It should be pretty clear to anyone at this point that all you need is a laptop, programming skills, a good idea, and a lot of luck to become a billionaire. You don’t need thousands, let alone millions, of employees labouring for you.
Name a company with a billion dollars in revenue that is, or could be, operated solely by someone with a laptop and programming skills.
Indeed. There's a big difference between 1 person and a team of hundreds.
I definitely would not describe myself as a socialist (I have an academic background in economics) but it's pretty clear that the labor theory of value is not contradicted in the slightest by citing examples of lone rent-seekers.
And what of users? The value in social media companies, for example, comes from the number of users, who provide free labor in producing content.
Write code that makes those computers $0.01-$0.10 more valuable for human being, multiply by large number of humans paying yearly.
Billion dollars, easy
While central to Marx’s writing, the LTV isn't particularly essential to socialism (that labor is essential to the production of value is, the LTV itself is not).
> It should be pretty clear to anyone at this point that all you need is a laptop, programming skills, a good idea, and a lot of luck to become a billionaire.
Or ownership of sufficient quantity of the means of production and a lot less luck. But, though there are reasons to question the LTV, I'm not sure how the high value of of some particular labor that requires only minor capital to realize in any way figures I to such criticism.
But that's silly. We see celebrities generating tremendous amounts of economic value by the "labour" of taking a selfie. To emphasize the labour is like focusing on the discarded cigarette butt instead of the thousands of acres of dry tinder it landed in.
Or ownership of sufficient quantity of the means of production and a lot less luck
People who own factories needed a lot of luck to get there as well. What real difference does it make whether I earn a billion dollars with a factory or a laptop? Or are they roughly equivalent in power and my laptop ought to be collectivized? That doesn't seem right.
Well, and their and various publicists and promoters labor that went into creating the environment for the reception of that selfie, and lots of other people's labor on the things that made the celebrity a celebrity, whether it's the labor that went into building a business that made the family name for someone like Paris Hilton, or the labor that went into making movies or TV shows for celebrities manufactured in Hollywood, or the labor that went into political campaigns for celebrities of political origin.
Heck, even celebrities who have “made it” like Kevin Costner can still produce something like “Waterworld” while complete nobodies like JK Rowling can launch themselves to mega stardom by writing a novel while commuting on the train.