How to Steal a Billion
oversharing.substack.com
oversharing.substack.com
The Vision Fund is going to lose ~$19 billion. But Masa Son still controls over $80 billion. That's more wealth and power than almost any human being will ever have in history, ever.
At that point the numbers don't even matter. Maybe Neumann took Masa Son for $50 billion. Who cares? A person can live in the USA for their whole lives without working on as little as $3-5 million. Throwing billions around like this, especially when it's digital/paper money in the form of stocks and big corporate deals, really puts the absurdity sprinkles on top of this whole turd bowl.
It's this kind of thing that makes people lose confidence in the system. Most people out here are sweating medical bills in the low $10,000's, while the news is talking about billions being gained and lost in the span of a few weeks - so fast it makes you wonder if that amount of wealth really even existed in the first place.
How much has to be "lost" between digital transactions before the numbers become completely meaningless? A trillion? A quadrillion?
billionaires are incompatible with democracy
btw take a look at Gates' portfolio. He's as liquid as it get's at that level.
I guarantee that 100% of any of their shares would be swiftly picked up if they were sold at a 5%+ discount to the 52-week low stock price.
Markets are a real time pricing mechanism - they operate on instantaneous availability of both money and shares. Put enough shares out on the supply side, is the equivalent of flooding the demand side with money a. la. hyperinflation. In both cases, the good in question becomes effectively valueless.
If people lose confidence in the system because of that it’s because they can’t multiply. Billionaires are very rich compared to middle class people, but there are very few of them, and lots of middle class people. Elizabeth Warren’s new health plan will cost $50 trillion over ten years. Middle class Americans make $8 trillion a year, compared to about $130 billion for America’s too 400 taxpayers.[1] Confiscating the total wealth of every billionaire in America (about $3-3.5 trillion) would pay for Warren’s health plan for well under a year.[2]
We spend way too much time worrying about the wealth of a small group of people that, in the end, doesn’t add up to that large a fraction of total wealth or income. This is, in my view, the biggest reason why America can’t have nice things. Over on the other side of the pond, they don’t worry as much about figuring out how to tax billionaires. Because they know that, in the aggregate, it’s the middle class that has most of the money.
[1] https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/returns-taxpayers.... Rough proxy for billionaires.
[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/10/03/forbes-400-a.... Top 400 billionaire have $3 trillion. Another 220 billionaires not included, but due to the cut off they have at most another $600 billion.
Currently healthcare will be 52trill over ten years
Warrens plan from two estimates is 52-59 trill over ten years.
Billionaire thing seems wrong. Forbes 400 richest americans has 2.96 trillion total between them. Lowest person on the list has networth of 2.8 bill
To anyone who might take this as an indication Warren's plan will increase HC spending, if we do nothing average yearly HC spending for the 2020s in the US is going to be over 5T anyway. It was at ~3.65T last year, and growing fast.
This is part of a degrowth mindset, and it will freak people out who flee from the shame of not winning, who cannot handle pauses or idle time, who must have control over other peopes' lives. But we can't have those people running this planet into the fire. They're gonna have to learn to be alright.
Can you help me understand this better? Because I see this sentiment often. I'm just gonna do some quick math... Bezos + Gates + Musk + Zuckerberg = let's round up to $300 Billion. Divide that evenly among the 327 million US population. I'd get $917. Do you believe that I will take better care of myself or be a better father in the long run if I get a one-time bonus of $917?
My personal perspective is that equalizing things fully doesn't work. You want incentives to motivate people. However, it's quite amazing what motivates people - after all, for the average billionaire going from $62bn to $63bn isn't really some sort of milestone, unless they somehow surpass some other billionaire. Sometimes the things that motivate people are a lot more fine grained that it seems. So pure financial motivation is rarely the main incentive.
On the other hand, such huge imbalances do eat away at democratic principles.
My personal opinion is that at some point, companies should be treated as utilities/companies of vital national interest. After all, that's how rich people make most of their money, through shares, not through salaries.
So, basically, once a company is taller than X, the country this company is based on gets a certain share of the company, 5%, 10%, 20%, it doesn't matter. I'd also make these shares non-voting. Even better, I'd force these companies to give out a certain percentage of these shares to employees (after all, they're "the people").
We'd have fewer billionaires, we'd have more stable middle class people, we'd have higher state revenues, we'd have less of a disconnect between totally private companies, regular people and governments.
As the owner of a company, you have a choice: create a huge company and have to share the spoils or stay small and nimble and have greater control.
How do I, as a regular citizen, benefit from this? Is there some mechanism I'm not seeing? Because it feels like it's just a meaningless paper transfer.
Secondly, that's why I was also thinking of a variant where employees get shares, too.
As an investment strategy, I never hold stock in a company I'm working for. That puts too many eggs in one basket. If the company fails for some reason, not only have I lost my job but I've also lost my retirement savings. I would personally oppose being compensated in company stock and would sell it ASAP if given the option.
I'm not saying it's the best option or something I studied deeply, but we need something better.
Otherwise, with automation, we're back to feudalism.
Modifying the distribution of wealth isn't about chopping up the richest peoples money and handing it out to everyone else. It's about altering the flows of the dynamical system so that power is continually distributed in an equitable way, one that optimizes more peoples' ability to thrive and co-create healthy lives.
It's about changing the meaning of having vs not having money, it's about reducing the intensity of the leverage people have over one another, and about freeing people to have basic autonomy and agency in their lives.
Your POV fails to take into account the utility and time-value of the redistributed dollars. It's the difference between some unelected doofus having tons of power because of their stationary dollars, or building a universal pre-k and/or healthcare system.
I know I'd personally work less if I wasn't "blessed with the opportunity of choice" of terrible insurance plans offered by my employer where an emergency appendectomy leads to $5k in bills... or if I could work 75% time and reduce daycare hours.
If the wealth is redistributed to the people (the mechanism isn't important) then that amounts to a few thousand dollars per person. This isn't the kind of money that would allow wide-spread reduction in work hours. My expectation is that most people will liquify that wealth and spend it over a long weekend. Do you have a different expectation?
If rather than being given directly to the people, instead the state keeps that money, are you predicting that Donald Trump will use it to build you a new school?
Sure, with less people working we may not have forty choices of toilet paper or same day delivery of counterfeit trinkets... but I’m more than ok with that. It will be necessary to reduce carbon emissions, anyway.
* In M4A, Americans will pay ~$30T/10yr to providers through the government as a middleman.
* In the current private system, Americans will pay ~$30T/10yr to providers through whichever company their employer has selected as a middleman.
The only cost question re: M4A is whether Americans will spend slightly more or slightly less overall when costs are increased because coverage is extended to 10% more people, and costs are decreased by:
- massive efficiency gains of a single payer,
- elimination of profit to shareholders who siphon money away from care,
- better preventative care that reduces or eliminates more expensive catastrophic care.
And additional intangible benefits like:
- not having your healthcare decided by your employer,
- having the ability to be an entrepreneur and/or start a small business while having the security of healthcare,
- the fact that small business will be able to better compete with huge corporations for desirable employees because they won’t have to offer health benefits themselves.
But in 25 years how much does the system improve, what if it's like 50T over the 1st 10 years, then 30T the 2nd because of gains in efficiency? There's a lot of 'in the air' variables as well, where it could end up being 30 or 40T over 10 years if the efficiencies are higher than expected or if we can better negotiate terms w/ drug companies.
If we legalize weed and shrooms and tax them at the national level, that itself would also be a great way to gain money for healthcare. We also can easily halve our military spending and still have a strong national defense. Also adding a VAT may be a good idea, we could even give discounts to citizens so immigrants and visitors travelling in America also help offset our healthcare costs. For instance say vat is 4%, and we charge 12% for non-citizens it would A. discourage illegal immigration, and B. it would stop people worrying about immigrants because they'd have to pay higher VAT than everyone else, so they'd be tax payers and not just 'using the system'...
Also, I used “confiscate” in the context of literally taking all of billionaires’ money.
Her math adds up.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/11/05/warrens-p...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/01/opinion/did-warren-pass-t...
Warren’s calculations just prove why the whole fixation on billionaires and income inequality is a distraction. You're talking about a wealth tax that is unconstitutional, at levels that are completely unprecedented. You're talking about risking capital flight, and setting political capital on fire, to move the United States far to the left of Europe. (What a great campaign ad for Donald Trump! Warren is proposing to do something that even France realized was a bad idea.) And for what? Is it going to pay for M4A? Or balance the budget? No. Not even theoretically.
I say this all as someone who wants universal healthcare to be implemented (even though I'm pessimistic about it saving any money). I think Warren's proposal with respect to employer-side payments is actually pretty clever. But the wealth tax is a huge political liability, and it could take M4A with it. And when that happens, it won't be the fault of billionaires (the wealth tax wasn't going to raise the necessary revenue anyway). It'll be the fault of people making $200,000 who think they are "middle class" and shouldn't have to pay the same level of taxes their counterparts in Europe pay.
The efficiency gains of single payer are overrated. We pay more than other countries do in admin overhead, but admin overhead itself is a small fraction of total costs, and as a percentage of our spend, admin costs would necessarily rise, probably dramatically, if Medicare starts covering 30 year olds in addition to 68 year olds.
† I'm just taking your number here, not interrogating it.
The US needs cheaper healthcare, but single payer won't achieve that.
People focus on billionaires due to the fact that they are the most stark representation of the deeply unequal society in which they live. Wealth inequality is very real, please refer to the following: https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2019/august/wealth-ine... It's a rhetorical device
> Middle class Americans make $8 trillion a year, compared to about $130 billion for America’s billionaires.
So the group of people who leverage capital to sustain themselves and don't have to work have lower net income than the group of people who have to work to have a roof over their head?
> $50 trillion
I love how these numbers increasingly grow. First it was 36 trillion from the well-known Cato institute. Mind you, this was actually going to save money in the long term, so we have to bump up the number. The United states spend almost 2x per capita what Canada does on healthcare, so it seems pretty odd that we'd use current pricing systems to estimate the cost when the original M4A bill expressly increases leverage to negotiate. $50 trillion is a spook.
It's a rhetorical device that distracts from real problems and real solutions. Look at Warren's wealth tax proposal. It's blatantly unconstitutional and without precedent in the OECD. And what's the upshot? Just $275 billion in revenue per year. Compared to the $1 trillion or more we could raise by implementing a VAT, like every other OECD country has, or bringing payroll taxes in line with other OECD countries.
Focusing on billionaires also distracts from the nature of our "deeply unequal society." Look at the U.S. income distribution: https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-...; https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/fair-share-top-400-us-taxpaye....
The top 400 taxpayers earned $127 billion in 2014, let's say an even $150 billion in 2018. There were 70 million returns filed by the bottom 50%. If you took all billionaires' income and redistributed it among the bottom 50%, they'd have about $2,000 a year more, or a bit more than 10%. But look at the top 50% minus the top 1%. (Even Sanders considers the 98th percentile to be "middle class" given his tax plan wouldn't raise taxes on people with household incomes under $250,000.) They have $7 trillion in income, versus about $1.1 trillion in income for the bottom half. If you want to talk about income inequality, that's the root of it. And that's the most significant kind of income inequality in terms of impact on peoples' daily lives. Billionaires aren't the ones driving up housing prices in urban neighborhoods and driving out people of color. Billionaires also aren't the ones that would be directly affected by the increases in VAT and payroll taxes that would be required to move to a more European model of taxation and public services.
If you took all personal income ($10 trillion) and divided it evenly among all filers (140 million), you get about $71,000. If you or your household make more than that, you benefit from inequality.
> So the group of people who leverage capital to sustain themselves and don't have to work have lower net income than the group of people who have to work to have a roof over their head?
Zuckerberg doesn't work? Buffet doesn't work? Kylie Jenner doesn't work?
> I love how these numbers increasingly grow.
The $50 trillion number was calculated by Warren's own experts: https://assets.ctfassets.net/4ubxbgy9463z/2Tg9oB55ICu2vtYBaK... (linked from: https://elizabethwarren.com/plans/paying-for-m4a)
Credit to Warren, her analysis doesn't assume that Medicare for All will result in massive cost savings, which I think is highly unlikely given the American political system.
One of these things is not like the other. Don't be so slippery, please.
He’s talking about the aggregate income earned by the group. So the delta in individual incomes is offset by the massive delta in group sizes.
But I don't think Americans are punitive. They're not deeply troubled by the mere fact that there is someone out there with $8 billion. To the extent they care about billionaires, they're concerned about whether they're paying a fair amount to support the county that gave them so much. And from that perspective, what matters is the aggregate income of the group. And $130-150 billion just isn't much compared to the $6-7 trillion in annual government spending in the U.S.
Politicians thrive by disguising the punitive outlook as a practical outlook. They point to how much money Zuckerberg or Bezos have, and quickly pivot to how they could pay for universal healthcare, universal education, etc. A necessary aspect of that strategy is keeping people ignorant of the fact that even confiscating the total income of every billionaire would only pay for say 25% of U.S. higher education spending, or 4% of U.S. health spending.
I don't think this is a remotely justifiable belief. We have the highest prisoner rate per capita, we sanction anyone the second they step out of line, and the entire two prior decades have been shaped by a collective trauma that pushed us into seeking retributive justice against anyone--regardless of their actual role.
I fail to remember which Puerto Rican uprising this was during, but there was a mother who was jailed for the crime of making her husband and children breakfast. When slavery was finally ended, the 10 years of reconstruction was met immediately with horrific acts of terrorism and reactionary violence to reassert white supremacy.
Punitive Justice is a core tenet of the American civil religion.
I agree that the numbers become meaningless past a certain point, especially where we're talking about valuations, where it's basically a bunch of people's vague agreement on a price and there are incentives to make it look one way or another, but we also have really bad intuitions about just how much wealth there is out there.
In the limit of a single individual wealth works in a naive fashion where such distribution is possible. But on the scale of the economy, such a thing is not possible without inventing a better distribution mechanism than capital itself. If you redistribute each peace of your car's engine to each passenger, you will be forced to walk. Even as a thought experiment, evenly distributing the wealth of the world is not possible. As the wealth is produced by the incentives inherent in gradients of inequality.
Thus the project of the modern socialist is to develop redistributive structures that maintain such incentives. There are echos of this in George and Harberger, but little in modern Jacobin-style socialism, whose proposals amount to gifting the means of production to the sorts of people that staff an HR department.
Back to the main point, we see someone worth $100b and we think there's plenty for everyone, but even in a best case scenario, where we can magically distribute an equal share of all the wealth to everyone and it all holds its value, there's nowhere near enough for everyone to have the standard of living we have become accustomed to in the richest parts of the world.
It's true that most people are more interested in absolute quality of life than they are in the relative status granted by inequality, but the one implies the other.
You can make a case for less inequality, of course; but now we're quibbling about the price, as it were.
Say just 25% are successful in re-investing that money by buying small businesses w/ cashflow off flippa, or buying rental property, etc... Or starting a SaaS business, and that 25% is able to increase their income to 1 million.
Then that 1 million+ * 250,000, means his investment of 100B brought 250B to the economy. The other 75% who weren't so lucky in business, maybe they also invested and still built up a nice nest egg for retirement, or maybe they bought a home so they had a guaranteed roof over their head if hard times hit.
Many of the 75% might be able to get their net worth to 250-500k because of the 1-time gift.
This is all speculation.... In the real world it might be more like 10% are successful, but maybe 1-3% are super successful (become billionaires themselves).
If we had a cap on how much capital you could hold, then that would at least guarantee it funnels back to the bottom echelons of society. Though, I think the best cap would simply be a CEO cap of 150x average salaries (including contractors/offshore/etc). The CEO could earn whatever they wanted, as long as they simply gave everyone on their payroll a raise to meet their new bonus.
The other fact is that 90% of the successful people ARE successful because they didn't have to worry about money. When you struggle to put food on the table, it's hard to think about anything else or work on a side project. There was a good twitter feed/conversation back and forth w/ some people in SV a few months ago that basically was about one person saying 'anyone can make it', and the others saying 'those same people started at their parent's basement, they weren't exactly homeless or struggling'.
Actually it was Paul Graham who said:"The next time someone claims that starting startups is for rich kids, remind them that Airbnb happened because its founders literally could not pay their rent,"
Matthew Prince, the founder and CEO of Cloudflare replied: "Oh Paul, you know better. I had to borrow money from my mom to pay my taxes when we were starting Cloudflare. But I certainly came from a relatively privileged background, and so did the AirBnB founders. It’s hard to take risks if you don’t have a safety net. #bereal,"
Source: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1129897694984646657
I'm not saying we can ever 100% make everything equitable. Not until we have robots doing 100% of the work and < 10% employment and the means to just let people have what they want or need to be happy, in a world where money isn't even a thing we value anymore, or even use.
But if we could just give everyone a floor, or safety net then we can see a lot more combined global progress. Imagine if every child had food on the table just in America and a roof, and healthcare, and could focus on being a kid and getting an education. Imagine if just doing this created 1 million new scientists over the next 50 years that wouldn't have originally existed.
What could they find or discover? The goal shouldn't be take everything but.. take enough that the game isn't forever slanted out of control. That's what GBI or a negative income tax would do. Hell just single-payer healthcare might be enough for some families -- if they didn't have to pay medical bills or copays.
Global money: $90,400,000,000,000
Global population: 7,742,131,000
Money per person: ~$11,650
But money gets spent it all will end up back in the top 1%'s hands. They have funnels in place to ensure that money funnels up into their hands. Which is why GBI makes more sense, by giving money gradually/recurring it keeps cycling. The poorer families getting GBI would spend 100% locally essentially keeping the money in the local economy.
In some parts of the US, 100k would make you crazy wealthy. In other parts of the US, it wouldn't even make you middle class.
If you have everyone money, they would buy and sell goods and services instead of hoarding it.
Their money are put to good work. They don’t just put the money under a mattress.
Personally, I believe this is immoral.
Bring on the fully automated luxury communism!
The numbers don't matter to whom? I have to imagine the numbers matter to Neumann, Masa Son, WeWork stakeholders & WeWork employees. It is never meaningless.
And it will be decent for that price if you can just buy a good house and vehicle.
I think you'd do fine.
I take home 20k/30k, etr of 35%.
Everything else seems pretty far under average, or in the case of rent, unrealistic. My prices are reflective of a high tax/cost of living city in the northeast.
Just rent on a studio within a thirty minute drive averages $1k, only including trash, snow.
Add $100 for basic cable internet.
Double that car cost, 150 almost covers gas and insurance. Doesn't include paid parking. Some jobs and Some parts of the area can get public transport to workfor them, I can't.
$60 is pretty low for a decent cell phone plan. Be more like 120 in reality.
health cares an extra $800/mo (after insurance pays) if I were to follow my health care providers reccomendations.
3.5% of 3 million is 105k. That puts you in the 87th percentile of Americans.
A billion seconds is 31.7 years.
staggering difference.
Also, the post title is a nice nod to an Audrey Hepburn/Peter O'Toole movie dripping with '60s cool: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060522/
Even the wisest can be a fool sometimes. And a fool can sometimes spout wisdom.
We are only human after all.
But, they are giving up, and venture capital is reducing the company to the value of its parts, not its potential, before that Building Management Suite gets assembled. There is a future where their software stack becomes the de facto standard for all building management, the Outlook/Excel of owning property. WeWork could pivot from a real estate company to a property ownership enablement company.
Thats not so much spray painted shit as "im using free cash flow from real estate to build this grand well defined vision, (with a coat of hippie mysticism paint) do you want to come along for the ride, for better or worse?" Because he is an executive, talking to executives, his pitch always came off as vague. But the actions of the company, and the parts they were assembling, paint a much more strategically sound and intelligent portrait.
Isn't AirBnB an obvious hospitality company?
AirBnB is not buying houses to rent, it's a web middleman.
Amazon does sell stuff directly, so it's retail not tech.
All these 3 companies are well categorized, WeWork is not, WeWork buys properties to rent, it's just that, nothing that Regus isn't.
If you're a grocery chain and you contract out most of your technical needs then you aren't a tech company. But if you're a grocery chain and you hire and maintain a large technical team to provide you with various custom pieces of technology, you're both a grocery chain and a tech company.
This could be any piece of tech: from custom software to custom refrigeration systems.
You will. It's easy. There are thousands of non-tech companies around you. Your local grocery store, laundries, car services, barbershops, etc. They do not hire software engineers, they do not build internal tools. Some of them do rely on third party software, but it's different.
Pretty much every bank is a tech company nowadays. Insurances? Same thing. If Oscar or Chase fires all of its engineers, the business is dead. By my definition, a tech company is a company whose business won't sustain long without its engineering team.
It doesn't take a genius to see this opportunity but it does take an incredibly lucky person to be in a position to exploit it.
If Adam Neumann doesn't end up in jail after all this, then I will concede that he is not an idiot.
Consequences are for people who don't have a billion dollars.
But you know, the next few years of his life are going to be mildly unpleasant, and we shouldn't forget about the emotional impact about that. Maybe he'll have a very public come-to-Jesus moment that will be cathartic for everyone involved, or maybe he'll disappear from public life forever with his vast WeWork wealth and live on some estate in an exotic locale.
But either way, this failure isn't going to be easy for him. He's going to feel several emotions and not all of them will be pleasant.
What's he gonna lose? Friends who invested with him? He can buy new ones.
Feel bad? You can literally hire a whole team of therapists for life.
He can sit in his mansions and not be in the public eye forever, it's not like being in the public eye is some sort of requirement for living.
Heck, he might even find a new following among people who want to emulate how he grabbed all that money.
But it's the kind of disappointment and anger that you get over in a few months.
The only difference is he'll have a billion dollars and the ability to do whatever in life he wants.
If you were in his shoes, would you go back and do things any differently?
I wouldn't have been in his shoes, because I have a shred of decency.
Maybe not hire a famous DJ for the announcement of layoffs.
If this were reddit I would link to /r/aboringdystopia.
If you're having trouble finding sympathetic targets in this fiasco, mayhap spare a thought to the several emotions employees whose options are underwater felt when they heard about their Superhero CEO's cash out.
And when you say "mildly unpleasant", I can only assume you mean that for the rest of his life, his sole source of genuine unpleasantness will be from his own psyche. Because he'll be worth a billion dollars. And while money can't buy happiness, it can remove every last speck of annoyance, peeve, and inferior market option.
This failure will be easier for him than for most other people who fail far less spectacularly.
Even if a thousand people make it their life's mission to persecute him at every moment of the day, he still has approximately a billion dollars more than all of them put together. All he really has to worry about is avoiding Saudi-controlled buildings and territories for the rest of his life.
Honest question: do you think it will be harder for him than for the rest of us that have to deal with failure and yet have to chase jobs and deal with the pressures that come from not being wealthy?
Given the level of sociopathy likely required to get where he is at, I sincerely doubt it. I cant assume he feels as I would in thus situation because I literally couldn't GET into his situation.
I really, seriously doubt this. He's laughing all the way to the bank.
He didn't? He didn't hurt his employees, his investors, his contractors, and so forth? He didn't hurt the the tech space (WeWork is not a tech company, but they're widely perceived to be) by reducing even further what little trust it still has?
They will as soon as they have enough cash to pay severance: https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/03/wework-layoffs/
I think the guy is a piece of excrement, probably simonh thinks he's a piece of excrement as well. However, he did what he did out in the open. He just did it with jaw dropping temerity. No one participating in this whole affair can claim to have been victimized. He asked for all of them to consent to the insane, and they gave him what he wanted, hearty consent.
It's a cautionary tale to me, of how greed can blind what are normally relatively intelligent people. Don't let greed blind you when evaluating startups.
This part:
> Contractors may not have known, but certainly had access to the same information everyone else had and could have known had they actually reviewed the information.
is unreasonable, in my opinion, but perhaps I wasn't clear on what I meant by "contractors". I wasn't talking about IT contractors, but about all the rest -- the companies providing office supplies, janitorial services, and so forth.
Nothing I said expressed this attitude.
This really hinges on how much he has upset MbS who will shortly have a trillion dollars if the Aramco IPO happens. He is a man with a ruthless reputation.
What if Adam now becomes a great angel investor? Life is like that , all twists and turns , and the ToS says it's not guaranteed to be fair.
He tried to. Had the IPO gone through it would have fleeced billions from "institutional investors" (i.e. pensions and 401ks).
Anyone can borrow $50,000 for a new car, $500,000 for a new home, or $5,000,000 in venture capital if they are connected enough. But there is simply no money available for anything outside of mainstream status quo thinking. That's why the Ubers and Airbnbs and WeWorks in these times are founded on hustling and even skirting laws in some cases.
That's great and everything (I guess?), but I am personally tired of the hustling/hacking mentality. I'd like to see real progress in the standard of living for everyone in the world. That's founded on the idea of self-actualization, that everyone has the modest resources needed to start their own business or invent the things that help themselves and their communities.
How many people here have been on verge of financial ruin trying to get their ideas off the ground? I've been up, I've been down, but overall I've basically been running on empty for over 20 years. I'm tired of it. I didn't expect my career to turn out this way. And I'm deeply concerned about a looming recession forcing otherwise capable, intelligent people to scrape by underemployed, doing menial work to make rent because there isn't enough capital flowing. Because it's all locked up in a few wealthy peoples' hands, who have a very Laissez-faire view of economics.
All of the above is why I'm almost certain now that hard times are coming as early as next year. I've already been through it twice with the dot com bust and housing bubble popping, and we're overdue for the next downturn.
^^^ Note that this wasn't always the case. There were protections in place like the Glass-Steagall Act that lessened these boom-bust cycles, which were overturned by the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act and others. What we've been going through with this vast increase in wealth inequality is by design.
I was born in 1977 so I remember when it wasn't this way. But many of you reading this now were born after the corruption was instated and might not realize how honestly affluent middle class Americans felt in the 1980s and 1990s.
It can be that way again, but please, look beyond private sector solutions to these problems. The government is We the People, not some specter out to get us. I know that many of you live in Silicon Valley and other big cities that suffer from high taxes or government micromanagement, but I live in Idaho and have seen how the lack of government can lead to widespread poverty and environmental degradation.
Laws can change and movements do happen, which is why I'm optimistic that reforms are also coming and that we might finally see some relief in the 2020s.
To actually get anything, you should ask for 10-15 million in seed capital.
If you want, you can imagine him as a diabolical genius who explicitly set out to short the unicorn bubble and then walked away barefoot with a jaunty whistle and $700 million of SoftBank’s money, but that does not strike me as necessary or accurate. My model doesn’t require you to think that your startup is dumb! You don’t need to worry about Neumann’s personal beliefs and motivations at all, really. You can just think of him as a product of the invisible hand of the market. A lot of money was pouring into startups, there was a lot of demand, and the demand called forth supply, and the people who supplied the supply got rich; it is elemental and straightforward and has very little to do with questions like “is this a good business model?”[0]
“Capitalism occasionally makes huge mistakes,” is part of the story, but the other part is that there are rich rewards for those who spot the mistakes and bet against them. This is a lesson specifically of financial capitalism: In most businesses you can notice a competitor doing a dumb thing and create value by doing a better thing, but the financial markets are special because you can notice a competitor doing a dumb thing and get rich by taking the other side, without creating value or doing a better thing. If you notice that people are buying dumb unicorn shares for too much money, you don’t have to invent a better way of doing business or of funding companies. You can just sell them as many as possible of the dumbest possible unicorn shares; when the bubble bursts, you collect your winnings. This sort of thing—getting rich by being smarter than your counterparties, making markets more efficient by being on the right side of bets—is a classic path to wealth creation in the financial business. Tech, traditionally, has a different ethos, one of getting rich by changing the world. But sometimes there are crossovers, and anyway maybe WeWork was never really a tech company.[1]
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-02/the-tr...
[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-23/how-do...
They have to tell them with "authenticity", after all.
Unfortunately, you can see large consequences when it’s not given it up.