Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

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> and those dollars in the economy are concentrated in hands of the very wealthy on the backs of immigrants.

You're very obviously wrong. The employees of Tesla and its suppliers will extract the extreme majority of all financial value from the existence of Tesla. If Tesla survives for 20 years, that tally will be in the multiple hundreds of billions. Elon Musk will end up owning a single digit percentage of that value creation. The same is true about nearly all successful corporations. Of all the financial value created by Google over its existence, Larry & Sergey (and the early Google investors, most of whom liquidated not long after the IPO) will end up having owned a tiny sliver of it.

Uber's drivers will extract the extreme majority of all financial value created by Uber. Over a 20 year span, that number will dwarf what Kalanick and Uber's investors extract. Further, Uber riders will derive a similarly extreme financial value over what Kalanick does, through convenience / time saved etc.

Good luck naming a company that isn't true for.

This feels like a straw man, I did not make the argument that founders will retain all of the value. Obvious the economy is complex but corporate profits and executive pay are at all time highs. Employees are capturing less and less of the revenue stream. Now, founders may not retain their ownership but the ownership will remain in the hands of the class of the wealthy.

(I think it is a weak point for me to make, but I'm pretty sure there won't be Uber drivers in 20 years, probably not in 10.)

Fantasy. The vast overwhelming majority of corporation valuation is in stockholders' hands. By what measure can employees be seen to benefit from this? They are given a tiny stream of revenue for their labor. That's it. Explain.

I'm pretty sure the argument is that total payroll is way above any dividend payments. It's a good point, but I think it fails to account for the investment of the employees in form of opportunity cost/work.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank, total employee compensation in the US in 2016 was $10 trillion. [1]

The market capitalization of listed US companies, according to the World Bank, was $25 trillion. [2]

Assuming average gains of 10% per year in the stock markets, which stockholders would be glad to receive, I think, employees receive 4x as much as stockholders of listed companies.

1: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A033RC1A027NBEA

2: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/CM.MKT.LCAP.CD?name_desc...

That means for the 1% to own 99% of everything, they must have bled cash from corporations for a generation, holding their wealth in cash, leaving corporate valuation at a symbolic level?

Or that the majority of people spend everything they earn (or more) and never accumulate wealth.

One definition of poverty is, spending a day's pay on a day's food.

Oracle

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