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Comment by beloch | Hacker News Reader

>I hire more employees and I take $50k profit per house but I build 20k houses and make $1B. I earn $1B.

This is the "rock star" fantasy. You do something that becomes wildly popular and can then walk away while still making epic amounts of cash. You didn't earn that $1B through continuous effort. It was all made by your initial idea. It just takes time for the cash to be delivered in full.

Do you deserve to profit off a good idea? Yes, and few would contest that. Do you deserve to profit so much that you never have to work another day in your life? Should the system let people retire after having one good idea? That's going to seem like a sub-optimal system to many. However, its important to note that ideas take capital to implement, and it's much more typical for rock star rewards to go to those with the capital than those with the ideas. That's a system that many more will find to be flawed.

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This sub optimal system is what has (at times) led to massive growth of disruptive technologies and platforms.

People got reasonably mad at Apple’s iron fisted control of the App Store and access to its platforms.

It got to the point that there was political will to force Apple to change. (Sort of, in some circumstances)

But during the golden age of the App Store, when Angry Birds came out—-it wasn’t something people were hemming and hawing about the fairness of distribution platforms it was more like: “wow! iPhone! Check out this game! Everyone is playing this thing, Jack White is playing it. You too can have this game for a few bucks, can you believe this?”

It is only after Apple had ridden the horse a good long while and reaped what came to be outsized profits and using the thing to control competition over an extended period that something really was done about it. (Sort of)

There are many other examples of this kind of thing.

Compensated creative expression has somewhat relied on it in the form of intellectual property, which has built in albeit relatively toothless expiration.

But even IP is under greater threat than ever with gen AI. Just look at what fans are doing with the Star Wars franchise on YouTube right now.

Anyhow, I agree with the system is flawed but I mean to point out that deciding a person or company has reaped enough for their thing is something we do on a case by case basis.

It is not easy to say when to say to someone or something has been compensated “enough.”

How much profit do they deserve exactly? How exactly is it calculated, and who decides how it is calculated? These questions aren't in bad faith, I'm genuinely curious how people with your world view would answer them.

I don't have an answer, but I don't think the framing should be about what they deserve or not. It should be around how much money an individual can have/control before it becomes detrimental to society.

What’s the going rate on purchasing a law or Supreme Court decision?

It's the execution, not the idea.

> You didn't earn that $1B through continuous effort

Why does it have to be earned through continuous effort? It seems like you’re defending a sweeping assertion (that you can’t “earn” $1 billion), but retreating to a narrower position based on a very specific definition of “earn.”

Yes, you can’t become a billionaire performing fungible labor compensated on a periodic (hourly or annual) basis. But I don’t see why that’s the dividing line between “earned” and “unearned.” A lawyer charging hourly will never become a billionaire. But there’s been a couple of lawyers (Joe Jamail, Mark Lanier) who became billionaires by securing enormous verdicts for their clients. Are you saying lawyers “earn” their money only if they charge hourly, but not if they get a share of the money they recover for their client?

That seems to be a weird definition of “earned” versus “unearned.” Maybe you can say that money is unearned when it’s inherited. Or that it’s unearned when it’s just accrued interest. Or that it’s unearned if it’s through socially questionable activities like high frequency trading. But most billionaires didn’t get their money in those ways.

They are rewarded, yeah. And then they could retire, or they could take that money and put it towards more good ideas, like what Elon has done his entire life.

If we don't have a system for that, then how would you incentivize people to take on bigger risks, bigger projects, etc?

Also, should the lottery not be a thing? What exactly are you advocating by this line of reasoning?

Consider what happens in academia.

Imagine that making a ground-breaking discovery in physics came with a prize of a billion dollars. One good idea, and you can retire. Would that not harm science? Many scientists would keep working after their first prize because it's what they love to do. Some would accuse them with being greedy after they've made a few more discoveries. "Hey, leave some money for the rest of us!"

What I'm trying to get at is that the rewards for certain things are badly out of whack with what is necessary to keep people both rewarded and motivated. At least, in terms of what is healthy for society and progress. In general, the closer people are to the money the more unreasonable the rewards are. Perhaps people who are further from the money but who contribute just as much (or more) to society are right to be concerned.

P.S. Musk bought companies with people who had a lot of good ideas and convinced governments (mainly the U.S. government) to pay for it. He's always been a capital guy, not an idea guy. He desperately wants to be in idea guy, but his ideas are things like re-branding Twitter to X and the Cybertruck.

> P.S. Musk bought companies with people who had a lot of good ideas and convinced governments (mainly the U.S. government) to pay for it. He's always been a capital guy, not an idea guy. He desperately wants to be in idea guy, but his ideas are things like re-branding Twitter to X and the Cybertruck.

Personally speaking, I am sympathetic to the idea that billionaires (especially Musk) are often created more by government policy than market forces. Although for some reason the push to stop governments minting billionaires by fiat seems rather weak, which makes me think a lot of people are being disingenuous on the topic. Or maybe just haven't thought about it much. There is a bizarre zeitgeist where first the government has to give a man billions of dollars because something needs to happen ASAP, then they have to take the billions away because nobody thought the thing needed to happen all that urgently.

There is an overlap in the vibe between the people who are unhappy that the government rewarded Musk and the people who, at the time, were clamouring that the rewards for things Musk was doing were too low. 10, 20 years ago it was all "there isn't enough funding for electric vehicles", "world is literally ending from climate change" and "who is going to put money into batteries".

I'm not saying capital guys have no place. Should they be rewarded to the tune of a trillion dollars though, especially if most of it ultimately came from government coffers? That seems extreme to me.

The people closest to the money are the people who have the most control over how and who its allotted to. We really ought to watch them more carefully.

So how much should they be rewarded? You suggest a cap? What prevents someone that's more poor than you deciding that you nobody needs to make more money than them, so now you should make less money?

Your narrative is self contradictory. In your own theory of what happened, Musk was the idea guy, not the capital guy! You said the government provided the capital. Why did the government provide the capital to Musk rather than GM or Boeing or Rockwell? Because he was the one who could actually develop what the government wanted to support.

It’s rewriting history to call Musk a “capital guy.” Tesla and SpaceX entered markets with huge, established competitors. Those companies had access to virtually unlimited capital. But EVs and commercial space travel were pipe dreams before Musk got involved. I graduated with a degree in aerospace engineering pre-SpaceX and the field was moribund. Your options were going to Boeing to make airliners 1% more efficient every decade or going to Lockheed or Rockwell to design better missiles for blowing up brown people. The idea that SpaceX was just about a “capital guy” coming in is 100% hindsight bullshit.

You’re also just completely factually wrong about “most of” anything “coming out of government coffers.” The government gave Tesla a $485 million loan that was fully repaid. SpaceX received about $500 million in grants. In both cases, that was a small fraction of the money invested into the companies. Tesla’s cumulative net loss was $6 billion before profitability. SpaceX’s cumulative net loss is $42 billion.

At most you have a fair argument that the government should take equity in companies instead of providing grants with no strings attached. But that would just mean that maybe the government should have a 10% share of SpaceX or whatever.

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