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Comment by yellowbanana | Hacker News Reader

This has nothing to do with motivation,

If you start a company and that company becomes succesfull you will end up rich.

> Being a CEO/leader doesn't require some skill set that's given to you from some mythical watery being just because you're special.

Controlling a company requires shares, and shares are networth, it is good that companies are controlled by people who most understand them, and those are the people who started/built them.

There seems to be an illogical hate to people who have build companies that ended up being successfull.

If you are a small business ( non mega successfull company ), everyone is with you, "Small businesses are the backbone of our economy ", but then you win.

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Controlling a company requires shares, and shares are networth, it is good that companies are controlled by people who most understand them, and those are the people who started/built them.

Voting shares don't have to have monetary value. Rememeber Google's IPO where the founders had stock with 10 votes per share, or Berkshire Hathaway's Class B stock with 1/10000th the voting rights as class A?

So a founder could retain control of a company without becoming personally rich.

Aren't those classes of stock with voting power worth a lot more? I'm not sure how you'd possibly avoid being rich on paper if you have a majority voting power for Google.

Not necessarily, for example Facebook supervoting shares were setup to convert to normal shares if transfered, making them only more valuable to the original holder.

Okay, interesting. I'm guessing those people typically had many normal shares too, right? Otherwise if they're given a fairly small financial stake, and have no skin in the game -- I'm guessing that most investors wouldn't like that?

> Voting shares don't have to have monetary value.

I would think the power to control a large company would be worth at least something even if it is decoupled from the right to get part of any money they decide to give to stockholders.

> Voting shares don't have to have monetary value.

:facepalm:

If you control a company worth $1T, someone is going to be willing to buy your share. If you're implying that voting shares don't have to be transferable, the question becomes how do you pick the next leader? The current owner gets to appoint the next in line? That's basically monarchy. The history I was taught says that only those at the top thrive under monarchy.

How is that different than the current situation? If I own a controlling share of a company, I don't have to sell my shares to the highest bidder, I can decide to transfer them to my grandmother. Why does it matter if money is exchanged or not?

> There seems to be an illogical hate to people who have build companies that ended up being successfull [sic].

Companies are comprised of people and people do not like giving up control they have fought for, whether it is reasonable or not. It is difficult for many to avoid the temptation to use a position of power unethically to retain it. Nobody wants to be RIM/Blackberry, but it's neither okay for a company like Qualcomm to make immensely inequitable deals that are tantamount to extortion because they own patents on essential technology.

If you're the only game in town, you have a responsibility to act reasonably, but many do not and often the founders/execs seem to think they are entitled to keep their success.

Yes, you earned your success, but keeping it is another fight.

>Controlling a company requires shares, and shares are networth, it is good that companies are controlled by people who most understand them, and those are the people who started/built them.

Yes, indeed this is how things work in this particular system, so you are kind of making a circular argument.

For instance, I disagree with the whole concept of joint-stock companies.

Cool! Let’s have that argument in a world where joint stock companies don’t exist…

A lot of people seem to be in the mindset that it'll never be them so it should never be anyone else. It's not just in the US, here in the Uk we have the same mindset too.

A lot of people dislike/hate Elon Musk for example, and usually they focus on two things: his tweets, and his wealth. Conveniently forgetting that prior to his work at SpaceX and Tesla (which he's driven) reusable rockets weren't a thing and EVs were restricted to oddities laughed at on Top Gear.

It seems to be the way, people look at the wealth and think "well that shouldn't happen". But it doesn't come from no where, it doesn't just appear.

For anyone who thinks this wealth shouldn't appear, let me ask this: if someone could discover a cure for all cancers — how much should they be allowed to earn for it? I.E. What price would you put on the cure for all cancers?

You're right that it doesn't come from nowhere. It comes from the people who are actually doing those amazing things: the workers.

I think most of this sentiment comes not because of wealth in itself but how it was achieved.

majority of billion dollar companies are associated with bad behaviour : anticompetitive practices, shady deals, government subsidies etc. amazon got billions in subsidies just for opening second headquarters. amazon is selling ripoffs of big brands. worker rights abuses. microsoft did many things to eliminate competition. list goes on and on. and I’m not even talking about uber’s shady projects to avoid government agencies.

so when success gets achieved by scams and shady behaviour, probably it’s not much to celebrate and reward.

> amazon got billions in subsidies just for opening second headquarters

Because it’s going to spend far more there. Nearly all large commercial builds get similar deals in tax deferrals because having employment is still a big net win for the locality.

> For anyone who thinks this wealth shouldn't appear, let me ask this: if someone could discover a cure for all cancers — how much should they be allowed to earn for it?

Say 50 million?

> I.E. What price would you put on the cure for all cancers?

100 billion?

You've asked two separate questions there, but you're implying that the answer to one is the same as the other.

Just because you are capable of extracting a certain amount of wealth in exchange for something, does not mean that you should be able to.

So if I make a pill that cures cancer, _it_ is worth 100bn, but I am only worth 50m?

how does that make any sense?

It can makes sense if you take the position that medicine patents should be heavily reformed.

Shoulders and giants - there's no way you actually fully independently discover a cancer-curing pill. And even if you did, its existence would not and should not belong fully to you.

that still doesn't make sense. if I make $50bn I am worth a significant amount of that, if not most of it.

> its existence would not and should not belong fully to you

...if I didn't make it, it doesn't exist, so it fully belongs to me ..................

Ive done basic research, even worked in a lab that was doing cancer related research.

Whatever you do now, anything, is not just your own genius but its the accumulated genius of society. It would be quite literally impossible for anyone that "cures cancer" to have done it on their own. Not only it is extremely unlikely that they could do all work just by themselves (though possible) but they will have to rely on the work others have put through out the years... Work that in most cases has been funded through tax money!

So why would one person at the end of the line get to benefit so much from the collective work put by all of humanity to that point?

>So why would one person at the end of the line get to benefit so much from the collective work put by all of humanity to that point?

because the possibility of being the one to finally crack would be what motivates every preceding researcher as well.

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