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Comment by silexia | Hacker News Reader

Massive numbers of jobs as billionaires by definition are building highly successful large companies. Being on the cutting edge of science and technology. Improvements to all of our lives from better goods and services.

If you hate billionaires, then stop buying any goods off Amazon or from any other billionaire owned company. My guess is your quality of life will drop precipitously.

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Ignoring OpenAI due to when this article came out of the Fortune 500 one company was less than a decade old.

https://247wallst.com/special-report/2023/05/06/youngest-com...

Given we now have 2,500 billionaires how can they not manage to come up with new ideas that create companies any faster than that?

The reality is most billion dollar companies are made through mergers to reduce market competition not actually creating new things.

Majority weren’t billionaires when they started their successful companies.

Their successful companies (the employees) and the government, policies, and environment around them are the things that make them successful.

Billionaires mostly hoard assets. Important assets that you need (not want, need) to live.

I don't hate billionaires. They just shouldn't have that much money. NO ONE should have that much money. In fact, back in the 80s, virtually no one did. Remember when Bill Gates was the richest person in the world in 1995? And he had $13b of MSFT stock. Now the 10 richest people all have 10-20x that. That's not inflation (which is only 3x since then), that's an incredible increase of wealth concentrated in their hands, that gives them the power to light our industrial society on fire if they want. And some of them do want.

A cumulative total return of the S&P 500 since 1995 is about 2,467% (or roughly 25.7× your original investment).

Right, so a sensible society would tax capital gains more than labor, but since we didn't do that, the lion's share went to the already wealthy. For no reason other than being wealthy.

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