Paul Graham's response to AOC's statement on billionaires

There's only so much nuance you can convey in a few short sentences.

Really wish politicians wrote essays to persuade their case instead of just tweets or news interviews.

Further, not all startups become decacorns or megacorps. Small business exists, even though PG and the broader VC community would rather focus on the startups that make it huge. A sustainable business that employs 30 people, even under existing social structures, won't make the owner stunningly wealthy. And yet these businesses provide jobs just as well as the next uber or airbnb.

The people who design an iPhone are seldom millionaires, ditto for the people who write the software, the people who actually build them, and the people who buy them.

Startups may make billionaires, but that doesn’t mean those startups haven’t benefited primarily from no -billionaires.

More over the bulk of the money those billionaires have are either cash (so not contributing anything to anyone), or investment funds (eg not adding capital to new businesses, and not injecting money into the economy).

So the bulk of assets held by billionaires are only benefiting those billionaires, and then they aren’t actually doing anything with it except hoarding.

Billionaires don’t add value to the economy. Because one billionaire is never going to be spending more than 20 thousand times more than an average American. So they aren’t contributing proportional to the amount they benefit from the economy.

(Lesson: You don't need billionaires per se, but you do need startups, and startups cause billionaires.)"

Twitter and all but "startups cause billionaires"? Really?