Gates to students: Don’t try to be a billionaire, it’s overrated
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Just to get started, as long as we don't have clean water, plenty of food, proper healthcare, good education, meaningful personal freedom, and a well-functioning legal system for every human being in the world, cheap carbon-neutral energy, strong environmental protection and sustainable ecosystem conservation throughout the world, a cure for cancer, a complete genome and proteome and extended phenotype encyclopedia for all life on Earth, telescopes that can image Earthlike planets in other galaxies and the first stars to ignite in the extremely early Universe, robots crawling around under the surfaces of Europa and Enceladus and screaming through interstellar space toward Alpha Centauri and Epsilon Eridani, and human colonies on Mars and the asteroids and in the clouds of Venus, there will be plenty of interesting and valuable things to do for someone with tens of billions of dollars to throw at an ambitious project.
Maybe. But it doesn't particularly make me want to be a billionaire. If the main satisfaction you get out of having $100 billion dollars is giving it all away again, I'd rather let someone else make those $100 billion dollars and give 'em away.
I figure Bill Gates made $100 billion and gave it away so I wouldn't have to. Thanks Bill!
Anyways, the whole problem with trying to become a billionaire is that it's really a lottery. Sure, someone determined could probably earn a few million through effort alone, but becoming a billionaire requires a special mix of smarts, hard work, and luck. Mostly luck, disproportionately so. You can't just will yourself to earn billions.
Steve jobs?
The problem with doing is that it can be hard to make end meet while doing interesting work with long term payoffs. The options I can think of are:
1) Get an interesting job.
2) Fight tooth and nail to the top of the career/academic heap in a boring job and hope you make it to a position of being able to set your own interesting work while you still have brain cells.
3) Find an angel or patron who is prepared to pay for an interesting long shot.
4) Say hang it, and do interesting work while keeping your lifestyle within the modest remuneration you can scape together.
5) Part time work, with interesting stuff making up a full time load.
Can anyone suggest other options that might work with dependents?
I was really surprised to realise that my living costs are only about $130 per week, or $20 per day. If I could earn $20 every day, I could do whatever I want in the other 23 hours.
The Rothschild family is thought to have a net worth of a few trillion or thereabouts, so yeah. Of course, they do things with it.
Heads of state and CEOs have public wealth. The Rothschilds didn't.
http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=196892.0
Snopes most definitely is a disinfo website much like wikipedia
Anyway, I certainly can't find any evidence to support the contention that the Rothschilds are significantly wealthier than the wealthiest known people, and I don't believe it's possible to have a trillion dollars in assets while flying underneath the radar.
I have no idea how much money they have but I don't see why it would have declined. They have always been shrewd investors.
I doubt people that are great at creating value would appreciate making these kind of decisions once they get to know what's involved.
Just to give an example: an 8 year-old requested $50'000 from Bill and Melinda Gates foundation to help him survive by contributing to his leukemia treatment, but Gates turned the request down because they don't contribute to individual cases (their policy is to fund programs designed to target large groups of people, i.e. population control in Asia).
I don't imagine great founders or great engineers getting up in the morning because they dream in having a "point" to say in this kind of decisions. They love to do what they do best: creating something people want.
Using your example, Microsoft's creation of value to such a large consumer base couldn't have happened if there had been thousands of Microsofts equally successful (e.g. not thousands of companies can have a 90% market share in the same market at the same time, for company A to have 90% of market share of a market it means company B doesn't have it. Opportunity cost).
When you have thousands of people at the very very very top (.0001% cf 1%) that thousand of people would have to either extract wealth (not value, that's different) from the rest of the economy. There is only so much wealth to go around, regardless of how you represent it, whether its US Dollars or Friedman's island's stone money. Accumulation of wealth is relative.
The flaw in the argument is that you need one person with billions of dollars to throw at an ambitious project; of course we could also just decide to do those things collectively, and in fact have managed to do some amazing things that way.
I'm slowly weaning myself off of this damaging viewpoint. Something that has really helped have been TED Talks: it's awesome to see a room full of people - some of them hugely wealthy and successful - looking with absolute respect and awe at the presenter on stage talking about (say) the intelligence of crows.
This answer by Gates really helps further cement the idea in my mind that, yes, having more money is great to a point, but in the end, what have you DONE with your life? What have you MADE that brings value to the rest of the world? Those are the kind of things that bring true respect to you, from the rich and non-rich alike.
There's something about the way that money is discussed on HN that I find odd, but I haven't quite put my finger on it yet. Maybe it's that there can sometimes feel like a larger emphasis on politics or money than the things people have actually created... maybe. I'm not sure. I'm still working on figuring it out. Anyways, cheers to you!
But that's exactly what your parent is criticizing. There are genius people in the startup scene whose talents would be better applied to solve problems that actually matter, and not "optimize coupons".
The community could do so much more if it first asked, "what does this do for people?" rather than "does it make us a billion dollars?" There's plenty of opportunity out there -- especially if you focus on delighting your customers.
I haven't frequented Slashdot in years, but this is definitely the most striking difference between it (as I remember it) an HN.
Having gone through several large pay increases in my life, the really strange thing is that salary doesn't really affect that much. It slightly reduces stress about 'having enough' though most middle class (upper and lower) people can always be wiped out by disasters, and it only slightly improves your day to day life. When I was younger I'm sure I dreamed about making what I do today, but having gotten there I realize that if I were ever to arrive at my revised dream salary today it probably wouldn't change all that much.
Indeed, in the game of business, it does seem the most appropriate way to keep score. That doesn't mean business is the only game in town.
...or happiness.
I recently read "Stumbling on Happiness" which had an interesting discussion on the fact that there are several studies that show that pay raises up to around $45k per year result in an increase in happiness. But after that, an increases in salary brings only a marginal increase in happiness, if that.
So the question he raised is that if one doesn't receive additional happiness from earning more than $45k, what is the reason for doing so? Most other human actions are geared towards happiness. It really got me thinking about the subject.
But yeah, having a savings cushion while unemployment is rampant is satisfying.
The most depressing comment I read on HN was one guy telling a story about a sales manager he knew that encouraged his sales people to go into debt so they would be more motivated to earn more and therefore, make more sales.
I think the point of the $45k/year figure, though, is that you get no extra happiness from spending more than $45k/year. But being paid more than that helps 'keep score' in the sense that you know that someone really values your work -- particularly if you're able to compare with what other people are being paid.
Edit: I also sometimes wonder if there are differences related to social safety nets, and particularly health. It seems in the US that you need $millions to be completely certain that health issues couldn't financially ruin (or kill) you, so more money provides more security even when you're already fabulously rich. Whereas in most of Europe, if you're sick, you get treatment, so if you have a million euros in the bank you basically can't get any more security from money.
* There's a whirlwind introduction in my TEDx talk (http://mappin.es/TEDx), and I've published a survey paper on the topic (http://personal.lse.ac.uk/mackerro/happiness35000ft.pdf).
* I'd highly recommend the transcripts of 3 lectures by Richard Layard from 2003 (http://www2.lse.ac.uk/publicEvents/events/2003/20030106t1439...). They're what got me interested in the area.
It seems like it should be possible to convince people with some disposable income to put a substantial fraction of their extra money into actually saving the world. Giving What We Can (http://www.givingwhatwecan.org/) is one of the organizations trying to do this. Givewell (http://givewell.org) is doing research on cost-effectiveness -- and there's a HUGE range of cost-effectiveness among charities.
It seems you do need that initial dream to be about wealth in order to get some people to reach for success.
If you make $1B in a free market economy, you have also provided (at least) $1B in value to others. You need not have created it: you might simply have arranged for them to have it rather than other people.
An obvious example would be an extraordinarily effective thief, but one needn't be so blatant. For instance, the main effect of a successful investment advisor's work may be to transfer money from people who haven't taken her advice to people who have. (There may be some benefit to the -- presumably better-than-average -- companies she suggests investing in, but there's no reason why that should be large.)
I think one grievance of the OWS protestors is, roughly, that many of the richest people have got that way simply by arranging for their clients to have money at others' expense, rather than by creating value. Though they probably mostly wouldn't put it that way.
In a free market economy, one creates value and then exchanges that value for money. This means that in order for one person to get wealthy, it is not necessary for them to drain wealth from others. Equal value is exchanged.
In other words, one gets wealthy by making the pie bigger, not taking other peoples' pie.
In a free market, of course one can get wealthy by growing the pie. But one can also get wealthy without growing the pie, even when illegal or blatantly unethical actions are not involved.
For instance, consider a country with a perfectly free market, in which many of the people enjoy betting on horse races. These bets use a tote system, which means in effect that the odds are set automatically according to how betters are betting (and the owner takes a small cut from every bet, makes a steady profit, and gets rich). There are some professional betting advisors, who watch lots of races and monitor the appearance and performance of the horses. Some of them are very good at evaluating how likely a given horse is to win in a given race. They charge large fees.
Clients of a very good betting advisor will win more of their bets; they will, on average, lose less money at the races. They may even gain on average, if the other people betting haven't been well advised. If you bet without such good advice (or equivalent horse-assessing skills of your own) then you will, on average, lose more at the races than if the well-advised people weren't betting. The immediate effect of the betting advisors' work, on average, is simply to transfer money from people who aren't their clients to people who are. (And to themselves.)
These betting advisors certainly provide value to their clients. They may, if they're good enough and have many clients who bet a lot, be very handsomely paid and deserve every bit, in the sense that their clients gain more from the advice than they pay for it. But they have added no value at all to the world; they have not grown the pie.
If the advisors' advice is very good, they charge very large fees, and extremely cheap credit is not readily available, then someone wealthy can engage a betting advisor and reap a profit at the races that exceeds the advisor's fees, while someone less wealthy can't afford to pay an advisor. This may become an appealing investment activity for the wealthy. Effectively, what the advisors are then doing is to increase the price (for the majority) of betting on the horses, while diverting some of the profits to themselves and their clients. If the effective price increase is too large, no one unadvised will bet any more, the horse-racing business will collapse, and lots of people will be in trouble. (The people who actually organize the races and the betting will probably lower their prices to maximize their profits in the new situation, which will postpone that disaster.) But as long as that doesn't happen, everyone's still reasonably content. Compared with not having the betting advisors: (1) the people who organize the races will take less profit, (2) the betting advisors and their clients will take more profit, (3) ordinary betters will lose more, and (4) the actual results of the horse races will be entirely unaltered. Again, the advisors have not grown the pie; they and their clients gain at the expense of the unadvised betters and the people who organize the races and betting (the latter being the only ones who are actually adding any value in this scenario, by providing an activity that people enjoy more than they pay for it).
So, in this hypothetical scenario, betting advisors get wealthy neither by making the pie bigger nor by taking other people's pie, but by arranging for their clients to get more pie while other people get less.
(You might feel inclined to draw an analogy with, say, hedge funds in the real world. But the situations are not precisely equivalent, and I am not claiming that they are.)
People who engage in gambling, such as on horses, do so voluntarily. This means that they believe they are getting value for their money blown, even if you don't see the point in gambling yourself.
A lot of gamblers find gambling to be highly entertaining, even when losing. Personally, I find it dull.
Happiness/life satisfaction doesn't improve with more money. You need enough money to be comfortable (i.e., a roof over your head and food on the table), but after that it has no effect.
With $5M you buy an excellent house anywhere, send your kids to the best schools, drive a very nice car and have plenty of money left over for traveling the world. $5B will get you more houses, cars and a massive yacht, but why do you want those things? If you want it to beat your neigbours, then you'll always be unsatisfied since there'll always be people with more (except when you get to the level of Gates), but more importantly, people get used to good things. I have seriously impressive camera equipment. A few years ago I would have loved to own such high quality gear and would be using it all the time. But now, most of the time it sits on a shelf in my bedroom. And I imagine it would be exactly the same if I owned a Ferrari. Or a fleet of them.
And then you have the super-rich people problems, foremost is worrying about their children. A well-meaning relation telling them that they'll never have to work a day in their life isn't going to do much for their drive to do something with their life. And finally, most rich people, whether they're worth tens or hundreds of millions, don't consider themselves financially secure, but they think they would be if they increased their wealth by 25%...
"A man only has one stomach and one dick".
www.criterion.com
The declining marginal utility of money, defined
Gates. Hmm. I think computer is a great tool, but if by computer science we mean understanding queing theory and hashing and database indexes, not sure. But knowing how to write a program, prime numbers by algorithm is very interesting test of whether I know prime numbers. What’s really necessary? Geometry? No, probably not. But certainly a level of complex thinking valuable to be exposed to. Statistics very important. Where computer scientist falls in hierarchy, I don’t know."
Obviously elementary level students don't need to know queing theory etc. However, I think a lot games developers might disagree that Geometry is not really necessary. There's other uses as well I'm developing a web app for customizing products and I use Geometry every day.
Student question: Thoughts on health care reform?
Gates: I know a lot more about malaria and hash tables. I like hash tables and I dislike malaria.
Oddly enough, I know very few people personally who set out with an exact locus on their future net-worth. Many, in my and the upcoming generation, aspire to have meaning over / along with money.
Sorry but it's true.
I think a billionaire knows better about that.
I see such bad financial advice coming from those who obviously have never made money (shouldn't be surprising, I guess). And then when someone comes along who has made a lot of money, most people ignore what they have to say.
Well yeah. 1 million is pretty cool. It means you're free to do whatever you like.
Cause hey i'd be pretty happy with 1 million. Or half that. Or quarter that. Or less.
Still, I like to think that Bill Gates, having been a many-billionaire since the 1980s, has lost track of what the hell a mere million dollars is worth nowadays.
Not a billion dollars.
But yeah I always wondered what the threshold of wealth is when you literally can do anything you want without any thought to how much.
If you want to go to the bar and have a beer, you might already be rich.
If you want to go to Mars, you might never be wealthy.
Actually making a difference in this world.
Fuck anything for money's sake.
Even $10b isn't enough to accomplish every large goal, but being able to do cheap LEO satellite launch (space cannon), real free trade zones internationally, and robotic space missions to mars, the moon, etc. would be amazing. Plus anonymous electronic cash, and trusted computing.
"Gates: I didn’t start out with dream of being super-rich."
Is it the transcription or has Mr Gates interpreted the phrase "someone like you" in a very narrow way?
I assure you the A=B... part is not a random addition by me, she actually said this but I could not tell what it was based off of.
Really besides a few questions from students that I felt were a little off topic, Mr. Gate's presentation was really fascinating and I am more than glad that I was able to attend.
If A = B and B = C then A = C is an example of a transitive relationship in Maths.
At the department website it says the talk will be archived, but the link doesn't seem to be active:
For me watching the Kinect render the images so smoothly and immediately was pretty cool. Then again I was stuck 4 floors up and couldn't see anything.
I ended up leaving shortly after he started the Q&A. The crowd was too fanboyish for me to handle.
Other than that, and the ability to go anywhere you want, do anything you want within reason, and stay as long as you like -- yeah, I'm sure being a billionaire is overrated.
"Personally like to thank you for saving me winter algebra last year through Khan Academy investment."
"Africa, 800m today will be bigger than China or India, 20M in 2040. In terms of stability, education."
"Politics and role of web?"
"Student question on negative impact of technology."
I understand that he was just trying to get the gist across, but this is a news article. I would have rather read a more readable article an hour later.