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Comment by dfadsadsf | Hacker News Reader

Any article about wealth that does not put age at the center is garbage.

When you do that, you'll find that people at 25-35 , XX years ago, held significantly higher share of total wealth than now.

Will I also find something that actually vaguely resembles a population pyramid instead of 2020’s squeezed tube of toothpaste? i.e. proportionally more 25-35 year olds & infinitely fewer 35+?

https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/1...

You can try 1960. Less 25-35 year olds, more 50+ than in 1990, and way more kids.

https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/1...

Angry that old people have more time to accumulate wealth!

Government needs to step in and fix that!

Old people have the most unequal (between them) share of overall wealth than ever before.

Yay, free market!

Compared to later generations, they don’t actually!

This is a distraction. Elon Musk has more wealth than a person who saved 1 MM per year for 300,000 years. While an old person is likely to have 20x the saved income of their younger year's - wealth inequality is driven by capital holders amassing more capital and in turn passing it on via inheritance.

What's wrong with Elon Musk? He deserves it! He single handedly brought forward the EV revolution by at least 1 decade, maybe more. He improved the car emissions more than governments worldwide were not able to do for decades before him. EU made it significantly worse by betting on the wrong horse (diesel) and then pushing very hard on it and giving cancer to its citizens.

Bill Gates put a computer in every home

Steve Jobs put a smartphone in every hand (for better or worse)

Bezos revolutionized online shopping AND cloud computing.

Why wouldn't these people be billionaires?

Governments could never achieve this kind of progress, they are too bureaucratic, corrupt and incompetent. Take away the billionaires' money now, and you will stop the next big innovation.

All of them started with money and connections, do you think that these things would not exist without these individuals? or perhaps they just happened to be there first in a winner takes all market. In at least Bill Gates case he wasn't first, just better connected (having a Vice President at IBM for an uncle certainly helps!)

>do you think that these things would not exist without these individuals?

In the case of Elon, no. The technology foundation for SpaceX had been around for decades, with no traction.

I'm less familiar with Tesla and EVs, but several people seem to think Tesla advanced the EV industry 5-10 years relative to where it would be in a world without Musk

None of them "invented" the thing that made them rich, but that thing didn't become a worldwide sensation until they did it!

Smartphones were built by Nokia and Microsoft in the 2000s. Computers were thing way before MS, but still it needed Bill Gates' genius to make them ubiquitous. EVs were along for 100+ years...Modern EVs were just ridiculous: ugly and small, nobody wanted to buy them. Musk made the EVs sexy and desirable, and mainstream now.

There were many many people with money and connections, yet only some changed the world and became billionaires in the process, don't you think that deserves the recognition? I personally don't like either of the people I talked about, but you must give credit where credit is due.

Credit? Sure, they can take 100x the value of the median engineer who worked on the project.

Smartphones failed for a bunch of reasons in the 2000s, recognizing the convergence of touch screens, and mobile broadband was pretty smart. It likely would have happened within 6-12 months of when it did, if an engineer/pm failed to convince Steve jobs that the iPhone was a good idea.

But you see, they provide much bigger value than just 100 engineers put together. All the engineering was already in place for smartphones, yet it didn't happen until Jobs made it so. No amount of regular engineers would have made it happen. No amount of bureocrats either. Packing the idea and selling it, gaining momentum in appstore, needed a revolutionary vision, not a mere 100x person.

Singlehandedly? Surely a lot of the people employed at Tesla worked too.

And even if he did do something great, plenty of us don't think it is right for people to own that much wealth. Would Musk have really stopped if he knew that he couldn't possess more than a billion dollars? Is "I want to be a megabillionaire" really the only thing pushing innovation?

But it's not about engineering at all! This is not about who invented what, but about who drives a tech to new highs by inspiring engineers, investors and customers at the same time to create momentum.

Tesla is not an engineering marvel, it's not about that. All the tech already existed, the batteries were Panasonic, "self drive" was researched way before them by Mercedes, BMW etc.

It's an interesting idea to limit people's wealth a 1 billion. Would you include stock in there? I assume most of these billionaires don't own more than 1 billion in cash anyway.

If you cap them at 1 billion, I assume it would be by the government forcibly confiscating their money? That means they will not have funds to further invest in their dreams. Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook all really took off way after exceeding 1 billion for their founders. Would you have preferred to not have these large companies succeed just for the purpose to achieve a slightly less unequal world?(that is also significantly poorer too). The bull market of the past decade was mainly driven by the large tech companies, without them you would have had a stagnating US economy.

> He single handedly

....How does this level of 4chanism even fly on HN..

Do you really think Elon Musk provides orders of magnitude more value than the engineers who actually built the damn thing? His main contribution was the capital.

Of course a leader provides tens or hundreds of times the value of a follower, what an absurd question.

But that doesn't mean it's reasonable that he collects 10000 times more of the value. There is so functional difference between having 1 or 10 billion, except the amount of undue influence you can have on politics.

When the form of wealth is stock, the functional difference between having 1 or XX billion is corporate control of the company.

If your point is that it's important for founders to keep control, then sure, but you can have different classes of shares. Founders can stay in control of their companies without making tens of billions.

In the US, I guess this is true, although non-voting/low voting shares are illegal in many parts of the world.

>Of course a leader provides tens or hundreds of times the value of a follower, what an absurd question.

Why is this of course? If it weren't for the followers the leader would have nothing except hot air.

The real value is in the followers, it's just distributed over larger numbers. Maybe I'm missing something, but someone actually has to do the work and it's not normally the "leaders"...

There are a lot of small businesses getting a really hard education in this right now.

Because followers are interchangeable, but a leader is someone that wills something into being from nothing. It's incredibly demanding, most people can't even start a hot dog stand from scratch.

Why is it an absurd question? You haven't justified this "tens or hundreds" figure at all, just called it absurd.

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