agree on that point, then we are fully in agreement. That is, again, the only point I'm arguing.
Not a single one of these hit billionaire status via a one-hit-wonder. Every single one of them did so via a pattern of exploitation.
Sure, some of them might have had a one-hit-wonder that resulted in their first few million. But to keep climbing past a billion required steady, consistent, methodical, unethical exploitation and anti-competative practices. These are the poster-children for exploitative billionaires in our society.
I didn't say that. I said that (the overwhelming majority of) small businesses cannot become a billionaire company without a pattern of exploitation.
Sure, it's theoretically possible. But that might account for less than 1% of currently living billionaires, if any at all. Do we agree?
Tempting to agree on the less than 1%.
Regarding millionaires, not billionaires, I can only think of one who sold a business and then started a Linux distribution : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Shuttleworth
Heh Canonical is a funny example, considering most Linux users steer clear of it because of it's arguably exploitative practices in an effort to remain profitable.
I do think most, if not all billionaires have convinced themselves the ends justify their means. Zuck thinks he's "connecting the world". Bezos probably thinks the same thing Sam Walton did. Musk thinks he's ushering in the next stage of humanity. On some level I'm sympathetic to Ubuntu's cause; all tech companies harvest your data for profit, why not leverage that technique in order to bootstrap the prevalence of a FOSS platform.
But the point is, that's just what has to happen to amass that level of wealth in the society we live in. You can be as noble as you want, you can get lucky and find yourself in a pile of cash, but to steadily climb that ladder to the billion+ territory will require you to exploit or be exploited.
Absolutely I'm willing to agree to that.
I am only pushing back on the statement, "it is impossible to amass a billion dollars without exploiting the labor of the working class."
I certainly don't think that's the majority of billionaires. If your definition of exploiting the labor of the working class includes "having any employees that aren't part owners of the business," then of course the number of billionaires who can say that is vanishingly small.
But they do in fact exist, and I think the majority of people are aware of that. Therefore, making statements like "all billionaires exploited labor" makes the average person think your position is uninformed at best and disingenuous at worst.
I think there is a slightly different claim we're each making, and it's confused by the term "billion". I think we both agree that it's an arbitrary value that was used in the interest of an oversimplified claim above, but I think we can disambiguate the points we're making if we generalize it.
Your statement that "it is possible to be an X-aire without exploitation of the working class" is technically correct for the value of X=billion.
But I think the claim I'm making (and the oversimplified claim that was originally made) is that: for any given point in time, in any given capitalist society, there is a value X beyond which you cannot reliably amass and retain wealth without unethical exploitation.
The post above set X at a billion, maybe it's not a billion, maybe it's 100 billion. 100 years ago maybe it was 100 million, and in 100 years it'll be 100 trillion. But the point is that there exists a value beyond which ONLY exploitative practices can get you; or in other words, you will never be the richest man in our late-stage capitalist society by winning the lottery or through steady, ethical investments.
Man, I feel like we reached an agreement and now you're trying to walk it back. :P
And while I don't necessarily disagree with the point you're making, it feels like a setup to goal shift. Like, any example that gets brought up to counter the narrative can now just be dismissed as, "oh, but he's not enough of a billionaire."
And let's be real, a billion dollars, right now, is almost certainly beyond that arbitrary dollar amount X you speak of. There's only 3000 of them in the world! The *world! There's 8 trillion of us. How much more selective do we need to be??
Yeah, I know it sounds like a goal post movement, but I didn't make the original claim, and in fact thought the original claim was oversimplified, but that there was a truth to it. I think that in order to best illustrate that truth, "billion" had to be removed as it was a red herring.
And yeah the first half of it sounds like I'm setting a variable X, where X makes me right, but the fact that such an X exists is the point I'm making. If you agree then we're on the same page. The alternate claim would be that it's possible in our late stage capitalist society to be the richest person using purely ethical, non-exploitative means, which I don't believe is possible. And for a value of X=a billion, I think it's just very unlikely.
I mean, I certainly think it's possible to become the richest man on earth through purely ethical means. It's wildly, incredibly unlikely, but strictly possible.
You could become a recording artist that self publishes your own music, only distribute online, and become unprecedented levels of popular. Sell each mp3 for $5 and sell a few trillion of them.
Is that likely? Absolutely not. Exceedingly unlikely. But becoming a muliti-billionaire in general is exceedingly unlikely. This is one of the lesser likely ways for sure, but it's fathomable, at least in the sense that it's a coherent narrative that strictly could occur.
What about that scenario is strictly impossible? Not vanishingly unlikely, but literally could not happen?
Maybe in general, but it's impossible in our current late-stage capitalist society.
Because anyone who tries to do it would be quickly usurped by someone else willing to be unethical.
How do you unethically usurp a popular musician's fame in a way that lets you earn more money than them, given the parameters of my above example?
I assume you're going for the "is it impossible, or just highly improbable" route again. Is the musician example intended to be something that is possible? Do you think that example is possible? I think that even healthy, sustainable competition would prevent that example from ever happening. Which is part of the point: if you only have ethically run businesses, you'll always have healthy competition, and thus none of them can ever reach such an absurd amount of wealth over the others.
But let's say you're an unethical multi billion dollar corporation in the music industry whose bottom line is being impacted, and you're willing to do whatever to get part of that. Let me ask you, what would you do to get your piece of the pie? Feel free to just look around for inspiration :(. You'd likely start by offering to buy them out. If they refuse you have several options: creating a copycat that sounds similar, but pump out 10x more tracks to flood the market, pay off all "radio stations" (whatever companies you pay to stream music in random stores and clubs, etc) to prioritize your music, pay SEO professionals to ensure your products appear before yours, pay lawyers to find something to litigate over to stun your ability to make any more music. Someone who is actually in the music industry could probably come up with better ideas than me, but the point is, a company willing and allowed to play unethically will always beat out the ones that aren't.
I mean, artistry is inherently popularity driven, and we can see how knock offs rarely impact the demand for the original.
Damn, how many Minecraft or Minecraft adjacent games have come out in the last 15yrs? Have any of them made any dent in it's sales?
Look, you've set up a motte and bailey here. If I point to any example that concretely exists in real life, like Minecraft, you'll just say that the "X" wealth value is too low. If I say a hypothetical that doesn't exist, you'll say it's an impossibility. You're effectively asking me to prove a negative here.
If you truly, in your wildest imagination, can't think of a single way, no matter how extremely and unbelievably unlikely, that someone could become the wealthiest person on earth without exploiting the labor of others, I'm happy to agree to disagree on the issue. But it seems like that's more a lack of imagination on your part than anything.
Hell, here's a simple one. Elon Musk decides to will his entire fortune to a random stranger drawn by lottery, you end up winning, and then he dies. Congrats, you're now the richest person on earth. Did you exploit someone's labor to get that money?
All money on earth has at some point belonged to someone who did, and I'm not culpable because the $20 bill in my wallet was once probably owned by Jeff Bezos (or, you know, someone who's dead and evil). Are you now responsible for every ill thing that Elon Musk has done because you won his death lottery? Did you commit some evil acts on your path to becoming the richest person on earth?
So wouldn't you be relying on the unfalsifyability of your claim? Reminds me of Russell's Teapot. Your claim is that there is a vanishingly small, yet unprovably non-zero chance of something being true, therefore your claim must be true. I'm ok with conceding that.
I never said I was imaginative :D
That's the lottery example again. It sounds like we both agree it was accrued unethically, but would you agree that for such a person who is handed that wealth to maintain it, they would need to behave unethically?
Slippery slope?
I think we've now both accused the other of Russel's teapot, lol. Your claim that it's impossible to ethically become a muliti-billionaire is equally unfalsifiable, at least feasibly. I don't feel like I'm claiming anything absurd here. If you won a lottery that made you the richest person on earth (that was in some way devoid of any of the ethics concerns of the normal lottery system), then you would have become the richest person ethically. Or, at least, without having exploited excess value of other people's labor.
This isn't a Russel's Teapot because I'm arguing for a logical construction, not a point of fact. I'm not saying that such a person exists and you can't prove they don't. I'm arguing that it's almost tautologically true that if those events could happen, then my position holds water. I'm only arguing that it's within the bounds of the possible.
As for maintaining the money in a way that's ethical, sure, why not. Just throw it into a savings account that earns 2%/yr. Split it among a ton of banks and credit unions to stay within the FDIC insurance limits where possible. If you have 200billion dollars, that's 4billion a year to live on. Seems pretty easy to maintain your wealth that way. Am I missing something there?
I don't know what you're driving at with the "slippery slope" statement? Do you think I'm advocating that we should all be held accountable for the crimes of every dollar we have ever had in our possession? Or are you trying to imply that I'm arguing for always taking money indiscriminately? Regardless, I think it's reaching pretty hard in either direction.
But I think we're still talking past each other. Imagine a contrived situation where people are picking apples, and each have their own basket they're collecting them in, and their own strategy for collecting them. I'm saying that person A's strategy will never result in them having the most apples, and to me it sounds like you're saying "well if they happen upon a secret trove of apples, then they would have the most apples". Which, yeah, you're right, but that's not my point.
Or like how the optimal strategy to the Secretary Problem is to search ~37% of applicants without accepting, and then take the first one that is better than all of them. No, you're not guaranteed to accept the best applicant, but it's still provably the best strategy for any random set of applicants.
You would not remain the richest person in the world with that strategy, any other strategy that gains more than 2%/yr would overtake you.
Edit: I probably am moving goal posts here at this point, but you are helping me refine what it is I'm actually trying to say. I agree that ethical behavior could theoretically result in the most profits, but I'm also convinced that it is not even close to the winning strategy in our current society.
The issue is that your example fails to be analogous in that no one has ever had a winning strategy to becoming a billionaire. If there was an implementable strategy that anyone could do if they were unethical enough, there would be a hell of a lot more than 3000 of them in the world.
The only way to become a big-apple-person in your example is to find the treasure trove. You aren't physically capable of beating people up quick enough to steal all their apples. No current billionaire strategized their way into that position. They all found the apple lotto pile. Sometimes that pile is called Minecraft, and sometimes it's called Amazon, but they all became billionaires by finding a giant pile of apples.
And absolutely not on any strategy that makes more than 2% overtaking you. If I have 200billion dollars, at 2%, and you have 1billion at 10%, it's gonna take you nearly half a century to even reach my starting balance. Yeah, sure, you'll overtake me eventually, but that's more likely to happen because I died than because you ended up making more money than me.
And this is once again you moving the goalposts. What does it mean to "maintain that level of wealth"? Stay the richest for 5 years? 10? 20? 100? Your whole life? What if I die the day after I got the money? Do I have to invent an immortality potion to ever be able to claim to have "maintained" it? If you are unwilling to define what you mean by that, I'll just be aiming for an ever expanding, nebulous, "that's not quite enough."
I still maintain that I didn't set the original goalposts, but yeah, I hoped I had made my edit in time for you to read it. I'm enjoying the respectful discussion, regardless.
If that were true, wouldn't there not exist any billionaires?
Not if the game is zero-sum, the initial conditions for each participant are randomized, and some execute the strategy better than others. You can take the 100 best battle royale players in the world, all of them execute their strategy perfectly, but at the end of the day they can't all be winners as defined by the parameters of the game. In the real world the parameters aren't clearly delineated, I'd say the limit on the number of excessively rich people possible is emergent based on various factors (laws, how unethical parties are willing to be, amount of value being generated, etc.).
(And to head off the "how can you say zero-sum, but also wealth is being generated?". If the volume of exchanges of value between parties exceeds the amount of value being generated, then there is effectively always a cap that parties have to operate within, thus it is effectively a zero-sum system for those parties despite total value in the system increasing.)
The apple gathering metaphor was intended to convey my point about the difference between a wealth gain attributed strategy vs good fortune. We would need to extend it quite a bit to talk in terms of ethical apple picking, at which point I think we would just be talking about actual dollars.
And we've circled back to where we disagree. "Billion" (or rather, X) doesn't happen purely by chance. There exists a value over-which you cannot get purely by chance, it takes unethical exploitation, and there are people beyond that value.
This seems like a red herring. The rate of change that employing a certain strategy gets you is the more relevant quantity. An unethical strategy will diverge into unreasonable amounts of wealth territory, whereas an ethical one won't ever (and I have to keep saying, in this late-stage capitalist society.)
Of course billionaires can exist without having a winning strategy. Notch didn't set out to be a Billionaire. He just played infiniminer and thought it was cool, so he asked Zach Barth if he could make a spinoff. Facebook was started because Zuckerberg was trying to trick a chick into sleeping with him. These billionaires didn't have some Machiavellian scheme to become billionaires. They just made a thing that happened to dominate their respective industries. It happens when someone is first to market in a field that is prone to natural monopolies.
And of course money is a zero sum game. There's a limited amount of currency in circulation. That's true on it's face (ignoring government's creating more, etc.)
But I think the issue that we are actually disagreeing on is your claim that someone can't get more than X dollars by chance.
My counter to that is, "sure they can, by winning an X+1 dollar lottery." And I don't think you've made any sort of counter to that point other than, "yeah, but they couldn't keep it without being unethical," without ever providing a timeframe that you would consider sufficient to meet the definition of "keeping it."
Notch isn't a good example to bring up because, like the other lottery winners, they're the exception, not the rule. And again, Zuckerberg didn't become a billionaire from his initial rollout, that took years of deliberate decision making. Can we agree on that?
Regardless of their goals, they executed a strategy that directly resulted in them being billionaires. It wasn't random, it was years of decisions they actively made.
My counter was the apple picking example. When discussing the viability of various apple picking strategies, it subverts the discussion to say "but if the strategy results in them randomly finding a trove of apples, then that strategy could possibly win out". In that case, it's not their strategy that earned them those apples, is it?
Here's the the disconnect though. There are hundreds and hundreds of businesses that have done exactly the same things that Facebook did and went nowhere. Same strategies. Same exploitation. Same formula.
What makes Facebook different isn't that they did those things better. It's that they did them in the right place at the right time to corner the market.
I think there's a good analogy to the music industry. The most popular/famous/wealthy musicians aren't that way because they are more talented, or ruthless, or have the "winningest" music strategy. There are tens of thousands of other musicians who can play their songs as well or better than them, with more natural talent and willingness to murder for fame and wealth. So why are the famous people famous? Why are they household names while so many who are just as good if not better, with the same drive and strategy and goals, can't earn enough to put food on the table? It's luck. They won the popularity lottery by being in the right place at the right time to play to the right people that started the ball rolling.
And sure, ruthlessness and being unethical can help on that path, just as natural talent and determination can. But ultimately, at the scale we're talking about, they're negligible forces in the face of raw luck.
To use the apple picking example, what I'm saying is this. If you remove all "extraordinary" luck, and just see how well someone can do by being the meanest, most ruthless, crafty apple gatherer it is possible to be, the most they could end the day with is, let's say, 10 million apples. But we know that some people have 200 billion apples. So how do we reconcile that? The people with that many apples found an apple pile. That's the only way to get more than 10 million apples. And sure, maybe you actually found some other guy who found the pile and killed him to take the pile from him, or had some system by which you could trick people into pile hunting for you, so that you have better odds of finding the pile, but at the end of the day you have to find the pile to get more than 10 million apples. There is no other alternative. And yes, being unethical can greatly raise your odds of finding an apple pile, but anyone can find it. It's just very likely to be one of the unethical people.
But all this is, again, irrelevant to your original position, which was that there is some dollar amount X that you cannot get or keep without engaging in unethical behavior. Not that it's unlikely to get or keep, but that it is an actual impossibility. Do you still hold to that position in the face of the lottery example?
This is effectively my "battle royale" analogy. Agreed.
Not the musicians, the record labels. But yes, record labels have been ruthless in the music industry since, afaik, around the 1950s. As I mentioned before, I'm not well versed in the music industry, but I know of numerous examples of corporations cornering the music industry. There's a reason radio stations are always playing the same 30 songs, and why the vast majority of musicians end their careers in debt to their labels (at least 20+ years ago).
And there's a reason people call them "starving artists". It is a supremely rare occurrence for the actual musician to see much of the profits from their work. That's something the internet is changing (in both directions. No one's looking forward to those fractions of a cent per play on Spotify, but now you don't need to sign with a label to get a reasonable audience).
Sorry, I don't follow where these values came from or are supposed to represent. How do we know the max number of apples in this under-defined analogy I've come up with? It sounds like you're envisioning 10 million apples out on trees, and 200 billion stashed away to be found, while I'm picturing the vast majority (200 billion I guess) to be out on the trees needing picking.
But how this ties back to reality...you're saying that you believe the primary way to reach an unreasonable amount of wealth is in bulk, via pure luck? That's where we disagree. Going back to the top of your post, and my "battle royale" example, luck can get you a lot, but to amass an unreasonable amount X, you need a pattern/strategy, that keeps wealth coming towards you and away from competitors. And in order to amass an unreasonable amount, you need to use unethical means.
Hm, I'm not sure it's possible to say which of our worldviews is right here without a large amount of data that...which I don't know if is available.
I don't think you understood my last apple analogy at all, but honestly, I'm not really emotionally invested in trying anymore.
I think our impasse at it's core is that we simply disagree on how much luck plays a factor in becoming a "X-ionaire."
You seem to think that the ones who did it are just the best of the best at being unethical businessmen. I look at the ranks of those who made it and I don't see genius Machiavellian strategic masterminds. I see people who capitalized on exactly the right idea at exactly the right time.
I can't pont to a Zuckerberg or a Gates or a Musk and say, "ah, this was the unethical strategy that got them to the top." I see that they were at the right place and time to fill a massive unfilled niche in society, and to beat everyone to the punch.
That's not skill. That's luck. That's not masterful strategy. Luck. It's not the inevitable outcome of their unethical business practices. It's dumb luck.
Are they unethical? Absolutely. Did that help along the way? To a degree, certainly.
But like, think about it like this. Did Bill Gates ruthlessly stomp on others people and companies to grow Microsoft to what it is today? Absolutely. But how many competitors were there in that space that he needed to stomp? Five? Six? That means that out of 8 trillion people on Earth, he was one of 5, maybe 6, that even had the opportunity to corner that market.
And why is that? Because life isn't perfect information, and opportunities aren't evenly spread.
To make one final pass at the apples example. In life, the apples aren't uniformly spread across the trees. You have to have the thought, "I bet there are some apples over in that part of the orchard," and then go look for them there. Sometimes there's a few. Sometimes there's a lot. Sometimes there's none. Not every area you search will be bursting with apples. Sometimes, very very very rarely, there's 200 billion apples in the area you go looking. And not everybody knows what's going on everywhere else in the orchard at all times. Sometimes you and 5 or 6 buddies stumble onto the same patch of 200 billion apples at the same time, and you fight to the death over them. Sometimes you leverage that big pile of apples you just got to force others to look for big apple patches for you. Sometimes you use the influence from your big pile of apples to change the apple finding rules in your favor. Or sometimes, you're a random dude who thinks, "man, I bet there's a bunch of apples over there," and you find them and pick them all on your own. At the end of the day, the people who have big piles of apples have them because at some point they either looked and found a motherload of apples, and beat out anyone else who saw it while they were picking, or someone who did gave them all their apples on their deathbed. And being unethical can help you kill off the people in your immediate vicinity who saw the same bunch of apples you did, but to even have that opportunity to crush your competition means that you were lotto winning lucky to even be in the race at the start.
For this part:
I agree 100% (except for the part where the list of competitors was WAY larger, but that's neither here nor there). Yeah, obviously luck is always a factor for everyone, and opportunities don't present themselves to everyone, but for those who do have the opportunity, the person willing to be the most unethical will have the largest advantage, and thus is most likely to beat out the rest.
I agree that I don't think we can take the discussion further than this. Good talk. I'm just glad I found someone on here that didn't call me a proto-captialist nazi for calling the original post oversimplified.
Have a good one!