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Comment by Jaygles | Hacker News Reader

You've got to wonder what kind of a person is it that can get so far in building a successful behemoth like this but at the same time is able to seriously put forward ideas like becoming President of the world or asking management to cut 20% of the workforce yearly

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> You've got to wonder what kind of a person is it that can get so far in building a successful behemoth like this...

Makes you wonder if being a CEO is really worth 400X the average salary of the plebs or if it's all just luck and smooth talking.

It isn't, corporate leadership is effectively a tournament and CEO and executive salaries are the prize for winning it. The point of having a high prize is to get a lot of people to compete for it, not to reward the winners for the effort they've put it (which may only be slightly more than the runner up, while the reward is several times what the runner up gets).

Like, do you think the best golfer in the PGA tournament is "really worth" ten times as much money as the 14th best golfer? Did they work ten times as hard?

I don't think your analogy proves the point you think it does and is in fact a pretty great argument for why CEOs should be paid less and taxed more. A large part of the success of both athletes and CEOs is up to circumstances and chance, as well as the other competitors who may be deficient in a number of ways. Being less incompetent than your peers doesn't mean the same thing as being competent.

Pay isn't just about giving people what they deserve. It's also about providing the incentives that create the behavior you want. You can do that through piece-work compensation, but that's extremely hard to manage for executives (and knowledge workers, too, but that's a separate discussion).

If your workers aren't risk-adverse, then a tournament is exactly as efficient as a piece-work compensation scheme for convincing them to put in effort. The proof is a bit more involved than I'm willing to digest for a HN comment, but there's a full paper you can read about this here: http://faculty.smu.edu/Millimet/classes/eco7321/papers/lazea...

Anyhow, what all this means is that providing a prize to top performers means you can get a ton of effort, training, and work from people competing for it, and you don't have to incur the expense of monitoring the inputs into performance or quantifying the overall performance rendered. You only have to care about the rank-ordering of performance.

> Like, do you think the best golfer in the PGA tournament is "really worth" ten times as much money as the 14th best golfer?

To the sponsors? Yes.

I wonder if there is some lingering idea inside their own head that what they're doing is nonsense ... so more nonsense seems pretty logical.

The ultimate lesson is that very few people, even those who seem wildly successful have any idea what they are doing.

This is why narcissist and people who are overconfident to the point of absurdity often excel and business at life. No body else has any idea what they are doing, their competitors mostly have no idea what they are doing, and they are willing to project that they know what they are doing unconditionally which is attractive to many people.

So people follow them.

This is basically the take-away of much of modern philosophical thought (absurdism/existentialism). Existence precedes essence... we are thrust into the world with no 'idea' of what's meaningful or important. People gravitate to those who have well-defined vision since working towards something (even if that thing is ultimately flawed in some way) feels better than idly spinning your wheels waiting to die.

Yeah my curiosity is how one can get so many things right when the same logical processes can spit out completely bonkers ideas at the same time. Is it insane luck that they hit the mark so often?

>Is it insane luck that they hit the mark so often?

No, its money.

All these "tech unicorns" backed by VC money are the same.

Spend Billions to obtain "growth metrics" until such time as the spending can no longer be maintained and you have grown your "valuation" to a point no VC/private investor will save your ass, then dump the company on the public.

The marketing doesn't even change just the company, "at any time we can turn off the spending and growth, and make pure profit."

It's luck, and taking credit for the work of the people they hire.

Someone with unbridled belief in themselves.

I lean towards this being ignorant hubris. I don't think he set out to scam investors.

  I don't think he set out to scam investors.

I tripped, fell, and when I put my hand out to catch myself I accidentally had the company give me a loan to buy a building that I leased back to them.

LOL +1

It's not ignorance to sell your company its trademark or to buy a building with a loan backed by company stock and then have the company lease it from you at a tidy profit.

Let me give you an insight into the thought process here:

'It's not unethical if I don't feel bad about it.'

The key to operating this way to is cultivate a sense of belief in your own BS - inspire others by having the 'vision thing', saying 'I wish you could see what I can see' etc. Ignore anything negative and devote as little thought to it as possible because what people are buying into is your sunny disposition - they don't really want to analyze your stuff, they want to feel the way you look: radiantly confident. So you just think happy thoughts and if anyone asks you troubling questions re-articulate your vision of heaven/ profits/ national pride/ whatever and make a performance of being nurtured by that beautiful vision alone, before mentioning that anyone can share it for 3 easy payments of $____.

Don’t forget world’s first trillionaire

There's a theory that there is no way to become a billionaire without fucking over a lot of people.

To become a trillionaire you'd have to fuck over 1000 times as many people. Without getting lynched.

Or you could serve a lot of people, it's probably easier.

Sell something for $10 that's worth $12 to the buyer and costs you $8 to make. Repeat a billion times. The people you did business with got an extra $2 billion, you got $2 billion, everybody's better off.

The main issue is that all of these companies these days are selling things for $7 that cost $8 to make. Repeated a billion times.

The people you did business with got an extra $5 Billion, you lose $1 Billion. All the companies trying to offer the service for $10 (or some other fair price) will be eradicated by your company, because a company cannot compete selling things at a fair ($10) price when you are selling it at $7.

By the time you get to a million times, someone else is going to do the same thing, by selling that item for $9.50.

You need a moat to actually scale that business model. And the ethics of many moats aren't particularly squeaky-clean...

To paraphrase what others said: that’s a great way to become a multimillionaire, but to get to a billion you have to step on a lot of toes. I think Bill Gates observed that your quality of life doesn’t really change after about 50 million. Even with inflation, by the time that’s a billion, billionaire won’t be what people target. Hell, 40 years ago people dreamed of being millionaires. Inflation adjusted that’s only 3 million now.

If you were really that philanthropic, why would you carve out a billion from that revenue stream instead of giving back, or investing it in better equipment or people?

You realize that a billionaire has almost nothing to do with their money but invest it in better equipment or people? That's what investing is and that's what billionaires do with their money.

So on the front end the billionaire had to give more than a billion dollars of value to society in order to get people to voluntarily do business with them. Then on the back end they have to turn around and invest most of that money back into society. In doing so they're shouldering the burdens of market research, diligence, and risk.

Society wins twice from this and in return the billionaire gets to spend a lot of money. Society wins there, too, because the economy benefits from their ridiculous spending.

Does this work perfectly? Absolutely not, but nobody has a better system that I've seen.

Sociopaths, and not the chaotic good kind.

Narcissistic sociopath - a perfect start-up CEO.

Yep. More people should read the Gervais Principle.

would make a great president too.

https://twitter.com/MichaelJFoody/status/1022521010078273536

>it says a lot that when confronted with an objectively dumb rich dude like trump (no working memory, can't apply grammar consistently, childish vocabulary, shallow concepts) people will choose to believe he's secretly smart rather than that wealth isn't a result of intellect

Trade Trump's name for Adam Neumann and I think you have the answer to your question.

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