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Comment by Carrok | Hacker News Reader

> People are billionaires because they “share with society”. They take a small fraction of the wealth and surplus they create.

I truly cannot believe that anyone with an ounce of empathy or integrity could possibly believe a statement as absurd as this.

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One day it's all going to trickle down, just like they promised us, keep waiting! All that wealth is going to leak through and soak our empty pockets until they are heavy with gold! The Holy Gipper wouldn't lie to us.

You do realize that any broad-based improvement in overall living standards is a result of exactly that kind of process?

My sister in New Zealand uses StarLink because ADSL stopped working in the rural wops.

She gets more utility than she pays for (that's the one trick of capitalism).

Is that trickle down?

I feel bad for your sister. Only one reasonable option for an essential utility and all it costs your sister is hundreds a month plus sending all of her private data to a Nazi billionaire who is using it to train his AI while externalizing the costs of light pollution and space congestion/garbage onto the entire rest of the planet? It's looking like there's more than one trick to capitalism.

Why blame capitalism?

Maybe look for a better word that encompasses other political systems too - power?

There are many examples of surveillance states (and the best known examples were not labeled capitalist).

The surveillance you blame on Musk is the same from other ISPs - therefore your analysis is simply incorrect. She needs a VPN to avoid ISP snooping on the metadata (IP addresses used, DNS, etc).

And the US is a bigger snoop (Echelon, 5 eyes, Room 641A).

Our individual choices are limited in New Zealand (written on an iPhone - far more snoopy than my ISP).

Disbelief rarely alters reality. Eppur si muove.

Stating something as fact doesn’t make it so. :shrug:

Why is this absurd?

Two sorts of people become billionaires from share price increases. The founders and the early investors. Neither are thousands of times more impactful than the other early hires, but they get to keep billions of dollars while the early hires only get a handful of millions. And the slightly-less-early-hires who were too late to get equity usually get nothing more than their salary, regardless of their impact.

I don't have any problem with people getting insanely rich from stock price increases, but the argument that it's society sharing the value they created ignores the fact that they were only responsible for the initial foundations of that value, and not all the work that continues later.

> Neither are thousands of times more impactful than the other early hires, but they get to keep billions of dollars while the early hires only get a handful of millions.

That's a meaningful tradeoff of risk vs. return. If you choose to be an early hire rather than founding your own risky venture, that ultimately means you value the security of "only" getting millions over a lottery ticket that might or might not be worth billions.

Society shares in the value because - insofar as the company is now worth say $X - that's because they have some way to create value that justifies a price of $Y per year for N people. And for those N people to be willing to pay $Y, they presumably have to be getting more than Y value (otherwise they wouldn't bother). So the real consumer value minus $Y is the 'value' created - the consumer surplus. Obviously there are exceptions but I think this is true in general.

And re the impact of the founders/early investors, I agree that they didn't contribute 1000s of times more. But like, if I bet a million dollars on a sports games and I get bet right and make 5 million would you say I ought to pay the players who really did the work? It's not about "adding value" its about property rights. The the second tier of engineers isn't happy they can (and sometimes do) found a competitor.

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