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Comment by chadcmulligan | Hacker News Reader

Its not just tech bros though, anyone who's made lots of money from business is treated like they're the smartest person in the room by many people. The person who made millions from making a sugary drink and marketed it as something healthy is not necessarily pretty smart and more than likely isn't someone you want in charge of anything.

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> The person who made millions from making a sugary drink and marketed it as something healthy is not necessarily pretty smart and more than likely isn't someone you want in charge of anything.

Quite literally in the case of former Apple CEO John Sculley.

"not necessarily pretty smart" is a very nice way of putting it.

I don't know where the threshold ought to be, but beyond a certain size a pile of money can only indicate bad things about its owner. Either they're too unimaginative to turn that potential into action, or their designs are so against the will of the people that it's going to take gargantuan amounts of coercion to get them done. Either way, a billionaire is an individual of dubious merit.

Most rich people aren't sitting on piles of cash; their capital is (usually) invested in a corporation which is busy turning potential into action, as you put it. I think there's an argument to be made that amassing and hoarding great wealth, particularly near the end of one's life with the intent to pass it directly onto one's heirs, is morally questionable if you believe in any kind of universalist ethic. But I think criticizing someone as uncreative simply because they're not selling off all their equity to go pursue some other venture is way off

That sounds very good but it's difficult to square with the behavior of those corporations. Can it really be that the change all of these well meaning rich people want to see in the world is... products that spy on an manipulates their users, products that can't be repaired, and products that putting future generations at risk by damaging the environment?

Either these investments are not paying off, or they are and the investors have a very dark vision for us. Neither reflects very well on the investor.

> products that spy on an manipulates their users, products that can't be repaired, and products that putting future generations at risk by damaging the environment?

You seem to have a very narrow view of the range of products that exist. Are you basically just talking about smartphones?

When I wrote that I was thinking about the coersive trend of SaaS products in general, the labyrinthine firmware used by my HVAC system, and land investments that result in rainforests being burned to make room for more cows.

I would guess it's not so much that they "want to see this change" as much as "they want to make as much money as possible and don't care about these consequences"

Yeah, I agree. But of what use is that money, if not to ensure that you can shape the consequences according to your vision? If you have to make things worse to make money, and you need money to make things better, then a sane person would course-correct.

Beyond a certain point, supposing that your investments continue to yield monetary returns at the cost of making others tolerate worse outcomes, it's just an indicator that you're a junkie.

> Either way, a billionaire is an individual of dubious merit.

This sounds like the "poverty is a moral failing" argument in reverse. See eg https://unherd.com/2017/08/remembering-time-poverty-often-bl...

I think there's a pretty significant difference between criticizing somebody's lack of resources and criticizing somebody's allocation of resources. Both might be the result of choices they made, but the connection for the latter is much more obvious.

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