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Comment by markdennehy | Hacker News Reader

Wow.

You do get, don't you, that there's no real difference between personal wealths of $100 million and $1000 million? And that there shouldn't be? Why do so few people get that there's a ceiling here? You earn enough money so that you can live off the interest of what's in your bank account, and congratulations, your financial worth is now $MAX.

Seriously. $MAX is a real thing in the real world. It's where you can stop working for money and start spending all your life with your kids, or doing the things you want to do regardless of the mortgage and the food bills and the school bills and so on.

Folks who think $MAX is a naive concept... need to grow up a little bit and remember that life ends and if you don't enjoy it during it, you don't get to enjoy it afterwards.

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There is a big difference. A person with a wealth of $100 million shouldn't be called a billionaire which is why I wrote that comment. :)

I don't get why you wrote what you did as a response to mine; I just made a factual correction. (I even stated that the point still stands.)

Edit:

This was not an argument over the meaning of the word 'billionaire'; the post I replied to likely assumed that Wozniak was a billionaire (defined in the way that over 99% of Americans would understand it) and I mentioned that it doesn't seem that is the case.

If you're arguing about the alternative definitions of 'billionaire', it could have been an interesting sidenote, but ultimately the definition that I am using is what most Americans (i.e. the country Woz lives in) would assume and to use another definition in this context is poor communication.

The whole point of the post I responded to was just saying that if Woz wasn't working with Jobs, he might not have been as rich as he is now; no judgment was made on what it means to be "rich enough", etc.

Because if you want to argue over the meaning of the word billionaire, you start with why we shouldn't have changed the meaning of the word billion :)

When you're talking about personal wealth, there's a real danger of money going from a tool to do stuff; to being a way to keep score. And that latter road leads to the worst kind of arsehole-ry (damn, that needs a better word).

I was assuming that Woz actually had over a billion dollars in the literal sense. I was clearly mistaken and I did appreciate the correction.

Not sure why a simple correction turned out to be controversial. I was wrong and you corrected me. I'm not offended so no one else should be either.

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