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Comment by kklisura | Hacker News Reader

Judging by his net worth he hasn’t done anything for us, he did it all for himself

The reason he has money is because he built products and services that people willingly exchanged their money for.

While true, his wealth is 99% speculative.

Elon has a closed box that he has successfully convinced a lot of people that there is a lot of money inside, and sold them small stakes in the contents, and promised year after year for 10+ years that this will be the year he opens it.

So the people who lament that he is a trillionaire have nothing to worry about then. It is just paper "wealth" that the market will pull back down to earth

Even if his 1T is speculative and undeserved he still has extreme power from that wealth. And there’s no indication that the bottom will fall out any time soon, so I think the lamenting is justified.

Such a boring statement.

Many people have built products used by far more people, that have generated far more utility, and accumulated far less personal wealth. These things aren't connected.

It's possible that the first sentence is true. Open source software comes to mind. However, that doesn't undermine the point that the reason he has money is because he built things other people wanted to buy. The fact that other people chose to forgo monetary rewards for their creations, or gave away their money, is not relevant to the question of whether he provided value to others.

The most dangerous oversimplification facing the human species.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

How do you figure? Trying to understand and hoping you can walk through your logic

Not an native english speaker, but someone "doing something for me" is not (me buying products and services from that someone|selling products and services to me).

So your main observation is that he never gave you anything for free. Okay.

He has created the second most millionaires out of direct employees behind Microsoft. Many, though not all, of those new millionaires have been blue-collar workers (not office workers), unlike the case for Microsoft produced millionaires. So, from that PoV, he's done good for his employees.

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