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Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

Yes, to answer your question, Paul Allen did earn his wealth.

No different than if a middle class investor bought Las Vegas Sands at $1 in the great recession and rode it to $85, with that investor having fully earned their return too. Except Allen arguably deserves his return even more than said average investor because he was personally, hugely responsible for the formation and success of Microsoft.

Your premise is obviously that if you aren't shoveling snow for each dollar earned, then you didn't properly earn it. An arbitrary, agenda oriented, anti-wealth stance: there's no scenario under which any person can ever actually earn their wealth or income in your premise. Any amount of income or wealth can come under attack as having not been fully earned - and that's of course the whole idea.

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He earned some wealth, but nobody earns billions. To get to that level of wealth one must leverage things far beyond the control of one person. For someone like Allen, that's probably IP law and the opportunity of being in the right place at the right time to dominate a specific market. It isn't like, had Allen not been around, that we wouldn’t have computers or that the market wouldn't be dominated by a particular OS. Those same billions would have gone to someone else. His niche would have been filled by any number of other people.

Other people, equally talented and equally hard working, are paid far far less. To say that Allen "earned" every dollar is to suggest that they have not, that luck is not a factor.

Luck is not a zero sum game. Yes, he was partially lucky and yes, he earned every dollar. There're so many lucky people in the world and so few Allens.

I also have experience anchoring in the Caribbean, among reefs as well (abeit in a much smaller yacht, like, kind of order of magnitude smaller :-)). And no, you can't predict where your anchor chain will go, especially if your common sense contradicts what "local authority" says. Sometimes they're right (most of the time, they were born there and spent the whole life) but sometimes they are just plain drunk and do not care. Island time.

> he earned every dollar

bullshit. People get rich on the unpaid labor of others. If nothing else, he would have less money if microsoft didn't participate in the anti-poaching scandal. It's clearly not his fault, but he got money because his corporation didn't pay market wages.

edit

This is, perhaps, a little harsh. I don't think he's a villain. I've never met the man, but i'm sure he's a decent guy. But you have to admit, his net worth is not a perfect reckoning of the value he created in the world. He's rich. good for him. Some of that money came from him, as an owner, colluding to not pay fair wages. This is just the most recent example. There was the whole temp workers thing. Microsoft has a fairly shady history.

>If nothing else, he would have less money if microsoft didn't participate in the anti-poaching scandal.

>Some of that money came from him, as an owner, colluding to not pay fair wages.

What are you referring to?

> People get rich on the unpaid labor of others.

"citation needed" (c)

> There was the whole temp workers thing.

"bullshit" (c). You automatically assume that under other conditions these workers would have made more money. In many similar cases though, they would have stayed unemployed. So you have to prove the point that somebody made some actual wealth from underpaying these workers. Which is possible, but not automatically true.

Also, http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

Also, I was born and lived half of my life in Soviet Union. I know what you're talking about and experienced it first hand. I've also experienced big time what happens when it doesn't work (and so far there's no good example in the world of it working sustainably).

Apple and google settled [1].

Microsoft, IBM, ebay, a bunch of other companies participated in the collusion scandal. Microsoft's case was dismissed due to the statute of limitations. [2]

Again, I don't think he's a villain, good for him for getting rich. I don't believe those billions are an accurate reckoning of the value he personally has created in the world.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/24/apple-goog...

[2] http://www.workplaceclassaction.com/2015/12/microsoft-defeat...

Our economic systems in the West may be far from ideal, and certainly create huge imbalances between the richest and the poorest that we would do well to address for many reasons. A significant part of that imbalance comes from our company structures, where the workers creating the value often receive relatively little compensation, while founders, investors and the most senior staff receive most of the benefit.

That said, I don't think your argument that no-one is worth a huge amount of money is inherently a strong one. My favourite example of this is JK Rowling, who is arguably the most successful author in history and reportedly worth around a billion dollars today. That money was earned primarily from the success of the Harry Potter books she wrote, which have sold almost half a billion copies worldwide. That's a lot of happiness she's created for a lot of people, and personally I don't begrudge her being heavily rewarded for doing more good than most of us ever will in our lifetimes.

The position is not as clear cut in the case of Paul Allen, since he didn't almost single-handedly write the software that generated the vast amount of value Microsoft has produced in the world over the years, and there is a much stronger element of the founder/investor/senior vs. employee argument I mentioned before in his case. But given how much value Microsoft has generated over the years, if you're going to criticise Allen's wealth I think you need more than just a blunt "no-one deserves to be that rich" argument to be convincing.

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