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Comment by fijiaarone | Hacker News Reader

Can you explain why we pay Sam Altman & Elon Musk? Or Jeff Bezos & Bill Gates? They’re just middlemen collecting money for other people’s labor.

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You are welcome to try to cut them out and start your own business. But I suspect you might find it a bit harder than your employer signing up for a SaaS AI agent. Actually wait, isn't that what this website is? Does it work?

This is backwards. Those people got into the positions they have by having money to spend, not because someone wanted to pay them to do something. (Or they had a way to have control over spending someone else's money.)

Do people on Hacker News actually believe this? Each one of the four people named built a product I happily pay for! Then they used investment and profits to hire people to build more products and better products.

There's a lot of scammers in the world, but OpenAI, Tesla, Amazon, and Microsoft have mostly made my life better. It's not about having money, look at all the startups that have raised billions and gone kaput. Vs say Amazon who raised just $9M before their $54M IPO and is still around today bringing tons of stuff to my door.

The most successful scammers will provide you with something of value and then act to swindle you and many others of multiple times the amount of "value" they're generating. With Musk and their friends it seems to be the pattern.

Musk sells several things. Electric cars for $40k-$100k. Satellite internet for $40-$120 per month. X/Grok premium for $8/mo. And space launch services for about $2,500 per kg. Which one(s) of these are the scam? Prices seem decent to me, but if you tell me where I can get cheaper and better I'm open to it.

The "scam" part of Tesla has been well-documented, from their failure to deliver reliable full self-driving to the Cybertruck's low quality manufacturing, there is a lot of information out there about it.

I can't comment on the other things.

comma.ai owns a lot of cars, including a Tesla, so I have tried most cars in the price range. Tesla is certainly no more of a scam than the other cars, and compared to say, the Chevy Bolt, it's a lot better. Can you suggest a better car for the value? Is there another car I can buy with better full self driving?

They are a bridge between those with money and those with skill. Plus they can aggregate information and act as a repository of knowledge and decision maker for their teams.

These are valuable skills, though perhaps nowhere near as valuable as they end up being in a free market.

A mistake lies in thinking it’s a market, but it’s egregious you’d call it free

The free market is an analyzable simplification of the real market, however I think the assumptions hold in this case.

If a CEO delivers a certain advantage (a profit multiplier) it's rational that a bidding war will ensue for that CEO until they are paid the entire apparent advantage of their pretense for the company. A similar effect happens for salespeople.

The key difference between free and real markets in this case is information and distortions of lobbying. That plus legal restrictions on the company. The CEO is incentivized to find ways around these issues to maximize their own pay.

Sounds like skills that bots already do better than humans.

Scam Altman and Musk are paid to manipulate stock markets and enrich themselves and their friends.

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