Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

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Every one of us has run into situations where choosing to be honest has materially cost us. You accidentally scratch a parked car on your way out. Do you stop and leave a note with contact info or not?

The richer you are, the more leverage you have and larger the material cost for these situations. A fellow rich friend gives you a little insider info that a stock you hold is about to crater. Do you sell some?

In other words, being honest is a tax, and the wealthier you are, the higher that tax rate. Given that, I think the only way to reach certain levels of wealth is by not paying that tax.

Therefore, I treat anyone at Musk's level of wealth as intrinsically untrustworthy. You don't get to be a billionaire by being a normal honest human. And if by miracle you should happen to, being a billionaire I think fundamentally changes your psychology such that you cease to be normal and honest. There may be exceptions, but I think they are exceedingly rare.

Billionaires are functionally a different species.

> being honest is a tax

Being honest is an investment in an honest society and a just future. Of course, the problem with being honest is that, as with any ideological conflict, those who volunteer for the front lines make the most sacrifices, and have to trust that the tide will someday turn in favor of their side, even though they may never see it happen. So there's a lot of "you go first" noise instead of active effort to walk the talk.

Nonetheless this trending fad of referring to any cost that has no obvious immediate benefit to the payer a tax is starting to outgrow the original, and usefully narrow, scope it once had.

It would be equally valid, semantically, (and I would argue more valid prescriptively) to observe that having to constantly verify at great expense what in an honest society you could you could otherwise trusted at nearly zero expense, is the more costly and pernicious "tax" on total human productivity.

I probably should have been clearer that I believe strongly that it's a tax worth paying. My point was just that I think it's statistically extremely unlikely for a consistently honest person to become obscenely wealthy because the cost/benefit proposition gets worse and worse the richer you are. It's relatively easy to walk away from a dishonest deal that nets you a hundred bucks. But it takes a lot more character to walk away from a dishonest deal that nets you a hundred million.

I tend to assume (possibly without sufficiently compelling evidence, but I'm allowed to believe what I want) that anyone who's reached stratospheric wealth has done so by not walking away from some of those shady deals.

You may be right that "tax" is not a good metaphor.

> to observe that having to constantly verify at great expense what in an honest society you could you could otherwise trusted at nearly zero expense, is the more costly and pernicious "tax" on total human productivity.

I agree 1000%. The value of a society made of honest people is radically improved efficiency.

> My point was just that I think it's statistically extremely unlikely for a consistently honest person to become obscenely wealthy because the cost/benefit proposition gets worse and worse the richer you are.

From experience this completely lines up with what I have seen, in my almost 40 year career. I've watched serial entrepreneurs to things I would never dream of. It was then I knew, I'd never be rich.

The only quibble I have with your idea: it's not just billionaires. Of course, there are more millionaires who are still honest, but the percentage compared to the non-millionaire working population is much lower.

When you own and run a business, you are constantly confronted with decisions that have a good and bad path. The bad path, for me, is when I answer "yes" to the question "will this make it harder for me to sleep well at night?" Those decisions came up so often early in my career. I pride myself on how well I sleep at night, but I'm not rich.

If anything I'd say it's the opposite. A random person can get away with cons and scams for a long time. Whenever they get caught, they can just set up shop somewhere else. They can change their name (or simply lie to others about their name). Famous people can't do that. If you're famous, you can commit one scam before your reputation is ruined. Even if the story manages to avoid the news, people talk and word spreads. The incentives are such that a purely selfish billionaire sociopath is better off being honest.

Also, being extremely rich makes you a target for ambitious or activist prosecutors. Everything everywhere is securities fraud.[1][2] Whether you're hung out to dry or not is determined by how much your behavior has annoyed people in certain departments of the US government, or how much you've annoyed their friends.

1. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...

2. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-06-22/everyt...

Trump University was a scam - it didn't stop Trump from being elected.

He paid the price for that (and other things) via lawsuit settlements. Trump also had successful business ventures, so people saw him as a mixed bag. On another note, you don't need to be virtuous to be elected - just look at most politicians.

https://internationalbusinessguide.org/trump-business-career...

The names of the CEOs of every major MLM are out there but many of them probably live very easy lives unhampered by the obvious lies.

Alex Jones got away with it for 20 years before his own hubris of not complying with the courts took him down a peg.

Tons of celebrities ran their own pump-and-dump cryptos and their reputations are doing just fine.

Rich people just grift differently imo.

Exactly. Most like free of any consequence, and often above the law a la Russian interference, tax fraud, Jan 6, Mar-a-Lago documents

Then why can't I go to any news site without seeing a fresh new story of some rich/famous person getting caught red-handed being terrible and then gaining popularity from it?

I think what you are talking about is morality and not honesty. Musk is brutally honest - with the people he works with, with the investors, with his followers on twitter and everyone. He is brutally honest by letting them know on their face what he thinks is right and wrong. I would argue that not being honest about something wouldn't make you move forward.

You can be brutally honest and immoral at the same time. Not leaving a note for scratching a parked car is being immoral to someone.

Morality doesn't get you up the ladder because there are certain hard decisions you need to make. You may argue that dishonesty can take you up. I think dishonesty can only take you so far. It definitely can't get you to become someone like Musk.

> Musk is brutally honest - with the people he works with, with the investors, with his followers on twitter and everyone. He is brutally honest by letting them know on their face what he thinks is right and wrong.

He is brutally honest when it benefits him. But he is completely willing to lie when it suits him. See:

https://elonsbrokenpromises.com/

Or search for "Musk broken promise" or "Musk failed prediction" to see many other examples. You might argue that, "Well, he honestly intended these things to pass." But at his level of power, I believe there is a moral obligation to be reliable in one's public predictions.

The wealthier you are, the bigger the cost of certain actions, sure.

I'm not at all convinced that the rate gets higher. I'll go ahead and bet the opposite, that the cost of being honest represents a smaller fraction of your wealth as you have more.

Somewhat analogous to "fuck you money". If you badly need a job, you have to be silent about many issues.

I disagree but I think what you’re saying applies for most billionaires.

I don’t think Yvon Chouinard is a liar though, for example.

This is a really insightful comments right up to "Given that".

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