Hacker News Reader

Comment by kevingadd | Hacker News Reader

1) Health care, taxes, payment processing fees, development tools... There are a lot of expenses covered by an employer, especially when you're a game developer. 2) It's not $350k/day versus $50k/year, unless he can somehow sustain his current income indefinitely (he can't). 3) The value of games publishers and platform developers being willing to talk to you (and having access to development kits, etc) is hard to put monetary value on. Working at a studio like Valve gives you that, too.

View on HN

"unless he can somehow sustain his current income indefinitely"

If he sustains it for 2 weeks he's pretty much set for life.

He's already sustained at least $250k/d for two weeks. These numbers are 100k bigger than the last ones I saw a few weeks ago.

Pretty sure he could BUY Valve at this point. :p

I'm positive he can't ;-)

Considering he's made about 4mm, and Valve turned down a multi-billion dollar offer not too long ago, I think you might be a bit off-base. :)

Slight exaggeration. :)

Right now he has earned $3.6Million...

What do you mean health care? Look again where he's living.

Public health care doesn't mean that nobody pays for it. Since he's not employed by anyone else, it's part of the ~15% in mandatory fees that he'll end up paying in addition to the ordinary income tax.

1) The grandparent argument that being employed would be great because of health care benefits assumes that the creator of Minecraft lives in the US. If he had bothered to read the first sentence of the actual article, he would have discovered that this is not the case. In this place, we read the articles before commenting.

2) What 15% fees? Health care in Sweden is financed through regional income tax.

No, health care in Sweden is not solely financed through regional income tax. Large parts of the social security system are financed through payroll taxes and corresponding mandatory contributions from self-employed people (the latter is called "egenavgift" -- feel free to Google it).

But looking again, he's in fact born before 1983, which means that he has to pay pension contributions as well, bumping the total contribution up to nearly 30%. In addition to income tax, that is.

I'll trust you on taxes and fees for small companies, and I actually had no idea that employment fees went to healthcare, I thought it all went to pensions and unemployment. Thanks for correcting me! :-)

Anyway, I can see how the grandparent comment could somehow be right because of the technicality of how Markus' current company is set up, but his assumptions were still flawed, and he still didn't read the article. And 3 million € is still gonna be a pretty nice sum even after Swedish taxes.

Is it really so messed up that even if you have 3 Million $ in the bank, you can not buy health care in the US?

Could you fund a company and buy health care through that company?`I don't understand that system...

"Is it really so messed up that even if you have 3 Million $ in the bank, you can not buy health care in the US?"

If you had 3 million in the bank, you could easily afford a plan through many of the private health insurance companies in the US.

I think the parents point was that health care in Europe is substantially cheaper than in the US. We pay similar rates of tax to in the US, but get Healthcare in that as well.

yeah, but Nimitz class carriers. Who wouldn't want some of those?!

I would venture that if (as someone else suggested - I have no idea if its true) this developer will end up paying for healthcare as a fixed percentage of his income his healthcare would actually be substantially cheaper in the US.

Of course that doesn't necessarily extend to less successful developers.

No, my point was that universal healthcare makes it irrelevant if he is employed or not, he'll get the same care anyway.

dude, we're talking about over $300,000 a day

There is more value in having a large quantity of money at once then that same quantity over time. If he is smart with the money, I would say he (and his children) are set for life.

He'll be fine if he gets a financial planner and keeps running a business. He should start a business or foundation. Healthcare concerns are done away with because all your company really gives you with it's health care is the fact they've purchased into a group-policy with some company... you could do the same with your extended group of friends if you can organize the thing.

350k/day = 7 years of 50k/year. If he pulls 10 days of 250k/day he's made 50 years of income, or $2.5 million. |I'm really worried for the guy.|

Pay attention to the article if you're commenting on it. Healthcare is done away with because of where he lives.

He's also going to pay roughly 60% of everything he's made so far in taxes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com